Girl Gone Missing

by Marcie Rendon

  “I am so excited for you. At Macalester College they have an American Indian studies office too. I heard you’re going to be staying at the Minority Students’ house. You’ll get to meet some of their Indian students.”

  Cash stood still. Clearly, she wasn’t going to get away until Mrs. Kills Horses got through with whatever speech she had to give. How did she know how to find her? She had to have gotten her class schedule from the registrar’s office. What did she want?

  Mrs. Kills Horses was digging in her black, fringed leather purse. It had conch shells inlaid with turquoise up and down the purse handle. “Here! This is the name of the advisor to Indian students at that college. Be sure and look her up. And here is the address to the Minority Students’ center, the house you’ll be staying at. Men tend to forget those kinds of details. If you had told me this wonderful news, I would have been able to drive you down.”

  Cash took the sheet of paper and stuck it in her back pocket.

  “Oh, and one more thing. You know how we talked in the meeting about inviting AIM up? This paper has the address for the AIM office in St. Paul. Maybe you could stop by there and feel it out? See if they would think about coming up?”

  “I don’t know anyone there.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that doesn’t matter. They’ll all be friendly. It’s all for the cause. The Native American cause,” she said, wholeheartedly, flipping her one braid back over her shoulder and zipping her purse shut. “Just stop by and ask if they would come. We have a tiny bit of money we could give them for their trouble.” She turned and walked away, her heels clicking on the granite floor. “Congratulations! Always proud of our shining stars.”

  Cash stuffed the second piece of paper in her back pocket with the other paper.

  She drove to the apartment to get a Thermos of coffee and a tuna sandwich. Mo was nowhere in sight. Cash drove north of town and started driving beet truck early so she was done by eleven. She stopped at the Casbah, but all the regulars were over at the Flame for the monthly tournament. She played a few games, drank a few beers, danced a few country two-steps with a drunken farmer who only stepped on her toes three times. She left the bar at closing time.

  She took a quick bath when she got home. Washed her hair in the kitchen sink. Pulled on a pair of jeans and an extra large T-shirt. Grabbed a paper bag from under the sink and went in to her bedroom and looked at her stack of clothes on the overstuffed chair. What did one wear to get an award? Crap, what if I’m supposed to wear a dress? She sank down on the edge of her bed and looked at her pile of jeans and T-shirts. Not a dress or skirt in the pile. And it was late. Nothing open. No place to buy a dress in the entire town.

  She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d worn a dress. Sometime back in, maybe, tenth grade? There was some kind of family reunion for the foster family that everyone got dressed up for. The foster mother insisted that Cash wear a dress. The mother had bought it at the clothing store in Ada. It was a size too big. “You’ll grow into it” was a too-often-heard refrain. No one seemed to notice that Cash had stopped growing at twelve. It had been a putrid yellow with a white collar. Cash had “accidentally” washed it in a washer load of bleached clothes. No one was ever going to wear that dress again.

  She looked at her pile of clothes and wondered what the heck to take to the Cities.

  After fifteen minutes of staring and half a bottle of beer, she dug through the dresser drawers where she kept the clothes and odds and ends she never used. From the bottom drawer she pulled out a long-sleeved cotton shirt she had forgotten she had. It was off-white with tiny blue flowers on it. It wasn’t too wrinkled. She smoothed the cotton fabric out on the bed. The shirt had all the buttons. If she put her jean jacket on over the shirt, no one would notice the wrinkles. She rolled the shirt up tightly and put it in the bottom of the paper bag. She found a pair of black jeans and did the same. A pair of undies. A clean bra. Socks. On top of it all, she put in her well-worn cowboy boots. Bottoms up.

  There. She was packed. She opened the top dresser drawer and grabbed a couple packs of Marlboros from the carton she kept there. Threw them into the bag. And her hairbrush.

  Cash had an internal alarm clock from working farm labor. Whether she got to bed at four a.m. or got drunk the night before or was sick in bed with the flu, she invariably woke up with the sun, daylight saving time or not. Didn’t matter. But she was nervous about this drive to the Cities. About this award thing. So she set her alarm for six-thirty, just in case. Then she pulled off her jeans and crawled into bed.

