Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  They walked across the grass together. The woman—Mexican, maybe, or Cherokee—wore a short, shiny dress and hugged to her chest a pink child-size backpack but her face looked over thirty. Dennis squinted as he walked up the steps, rain running down the creases of his cheeks.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” He glanced toward the cabin door where Ricky stood, his eyes following the movements of the dark-haired woman.

  Jodi shrugged. “What’s up?”

  “Not a whole lot.” Dennis shifted his weight between his feet.

  Jodi raised her eyebrows and clenched her cigarette in her teeth.

  “Hey, look,” Dennis said. “I need you to do me a solid.”

  “I already did you a solid.”

  “Well.” His voice pitched up in the middle of the word. “I need you to do me another.”

  Jodi jerked her chin in the direction of the woodshed. “Are you taking that shit out of here today?”

  “Look”—Dennis pressed his hand to his breast pocket for his cigarettes—“this is Rosa. She just—”

  “Rosalba,” the woman said, the name rolling, half-soft, half-staccato, off her tongue.

  Dennis paused, cigarette raised to his lips. He looked over at the woman and her body tightened, muscles tensing visibly.

  The rain rang heavy on the roof.

  Dennis turned back to Jodi. “I just need you to keep Miss Rosa here for a little bit.”

  “Keep her here?” Jodi looked up and caught a glint of fear in the woman’s black eyes before she glanced away.

  “I got this friend, Cruz, who runs a little, uh, you know, bunny ranch.” Dennis’s eyes met Jodi’s and his mouth twisted up into a smile, his whole face itching with a tamped-down gleefulness, and for a moment he looked no different than he had as a twelve-year-old making up stories about getting laid. “Most of the time the cops take a little cash on the side and turn their eyes, pretend it’s just a trailer park. But now there’s talk that state police want to investigate, turn Cruz’s whole place inside out, and Rosa here ain’t got papers.”

  He exhaled smoke in two thin streams and stepped closer, pressing into Jodi’s palm a limp one-hundred-dollar bill.

  Jodi stared down at the crumpled money, a buzz not unlike nicotine rising in her brain.

  “Why are you helping her?”

  Dennis was halfway down the porch steps already. “I told you, it’s a favor. I owe Cruz.”

  Jodi looked back to the money and there she was again, tipping over the edge of some precipice of decision making, but it still did not seem real and she wondered now if she had somehow managed to carry the floating, choiceless world of prison here with her into this unreal place.

  “I’m gonna need more than this.”

  “It’ll just be a few days.”

  “You need me to do this, right?”

  Dennis squinted at her through the rain.

  “Then I’m gonna need a little more money. You think you can just—”

  Dennis tugged his wallet out and freed another hundred-dollar bill, tossing it at her, and then he was gone, his truck tires sucking loudly at the mud until the rain-haze swallowed him completely.

  Rosalba smoked hand-rolled cigarettes like the ones that Effie had favored, and though Jodi had told her she could smoke inside the cabin, she seemed to prefer one particular spot down at the end of the porch where the gutter spat the rainwater out into the flat dirt.

  For a while they all crowded in the cabin door and studied her, the boys poking their heads through Jodi’s, Ricky’s, and Miranda’s legs. Rosalba seemed not to notice them. She sat there, looking distant and utterly self-contained, watching a gray squirrel cross the yard, flicking its tail against the rain. Eventually everyone wandered off except for Ricky. He was fascinated by her; he’d trailed around the cabin as Jodi introduced her and he moved in closer now as Rosalba measured a line of tobacco onto a paper rectangle, licking the edge and pinching it closed.

  It didn’t seem right for someone who had been forced into hiding—dropped off in a totally unfamiliar place—to spend the afternoon smoking cigarettes and watching the wildlife. Someone illegal, someone running from the law, and here she was acting like this was a bed-and-breakfast. She pricked at something in Jodi, some old Jaxton instinct that made her want to force the girl to show her pain.

  “Is Dennis in love with you?” Jodi asked, stepping around Ricky and walking toward her down the porch.

  Rosalba’s laughter was rough and phlegmy. She shrugged, pursed her lips, and let out a thin stream of smoke. “I don’t really know your brother.”

