The Ninth Metal

by Benjamin Percy

  “Okay.”

  “Northfall’s ours—right, Johnny? It always has been. The Frontiers have kept this place alive as long as we’ve been alive.”

  “Okay.”

  “This Black Dog? They’re a bunch of vulturous bitches. Swooping in here with their bullshit and trying to, like, usurp us.”

  “Usurp you?”

  “Isn’t that the word? Like stage a coup or some shit?”

  “Seems like there’s plenty of money to be made. We don’t need all of it. What’s wrong with a little competition?”

  “It’s not just about that, dumb-ass. These pricks have operations in Alaska, Texas, North Dakota. They leave a mess wherever they go. Superfund sites up the ass. No philanthropy. Treat their employees like garbage. They don’t care about Northfall. They don’t have its best interests in mind.”

  “Plenty of environmentalists will say the same about us.”

  “Mining’s going to happen here whether those nature-worshipping pansies cry into their recycled tissues or not. Who you want doing the digging? The guys that got roots that run deep. That’s who. That’s us. Even some Prius-driving granola-puss is going to agree with me on that. We want to make this town into a powerhouse. Black Dog wants to make this town into a carved-out pit.”

  “This isn’t my fight.”

  “Sure as shit is, Johnny. And it’s not just about profit. It’s about control. The future of this family, the future of this company, the future of the town, the future of this state—all the goddamn pressure in the goddamn world is on us right now.”

  “You should really go talk to your guests. People want to say hello to the bride.”

  “We’re going to talk more about this later. Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “You promise?”

  “I’m—look. I’m sorry, but I’m planning on leaving tomorrow.”

  She curls her lip at him, that old fast temper. “The hell is your rush, Johnny? You haven’t been home in five years. Stick around. This is your town. We’re your family.” She slaps a palm against his chest and knocks him back a step.

  Twenty years ago, he would have pinched her or yanked her hair and run. Now he smooths his coat and says, “I go by John these days.”

  “John,” she says in a nasal, drawn-out voice meant to make the name sound boring.

  “Aren’t you leaving anyway?” he says. “The honeymoon is in Mexico, right?”

  “You’re not going anywhere. All right, John? We’re going to talk. After this lace-and-cake circus finishes up. Got a favor to ask you. Can’t deny a bride on her wedding day—am I right?”

  “Yes. Fine. Now go.”

  “I gotta go make nice.”

  “So go.”

  She starts away from him, but before she gets far, he grabs her by the elbow. “Is that blood?”

  “What?” she says, annoyed and then concerned. “Where?” She tucks her chin and sees the dime-size spot on her breast. She plucks a cloth napkin from a table, dunks it in a glass of ice water, and roughs the stain until it’s only a pink memory. “Probably just red wine.”

  8

  * * *

  Six months after Stacie was sworn in as a Northfall police officer, her uniform still feels like a costume. The belt—weighed down with pepper spray, a Taser, handcuffs, a pistol—bothers her, abrading her hips and ribs, building up calluses where none should be. Her heart jumps every time the radio squawks. She wonders why everyone stares and stiffens at the sight of her, and then she remembers, Oh, right, I’m a cop. Stacie Toal, Northfall PD. Part of her hopes the newness will wear off. And another part of her hopes she never loses the chirpy excitement, the stupid gratefulness she feels almost every day. She has trouble not using the word awesome in every other sentence, and she figures that’s a good way to be, full of awe.

  The downtown slides past her, every building lit up, every parking lot full, the sidewalks crowded with strangers. Hank Lippert drives. It’s a warm night, but after a day of air conditioning, they’ve both rolled down their windows, and the breeze feels good. She takes in the vaporous night, the stink of cigarettes and weed, the whoosh and rumble of passing cars and trucks. A group of men straddling parked motorcycles glance their way and then double over in rowdy laughter. Drumbeats throb from the open door of a bar.

