Girl Gone Missing

by Marcie Rendon

  Cash didn’t know what to do. She had no intention of staying overnight in a house that looked like it belonged in a fairy tale. Since Wheaton got her the apartment, she had never slept anywhere except there or in the bed of her truck. She didn’t see that changing tonight. But she didn’t want to give that information to Dean LeRoy.

  She walked up the brick staircase to an oak door they could have walked through together, side by side, it was that wide. Dean LeRoy rang a bell that Cash hadn’t even seen. Every bone and muscle in her body told her to run, and to keep running. But she stood stock-still.

  A fashionably dressed black woman in her mid-thirties answered the door. Her hair was styled into a modish Afro. Her navy leather pumps matched the navy skirt she was wearing. Cash had read about silk blouses. The yellow blouse with bright red flowers the woman was wearing was the first one she had seen in real life.

  “You must be Renee Blackbear,” she said, extending her hand for Cash to shake. Her fingernails were painted a pale pink. “Welcome. Come on in. And you are Professor LeRoy, correct? Pleased to meet you both. Call me Frances,” she said to Cash. “I’m the house mother here. Come on in. Let’s shut the door—it’s a bit chilly out this time of the year.”

  But Cash felt colder inside than she did standing outside.

  “Let me show you around. You can bring your suitcase in and get settled once you know where you’ll sleep.”

  LeRoy excused himself. “I’ll be staying at the fraternity house with the others who came down. I’ll come back at five-thirty to take Renee to the award ceremony.”

  Frances fluttered him out the door, assuring him she would make Renee feel right at home. “Come on,” she told Cash, “I’ll show you where you can sleep. The kitchen is over there. There are probably some chips and such, if you want a midnight snack.”

  The more silent Cash was, the more talkative Frances became, until she was chattering like it was forty-below.

  Frances showed Cash the parlor and the library and another living room. Each of the rooms was decorated with Black is Beautiful posters or photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. In one of the side rooms, Cash saw posters of Indian chiefs thumbtacked to the wall. In another room, the ballroom, Frances called it, black light posters of Jimi Hendrix and Kool and the Gang were tacked up.

  Soon they were back in the wood-paneled front room. Frances’s face begged Cash to say something. Cash held up her pointer finger in the universal sign of “just one minute” and she walked out the door. Before she even got one step out, she inhaled and exhaled. Inhaled again. The crisp fall air filled her lungs and refreshed her mind. She dug in her jean jacket pocket and lit up a Marlboro. Just as she threw the match on the ground, the door behind her opened and Frances said, “You’ll have to move your truck to the parking lot on the side there.” And then she shut the door behind her.

  Cash finished her cigarette before she went to her truck to move it. She checked to make sure her .22 was tucked way behind the front seat out of sight. She hadn’t fired the rifle since the incident a couple months ago, when two hotheads from Canada had killed an Indian guy who had come down from Red Lake to help with the harvest season. She had stuck her cue stick back there too thinking that maybe, somewhere in the big city, there might be a pool hall she could check out. While she was digging around in the truck and arranging things, she also remembered the money she had stashed in the springs under the driver’s seat. She reached up and felt around. Yep, the roll of bills was still stashed between two of the wire springs.

  Cash grabbed the paper bag with the clothes she had packed to wear to the award ceremony, locked the truck up and went back into the big house. Frances was sitting on a couch pretending to read a newspaper. Cash pointed toward the stairs and Frances nodded.

  She closed the door to the room.

  Everything in the house was thick and dark. Thick wool carpets. Thick brocade curtains. Thick mattresses. Thick walls.

  She sat carefully on the edge of the bed. It had one of those nubby bedspreads the foster mothers seemed to love. Cash tugged at one of the small tufts. She remembered picking a bedspread bare in one of the homes, picking the tufts out in her sleep. That had ensured a beating.

  She shifted on the bed. She hadn’t seen anyone else in the house. Frances had said most of the students who were staying over the weekend were at the football game. There was a clock on the bed stand that said it was four-thirty. Dean LeRoy would be by in an hour to get her.

