I wasn’t built to love women—let me tell you that right away—I know that now, but over the years I have been drawn to certain people no matter their gender. Whether male or female, however, the mere thought of approaching someone made my heart quake and my eyes pulse but I couldn’t stop myself when I saw the girl I’d come to know as Jenny standing among the cut flowers near the entrance to the More-4-You. She had a hypnotic quality that drew me, that pulled my words from me. Something inside had to come out, and it ended up being the stupidest, most awkward question I could have asked.
“Sniffing for butts?” I asked, leaning in next to her. This was what my father had said when he had caught me stalking ashtrays two years back. I regretted saying it before I had finished, my heart again entering panic mode, quaking in my head.
“More like sniffing for packs,” she said, eyeing me up and down once before turning back to whatever she had been looking at before. I stood there next to her long enough to get a deep breath of the soft floral perfume she wore, roses and violets, and in that time she glanced my way twice but did not meet my gaze. Thinking she might not like me, might not like being approached, I took a few steps back to let her have some room and understood suddenly that I had done to her what the boys in the truck had done to me. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable and she had gotten there first, after all, so I tried to mind my own business for a while, tried to look away. I studied the roses and the chrysanthemums in their buckets, bundled into dozens by color, but I was drawn again and again to Jenny, her bold blue eyes, soft slope of a nose, and the way the slight breeze lifted her blond hair in wisps. I might have gone and left her alone if I hadn’t seen in my stolen glances that she was sneaking looks my way too.
Before long, a Cadillac pulled into the lot and angled into the first row. A woman got out with a long, thin cigarette hanging from her mouth, the brand I associated with this type of older lady. Pantsuit, perfume, expensive car. Digging in her purse as she moved toward the store, I thought she was going to walk right in, cigarette and all, but as the electric doors opened she tossed it without looking in a flash of sparks on the sidewalk.
After the store swallowed the woman, Jenny looked around to be sure no one would see, then crouched and picked up the cigarette. She took a deep drag, then handed it to me and stepped off the curb into the parking lot. I leaned back against the store and puffed as I watched her approach the car, open the door, reach inside. After the car door slammed, she kept on in the same direction, past the next row of cars parked facing the store, but turned to me with her hand in the air to show me what she had gotten. It was the rest of the woman’s pack, of course, and I would have laughed out loud if a car coming down the next lane of the parking lot hadn’t come to a screeching halt, the driver laying on the horn as Jenny walked into traffic. She didn’t get hit, but she did slap hard on the hood of the car.
“Watch where I’m going why dontcha!”
“Get outta the road!”
I had other, more important business in Holm but I couldn’t look away. I should have stepped to the ashtray, sunk my cherry in the sand, and again took up my position on the wall to wait for another wasteful smoker—I was quite certain that this careless girl wouldn’t lead me to my mother—but instead I called after her, ensuring everything that came later. She stopped and turned but didn’t try to meet me, let me walk all the way to her with my heart pounding.
“Any chance I can get a square or two off you?”
She reached into her shirt and took the pack from her bra strap.
“Do you like music?” she asked, holding two cigarettes out for me, a white V from her closed fist.
“Music?” I hoped my face didn’t show how odd a question I thought this was. “You bet.”
“There’s a concert at the fairgrounds tonight,” she said. “Out past the Walmart.”
I put one cigarette in my mouth and the other behind my ear. She flicked a lighter inside a chimney made with her left hand and I bowed to the flame.
“Are you gonna be there?” I asked.
“I might be,” she said and walked away, rounding the corner at the movie theater without looking back.
I figured my laundry had finished, so I went back to the laundromat and moved my clothes into a dryer. To kill some time, I dropped a quarter into the Pac-Man machine and beat four levels, but the ghosts won eventually, as they always do.