  The wind blew in sideways now and the trees all leaned.

  “Your English is real good,” Jodi said.

  Rosalba pulled a loose strand of tobacco from the end of her cigarette. “In Mexico I taught at the university.”

  Jodi looked up and Rosalba met her gaze. The skin around her eyes was hatched with soft wrinkles, her mouth full and bow shaped.

  “You could teach me?” Ricky said, leaning past Jodi and pointing to the tobacco pouch in Rosalba’s lap.

  Rosalba smiled. Her left front tooth was rimmed in silver and it winked when she opened her lips. “Here,” she said, holding out the half-smoked cigarette. “You can have it.”

  “But you could teach me how you do your trick?” Ricky said, moving his fingers in a mime of Rosalba’s rolling action.

  Rosalba clamped the cigarette between her lips and brushed the loose tobacco off her lap. “I will show you any trick you want if you first just tell me where is a bathroom.”

  Ricky nodded and stepped to the edge of the porch, pointing toward the outhouse at the bottom of the yard.

  Rosalba froze, half-sitting, half-standing, her eyes wide with shock.

  Ricky looked at her and laughed, still pointing down the hill. He laughed and Jodi turned to face him. She heard his laughter and everything spun out slow as she watched him tilt his head, smiling broadly.

  “Oh, okay, wow,” Rosalba said.

  She set her bag on the chair and headed toward the outhouse without noticing the magic alchemical shift of the moment but Jodi was paralyzed by it. She heard Ricky’s laughter and something loosened inside her, some rearrangement of particles that opened up room for more air. She didn’t know that she had been waiting for this, didn’t know until that moment that she had not heard Ricky laugh, ever, and had not really seen him fully smile, not since Paula.

  In addition to her tobacco, Rosalba kept in her backpack playing cards decorated with images of Catholic saints and a bottle of tequila. What began as a demonstration of card tricks and then a round of rummy between Ricky and Rosalba turned into a full-tilt poker game by early evening. Miranda joined the table, gathering up her cards into her hand and watching intently as Rosalba wet the web of her thumb, poured on salt, and licked it before drinking down a shot of tequila. The boys crowded around, Donnie climbing up onto a chair for a better view. The room was loud with laughter and shouted instructions, the lamplight drawing their silhouettes tall against the log walls.

  “Hey, Jo, come play,” Miranda said, but Jodi hung back, feeding kindling wood into the cookstove.

  She couldn’t shake her feeling of irritation at Rosalba for acting so easy and comfortable. This is my place, my people, she found herself wanting to say, as if Ricky, Miranda, and the boys were a finite resource that might get all used up. My people. But, truthfully, she and Miranda were yet to ever use the word girlfriend, and Ricky, well, she wasn’t sure exactly how to quantify her connection to Ricky. Already, in just the four or five hours that she had been at the house, Rosalba seemed to have inspired in him more of the sort of awe and trust that Jodi herself had hoped to spark when she’d walked into the Georgia Folk and Country.

  “For you.” Rosalba passed the tequila to Ricky, who sniffed the bottle and shook his head.

  “It cleans you out,” she told him. “Brightens you inside.”

  “He doesn’t need to be drinking,” Jodi said.
r />   The table went quiet.

  Miranda looked over at Jodi, confused, and Jodi felt sorry for having so resoundingly smashed the good mood. She stepped out from behind the cookstove and watched as Ricky locked eyes with her and lifted the bottle slowly to his lips. Somehow, when Veeda had questioned his drinking of a whiskey-coke, it hadn’t seemed like a big deal but now Jodi realized that she had no idea how he reacted to alcohol or if he had ever had much to drink before at all. Her own mother was not what you would call a happy drunk and it worried her, thinking about that possibility of an unpredictable personality shift.

  Ricky closed his eyes as he swallowed the shot, then blinked and set the bottle on the table but kept his hand around it.

  “All right, that’s enough now, leave some for me!” Jodi stepped closer, wishing her voice sounded more playful.

