Sugar Run: A Novel
Page 14
She grabbed Kaleb and ran to the bathroom, holding him so tight he cried. She ran his hands under the water and tipped his head back, thank God there was no white on those rosebud lips and fat little tongue.
“Lee!” she screamed again, but her voice made Kaleb cry more, tears dangling from the end of his nose. She kissed the salty drops away and carried him to the bouncy horse, strapped him in there. “Mama will be right back.”
She raced up the hallway to her husband’s body, bent and pressed her fingers against his neck. He had a pulse. She let her breath out and leaned back. A part of her itched to slap him right across the face but another part of her was not sure she wanted him to ever wake.
Kaleb was crying on the bouncy horse, his hiccupy sobs competing with the squeench-squeench of the coiled springs. Miranda left Lee and went to him. She carried him outside, away from those too-quiet rooms and into the shaky chatter of cicadas, the midday Georgia heat.
They followed the white pebble path around to the backyard. There was no one else around, no neighbor close enough to have heard her screaming, no one to tell or not tell, nothing but the rush of wind in the trees.
The pool had drained itself again.
“Ool! Ool!” Kaleb pointed and laughed, clapping.
The pool had been leaking so much that Kaleb didn’t even know it was supposed to have water in it.
“Ool!” he insisted, and she hugged him against her chest and climbed down into the deep end.
The chalky blue concrete was hot but Kaleb didn’t mind; he wriggled out of her arms and took off crawling. Miranda lay back. The walls sloped up and met a sky that nearly matched them. Blue above and blue below. Sealed off, she thought, and when panicky questions rose in her head she pushed them out. Not in here, she said, spreading her fingers across her stomach, one hand for her new baby and one for her perfect boy who lay beside her, blinking and cooing.
At the Ruritan Club thrift store in Render Jodi found a few rugs and curtains for the cabin and they set up the two bedrooms, Ricky in the back with the boys and Jodi and Miranda in the middle room.
Miranda seemed to take to the rustic living with a fervor that surprised Jodi. There was no way to get the electricity reinstated so they used oil lamps and the old hand pump that drew rainwater up from the cistern to the kitchen sink. Jodi waited for the moment when Miranda would protest the lack of an indoor toilet and hot water. She could picture her already, packing her kids into the car and driving away, and panic filled her at the thought of waiting there in the dark cabin with Ricky, wondering if Miranda would ever return. So she tried to shield her from the worst. When they cleaned out the cookstove they found that mice had made the oven into a giant nest, and beneath the layers of stinking insulation Jodi unearthed the tiny bodies of a dead litter, little perfect paws tucked up under their chins. She turned quickly before Miranda could see, dumped them into a bucket, and carried it outside, gagging.
Every morning she woke with the intention to go buy a newspaper and look into jobs. But she was afraid that leaving the land would break the spell and wake her from the dream of Miranda’s night-warm body, so open, there in the bed beside her, the crackle of twigs laid on banked-off coals, and the smell of wood smoke. Tomorrow, Jodi thought, tomorrow. She’d have to find some way to make steady money eventually but the thought of begging for work sickened her, knowing that she would likely not be hired anyway, not after anyone saw her GED and Class B felony.
As long as she stayed there on the land her days were full of a nebulous distance—the tawny fields and arched blue sky, like some carefully preserved memory. They really could be safe here, she thought, in this most distant of all places; not only did Lee have no reason to think the boys would be here but also the land itself seemed to possess a special kind of force that kept it separate and abiding. Up here it did not matter that she had no real life skills and as she walked through the fields nothing outside the beauty of the present moment seemed consequential, not even hunger. Only when the boys complained did she notice that it was time to eat.
Irene had brought them a couple of boxes of food-bank goods and Miranda took trips to town for whiskey and beer. She’d managed to convince some store clerk to ring up the alcohol as “miscellaneous” on her EBT card. Jodi wondered just how much money she had on that card but she hadn’t yet dared to ask. Her own dwindling cash was worrisome but only when she went to town; up there on the mountain, there was nothing to even spend money on.
One afternoon she had gone down to Render with Miranda and called the lawyer but he was out of the office; though she knew it was foolish, she’d felt relieved. He had said that he would look into refuting Leonards’s claim, since Jodi had been in state custody and never informed of the auction, but the less she knew about the proceedings, the more she could dream. She had the sense that she was teetering, just barely managing to balance between the sweetness of the summer days and the dark reality of the lawyer’s words. Ron Leonards’s fictive face kept looming up, smug and sun creased. His presence hung over the land like acrid sweat, but if Jodi pushed back, he receded into a haze of spritzed green grass, palm trees, golf courses, and tennis courts.