* * *
It was past noon by the time the bedclothes were washed and back on the bed, so I stopped in for a burger at the Arlington. I got the one with a scoop of peanut butter like the super had mentioned—somehow more sweet and delicious than I had imagined—then I snaked a spiral through the west side of town. As my mother had told me in her letter, the Arlington stood at the intersection of Old Main and Center and the streets that crossed Center had been named after trees. Those trees grew along each street with the exception of Elm, whose trees had all been lost to disease. First Ash, then Birch, the middle school was on Cypress, followed by Dogwood and Elm, and Fern ran parallel to those for six blocks in either direction before turning eastward to meet up with Old Main making two grids, planned and predictable. The streets named for trees had no sidewalks; rather the blacktop broke into gravel near the edge of the road where grass then picked up, the lawns of wooden houses with peaked roofs or the occasional three-story brick apartment building. Churches here and there and nothing more to Holm than that. I took Fern north past where all the other streets ended and found the high school and beyond that the cemetery, and then turned around to take Fern south, ending up at the hospital and the government center. Beyond Holm to the west, the forest grew thick before it dropped off into the Spirit River, then came up just as thick again on the other side before it turned into farmland. Center crossed the river valley on a long bridge, became a four-lane highway on the other side.
A few hours after lunch I ended up at the library—the librarian was adamant that she had never heard of anyone by my mother’s name and refused to check the records—then across the street in what passed for a park. I sat in a swing in a playground that shared a small square of grass with a picnic table, a couple of benches, and a water tower. I had talked the librarian into letting me take the newspaper outside and was reading about the recent conviction of Timothy McVeigh, guilty on eleven counts and likely to be sentenced to death by lethal injection later in the summer, when a young man stopped his truck, sauntered over, and introduced himself as Sven Svenson. Six feet tall, all field work and sunburn. Boots, hat, Confederate flag for a belt buckle. Cheek swollen with long-cut tobacco. As he approached, I saw he had one of the nicer trucks I’d seen in town, painted cherry red and fixed up with a shiny chrome roll bar. Hat in his hand, he called me ma’am, spoke softly, politely, then stood tall before me with his thumbs hooked into his pockets. Blue eyes and straight teeth on display, his similarity to McVeigh in the photo next to the article I was reading was striking.
“And if you like to get a little rowdy,” Svenson said, pressing one of his nostrils closed with an index finger and sniffing, “well, I can take care of that for you, too.”
I raised my head so that he could see my face. I didn’t speak but when he saw I was no lady his smooth talk turned rough, making the bearded men in the Arlington and the boys in the passing truck seem like gentlemen. When he ran out of swear words he bent down and pushed my shoulders, sending me backwards on the swing and, unready for such force, I tumbled for half a flip in the air before I landed in the grass, the newspaper splayed out next to me, peeling away in the wind.
“I better not see you again,” he said, hovering above me, holding his fist in the air between us. “There’ll be trouble if I do.”
I lay there for a time, thinking that every boy in this town might have a slight case of myopia, but decided in the end that they were merely desperate. I was in the habit then of making sweeping generalizations, defining large groups of people by a single shared characteristic. It was easy for me to do
, since I had been so isolated for so long that by this point I always felt like I was outside looking in, even back in Grand Marais where I had spent my entire life. Holm, it seemed, would be no different.
When I finished gathering the paper and refolding it, I lay again in the grass to gaze at the sky and saw that I might have a friend in town, or at least a sympathetic ear: someone had climbed the rusted ladder of the water tower and spray-painted the word sucks after HOLM on the tank.