  Cash changed clothes. She stood on the edge of the clawfoot bathtub in the bathroom to get a look in the medicine cabinet mirror. With her jean jacket on, the shirt didn’t look too wrinkled at all. She stepped down off the edge of the tub and pulled the shirt collar out over the jean jacket collar. There, she almost looked dressed up.

  She moved her ID, money and matches from the jeans she had taken off into the back pocket of the jeans she was wearing. She rolled up the clothes and the tennis shoes she’d worn down to the Cities and put them in the paper bag. Put on the cowboy boots with her jeans tucked in. She brushed her hair and rebraided it into one long braid. She stood back up on the bathtub edge. Gave herself a once over. Figured it would have to do.

  When she left the house, paper bag in hand, Frances was nowhere to be seen. There were two Indian students sitting side by side on one of the couches, eating potato chips from a green glass bowl. The three of them nodded their heads at each other and said nothing.

  She had just stashed the paper bag in the cab of the truck when LeRoy pulled up beside her. Danielson and the boys were in the car with him.

  “Ready for your big night?” he asked Cash as all four of them got out of the car. The boys were now wearing suit coats over their cotton shirts and corduroy pants. Each was wearing a square knotted tie around his neck. “We can walk to the banquet center from here. You gonna be warm enough?”

  Cash nodded. She’d be fine. She locked up the Ranchero and stuck the keys in her front pocket.

  Cash didn’t feel so underdressed once she got to the banquet. Some of the women were wearing dresses and heels, their hair in Jackie Kennedy bouffant styles. But plenty of others were dressed in flared bell-bottoms and sheer made-in-India cotton shirts. A few wore thin-braided leather headbands, their long blonde hair purposely brushed out to look unkempt. Most of the guys were dressed like the two dudes with her: junior college professors.

  The tables were set with white tablecloths, napkins folded like cranes on the top plate. On one side of the plate was a line of forks and on the other side an equal number of spoons. Cash watched carefully as the men at her table navigated the plates and bowls and cups and silverware. The meal was some kind of chicken. The overpowering taste of sage almost made her gag. She filled herself up on mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables. Presenters gave short speeches for each category of awards.

  Professor LeRoy drummed his fingers on the table as they called out the third and second place writing award winners. When Cash’s name, Renee Blackbear, was called for the first-place award, he jumped to his feet clapping furiously. Cash was so nervous she out-of-bodied herself the minute she heard her name. She watched herself get up from her seat at the table, navigate between the tables to the microphone, accept the paper award, shake some hands and move through the tables to sit back down.

  As she plopped down on the red velvet chair at the table, she also returned into herself. All of one being, she held the award out and read Awarded to Renee Blackbear. As if listening from underwater, she heard Mr. Danielson ask to see the award. He was already reaching out to take it from her. It got passed around the table. All the men offered their congratulations, Professor LeRoy the happiest of all. Cash was still in a fog of tension, repeating thank you, thank you to each comment.

  God, she wanted a beer. The adults at the table were smoking. In fact, LeRoy was chain-smoking. She looked around and saw that some of the girls dressed in bell-bottoms were smoking at their tables. She lit up.

  Talk at the table
turned to what each of them wanted to do on Sunday before driving back to Fargo-Moorhead. The boys wanted to visit Como Zoo. Danielson wanted to stop by Shinder’s Bookstore in downtown Minneapolis. Everyone at the table snickered except Cash. She had no idea why visiting a bookstore would cause grown men to snicker until one of the boys said, “You can get me the latest Playboy.” And the table erupted in laughter. Cash was ignored, as usual—“just one of the guys.”

  LeRoy asked, “Anything you want to see, Cash?”

  Maybe because she was upset at the guys wanting a Playboy. Or because she felt totally excluded from the night’s festivities and certainly out of her element in this swanky place with white tablecloths, too much silverware and red plush chairs, Cash heard herself saying, “The Grain Exchange.”

