Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  He came up the next evening after his work shift, eight hours on the line at the chicken factory, and Jodi—watching him walk across the yard with his chain saw and weed whacker, babies, wife, and a bottle of bourbon—felt the thawing warmth of gratitude spread through her.

  “You didn’t have to do all this,” she called from the porch. “I just wanted to borrow your weed whacker.”

  “Ain’t no trouble,” Dennis said, hefting his younger daughter up onto his hip.

  The small house filled with the flurry of six children and Jodi hung back, smoking on the porch until Dennis’s wife, Veeda, called her name.

  “What’s up with Donnie’s chin?” Veeda poked her head out the front door.

  “He fell down and then—”

  “No, I mean, you planning on leaving those stitches in there until his whole face gets infected?”

  Jodi turned away from Veeda’s sharp eyes. Truth was, she had noticed over the past week how the skin around the stitching had grown puffy but she’d hoped . . . hoped what? That the stitches would just disappear?

  “Lord,” Veeda said, shaking her head and exhaling loudly. “Dennis, fetch my first-aid kit from the truck.”

  Jodi paced the porch while Donnie screamed inside. She pressed her fingernails into her palms until she couldn’t stand the pain. What must they look like, she and Miranda? Fuckups, she guessed. No matter how much Jodi cared about those boys, she didn’t know anything about how to raise them.

  Dennis came outside and gave her a smoke. “He’ll be fine. Veeda’s been working down at the VA hospital for almost a year now, she knows what she’s doing,” he said. “And, hell, we got hurt worse than that all the time when we was little. Remember? We was always cutting each other up, shooting each other full of BBs.”

  Jodi smiled weakly and followed Dennis as he picked up his chain saw and headed off toward the overgrown road.

  As they crossed the yard she cleared her throat. “I need to ask you for a favor.”

  “What’s that?” He glanced back at her but kept walking.

  “I need to borrow some more money.”

  “Really?” His voice was soft and almost teasing.

  “Not even Walmart will hire me with the felony and—”

  Dennis stopped walking and turned, raising his hand to cut her off. “Yeah, you know, I was just thinking on that the other day, wondering how y’all are making do.”

  Jodi looked down at her feet.

  “I got to thinking.” Dennis shifted the chain saw from one hand to the other. “It just so happens that I need a favor too.”

  Jodi glanced up.

  “I need somewhere to store something and I was thinking, now that you’re staying up here, you could keep an eye on it for me.”

  “Store something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What something?”

  “A few pounds of sinsemilla.” His eyes skirted off toward the trees.

  Jodi’s laughter cracked out louder than she’d meant it to. “You do know I just got out of prison, right?”

  “It’d only be for just a little while. I got a guy I’m selling it to but he can’t take it off my hands just yet. I’ll give you a cut for holding it for me. I just can’t have it at the house.”

  “I’m on supervised release.”

  “You got Ballard, though. You know that fucker’s just sleeping his way to retirement. I’ve got friends who’ve done way crazier shit than this while they was on parole under him. He ain’t even gonna check anything. Hell, he don’t even know this place exists, does he? As far as he knows you’re living with Mom and Dad.”

  “Dennis, I’m not having nothing to do with—”

  “How the fuck else you plan on making money then?”

  Jodi turned away. Across the hoof-scarred pasture a group of cattle stood out blackly against the deep green trees.

  “Look, if you can help me out with this, don’t even worry about the four hundred I lent you before.”

  Jodi breathed deeply and looked back at Dennis, his nose and cheekbones hawkish in silhouette.

  “No, I’ll pay you back,” she said, “soon as I get settled and get a job. I swear—”

  “I ain’t asking for that money back. I’m proud to help you. That’s what family does, Jodi, they help each other out.”