  As she was falling off to sleep, she thought about the days in foster care. The nights when she would go to bed hoping she wouldn’t wake up, or that, if she did, it would have all been a bad dream. There was nothing in her world that had prepared her for college or awards or drives to the Cities. Long ago, she had given up thinking about tomorrow. There was only this moment, this time, this now. And with that thought, she was sound asleep.

  Her dreams were disjointed. Girls with very long legs, legs as long as electric poles, walked down a street barely lit by street lamps. Mo danced with a cue stick, but he was doing a jitterbug, not a slow waltz, the cue stick flying through the air. Cash found herself flying over tree tops, plowed fields and eventually square blocks of buildings, higher above the ground than any she had ever seen. The air was thick, dense. She had to work to fly through it, not like the country air she was used to flying through in her dreams. She flew for a long time over buildings and more buildings. Looking down, she saw lots of trees, all of them getting winter-bare already. There were lakes and a river winding between two cities, much like Fargo-Moorhead looked from above. The streets were in squares, like farmland, but much, much smaller. She felt a current pulling her to the east side of the river. It was like a gentle vacuum pulling her in and down. She felt her stomach grazing the tree tops and she had to navigate her body to miss the upper branches.

  She looked down. Below her now were tree-lined streets, with brick and wood houses lining the blocks. There were green street signs on each corner. Cash tried to read them as she drifted by. Selby, Marshall, Kent, Mackubin. Some of the signs were blurred and she couldn’t read them fast enough. In midair, she came to a full stop floating in front of a big red brick house. Dark. The street ran south to north. The number on the house was glowing in puke green numbers. 175. This spot was ice-cold. The house had a porch with latticework around the base, one end of which was half torn off. Without waking, Cash rolled over in bed, tightened the covers around her and drifted into a dream about sitting in a truck waiting for a combine to reach her end of the field.

  Cash woke—once again—to the smell of cooking bacon. How in the heck did this guy drink all night, wake up without a hangover and be all cheery and happy cooking breakfast? And what had triggered the flashback the other night?

  Maybe he didn’t sleep. Or maybe he slept during the day while she was at school or working.

  She tore a page out of one of her notebooks, smoothed it out on top of her dresser and wrote down as much of her dream as she could remember. She underscored the number 175.

  She rummaged around and found the addresses for the AIM office and the Minority Students’ House in St. Paul and put those notes with the paper about the dream on top of the dresser. Then she put on clean jeans and T-shirt with a jean jacket on top of a fleece hoodie to keep her warm.

  She stopped, stood momentarily in her room. She wondered if the Cities were far enough south that it might be a bit warmer there than in Fargo-Moorhead. Two hundred fifty miles probably was not enough to make a considerable difference.

  Was there a real Grain Exchange building in Minneapolis? Every day the radio issued the farm market report out of the Grain Exchange. It had never occurred to her before to wonder if it was an actual building.

  “Git while the gittin’s good, girl,” Mo said, putting a plate with eggs, bacon and pancakes on the table.

  Cash pulled out a chair and sat down to eat. “Soon my j
eans aren’t gonna fit.”

  “You need some meat on your bones. What time you supposed to be over at the school?”

  “Ten in the parking lot, where they have the state cars. There’s another teacher taking some science students down too. I’ll just follow them.”

  Cash finished eating, put her plate in the sink, stood looking around the kitchen as if she would never see it again.

  “Go on. Have fun. This is a good thing.”

  “You think so?”

  “Beat it. I’ll guard the home front. See you on the flipside.”

  Cash went to the fridge and pulled out two beers. “Just in case,” she said, when Mo raised an eyebrow.

  At the college, LeRoy was already in the parking lot. So was Danielson and two brainy-looking guys, each wearing a white shirt under a dark cardigan and corduroy pants. They were also wearing hip-length, lined trench coats. They looked like teenybopper versions of college professors. Their hair was thicker and adolescent pimples were still on their faces, but someday they would replace LeRoy and Danielson.