  Rosalba raised her eyebrows and looked back and forth between Jodi and Ricky. Jodi took the bottle and drank a too-long swallow that caught and burned at the back of her throat. She felt them all watching.

  “Kaleb,” she said, setting the bottle beside Rosalba. “Come help me fix dinner.”

  Kaleb stood on his tiptoes, his face peeking up above the table, lips pinched into a pout. “Why?”

  “Don’t sass me,” Jodi said, hearing the sharpness and wanting to take it back already, hating the way that Kaleb’s face crumpled. “I need your expert advice,” she added, “your opinion on the seasoning.”

  He sighed loudly and Miranda giggled. “Is she working you too hard, little chef?”

  Kaleb nodded but slipped his hand into Jodi’s.

  The thing was, she realized, she knew almost nothing about Ricky. She knew he loved Paula and that Dylan had beaten and abused him for all those years. She knew he was obsessed with music but when she thought about it now it occurred to her that she hadn’t heard him sing once over the past two weeks.

  She dumped three cans of chili in a pot and handed the spoon to Kaleb.

  None of this not knowing had seemed like a problem until now. Back in Jaxton she’d assumed that freedom would be enough, both for her and for him. She had pictured Ricky safe, out of Dylan’s reach, but beyond that all she had was some image of him fishing. Did Ricky even like to fish? She couldn’t decide if this was something Paula once said or just something she’d invented and she felt an ache now, a yawning sadness at this not-knowing and all the distance it implied.

  “Rummy.”

  Jodi looked up as Ricky held an ace high above his head and shouted again, “Rummy!”

  “Wrong game.” Miranda was laughing breathlessly and reaching to snatch his card.

  “One moment,” Rosalba said as she stood and walked out onto the porch.

  Jodi left Kaleb at the stove and followed her.

  “Hey,” she called.

  Rosalba turned to face her and there was a current there, a measuring and waiting that was, to Jodi, so familiar. She waited as the silence tripled between them.

  “I am sorry about the tequila,” Rosalba said finally. “He does not drink?”

  “If he wants to.” Jodi shrugged, realizing suddenly that she did not want to be cast into the role of the one who held Ricky’s leash. She stepped closer. “What happens to me if you take off and Dennis comes looking for you?”

  Rosalba’s eyes were blank. “Take off?”

  “I don’t care what he pays me, I’m not going to keep anybody locked up here. But if he comes back for you and—”

  “No.” Rosalba shook her head. “Do not worry about me.” She managed a better jail face than Jodi ever had—so quiet she was not there, just the whisper-crinkle of cigarette paper as she rolled a fresh smoke—and yet her presence was somehow loud also, proof of how little control Jodi had over anything.

  April 1989

  Paula came back to their hotel room last night, Jodi thinks, but then again, maybe she only dreamt her. The hotel room is empty, thin yellow light seeping in under the curtains. Jodi checks for the .38, feels the curve of the handle there under the corner of the mattress, and relaxes back onto the lumpy pillow. This is San Antonio, Texas, but the voices outside are still Mexican.

  Paula leaves these days without saying anything. Sometimes she brings Jodi to the games, in the backrooms behind pizza restaurants, in white-pillared houses or smoke-thick clubs, but most of the time Jodi does not want to go. Once, she stayed naked, alone in the hotel, for three days straight. She smokes cigarettes and paints her toenails. She drinks Carlo Rossi and adds water to make it last. She plays solitaire. She masturbates. She cuts her hair.

  She had thought that the money from the poker game in Tampico, though it was less than expected, would make them ready. Ready now to go get Ricky and return to Effie’s land. But Paula says that is just the base layer, they have to keep building.

  When Paula is gone, Jodi is desperate for her to come back—the emptiness ravaging inside her as the Paula-less hours pass—but when Paula is there Jodi experiences a creeping sort of irritation at no longer being alone. In her solitude she feels she is getting somewhere, burrowing deep into a new and unexplored self.