  Dennis pulled the cord on the chain saw and the machine barked to life as he cut past her in two quick steps, the blade only inches from her leg. He set at the thicket of sumac and chinquapin, slashing the branches, trampling the feathered leaves and fuzz of ocher-red berries. Jodi watched him, his muscled arms tanned and inked with a five-pointed star, an Indian war bonnet, and a blue-black bird whose wings spread like a cloak over his shoulders. He turned toward her and she startled and lifted up the weed whacker.

  Halfway down the lane they came to a fallen sourwood tree, the crooked trunk nearly thick as Jodi’s waist. Dennis worked at it, cutting it down to stove-size chunks, his chain saw bucking against the green wood. Jodi hauled the logs over to the edge of the lane, sweat beading all across her skin. The sun had sunk below the ridgeline but the heat still clung in the air.

  A quarter of the way down the log, Dennis stopped and shut off the chain saw. He left it lying beside the tree, the air booming with the new silence.

  “Hey,” he said, looking straight at Jodi. “You and Miranda got some kind of sick shit going on up here?”

  Jodi froze.

  “Are you fucking her?” There was a flint edge to Dennis’s voice that buried itself deep inside Jodi.

  “No,” she whispered, the word coming out before she even had time to think, a slap of a reaction that left her dull and defeated. She hated that this was her first response and tried to tell herself that she only wanted privacy but there was something else there, the scent of self-hatred as ripe and familiar as her own shit.

  “I can’t stand to think of those boys growing up around something sick like that.” Dennis dragged his eyes up and down Jodi’s body.

  “No, it’s not like that between us,” she said again, feeling the lie, heavy and ugly on her tongue, as she waited for the chain saw’s scream.

  Back at the house Miranda had set up a bar. She’d gotten Ricky to haul over a couple of logs and balance them between the porch railings and she’d lit candles along the edges and laid out the cans of Budweiser and bourbon and Coke in little teacups.

  “Aww, shit, would you look at this?” Dennis said. “Now that’s neat.”

  Donnie, recovered from the removal of his stitches, was chasing Dennis’s girls, five-year-old redheaded Dana and her white-blonde three-year-old sister, Janelle, back and forth under the rotten beam while Kaleb frowned at them from the corner of the porch.

  “No, it’s nothing,” Miranda said. “We don’t even have ice.”

  Veeda rolled her mascara-rimmed eyes and blew out a thin stream of smoke. “There’s hot dogs on the stove,” she said.

  “Hot dogs again?” Donnie cried.

  “Don’t talk like that.” Dennis leaned down toward him. “My wife fixed you food, now you be grateful.”

  “Bluh-uh-uh.” Donnie pretended to vomit into his own hands and Dennis set his beer on the bar and grabbed Donnie’s arm.

  “Don’t touch him,” Jodi said. Their eyes met and stayed but Dennis’s hand loosened and he let the boy go.

  “Fine,” he said. “Spoil the sonofabitch.”

  They brought oil lamps out onto the porch and the light flared over the tired faces, Dennis drinking fast to keep himself awake and Miranda waving her cigarette all around to drive away the mosquitoes. Ross and Janelle, playing waiters, hustled back and forth between the porch steps and the bar.

  “Can I take your order?” Ross’s eyes were so serious.

  “I’ll take whatever is in that teacup,” Jodi told him.

  “Whiskey,” he said sternly, “and Coke-Cola.”

  “All right.” Jodi smiled. “I’ll take that.”

  Miranda stirred
the drink with her finger, licked it, and added another drop of bourbon before handing it down to Ross, who carried the blue-and-white china reverently, not spilling a drop. He served cups to all the adults all the way around and when he brought one to Ricky Veeda turned toward Jodi.

  “He supposed to have that?”

  Jodi studied Ricky, twenty-nine but hunched like an old man, silent there on the steps beside Kaleb.

  “Yeah, sure, why not?”

  Dana had a bag of sparklers that she counted and recounted carefully before passing them out among the boys.

  “Go on out in the yard with those,” Dennis said, handing her a lighter.

