Northern Lights

by Raymond Strom

  “No charge for these, my man, I want you to enjoy being alive.”

  I put my money back in my pocket as the young man walked off, dreads swaying behind him, and then Jenny told me to watch her. She took a deep breath and held it in as long as she could, exhaled, and did it again. When the balloon was the size of one last breath she took it all down, but instead of exhaling into the air she refilled the balloon and then emptied it again, an external lung. A couple cycles in, the balloon fell from her fingers to sputter through the air, then her head rocked back on her neck and she stared up at the sky. I brought my own balloon to my mouth and followed her lead.

  The world inside the balloon was a place I couldn’t remember once I left, only the feeling of having been home remained, of having truly existed, as if the world where I lived in Holm was the dream and this other place real. A siren in my ears called me to constant attention, woowoo-woowoo-woowoo, an awareness so keen that I could do nothing but remind myself that I had to remember this, only this, so I could tell Jenny upon my return. That clarity was lost once the real world came back into view, leaving me with the feeling of having forgotten something important. Back from such a serious space, the setting around me seemed trivial. I looked over at Jenny coming out of her trance as well and when our eyes met I felt the hilarity inside me, an ache in my gut I had to hold with both hands as it made its way through me. Laughing then, in the grass with my beautiful friend, there was nowhere I’d have rather been.

  When we collected ourselves, stood up, and walked back toward our camp, I saw that by Holm standards the parade of people walking by had become a freak show. Pierced noses and lips, plugged ears, tattoo sleeves. A pair of twin boys with matching braids so long that they tangled up in their ankles as they walked. Jenny tried to stop anyone who came by with the story of my near death in the hopes of getting more free stuff.

  “He almost died,” Jenny said to a boy who was maybe fifteen.

  “I spilled beer on myself,” he said, holding up his can to show us the label. Budweiser.

  By the time the sun turned the sky pink and red, we had a bag stuffed full of weed and a pile of firewood. J splashed the logs with Wild Turkey and threw in a match, then passed the bottle to Jenny. Mary made a choking sound, crossed her arms, and stared deep into the flames.

  “What’s wrong, babe?” J asked Mary as Jenny tipped the bottle.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “I know that ‘nothing,’ ” he said. “That means something.”

  “Can I have the whiskey already?”

  Jenny wiped her mouth and passed the bottle, then moved away from J, taking a seat on the grass next to me. Mary took a long drink and we sat there watching the fire for a while, until J stood and unzipped his pants, then turned and peed into the long grass.

  “I need to use the restroom too,” Jenny said.

  “You could go here,” J said, head turned back toward us. “I won’t look and there’s TP in the car.”

  “Would you stop being such a crude prick?” Mary said before she led Jenny into the darkness.

  J finished his business and sat down near the fire again, unaffected by Mary’s accusation. The fire crackled, a pine knot popped.

  “So how was that balloon?” J asked.

  “It’s like hitting the reset button on a video game,” I said after searching a moment for the comparison. “You know what I mean? The way the image on the screen squiggles then cuts sharp before you’re back on the start screen again.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” he said. “I’d give anything for an old Nintendo.”

  “I have one,” I said, “but I don’t have a television to play it on. You could have it if you—”

  “Any of you faggots want to buy some powders?”

  The owner of the interruption walked into the ring of light cast by our fire and I thought it was Svenson but he was shorter and fatter and balding. A minute later, the Svenson I knew showed up to stand beside his older brother.

  “Figures we’d find this fucking longhair out here,” he said and kicked at my leg with his boot. “Fortunately for you, we’re here on business.”

  I didn’t answer or acknowledge him. Instead, I stared deep into the fire, watching the tongues of flame lick away the outer layers of the wood. My uncle was a small-town tough like Svenson, right down to the pickup truck and the bad attitude, and I understood Svenson because I understood my uncle—they were both out to prove their size and power in the world. If I ignored him long enough and stayed out of his way, thereby conceding Holm to Svenson, he would stop bothering me. As long as I could survive until Svenson got tired, I thought, my life in Holm would be just fine.

  “Enough chitchat,” Svenson’s brother said. “Y’all want some shit or not.”

  J dug in his pocket and pulled out a five, held it up. Svenson took it.

  “Five lousy bucks? What is this, middle school?”

  His brother stepped over to J and pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket. He dipped a long spoon inside, then held the tip to J’s nose. J sniffed and his eyes went wide. He put his hand to his heart and then exhaled deeply.

  “Damn,” J said. “Can I get your phone number?”

  The elder Svenson pulled a small notebook from his pocket, scribbled on a page, and handed it to J. “If you’re going to come to my house, you’ll need to come alone,” he said, then pointed at me. “Don’t bring this freak show with you.”

  J agreed and slipped the note in his pocket. Svenson and his brother made their exit, or we thought they did until there was a loud pounding on metal, Svenson slapping the hood of Mary’s Buick.

  “So this is the car you’re cruising around in?”

  No one answered and soon we heard the older brother asking the faggots at the next fire if they wanted any powders.

  “That’s the guy you were talking about back at my place?” J asked. “What a prick. Good shit, though, real good shit. If I had a little more I bet I could beat his ass even though he’s a foot taller than me.”

