The thing is, Jenna knows. She pretends not to, because that’s simpler. And it’s surprisingly easy to trick her mind blank. But she knows what happened to Dan.
A few weeks ago, he came home with a fat wallet and big promises. “Just you wait,” he kept saying. “This is only the beginning.”
She couldn’t help but smile when he handed her a few hundreds, but then worry started gathering inside her and she crumpled the money into a sweaty twist and said, “Where’d you get it?”
He wouldn’t answer her except with a stupid grin, but she kept after him. “Dan Swanson? What have you gone and done?”
“Everybody else in Northfall is making bank,” he said. “Why not us?” It was a question they had often posed. She made good tips at the Lumberjack Steakhouse and he made a solid salary of forty-eight K as a deputy, but everything was more expensive now because of the boom. A gallon of milk cost seven bucks. Their rent had been jacked up to two thousand a month and their landlord said, “If you won’t pay it, seven other metal-heads will.” On top of that, they had car payments, student loans, credit card debt, medical bills from the croup that put Timmy in the hospital last winter.
Dan was never good at keeping secrets, and a few beers and hours later, he finally told her. “There’s the mines, and there’s the mills.” He was referring to the metalworks that had been built in St. Paul specifically for the smelting and rolling and casting of omnimetal. “An armored transport goes out every morning, carrying the load.”
Because omnimetal was so difficult to mine, only a thousand pounds or so shipped out of Northfall every day. That might not have sounded like a lot, but the ore was fantastically rich and dense, translating to ten parts per million as an alloy. “The Frontiers send ten semis down to St. Paul. A caravan with a security detail armed to the gills. But only one of the trailers actually has anything in it. Maybe the third, maybe the seventh. Depends. Different one every day.”
“Please, please, please don’t tell me you’re stealing from the Frontiers.”
“What? One of them screws you and that makes you loyal for life?”
“It has nothing to do with that.”
“Then what?”
“The Frontiers are —”
“They’re what?”
“You don’t need me to tell you. You already know. They make the rules around here.”
“Maybe that’s about to change.”
“Please, Dan.” Her head suddenly felt too tight and she took down the bun and shook her hair out. “Please. You can’t possibly be this stupid.”
“Do I look stupid?” he said and opened the freezer and rattled his hand around in the ice tray and pulled out a cube and popped it in his mouth. “I’m not stealing from anybody. I’m selling.” He thumped the freezer door closed.
“Selling? What?”
His cheek bulged with ice. “Information.”
The traffic was a mess in Northfall, packed with cars at all hours, for the same reason the sewer system kept overflowing, for the same reason the lights sometimes faded and the internet was spotty and the cell service unreliable: about seventy thousand too many people lived here, and the infrastructure hadn’t caught up. “So we always help get the caravan out of town.”
“We?”
He slipped the ice from one side of his mouth to the other. His words were starting to slur, his tongue numbed by the cold. “Me and the boys. We fire up the sirens, swirl the cherries, shut down the traffic lights, and get the goods on their way.”
“Okay.”
“So I’m there at the loading dock at eight a.m. I know.”
“You know? What?”
“I know what trailer in the caravan holds the omnimetal.”
“Dan . . .”
The ice crunched as he bit down on it. “Guy approached me.”
“Dan, I’m not liking where this is going.”
“It ain’t going. It’s already gone.”
“Guy. What guy?”
The words sounded around his crunching. “A guy. Okay? Let’s leave it at that. A guy. And all he wants to know is which trailer.”
“Jesus Christ, Dan. No. You didn’t.”
He swallowed the ice with a loud gulp. “Five C-notes he’s paying me for the answer.”
“Do you realize what you’ve done?”
He kept smiling even as his voice came across as more and more indignant. “I didn’t do nothing. I’ve told him three times now. And nothing’s happened except me making some extra.”
“You been paid three times? And this is the first time I’m seeing any money?”