  After brief introductions of names Cash forgot as soon as she heard—the Mikes and Steves of the Valley all blended together in her eyes—LeRoy laid out a map on the hood of the state vehicle. He pointed out the roads they would take. “We’ll take the new highway as far as it goes, then, here, we’ll jump over to old 52, maybe we’ll stop in Alexandria for lunch, grab a quick sandwich at the truck stop. Once we’re in the Cities, stick close to me, don’t let another car get between us, if we get separated, we’ll never find each other. Here, you take the map, here’s a blow-up of the St. Paul streets in this corner of the map, I’ve circled the streets where Macalester is, over in St. Paul.”

  Cash reached back to touch the pocket where she had put the addresses from Mrs. Kills Horses. Damn! She’d left the pieces of paper at the house.

  “This X is where the Minority House is, but just follow me, I have to drop these guys off at the Sigma Phi fraternity house where they’ll be staying.” He folded the map so the roads he had pointed out were showing and handed it to Cash. “Let’s go!” All the men piled into the navy-blue sedan with the State of Minnesota license plates. Cash hopped into her Ranchero.

  There was little traffic at this hour on Saturday morning. Farmers tended to start their days early, even their shopping days, so anyone who was coming into town was already in town. And most of them would stay for lunch, “make a day of it,” at one of the local restaurants.

  Cash stayed two car lengths behind the state sedan. Close enough so no one was going to jump in between them. Dean LeRoy was driving the speed limit. Cash turned on the radio. “Only the lonely…” drifted from the speakers. She cracked the window two inches and lit a cigarette. Took a sip of coffee from the Thermos Mo had handed her as she walked out the door.

  Flat farmland slid by outside. Plowed fields, black dirt waiting for white snow. Golden stubble fields that the deer seemed to love to graze early morning and at dusk. In some fields there was a lonely stand of oak or pine trees. Tall grass grew at the bottom of their trunks, holdovers from early homesteads left behind when families moved to a different quarter-acre to build their new modern, ranch-style homes—families who were more interested in the two-parent household and raising children with TVs, phones and modern ideas. They left ma and pa behind to live out their final years on the old farmstead with their old-world ideas. Most of those houses were now a pile of timber hidden by the tall grass and tree trunks.

  About forty miles out of town, the landscape changed. Flat land gave way to rolling hills. Cow pasture, where Angus or Hereford cows grazed, co-existed with corn stubble and plowed soybean fields.

  The little college caravan had reached the edge of Lake Agassiz. The lake, the result of a melting glacier moving north, had existed for over ten thousand years. The glacier had shaved the land flat, leaving behind the Red River and the surrounding Valley. The yearly flooding of the river, caused by the abundant snowfalls of the north and the multiple small creeks and rivers that overfilled their banks with the freezing spring melt off, created the thick rich topsoil of the Valley.

  Black gold is what the area farmers called that soil. They would stand around in their fields in the summer and fall months, kicking clumps of dirt. Or bend down to crush the soil between their calloused hands. The richest dirt was pitch black and fine. Closer to the river, it began to mix with river clay, causing slippery roads for truck drivers hauling beets or potatoes to the harvest plants. On the highway where Cash was driving now—on a slight, barely perceptible incline—she entered the upper ledges of what used to be that ancient lake.

  Up here, the soil contained sand. Kids would sometimes dig through the fields, ditches and farmyards to find seashell fossils. In the spring, farmers harvested rocks on the edge of Lake Agassiz. In the Minnesota winters, the ground would freeze up to four feet below the surface. When it warmed in the spring, rocks were pushed to the top. On the lake edge, now turned to farmland or left as oak and pine forest, abandoned farmsteads often had a pile of boulders in addition to the falling down buildings of the ancestors. Teens from the Valley hired themselves out in the spring to walk the fields and toss rocks into a wagon driven beside them. It was a job Cash herself had never had to consider. Driving truck was her primary trade.