  They clattered down the steps, leaving only Dennis’s one-year-old son licking his blanket and working up a good cry. Veeda looked at the baby wobbling there, naked except for his rumpled diaper. She eyed him as if he were a mildly irritating drunk, a man she wished she could stop from coming over and talking to her.

  “Refills,” Miranda said, stepping out from behind the bar and splashing the last of the whiskey into their cups.

  Dana could not get the sparklers lit. Donnie pushed his up his nose and Dana screamed at him until Ricky came down off the porch steps and took it. He gathered up all the sparklers, then pulled out his lighter and cranked it up high. Watching him, Jodi felt a pinch of worry. Says I can’t be trusted with fire. She wanted more than anything to believe that Dylan and Anna were every bit wrong about him, but still, sometimes his moods seemed to shift unexpectedly, like something large and silent moving underwater, and the way his eyes caught and stayed on that flame worried her some.

  The children leapt at his legs like yappy dogs. He passed out the sparklers but kept his lighter on high, only inches above those little heads.

  “Hey, Ricky,” Jodi called. “Watch that flame there.”

  He looked over at her, his eyes unreadable, and kept the flame turned up high, pulsing so that it singed his thumb. No one said a word and the moment stretched long, the children bouncing in a circle around him while Ricky stared at Jodi and Jodi stared at the flame. Then, just as Jodi stood up, he took his thumb off the lighter and dropped it back into his pocket.

  “Look at all those stars.” Miranda leaned out over the railing, her hair rippling.

  Jodi watched Dennis watch her.

  “Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion,” Ricky said, sitting down on the steps. “And turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night.”

  “It’s already night.” Donnie stomped up onto the porch with his burned-out sparkler, marking a black trail across the sagging boards.

  Ricky continued on. “There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon—”

  “And another glory of the stars,” Jodi said, the words coming back to her from some far corner of her memory. “For one star differeth from another star in glory.”

  Ricky glanced at Jodi and smiled. “And the third angel sounded and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as if it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters.”

  Jodi closed her eyes to better see the wild pictures painted by those ancient words.

  “And the name of the star is called Wormwood and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, and they were made bitter.”

  “Oh, hey.” Dennis startled up out of half sleep. “Jodi, I almost forgot, Mom said to tell you that lawyer’s been calling and asking for you.”

  Jodi sat up straight. “What did he say?”

  “Hell if I know. Mom just said he’s been calling.”

  April 1989

  “No, I know you can do it. Really, it’s simple, just about timing,” Paula says. “The guy goes to take a piss, you drive up to the door, come in with the gun, grab the money, and we’re gone.”

  They are sitting across from each other on the narrow bed at the Hospedaje Familiar while Paula rolls a joint and explains her plan. She’s been playing poker with the same group of men in the back room behind a butcher shop in Tampico for two weeks now and the plan has come into shape slowly. There is a man who guards the door, she says, checks them all for weapons and won’t let anyone in or out after the game starts, but once each night he leaves his post to step into the bathroom. The bathroom is right beside the poker-playing room but its door is on the outside of the building, facing the street. All Jodi has to do, Paula explains, is wait until he is inside and then drive the Cutlass up to block the door. He won’t be able to do a thing until they have the money and are driving away.

  “But I don’t know hardly any Spanish,” Jodi says, taking the lit joint that Paula passes to her.

  “Doesn’t matter, the only word you need is dinero and probably not even that. I think it’ll be obvious.”

  Jodi gets up from the bed and rummages around inside their duffel bag until she finds her purse with the .38. She stands and faces the mirror, stretches her right arm out straight, and holds the pistol steady as she walks slowly toward her reflection.

  “God, you look sexy like that,” Paula says, smoke coiling out the corners of her mouth.

  They practice that evening, in a sandy, abandoned lot out past the municipal dump. As the sky melts from orange to coral to gray, and the bats come out, flitting and dropping spastically, Paula stands with her back to the dunes and smokes, watching Jodi rev the Cutlass’s engine, then slam on the brakes, leap out, and run, pistol held tense and high, nylon panty hose pulled down over her face.