  It’s more than the job that feels novel. She still hasn’t gotten used to the way Northfall has changed. The new town and the old town battle for control of her mind, reality uneasily warping her memories; it’s like she’s looking at her history through a funhouse mirror. Over there, behind what used to be a dry cleaner’s and is now a vape shop, is the parking lot where she lost her virginity in the back seat of her parents’ Buick. Over here, a real estate agent’s office plastered with million-dollar properties was once an ice cream and candy shop. In that alleyway she found a stray cat and took her home and named her Snowball. On that park bench, in fifth grade, she watched the Fourth of July parade.

  She’s supposed to be looking for one of their own, a deputy who didn’t clock out that morning. His Dodge Charger has gone missing and he hasn’t responded to repeated hails and his wife keeps calling to ask about him. Dan Swanson.

  Stacie hasn’t been on the job long enough to know everyone, but she’s seen him around the station, said, “Hey,” in the hallways and parking lot. Early thirties. Goatee. Weightlifter’s build. Married, but with a single-guy swagger and too much cologne.

  “He’s fine,” Hank says. “Probably went on a bender at the end of his shift. Or met up with some tail he’s chasing on the side. Happens.”

  “It does?” Stacie says.

  “Sure, sure.” Hank is her partner. Fifty-something, mustached, rumpled, and greasy along the edges. Parts of him bulge against his uniform. Someone thirty years older than her might find him handsome in an Elks Lodge kind of way. He smells like the Kodiak chew he spits into an empty Gatorade bottle. “He’ll show up soon. Probably stinking of sex and Wild Turkey. You’ll see.” Hank reminds her of the kind of men who excel as car salesmen and middle-­school football coaches. She’s been doing her best to listen to him because he must have something to teach her even if he seems to be 80 percent full of manure.

  She’s been packing candy with her. Gummy bears. Skittles. Starbursts. Always fruit-flavored, nothing that can melt easily, like chocolate. She hands it out to kids but also to anyone they help: a man whose car broke down on the side of the road, a woman reporting her husband for throwing a chair at her. They all accept the candy with a weird look of disbelief and pleasure. She pulls out a pink Starburst now and offers it to Hank and he says, “Huh? No, thanks. Had two cavities filled the other day. Supposed to lay off the sugar.”

  “Life’s not worth living,” she says and pops the candy in her own mouth instead, “without sweets.”

  The radio chirps and dispatch says, “Car Three, we got a disturbance at the United Methodist on Forest Park Road. Sounds like metal-eaters.”

  Hank unclips the radio, thumbs the button. “This is Car Three. Five minutes away,” he says and switches on the rack lights. “This should be interesting.”

  “Oh, I think every call’s interesting.”

  The night kaleidoscopes red and blue. The traffic unzippers out of the way and the car picks up speed and they both crank up their windows to seal out the wind.

  The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently ran a series on ninth metal and addiction. Everyone wanted to try space dust. People said it felt like sex in your veins. They said it made your brain go somewhere else. They said it sped up your metabolism and kept you awake for days. “You think the metal-eaters are dangerous? Because they always seem so—I don’t know—dreamy and trippy to me.”

  Hank chances a look at her, then jerks the wheel and bombs down a side street. “I assume everybody’s dangerous. I advise you to do the same.”

  “I like to assume everybody’s good.” She pitches her voice high, but it still doesn’t sound true. “They just sometimes make mist
akes.”

  He coughs out a laugh. “You say so. But these guys? I don’t know. They’re spooky.”

  Hank, like so many of the locals, believes the town is under siege. And she gets that. But she’s a self-described optimist, openly fond of inspirational calendars and platitudes printed on coffee mugs and sewn onto throw pillows. She loves Disney and Hallmark. She only reads books that promise to give her a good cry. When someone asks what she does, she generally uses the word peacekeeper, not cop. Sometimes, at the end of the day, her cheeks ache from all her smiling. More than once she has been referred to as a Pollyanna. Maybe that’s meant as an insult, but it’s never bothered her. What’s wrong with hope? What’s wrong with heart? The world needs more of it.