* * *
Past the laundromat and the railroad tracks, Center Street led me out of the planned part of Holm and set me on a path to the fairgrounds. To the north was the industrial part of town, where I found a green street sign that read BIG LAKE PLASTICS, my mother’s old place of work, with an arrow pointing up East First. I’d be sure to make my way over there to see if anyone knew her but for the time I had Jenny on my mind so I kept on eastward. Beyond the plastics factory a few other smokestacks towered in the distance, and to the south was a run-down residential neighborhood, a few blocks of smallish square houses placed at odd angles on spotty lawns. Driveways here were gravel or dirt ruts in the grass. Broken walkways led to thin doors hanging loose on their hinges. No tree lines had been planted on this side of the railroad tracks, random oaks grew in a front yard here and a side yard there, marking out the makeshift gardens in the empty lots between houses. This went on until the sidewalk ended, then I walked the shoulder past a Pump ’N Munch and a short strip of businesses that faced the highway. After running across the southbound entrance ramp, I stepped up onto the curb and kicked through the knee-high weeds that grew through the cracks of the cement incline under the overpass, where country music and exhaust hung thick in the air around the idling cars and trucks. Beyond the highway the Walmart came up on my right, a cement box five hundred feet by five hundred feet with a parking lot somehow larger. It hung on the horizon for a while, by far the largest property in Holm that I had seen, not quite as tall as the Arlington but covering much more ground. A short while later I saw that the fairgrounds were on the other side of Center so I scurried across the road when the traffic grew thin.
The band was four guys with shaggy hair, mustaches, and beer guts and they only played songs by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I sat under a tree a good ways back from the stage with my eye out for Jenny. The wind was coming in over the horse stables and blowing straight through the concert so I watched the first couple songs with my hand over my nose. No one else noticed the smell. People had spread blankets in the grass and children ran from family to family waving and smiling. A man was selling beer and snacks in the shade near the band shell and beyond him was a gateway made of balloons, the entrance to a small carnival of games and rides.
After the singer told us what he hoped Neil Young would remember, a thin noodle of a boy about my age walked over to me. He was wearing a Twins hat pulled down so low that the bill hid most of his face and his clothes hung baggy on him, jeans sagging to the side. He sat down next to me and bobbed his head to the music, occasionally mumbling along with the lyrics between sips from a bottle that said MOUNTAIN DEW on the label but must have been mixed with something because the soda looked much darker than I remembered it to be.
The band went on break at the end of the song and many in the crowd groaned and stretched, went to buy beer or popcorn. The boy took off his hat and squeezed at the bill with his hands, bending the deep bow in the visor even further. His blond hair was short and stood up in tufts, a month or two of growth since his last buzz cut, but when he turned my way I saw a heaviness around his eyes that drove straight through me. He seemed on the edge of crying, as if he were doing all he could to hold back tears, and I felt my body lurch in his direction. My heart started up with the palpitations again, eyes pulsated—forces uncontrollable roiled my body. I couldn’t speak but found I could respond.
“What do you play?” he asked.
“I used to play baseball,” I said.
“No, what instrument?”
“Music?” I asked. “No, I don’t play.”
He took another drink, wiped the mouth of the bottle on his sleeve, then handed it to me.
“Black Velvet,” he said, smiling in a way that pulled the sad corners of his eyes up a little.
I held the bottle to my nose. I had never drunk whiskey before but I knew the smell.
“You a singer then?”
“No.”
“Then why do you look like you are?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You ain’t gonna make any friends looking like that.”
I handed the bottle back without taking a drink, avoiding the boy’s eyes so as not to be drawn in, then stood up and brushed off my pants. Unsure if I was fleeing what he said or how I felt, I looked off to the stables and then turned toward the midway, leaving the drunk in the baseball hat sputtering insincere apologies behind me.
The fair was like any other I had been to up around Grand Marais when I was younger. Maybe the same fair, they did travel after all. A round man fried doughnuts and sold popcorn from a red cart. Another had milk bottles balanced on blocks and taunted me with a “Looks like a girl, throws like a girl” as I passed. Young mothers were led from booth to booth by screaming, happy children. One boy followed his father closely, finger linked into the older man’s belt loop, crying and red-faced, begging for cotton candy. Beyond the games were the rides: Alice’s Teacups for the kids, the Scrambler for those a bit older, and the Ferris wheel for everyone.
“Hey you,” someone called. “Hey you. Lucky!”