  The night is hotter than usual. Or maybe not, Jodi thinks. Maybe it’s just her nerves. She tried, for the past twenty-four hours, to decide if she should do up before this and finally she realized she could not possibly accomplish it sober. Now, though, she is not sure the speed was such a good idea. Instead of the usual rush of supersexed power and holiness, it is just making her feel itchy and paranoid.

  Paula has been inside the back of the butcher shop for over an hour now and all Jodi has to do is wait. She has a clear view up the street to the gray door of the shop and the pastel-green door beside it that is the bathroom. Maybe the guy has changed his routine, though. Maybe he took a piss before the game started and now he won’t have to go all night.

  She lights a cigarette and tries to concentrate.

  There is the smell of frying meat coming from one of the apartments on the street, and the scent makes her stomach bunch up like a fist. If she leaves the car windows down, mosquitoes land all along her arms, but if she rolls up the windows, it is too hot to breathe. She blows out her cigarette smoke, directing it toward her arms, and the insects lift up momentarily.

  A song comes on in the house across the street, something fast and jumpy with lots of accordion. Jodi finds that her feet and hips are bouncing along with the rhythm. She thinks this is a good thing. See, she says, I’m not nervous.

  The door swings open.

  Her heart drops straight down into her lap. She remembers to crank the car and press the gas. She cannot remember to breathe but she steers the car up the street, bucking over the sidewalk and roaring into the green door. She is out. Panty hose pulled down over her face, blood pulsing loud in her ears, pistol steady.

  It is only five steps to the door but they have heard the car and are already on their feet when she enters. The room is patchy, everything blurred by the hose on her face, just dodgy spots of light and dark and her own voice, spiking, panicky. The men move back, a chair topples; their hands go to their belted waists instinctively, though they have no weapons there. Only Paula is still sitting, looking back and forth from the men to Jodi.

  Jodi is suspended, watching the men’s attention, fixated on the pistol in her hand. It thrills her, this moment of pure concentration. She feels their energy pulled toward her, and though this was not a part of the plan, she thinks now that they should see her shoot. None of them have gotten out any money and she is not sure how to go from this moment to the next. She turns the pistol up to the ceilin
g and pulls the trigger.

  The sound breaks open and pours down on them and the men are all movement now, hands flying to pockets and billfolds. Jodi can hardly breathe inside the panty hose but this is it, it is all happening. She grabs the bills from their shaky hands and stuffs them into her bag. She looks toward the door and Paula rises beside her. They are moving together now.

  Jodi looks back just once and this is when she sees first the chair and then the man lifting it up over his head, lunging toward her. She spins, tumbling against Paula, and holds the pistol out.

  “Stop,” she says, not sure if she is saying it to the man or herself, but already her finger has squeezed the trigger and the man falls backward. The chair and the man land and break apart, the chair hitting the wall and the man rolling, curling in on himself. His shoulder is dark with blood and the blood is moving, spreading out quickly across the concrete.

  Jodi stumbles and is jerked back. Paula’s arms are around her and she is moving, turning. Paula is pushing her. Run, run, RUN.

  They drive for eight hours straight, Paula at the wheel and Jodi staring out the window, watching shadow shapes. When Paula tells her to, she counts the money and finds it to be several hundred dollars less than they had expected. She cannot stop seeing the pool of blood.

  “Do you think—”

  “It was only his shoulder,” Paula says, without taking her eyes off the road. “He’ll be fine.”

  They cross the border at Matamoros just before the sun rises. The lamps at the guard hut spill thin green light into the dusky air. The guard tells Jodi to get out of the car. She hands him her passport and stands there, trying to calm her pulse, listening to the bug zapper on the corner of the building. The guard looks from the passport to Jodi. She stops breathing. He looks back to the passport and then to his watch.