Dan ignores the implication. “This guy, he says he might have more work for me. More ways of earning.”
“I bet he does.”
He shook his head, gave her a pitying look. “I knew I shouldn’t have said nothing to you. I knew you were going to break my balls. Honestly, it’s sometimes hard to remember why I ever wanted to marry you. All you do is whine, complain, come down on my high.”
“You don’t want to mess with the Frontiers. They’re more than the bunch of suits you think they are.”
“We could use the money. We need the money.”
“You’re a cop, Dan. You’re supposed to do what’s right.”
“Maybe nothing will ever happen.” His voice lowered here and his gaze shifted to the window and took on a dim, dreamy look. “But even if something did happen, even if there was some kind of heist, the Frontiers could afford it, right? They’re rich as all hell. Probably have the load insured. No loss. Everybody makes money. The rest of us deserve a piece of the pie.”
“People could die.”
He blinked a few times and settled his focus back on her. “People could die driving down the road or choking on their breakfast or slipping in the shower. Don’t piss on me with your hypotheticals.”
The argument had gone on and on and grown louder and louder and finally ended with a bruise ringing her arm from where he grabbed her and shook her and gouged his thumb deep and said, in a seething voice, “You’ve never believed in me. A wife should believe in her husband.”
“You’re so stupid,” she said. “You’re putting your family at risk.”
She didn’t see him swing. She didn’t feel the impact of his fist. One second she was standing up. The next second she was on the floor. Her vision narrowed and expanded. Her ears whined. The side of her head felt hot and began to throb with her pulse, more and more painful with each beat of her heart. Whenever he hit her, he knew enough to miss her face. Her hair would hide the fat black egg that would rise from her skull, just as her clothes had hidden the bruises that sometimes mapped her ribs or thighs.
He stood over her a long minute, breathing hard. Then he reached down and shook the money out of her fist and shoved it in his pocket. “There. Now you’re free to feel good and saintly about yourself.” He grabbed the keys off the counter and marched out of the kitchen and slammed the front door and drove off in a hurry, and the noise of the engine had barely faded around the corner before she pulled out her mobile and texted Talia.
* * *
They weren’t friends—Talia Frontier had no friends, as far as Jenna knew—but they had history. Because of Johnny.
He would come home from boarding school for holidays, and in eleventh grade Jenna met him at a New Year’s party. It was a Northfall tradition for the high schoolers to gather up the stiff, browned Christmas trees shedding needles in their living rooms and toss them into the backs of pickups and drive to a gravel pit and heap them into a giant pile and set it aflame. That night it was ten degrees, but the heat from the fire came in a sizzling, crackling rush, chasing everyone to the edges of the pit, where they drank Hamm’s and fruity wine coolers and danced to the music thumping from the open window of a Bronco that belonged to him, to Johnny.
She knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. He wore a black leather jacket and a cap that threw a shadow across his face and pinched a cigarette between his lips that b
obbed when he spoke. At first everyone thought he was selling, but he didn’t care about money. He was giving the drugs away. Molly tucked into Altoids tins. Weed and oxy in Ziploc baggies. “Merry fucking Christmas,” he was saying. “Happy fucking New Year.”
The pile of trees burned fast and hot and then diminished to low flames and red embers and black branches. The more moderate blaze drew people close and rippled its light across the gravel pit. Jenna felt buzzy and warm and brave from the beer she had drunk, and so she walked up to Johnny and said, “Are you trying to bribe us into becoming your friends or something?”
She was smiling when she said it—sounding somewhere between teasing and flirty—but when his gaze turned on her, she felt the same as when the match first struck the trees and scorched everyone back. Then his eyes softened and he smiled too and said, “I just want to see you townies get so messed up, you do things you’ll regret. I’m here to encourage bad behavior.”
“How charitable of you.”
“Right? How can I hook you up? What’s your poison of choice?”
“Think I’ll stick with the beer.”
“A good girl, then.”