I don’t know why I looked up—I didn’t feel lucky. I turned to find a young man with his eyes closed to mere thin red slits. His hair was shaved up the sides but long on top, just to his ears. He wore a flannel over a T-shirt and jeans. I looked down at my own clothes—we wore the same outfit. Next to him was a girl wearing glasses with big red frames, her hair pulled into a ponytail so tight I thought at first her head was shaved bald. She hugged a large stuffed bunny to her chest and he held a thin plastic ring in the air between us.
“Our luck has run out,” he said. “Will you blow on this?”
“What?”
“For luck,” the ponytailed girl said.
“Okay,” I said, stepping over to them, leaning in to blow a short breath at the ring.
They both turned back to the game, a table full of soda bottles a few feet away. He tossed the ring with a high arc and it came down a winner, then his girlfriend jumped with delight and wrapped her arms around him. I was happy I could help them win but, consumed with bartering the bunny and the winning ring for a new prize, they left me behind them and I folded back into the growing throng of Holmers.
As the sun was setting, the crowd changed from parents with small children to teenagers and young adults. Guys my age smoking cigarettes, arms around girls, none of them Jenny. A group in the shadows with tallboys wrapped in paper bags. The crowd thickened and I was afloat in a sea of cowboy hats, baseball caps, and teased-up hair. I thought I saw her a number of times but after a couple of hours I couldn’t remember what she looked like beyond an undefined beauty and blond hair. The lights on the rides streaked across the darkening sky. I stepped out of the mass to get in line for a hot dog but I should have known better.
“I see you, faggot!”
It was a yell from above. At the top of the stalled Ferris wheel, the silhouette of a man in a cowboy hat stood against the darkening sky. Svenson. A moment later, the ride shook back into motion, almost tossing him from the car. A woman near me covered her son’s eyes.
“I told you there’d be trouble!” he yelled, leaning out of the swinging car.
The vendor put my hot dog in a bag and I slipped back into the crowd, invisible again. Svenson was now stalled at the nine o’clock position so I turned back toward the game corridor, hoping it would lead me out of the fairgrounds, but I soon found myself at a dead end, a double-wide gaming booth where children kneeled on fake grass and plucked colorful plastic swans as they floate
d by on a twisted, narrow river.
I didn’t look to see who owned the strong hand that came down on my shoulder. Rather, I slipped out from under it and ran down the lane of games to a chorus of heys and fuck yous from those I jostled. As I made my way through the concert, the singer bemoaned Tuesday’s passing to a much thicker crowd—the open grassy field now checkered with blankets, a mass thirty or forty people deep around the stage, dancing and singing along. I had to slow down and sidestep to get back to the entrance gates where I picked up my sprint.
In the parking lot I heard quick footsteps behind me but they turned off before I reached the exit. I was running along the shoulder when I heard Svenson’s truck. My heart was pounding from fear, as I had no doubt he would run me down right there, so I cut across Center and hurdled the median, stopping traffic in the oncoming lane with a screech. Svenson paced me, his head out the window, and another young man climbed out the passenger side, both yelling but their words were lost in the wind. I passed the Walmart on my left and then I was at the exit passing under the highway. Svenson sped ahead to turn back for me but got stuck at the intersection so I cut across the Pump ’N Munch lot and ran toward the long building that housed a few shops and a café. I looked for a sign but the only one I saw said HELP WANTED.
“Welcome to the Aurora,” a man said. He wore a white chef’s jacket and had long dark hair pulled into a ponytail. “Table for one?”
I held up my hot dog and took a few deep breaths. “Actually, I’m here to apply for the job.”
An engine revved in the parking lot, then a siren sang and red and blue lights flashed through the window. The man who would become my boss and I turned to see an officer climb out of a car marked HOLM COUNTY SHERIFF on the side and make his way to Svenson’s truck.
“Take a seat there,” he said, pointing, then ran out the door.
Northern Lights Page 2