  Lately she’s found that she can’t fix Paula’s face in her mind, even when Paula has just left the room. She thinks of Effie’s land—pulls up the image, full and intact—the house with the sloping porch and black oaks out back. She closes her eyes and forces herself to concentrate until she can see Paula’s face just as clearly. Those sharp cheekbones and full lips, how her mouth pinches at the corner at the mention of Ricky’s name and the way her eyes rake a room, consuming, filtering, putting it all to use—a look that Jodi thought at first was the thrill of a vision, the beginning of a plan that wrapped around to satisfaction. It was that look that gave Jodi the idea that Paula could lead her to live inside a life bigger than anything she could manage on her own. Lately, though, Paula looks more desperate than powerful.

  Sometimes Jodi thinks of taking money from Paula while she sleeps. She thinks of ticket counters and a long bus ride back east. But the thing of it—the great, oozy, uncontrollable thing of it—is that she’s grafted her happiness onto this life with Paula, the flash and burn of it, the somewhere new each night and we don’t need anything but each other.

  In the beginning, when they first headed south, she’d called her parents a few times, proud to report on her travels. No one else in her immediate family had ever crossed the state line. In Mexico, though, the phone calls were too expensive and she hasn’t spoken to them in months. And now, she thinks, Paula is her family and the idea of herself without Paula is like the thought of amputation. She is reminded of certain evidence, studies that have shown how crack saturates the senses so that nothing quietly delightful will ever be satisfying again.

  August 2007

  With Rosalba there it made seven of them in the three-room cabin, and the storm kept on, hurtling against the tin roof. At first Miranda told her boys to play inside games but soon she gave up and let them tussle in the mud while she sat on the porch, smoking and tipping whiskey into her coffee cup, joined sometimes by Ricky, sometimes Rosalba or Jodi as they paced in and out and peered up at the cloud-dark sky.

  All the aimless, forced proximity reminded Miranda of life on the tour bus, when Kaleb was six months old and she had started performing and touring with Lee. It had been the manager’s idea—fresh blood, a way to perk up the show—and Miranda had been ecstatic for the chance, though really she was nothing more than a backup singer with a spotlight. They had done mostly local shows at first, not too much hard traveling with such a little baby, but then Tamara Monti booked a reunion tour with Lee and insisted that he bring Miranda along with them to Europe. Miranda was dazed with excitement and worry. There was no way she could bring Kaleb and she knew she ought to say no but this was her chance to see the glittering Old World that Lee had always spoken of. She weaned Kaleb and left him with Lee’s aunt Nina, telling herself that it would be just six weeks.

  Tamara invited Miranda up to New York a few days bef
ore the tour to learn her songs and in her sleek steel-and-stone apartment they drank martinis and stared at each other, a reflection of blondeness. Most people took them for mother and daughter, though with her surgeries and hair dye Tamara could almost pass for Miranda’s sister.

  “When I die, when I die, Daddy don’t fret for me,” she sang as she paced the window-walled room, cradling her guitar. “For the one who comes from the still and the quiet will surely know me.”

  Miranda looked away and watched the olive bob in her glass.

  “Come on,” Tamara said. “I want to hear you try out the melody.”

  Miranda closed her eyes. “When I die, when I die, Daddy don’t fret for me.”

  She opened them. Tamara was staring straight at her, fingers picking quick over the metal strings and yellow hair falling long and straight across her shoulders. “Fear,” she sang, “is the driving wheel but flesh from the blood He will conceal.”

  “You wrote that song?” Miranda leaned toward her.

  Tamara smiled. “The universe gave it to me.”

  Miranda entered the tour grinning ear to ear and leaking breast milk down the front of her minidress. No matter how much tissue she stuffed in her bra, the warm milk leaked through in quarter-size circles by the end of every show and her breasts ached fiercely but there was the Eiffel Tower, all lit up and looking, well, looking just like it did in postcards, but there it was for real! And the thrill of performing! She knew no one really cared about her, they were there for Tamara and Lee, but it didn’t matter, the whole experience was electric: her own voice rising and turning in with Tamara’s—when I see you coming across the Beulah Land—and the heat of the stage lights on her skin. Lee seemed disappointed with the tour, the musty old theaters and coffeehouses they’d been booked to play in and the small size of the audiences. Miranda had little to compare it to, though, and the applause sounded thunderous to her, a roar like a wave breaking over her head.