“No. Not good.” She arched her eyebrows. “I make bad choices, but never by accident.” She gestured with her beer toward one of the varsity football players who was dancing around the bonfire naked. “Unlike the rest of these sloppies.”
They spoke until the fire sank into a smoldering, ashy heap and dawn began to color the sky and then they drove to the Lumberjack and shared a big slice of banana cream with chocolate sprinkles. Afterward, they stood uncertainly in the parking lot with sleep-heavy eyes and he took her hand and said, “I’ll be back in July.”
Snow filled the air between them with what looked like powdered sugar. “Yeah?” she said. “So?”
“So be waiting for me then.”
He didn’t kiss her and she didn’t kiss him; they both made the move—too fast—and clicked their teeth together and laughed at their clumsiness and then the laugh gave way to a muffled gasp and roving hands and curious lips. His hand jammed into her hair and tangled it up in his fingers. Her thumb slid along his hip bone. At first their kissing was hurried and hungry and then it settled into something more gentle and lingering. A tongue tracing a lip. A nibbled ear. Breath shared.
This went on until the manager came out and said, “Can you kids get a room or something? It’s getting a little intense here for eight in the morning.” And they looked up to see all the goggle-eyed faces pressed up to the windows and steaming the glass with their breath.
For a year and a half, that’s how their relationship worked. Intense togetherness followed by long stretches of separation. Which suited Jenna. Not just because absence led to desire, but because Johnny could be overwhelming. She would never tell him this because he hated the school his father sent him to, but she thought he might need the structure of Stone Mountain Leadership Academy, the disciplined container it provided. The long runs in the mountains. The trail and fence building. The perfectly made beds and perfectly ironed clothes. The five a.m. wake-up calls and the nine p.m. lights out. Jenna’s mother ran a pet-grooming studio, called Ruff ’n’ Ready, in their garage, and she always said a tired dog was a good dog.
After he graduated, his father wanted him to go to college or enlist in an officer training program, but Johnny pushed back and when asked about the future he could only speak in the abstract about doing his own thing, getting his shit together, figuring life out. That translated to throwing lavish parties, taking the boat out on the lake or the snowmobiles on the trail, getting blackout drunk every other night. If he’d lived in New York or LA, people would have rolled their eyes and called him a playboy, a hell-raiser, but here in Minnesota, people shook their heads and pursed their lips and said he was a disgrace to his family and promised to pray for him. He had inadvertently killed his mother and now he was deliberately killing himself.
He wasn’t without depth. There was reason to his chaos. Sometimes they would lie on the hood of his Bronco with a bottle between them and study the stars and he would talk about how the planet was just a speck of dust. And in the history of that speck of dust, your life span barely registered. There was no end to the universe. “We don’t matter. Nothing we do matters. So we might as well have fun while we’re here.” When he crunched up Adderall and sniffed until his nose bled or took a deep skunky lungful of smoke or swallowed a handful of pills that made him feel swimmy for days on end, a part of her wanted to twist his ear and say, What if you do matter? What then? Because didn’t he realize he had won the lottery by being born a Frontier? Every door was open to him, if only he would reach for the knob.
But another part of her knew she couldn’t possibly put such thoughts in his head. Because he would be reminded what an insignificant nothing she was, beneath him. It was clear that’s how his family regarded her—as a no one, a nobody. Not good enough for him. For them. If the Frontiers were royalty, then Jenna was the equivalent of a chambermaid in the castle. But there was no telling Johnny what to do. He was out of his family’s control, and they recognized that she had a calming, almost narcotic effect on him. They got him into St. Olaf—arranging his acceptance after a sizable donation—but it was a dry campus and he didn’t last more than a month before facing expulsion. And then they tried to get him to go to the U of M, but though he started on the drive to the Cities, he turned around and came home. And then he enrolled with Jenna at Vermilion Community College in Ely, but he only bothered going to class when she escorted him there.
“What do you want out of life?” she once asked him.