  “The Grain Exchange?” one of the guys said, as if it were a foreign planet. Maybe it was just a word, not a place.

  Cash ducked her head, a feeling of shame washing over her. This whole weekend was bringing up feelings of shame—from the fancy Minority Students’ House to the dinner of chicken she gagged on. It reminded her of the times in foster homes when she was denied something other folks took as normal: a birthday not celebrated or not getting school pictures. School pictures were a luxury the county never covered for the foster homes. While the other kids traded billfold-size pictures in study hall, Cash would hide in a book, reading to escape the present. Shame was a constant companion.

  She had spent the last three or four years living her life so she could escape feeling such shame. She looked up at the men seated around the table. They stared back at her without saying a word. She couldn’t tell what they were thinking—if they were laughing at her or judging her. Finally Danielson said, “Shinders is downtown at 7th and Hennepin. I think the Grain Exchange is on 4th and 4th.”

  One of the boys said, “Yeah, on 4th and 4th. We visited it for our Junior Future Farmers of America class trip. It’s pretty noisy with everyone hollering out the stock numbers. I don’t know if it’s open on Sundays though.”

  “You can ride with me,” said Danielson. “We can go to downtown Minneapolis in the morning and look around.”

  Over my dead body.

  LeRoy said, “I wanted to go see the Cathedral on Summit. I was hoping that you would drive that way with me, Cash. There’s a college professor who was one of the judges for the writing award. I’d like to introduce you to him. He was mighty impressed with your work.”

  “Okay.” She jumped at the opportunity to avoid a trip to downtown Minneapolis with Danielson. “In the morning? I think I’ll get up early and drive downtown and just walk around outside the Grain Exchange.”

  “Sure. You can meet me outside the Cathedral after Mass and we’ll go to the professor’s. He lives up on Summit Hill.”

  One of the guys, the one who wanted a Playboy, nudged the other guy and said, “We’ll go to Shinder’s with you, Mr. Danielson.”

  The guys all laughed. Folks began to drift out of the banquet room. The Moorhead State group walked briskly back to the parking lot of the Minority Students’ house. The guys said goodnight and hopped into the state car. LeRoy rolled down the car window. “Nine a.m. outside the Cathedral.” Cash waved agreement.

  As soon as they were out of sight, Cash got into the Ranchero and drove toward Minneapolis using the Foshay Tower as her landmark.

  She poked along through downtown. Past Shinders on Hennepin. Past a lively bar called Moby Dick’s—it looked like a bigger version of the Casbah—but she didn’t stop. She drove the length of Hennepin Avenue and then down Nicollet. There were some women in very short miniskirts and beehive hairdos wearing extremely high platform heels. The way they stood, hips or chest jutted out, with their eyes scanning each car that drove by, Cash wondered if they were prostitutes. None of them had long blonde hair like the missing girls.

  She cruised over to 4th and 4th and parked across the street from what she assumed was the front door of the Grain Exchange. It was a large square building with hundreds of windows up and around the walls. She counted ten floors of windows and ten windows around one side and eight on the other. There were still some lights on in the building, but no one was out walking on these quieter downtown streets.

  The Grain Exchange had been a constant part of her life since she first heard the stock report on the radio. If she thought about it, she had probably heard the farm market report every day of her life since she started driving truck.

  A couple of cars drove by on the street. The reflection of the red, yellow and green from the stoplights changing signal colors vibrated on the cold pavement. Metropolis was real.

  Without thinking, Cash jumped out of the truck, ran across 4th and put a hand against the stone of the building. It was cold. Colder than the night air. Cash shivered, more from excitement than from the cold. She walked past the brass and glass doors and saw men standing around in a large room. The floor was some kind of polished stone with large marble pillars like she had seen in pictures of ancient Rome. The men were talking, using big hand gestures, excited about whatever they were discussing. Cash walked to the end of the block, looking in the windows as best she could.