The present moment beat loudly around her with the drone of deerflies and the saw-call of the cicadas in the trees. She watched the yellow grass wave above her from where she lay, sprawled on an old quilt in the back pasture. Up in the branches of the sweet gum she could see Miranda’s pale, brier-scratched legs. She was perched on the thickest branch, swinging her feet and holding her Pabst can high to cheer for the boys who were playing a makeshift game of baseball with Ricky as the pitcher. Watching her, Jodi was filled with a rush of giddiness, that certain simple joy of new beginnings. It was not unlike the feeling she had gotten with Paula but with less of the trapped and circular logic. She couldn’t think of her months with Paula now without seeing how Paula had been looping through her win-lose cycle for years, and Jodi, caught in the swing of it, had thought it was actually leading somewhere. She remembered something Frances had said to her once. Jodi had brushed the comment off—Frances didn’t know Paula, could probably never understand a love like theirs anyway—but her words had stayed with Jodi. Did you ever think that maybe she wasn’t worth any of it? Your love or your hate? The thought hit Jodi’s stomach with a snare-drum rhythm. If their brief love wasn’t worth everything, then both of their lives had been wasted, shaken out like a sulfur match—that quick—for nothing.
January 1989
The morning is a thudding red sun in Jodi’s face, a heat that matches the fierceness of her headache. Paula stands over the bed, bending close and tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear.
“Wake up, princess,” she says.
The room they’ve rented is as small as a closet, just one twin bed with faded Donald Duck sheets. Through the open window Jodi hears the cloock-cloooock of chickens in the dusty yard, the dip and rise of Mexican radio voices—Ahora en Radio 88.9—
“Come on.” Paula pulls her up. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
The taxi takes them past the downtown market—women in plastic sandals arranging piles of green bananas beside displays of electric alarm clocks and bottles of oily parasite cures. They drive around a man on a bicycle with a bundle of firewood piled so high it hides his body and then out past the resort hotels and beach condos to where the buildings taper off into thatched shacks and concrete bunkers. Jodi wants to stop for coffee, a bottle of water, but Paula says they have to hurry. She leans forward, staring over the driver’s shoulder until finally they turn off onto a sandy road that leads to a tin shed with two tiny propeller planes.
Jodi eyes the planes, glances at Paula, then back to the planes. There is absolutely nothing else around.
Paula smiles and pulls her close. “I wanna see your first-time flying face.”
The propellers are so vibrational Jodi thinks their rhythm will never leave her body. She is squished in the tiny cockpit, sitting on Paula’s lap, waiting to die.
The tops of the trees are a deep tangled green and among them Jodi spots a row of bungalows, half-collapsed back into the earth but the yards still sprinkled with plastic chairs and umbrellas. If she squints her eyes, she can imagine a mother out back hanging sheets on the line. It’s nothing more than junk, really, but somehow its placement there makes the land dearer, some stranger’s intimate past displayed so openly. As a child on the mountain she would come across rusted tin buckets and chimney stones, or a head of a baby doll, the plastic cracked and thin as an eggshell. Effie had shrugged it off as trash but Jodi turned around each time they passed to see the lonely way those objects looked among the winter trees.
“See,” Paula says, whispering into Jodi’s ear and pointing out to where the ocean begins, clear and heavenly, like a wrinkled extension of the sky. “I knew you’d love flying.”
And then they are over it, water expanding below them, and though there is air everywhere, Jodi cannot get enough of it into her lungs. It is stupendous, this vast blueness. She needs other words for it, something more than just aquamarine, turquoise, navy. None of those names catch the heart-wild magic of it.
“Thank you,” she says, laughing and gripping Paula’s leg.
What luck, she thinks, what staggering luck, to have found someone who wants to give her this.
The Cutlass leaks a long trail of gasoline, like spilled blood beading and clumping in the sand. The man who is supposed to be fixing it does nothing but cuss and squint and drag on his cigarette. A rooster scurries between the man’s feet. Paula says she could probably fix it better herself but she doesn’t have a welding torch, so they leave the car and hitch a ride into town to eat. All they have had all day are tortillas from the shop around the corner where the air is wet with the steam of warm corn dough.
The man who lets them ride in the back of his pickup is old, his skin crisp under the noon sun, his eyes like raisins. The wind blows around them the smell of fish and diesel fumes, and Jodi watches Paula as she raises her arm and points straight above them at the rippling rainbow of a hot-air balloon. The little woven basket is dwarfed by the glowing cloth and flames shoot straight up the center.
“You wanna try that next?” Paula says.
Jodi smiles and lies flat in the bed of the truck to watch the painted puffball.
“How about we go up in one of those and watch the sun set and then a fireworks display?” Paula stretches out beside Jodi, their heads knocking together every time the truck bounces. She grabs Jodi’s hand and they are staring at the cloudless sky and laughing, their laughter lifting up around them into the hallucinatory blue.
August 2007
“Miss Jodi?”
Jodi startled out of a dream and turned to see Ricky in the doorway behind her.
“You plan on taking care of that hornet’s nest?”
She squinted across the dim room. The cabin was entirely silent.
“Where are Miranda and the boys?”
“I tried not to wake you but standing here, watching, I got to worrying, it’s right outside the window by the boys’ bed and with the roof peeled up like it is and all . . .”
Ricky filled the doorframe and as Jodi stepped toward him he did not move back. She glanced out the window and saw that the car was gone from the lane.
“Miranda went to town?”
Ricky nodded.