He had a necklace, a chain with a pendant on it that housed a fang of iron ore. It had been his mother’s. Jenna never saw him without it. Not in bed, not in the hot tub or shower. He often toyed with it when in a dark mood, and now, rather than answer her, he pulled it out of his shirt and rubbed the pendant between his thumb and forefinger and sucked on the chain.
Every now and then, his father would try to include him a company decision, propose his involvement in a Frontier Metals project, but Talia was the only one able to successfully enlist him in the family business—because she wasn’t trying to stuff him into a shirt and knot a tie around his neck. She didn’t want to change or tame him. She valued him for what he was: An instrument of violence. A weapon. Johnny never said what he did for her, but he started keeping pistols tucked in drawers and under cushions and shoved into the waistband of his pants. Sometimes he had torn-up knuckles and blood on him that wasn’t his own. One time Jenna heard a rattle in the dryer and found a human tooth in it.
She wasn’t sure if she was enabling him or keeping him safe, but she couldn’t quit him even though she knew he was bad for her. It wasn’t just love. He made her feel alive the same way approaching the edge of a cliff did. She had the opposite influence on him, a grounding effect. “Being with you is so simple,” he once told her. At first she was insulted and play-slapped him, thinking he was calling her stupid, but he did his best to clarify. “Not like that. I just mean . . . I can’t spend five minutes with anybody else before they’re trying to cure me of being an asshole. Or a dumb-ass. Or an addict. Or a criminal. Or a whatever. With you, I’m just me.”
And then, when the meteors fell, when the ground shook and the lights went out, he left her. Until then, she’d thought she had her future figured out. But after that, the life that stretched before her felt suddenly empty. It was like getting caught up in a novel and turning the page and finding it and the rest of the book blank.
It took her a long time to realize her mistake. With Johnny. And later with Dan. She wasn’t an author. She was just a character in somebody else’s story. Her husband might have dropped her to the kitchen floor, but she got up on her own. If this town could change, so could she. If there was money and power to be found in these Northwoods, it could be hers. Nobody was going to do anything to her anymore. She was going to goddamn do something to them.
* * *<
br />
Talia showed up at the Lumberjack Steakhouse the morning after Jenna texted her. Talia was so big, her knees touched the bottom of the table and her fingers couldn’t fit through the handle of the coffee mug. Her nails and lips were painted the same shade of purple, and her hair was sprayed up in a thickly curled Medusa. She ordered the Bunyan breakfast with an extra side of bacon, and when Jenna delivered it, she slipped a piece of paper under the plate that told Talia what she needed to know.
“Do you love Dan?” Talia said when Jenna returned a few minutes later.
“I thought I did. At first.” But no. She had married Dan out of obligation. She was pregnant and he was willing and she remembers reciting her vows and feeling like the words were hollow even then. Love was something else. Love burned so hot it branded you for life.
Talia reached out and traced a fingernail along the bruise that colored Jenna’s forearm. “And now?”
“And now . . .” Jenna pulled her sleeve down to hide the green-yellow splash. “Now he’s just a fucking man I live with.”
Talia nodded and sniffed a sad laugh through her nose. “You remember how we used to have a dog, back in the day? Golden named Chewie?”
“I do. She was such a good dog.”
“That wasn’t an accident. You want to know how we chose her? We went to a breeder down in Mankato, and here’s this big litter of puppies pissing themselves with excitement. They’re all cute as shit. How could we ever decide? I’ll tell you how. My father, he took them one by one. And he held them down, hands on their chests, in the kill position. On their backs. Bellies exposed. The ones that squirmed and yelped and bit, he dismissed. But Chewie, she just lay there.”
“Okay,” Jenna said.
“That’s basically how I chose my husband.”
Jenna can’t help but smile, even though it hurts her head to do so.
“You chose the wrong dog,” Talia said. “You chose a bad dog. But the thing is . . .” And here she leaned forward. “There’s no fucking lack of dogs in the world.”
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