  When she got to the corner of the building, streetlights allowed her to see letters and triangles carved into the stone of the building. She used her finger to trace a triangle. She shivered again. It was beautiful. Cash had had no way of imagining what the Grain Exchange would look like. If anything, she had thought there would be a man sitting at a wooden desk in front of a radio microphone, reading the stock reports from pieces of typing paper.

  Peering back in through the large glass windows, Cash saw large boards with numbers written on them, room-sized chalkboards. Each had rows of numbers across and down. Written with decimal points. She laughed out loud. Not only was the Grain Exchange a real building, the numbers the announcers read on the radio came from somewhere and apparently had meaning to people besides farmers standing in the field, a smile crossing their faces if wheat was selling for more than a dollar a bushel. A spit in the dirt and a kick of the tractor tire if corn dropped three cents.

  Cash ran back across the street and hopped into her truck. She started the motor and turned on the heat. She pulled her jean jacket tight around her as she waited for the cab to heat up. She felt like a little kid on Christmas morning. If someone had asked her why she was so happy she wouldn’t have known how to explain the excitement of discovering that things, life, existed outside of the Valley.

  She smoked another cigarette while she considered the Grain Exchange, enjoying the discovery of this corner of reality, smiling to herself. When she finally felt fulfilled, had drunk in enough of the structure and stone building, she put the truck in gear and drove slowly away, looking back and back, as if she was leaving an old friend.

  She left downtown Minneapolis and drove University Avenue into St. Paul. She remembered Mrs. Kills Horses telling her to stop in at the AIM office, but she’d left that address lying on top of her dresser back in her apartment. She turned on the radio to find out what time it was. She had to turn the dial to find a station that wasn’t all static-y and then wait through a couple of songs before the announcer said, “And the time, in the City of the Lakes, is 10:11. Stay tuned for #30 in our countdown of this week’s top hits.” Cash turned the radio off. She wanted to soak in all the sights and feelings the city had to offer without any distraction.

  She tried to visualize the scrap of paper she’d shoved in her pocket. Maybe it was all the city lights, but she was having a difficult time pulling up the image. As she pulled to a stop at the streetlight at University and Dale, she looked to the left. There stood another bunch of women, high heels, miniskirts, smoking cigarettes, leaning into the open windows of cars that pulled up near the sidewalk. A movie marquee advertised XXX Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs XXX. By the look of the men sidling into the theater, Cash gathered it wasn’t a Walt Disney feature.

  At that moment, an unmarked police car ran the red li
ght at the corner, lights flashing, and pulled up to the curb on Dale. The women scattered like birds. Cash sat through the light, watching them run behind buildings and into alleys. Some ran across the street, barely missing moving cars. One woman’s blond afro wig flew off her head. Money, bills, flew behind her into the night air as she dipped behind the wooden stairs of a building and got lost in its shadow.

  Two guys got out of the car, dressed in street clothes, not cop uniforms. They walked a few feet on each of the street corner sidewalks. One of them cut across the street and started picking up the money blowing around.

  “Leave my fucking bread alone, you damn pig.”

  Cash couldn’t see anyone but it sounded like it came from the top of the stairs across the street. The cop laughed, held up the bills he had managed to catch and rifled them, fanning them out.

  “Fuck you. Pig.”

  The cop stuffed the money in his front shirt pocket.

  “Come and get it,” he hollered up.

  “Pig. Fuck you, pig.”

  He laughed, came back across the street and got into the unmarked car. His partner joined him as the dark sedan, almost the same make and model as the Moorhead State car, drove off.

  Cash pulled over next to the curb to get a better view of all the excitement. Gradually women came back out, walked up to each other, and stood in pairs. They complained loudly about the “pigs” ruining their night’s work, how they’d have to work overtime to make up the difference. The woman who’d lost her money emerged from the shadows. She picked up her wig and pulled it back onto her head. She bent down to pick up some money the officer had missed, her miniskirt riding high up over her underwear. As she was still squatted down, a car came from the other direction and pulled up next to her, blocking her from Cash’s view. Cash saw a man reach over and roll down his window. The woman stood up and leaned in his car. And then she got in the car and they drove off.