“How long was I napping? I didn’t even know I fell asleep.” Jodi rubbed her eyes and looked around the room. There was an empty whiskey bottle and a couple of cans on the table beside the dirty dinner dishes. Why hadn’t Miranda woken her when she decided to go town? Jodi stared at the filthy floor, scattered with leaves blown in through the front door. What was she going to town for anyway? If she kept ringing up booze on that food-stamp card, they’d soon have nothing left to eat.
“I figured you’d knock it down,” Ricky said, “but it keeps growing and—”
“All right.” Jodi turned back to Ricky. “Okay. Where is it? Let’s take care of it.”
He led the way around to the back of the house and Jodi followed, searching her pockets for her cigarette pack. She lit one and paused, waiting to hear the drone of hornets. Ricky approached the bedroom window slowly but Jodi saw nothing.
“There.” He pointed and she came closer. Instead of the monstrous gray funnel of doom she had expected, there hung from the upper pane of glass a small cluster of papery cells with three hornets hovering.
“That’s it? You’ve been worry watching that?” she said. “Why didn’t you knock it down when you first seen it?”
Ricky stared at her like she’d said the most obviously stupid thing. “I didn’t think it to be my place, Miss Jodi.”
She looked closely at him, blue eyes blank but mouth crimped with worry, and she could not unwind the thread of his thoughts or make sense of his expectations. She had found it hard recently to look straight at him for very long. She’d glance up and find him staring at her from across the cabin and a quiver would lick through her as she turned away. It was something about the distance between the boy of her memories and this large, quiet man, something about the way she sometimes saw Paula in his face, and something else too in his overdone respect for her. Back in Delray, at the museum, he’d seemed so competent but now that he was free of Dylan he seemed scared all the time, or angry, Jodi couldn’t quite tell which.
“Come on,” she said, “just call me Jodi, please. I don’t need the ‘Miss.’”
He bobbed his upper body in a sort of nod, sort of shrug. “Well, this being your house and all, I figured you’d be the one to take care of the nest and—”
“It’s your house too, Ricky,” she said, “and Miranda’s. We’ll all take care here.” She watched his face but nothing about it seemed to relax or change and so she looked away, dropping her cigarette into the grass and stamping it out. “Go on and knock that nest down now, all right?”
She was halfway up the porch steps when he called out again.
“You and Paula lived here?”
She stopped and turned back toward him but he was not looking at her. He stared off instead across the field toward Randolph Mountain. Her mind jumped and tangled in itself and she had to calm her breath before she spoke.
“We were coming back,” she said, watching his face closely. “We were gonna bring you here.”
Their eyes met and Jodi did not look away this time and she saw in his face some sharp spark of pain or hate before he turned and walked toward the hornet’s nest, his footsteps flattening the high grass.
The inside of the phone booth was thick with dust and Jodi had to wipe her fingers across the glass to get a clear view of Miranda leaned up against the Chevette, her pink dress sticking to her sweaty thighs. It was only the beginning of their second week in West Virginia and already Jodi’s money was gone, nothing but ten dollars left. They were eating grim little food-bank donation meals of boiled hot dogs and canned corn and still Jodi hadn’t quite managed to tell Miranda the whole no-money truth yet. It was part of a larger conversation about the future that she felt sickly ill prepared for. Their relationship was best kept in present tense.
She pushed her quarters down into the machine and squinted at the numbers in the phone book. It was hot inside the booth, the sun blazing all its strength at that little cube, and Jodi’s brain was swathed in gasoline fumes and last night’s whiskey.
“Thank you for calling Walmart.”
The sun felt personal and vengeful in its intensity.
“Hello?” the Walmart voice said.
Focus, Jodi thought, then realiz
ed she’d said it out loud. “Oh, sorry, I was wondering . . .” The words were there but backward. “Do you all, uh, well, would having a criminal record stop me from working at Walmart?”
“Would what?”
“I’d like to apply for a job.”
“Well, honey, you can’t do that on the phone.”
Jodi drew an X on the dusty glass. “No, I know, I was wondering, what if I have a criminal record?”
The voice paused and there was a rolling boom in the background, voices on top of voices. “Let me transfer you to management.”
The line beeped and then rang again. Jodi drew an O around the X on the glass.
“Thank you for calling Walmart.”
A shirtless man had come out of the gas station and was walking across the lot toward Miranda. Jodi dragged her eyes back to the pay phone. “Hello, I was wondering, if I happen to have a criminal record, would that disqualify me from a job?”
“Criminal record?” It was a man’s voice this time. “Well, yes, we run background checks on all applicants. What are we talking about here, a felony or misdemeanor?”
Jodi closed her eyes and an image sprang up, something from a movie she must have seen as kid: an astronaut, pulling himself, hand over hand, back toward his ship by a line tied around his waist, a line that, as she watched, unhitched itself and floated slowly up so that the astronaut in his puffy suit was left spinning, utterly alone, against the pulsing black forever of space.
Kmart and Magic Mart had the same policy. Jodi deposited the last of her change into the phone to call her brother Dennis. He’d lent her money before and could do it again but the words necessary for begging felt so cripplingly embarrassing that she only managed instead to ask him if he could lend her his weed whacker and help her clear out around the cabin. In person, she told herself, she could ask him better in person.