  The land rolled by. The hills were so different from the flatness of the Valley. You really could see forever in the Valley. On the horizon at home the only thing that might block the view were the oak and cottonwood trees that snaked along the Red River.

  Cash saw the sedan’s right blinker flick on. She followed the car off the interstate and pulled into a gravel parking lot. A Standard Oil gas station sat next to a low-slung building, a truck stop proclaiming HOME-COOKED MEALS. Cash got out and followed the guys into the restaurant. Truckers sat slumped at the counter, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, tapping the ashes into black plastic ashtrays set between each stool. Others were eating pie or finishing a roast beef sandwich smothered in gravy. No one looked up when they entered.

  LeRoy and Danielson led the students to a table looking out the large glass window, their view the gravel lot and other cars being waited on by pump attendants in dark blue Standard Oil uniforms.

  “You kids get something to eat. We’ll put it on the college credit card. Sandwich and a piece of pie might hold you until we eat tonight,” LeRoy said as the waitress handed them each a plastic-covered menu and, without asking, poured everyone a cup of coffee.

  Cash knew enough not to turn down a free meal and ordered the hot roast beef sandwich and a piece of apple pie. Danielson seemed to be on his good behavior, his leering and over-friendliness put on hold. The men—the teachers and students—talked about fertilizer and hybrid soybeans, which is what the guys’ science project was about. Cash wished she had the nerve to ask them if they knew where the Grain Exchange building was. But, because she didn’t know if it was a real place or just a radio show, she kept eating her lunch.

  After a brief mention of Cash’s writing award, she was ignored for the rest of the meal. Sometimes she would look up and catch Danielson looking at her, but not in the overt flirting way he did with Sharon and her back at campus. It was a more calculating look.

  When Cash was finished, she excused herself and went to the bathroom. When she came out, the men were bunched around the cash register as if all of them were paying the bill. Cash stepped outside and lit a cigarette. The sun was shining and the air smelled of gasoline and diesel fuel.

  Without saying a word, the guys came out and piled back into the sedan. Cash got in the Ranchero and followed the car out of the parking lot and back onto the freeway. After a quick glance at the map, she figured they were about halfway to the Cities. What would that be like? Her stomach fluttered. Maybe Superman would fly down and greet her. She wondered how to find out where the Grain Exchange was, if it really existed.

  She turned up Hank Williams. When she found herself singing along, she laughed out
loud remembering Mo’s off-key renditions of every song he sang. He seemed to know the words to them all too, and he didn’t seem to care that he sounded so bad.

  As they got closer to the Cities, there were more towns along the road, especially after they left 94 and got on 52. Highway signs declared eighteen miles—ten miles—next exit Minneapolis. As they got farther into the main city, she recognized the Foshay Tower from pictures in the newspaper and schoolbooks, the word Foshay in tall black letters, clearly visible embedded in the brick top.

  Leaving Minneapolis, they crossed a bridge over the Mississippi River. Another highway sign told them they were now in St. Paul. They exited the freeway onto tree-lined streets. They were bare of leaves now except for a few reluctant hangers-on. Cash squinted her eyes trying to imagine what the city must look like when all the trees had all their leaves.

  She imagined a princess’s palace, like the pictures in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Soon they were driving into a part of the city where the houses did look like castles and the streets were named Grand Avenue and Summit.

  And then they arrived at Macalester College. It was a majestic place, more regal than the Moorhead State campus. LeRoy seemed to be driving in circles. Finally he pulled over and parked. He got out of the sedan and walked back to Cash.

  “Just follow me and we’ll go drop these boys off. It’s taking me a bit to find their housing, but shouldn’t be too long now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then I’ll take you to the Minority House.”

  Cash nodded. He returned to the sedan. It took another ten minutes to find the boys’ housing. Cash waited in the Ranchero, watching well-dressed students walk around the campus. Not as many hippies here, she thought.

  With the boys and Danielson deposited, LeRoy led her to a three-story white brick house on the edge of the campus. It had a curved driveway. Cash pulled in behind the state car and waited until LeRoy got out and walked up to the door. He turned around and motioned for her to come over.