  So she tries to think positively about the change that has come to Northfall. There were times when she was a kid, when the sawmills and the mines started shutting down, that her father guessed the town would die. Now everyone wants to live here. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Shouldn’t the town be proud? Of course, some growing pains are to be expected.

  They roar through a neighborhood, and then the bungalows and fenced-in yards give way to a grassy lawn that leads up to a church. Stacie spots dozens of ghostly figures moving around it. Men or women, she can’t tell from here. But they’re all wearing black. Black T-shirts, black pants, black shoes. The color of the cosmos. This is the uniform of what some refer to as the Comet Cult—those who have formed a kind of religion around omnimetal.

  Stacie says, “How do they even make the metal into a drug?”

  “Grind it, crush it. Magnets, floats. Heat and water. I don’t know the whole rigmarole of the recipe, but they’re ultimately after the salt. That’s what they smoke and sniff.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  The squad car comes to a rocking halt and they yank open their doors and step outside and start across the grass. Stacie has to take twice as many steps as Hank to keep up with him. The night is loud with what sounds like hammer strokes mixed up with wood moaning and splintering as it’s torn apart

  “Junkies are both dumb as shit and smarter than hell. Give them a kitchen and some beakers, they’re all a bunch of Julia Child mad scientists. You could offer them an old sneaker and a brick of cheddar and they’d turn it into something toxic to shove up their ass or needle into their eye.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “They’re armed,” Hank says. “They’re always armed. Haven’t caught one yet without an open-carry permit, but be aware they’re packing.” Now they can see the ladders angled against the church and the people on the roof. Torn shingles fly off and slap the grass. Nails tinkle onto the sidewalk. A sheet of plywood hits the ground with a whoomp of displaced air that maybe sounds a little like the crack of a rifle, and Hank ducks down and reaches for his holster.

  “It was just a ​—” she says, but he doesn’t let her finish the sentence. “I know what it was.”

  There is a dumpster out front and a man unloads some construction debris into it. He has a pistol in a holster at his hip. He turns to look at them as they approach and his eyes glow a faint blue. It makes Stacie think of middle-school sleepovers when she and her friends would shut off the lights and crunch their way through mint Life Savers, delighting in the sparks they gave off. “Metal is,” he says. This is a greeting, a goodbye, an acknowledgment of truth, a prayer of sorts, a multipurpose phrase the metal-eaters use regularly in conversation.

  “What in the Sam Hill are you all doing to this church?” Hank says.

  “It’s our church.” The man’s voice is calm and soft. He is mostly bald, like all of the others, his hair downy where it hasn’t fallen out in patches. They all pause in their work to stare at them.

  “The hell it is.”

  “It was for sale. We bought it.”

  “The hell you did. This here’s a Methodist church. I been to a dozen weddings in it and twice as many funerals.”

  “Not anymore.” The man studies them without emotion. His white shirt and pants are dirtied and sweat through. “I can show you the paperwork, if you like.”

  Hank doesn’t seem to know what to say. He peers into the dumpster, then steps back a few paces and takes in the people perched on the roof and ladders like gargoyles. “I thought you did your worshipping out at the compound? What do you need to be here in town for?”

  “Visibility. Recruitment. We’re part of this town, whether you like it or not.”

  Hank shakes his head and spits a brown stream of chew. “I don’t know how you crazies could pool together enough money to buy a meal, let alone a building.”

  The front door of the church opens and a man steps out. A thin, balding man with hollowed cheekbones and eyes that strobe as he blinks rapidly. “Is there a problem here?” He approaches them. “Is there something I can do to help?”

  Stacie says, “Nico?” and he trains his gaze on her. “You’re Nico Frontier, right?” The Frontiers were as close as you came to celebrities in a town like Northfall, but while Ragnar and Talia seemed to be mentioned in the paper or on the radio every day, Nico kept out of the spotlight.

  “Metal is,” he says.

  Hank says, “Jesus, what are you doing mixed up with these people?”

  “We would like to continue our work,” Nico says. “If you don’t mind.”

  Hank starts to back up and his voice softens into an apology. “People are complaining, that’s all. About the racket. There’s noise ordinances in this town, you know. Why are you putting on a new roof in the middle of the night anyway?”

  “We’re not putting on a new roof,” Nico says.

  “Not sure I follow.”

  “There will be no roof,” Nico says and raises his arms to address the night sky. “So that when the parish worships, they can be that much closer to the stars.”

  9

  * * *

  It’s after midnight when John stands in his mother’s den. The original room from their original house, which has been consumed by the larger mansion or lodge or compound—whatever the word—built over the top of it. The guests are gone, but the backyard is still lit up with paper lanterns and busy with workers stacking chairs and collecting glassware and disassembling the dance floor.

  Her name was Hillary and she has been dead for over ten years, but the carpet is freshly vacuumed into stripes, and the desk and the sewing table and the shelves are dusted, so it seems she might walk in at any moment and pull down a book and settle herself in her favorite chair, the glider she sat in to nurse them all. One wall is entirely covered with photos, from floor to ceiling. Varying sizes, varying frames, some black-and-white, but most color. She was one of those people whose default emotion was joy, and the photos reflect that. She is smiling in every one of them. Among the more posed wedding and baptism and birthday and Christmas shots, there are candid moments of them camping at Loon Lake, skiing at Lutsen, climbing on some heavy equipment at the iron mines.

  She loved sundresses and Italian food and gardening and black tea and Ella Fitzgerald and Marlboro Reds. There was an exclamation mark at the end of every sentence she uttered. Her husband was twenty years older than she, and maybe she entered the marriage with the sense of being a caregiver because she was devoted to a fault, always giving to her husband and her children, never seeming to consider herself. She claimed to love nothing more than hosting dinner parties.

  Maybe others remembered her differently, but he didn’t want to know their version. In his mind she would remain cast in gold. Guilt and shame could do that to your memory. You either sought some way to deflect it and absolve yourself or you chugged the whole bottle of poison. It was his fault—no amount of therapy or assurance from others could convince him otherwise—and so she was faultless.

  He had stolen her lighter and a pack of Reds. He had brought them to the middle school. He had snuck outside during shop class, and on the loading dock he shook out three cigarettes to share with those who joined him. This was in February, and a storm
had blown in, mixing snow and sleet. They shivered in their shirtsleeves and stomped their feet to keep them warm when they lit up. They tried not to cough and pretended not to care when the shop teacher, Mr. Steele, appeared behind them and smacked John on the back of the head so hard that his cigarette extinguished in a snow bank five feet away. They followed Mr. Steele to the principal’s office, where they were promptly suspended, then sat silently while their parents were called to come pick them up.

  But his mother never arrived. On her way into town the snow gave way fully to freezing rain. The Cadillac slid on a turn and floated across the paint into the left lane and here she met a logging truck stacked with timber. The car was dragged along for twenty yards before crumpling into a shredded, smoking mess beneath the eighteen-wheeler.

  He didn’t remember much about the gray fever of that time. But there were flashes: The way his tie choked him at the funeral. The way minnows dimpled the surface of Lake Superior, feeding off the ashes when they spread them in the water. The way John’s father turned away from him when he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Maybe John was never a good kid, but he had always been the favorite, the treasured baby. Talia would complain that he got all the attention, that they spoiled him and made his every day feel like the weekend, and she might have been right. But his mother’s death—when he was thirteen—made him wild and impossible. One death changes a life; one comet changes the world. He grew his hair long. Dyed it peroxide blond. Pierced his eyebrow. Stole from his father’s liquor cabinet. Bought weed and oxy behind the bowling alley. He set an abandoned trailer on fire, stole and wrecked a car, and broke a bottle over someone’s head and put him in the hospital. He would have been expelled from the middle school if not for his father pulling him out and sending him to a boarding school for troubled boys in Colorado.