  Jenny and Mary returned then, and Jenny asked, “Was that Sven Svenson?”

  “Where?” Mary asked.

  “Just there,” she said, pointing. “I can hear his stupid voice from here.”

  “Oh,” Mary said, sounding disappointed. “He’s gone already?”

  “You’re into that guy?” J asked. “Holy shit! That guy, Mary?”

  “No,” she said, but it looked to me like she was. “I know him, I mean, we used to go to Young Life together.”

  “He is a horrible person,” Jenny said.

  I didn’t like where this was going and I didn’t want to ruin the good time we had been having before Mary and Jenny had left for the bathroom, so instead of talking more about Svenson I told them about the last time I had nearly drowned, jumping off the high dives built on the old loading docks in Grand Marais.

  “The big swamp?” Jenny asked.

  “Oui, oui, mademoiselle,” I said. “Parlez-vous français?”

  “No,” she said, “but I recognize it.”

  Jenny had done a circle tour of Lake Superior with her mother, she told us, stopping at all the lighthouses as they traveled through northern Minnesota, Canada, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and Wisconsin. Then she moved on to other trips she and her mother had taken and I was off the hook. J passed the bottle and Mary rolled another joint while Jenny described for us the Grand Canyon, the Badlands, and Yellowstone National Park.

  “That’s enough about you and your mother,” Mary said. “Tell us about yours, Shane. You only saw her once after she left?”

  “Naw,” J said, “don’t make him talk about that sad shit now.”

  “I want to know, too,” Jenny said.

  “A-a-all right,” I said and stuttered through the first few lines but soon found my rhythm.

  One rainy day my father brought me home from school and put me on his knee at the kitchen table. We sat there for a moment, silent, then I put my head down
on my arms and cried. I watched Divorce Court on television—I knew what was happening.

  That fall I moved into fourth grade, the year we stopped having desks and instead were assigned seats at long tables in groups of four. Across from me was the beautiful red-headed Natalie, my first crush, but I knew I had no chance when she told this story to our group.

  “Every day I go home after school and see a pair of arms in the upstairs window of the house across the street. Covered in tattoos. One arm puts a beer can on the windowsill, then the other arm slams the window down to crush it and the first arm throws it into the yard. There’s a mountain of crushed cans down below the window. A woman inside thinks this is so funny, she laughs so loud we can hear her inside my house when the windows are shut.”

  Natalie looked at me and pointed her short finger.

  “And that woman is your mother.”

  That surprised me. Not that the story was about my mother—it sounded exactly like her—but that she had only moved across town. I hadn’t seen her for months.

  “My mom says that your mom is trash,” Natalie said. “She said only common trash would think that’s funny.”

  I followed Natalie home that day. Across the street from her house there were beer cans in the yard, but Natalie had been exaggerating when she said there was a mountain—I counted no more than thirty. Around the side of the house was the entrance that led to the second floor. I climbed the stairs and rang the bell.

  “Who is it?” my mother asked through the closed door.

  I answered with my name but she asked again.

  “Who?”

  “Shane,” I said. “Your son.”

  No answer. I heard a man’s voice and she said something about her fucking kid and how he should put that fucking shit away so she could let me in. The voice told her I wouldn’t know what it was and she told him that she didn’t fucking know what I was doing there anyways. A few minutes later, the door swung open and there she was, wearing the same beat-up pink sweatsuit that featured in the long, lazy days we spent at home before she left, but I hadn’t seen my mother for so long that her face had gone soft in my mind. I’d remembered that her eyes were the same deep brown as her hair, but I hadn’t understood until that moment just how different that made her from me, very much my father’s boy with my blond hair and blue eyes.

  “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii,” my mother said in the way I knew meant she didn’t want to see someone. It was musical. The first part had a nice high tone and it dropped as it moved on.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she lied. “Go have a seat in the living room.”

  I followed her down the hall, past an open door. Inside, a mattress sat on the floor without sheets, the pillows and a blanket bunched up near the foot of the bed. Another matching blanket hung from nails to block out the light. Past a closed door the hallway opened up into the living room, where I found the tattooed arms attached to a bearded man with long hair. He looked at me. I looked at him. He lit a cigarette. I sat down next to him on the couch. My mother went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. I lifted my eyes to meet the gaze of the tattooed man when her voice floated into the room.

  “What’s he doing here, Ole? If this is some kind of ploy to get me back—”

  The man tried to distract me with his tattoos. He raised his right arm in the air and showed me the skull on his elbow. The jaw was below the joint and the cranium above so when he moved his fist forward and back the skull would open and close its mouth. He told a joke and the skull laughed. He held his cigarette up to his elbow and the skull coughed. When his eyes veered off toward the kitchen, I followed them to see my mother, still on the phone, pulling the long coiled cord into the living room so she could look out the window. I’d always thought of my mother as a towering figure but there, in the afternoon sun, she yawned, arms stretching toward the ceiling so that the sleeves of her sweatshirt slid down to reveal her tiny wrists, and I couldn’t remember if my mother had always been so thin, so small.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, raising a hand to the glass, tapping with a finger before turning back to the kitchen and slamming the phone down into the cradle. A moment later she was standing over me, smiling the almost straight smile I’d see on my own mouth a few years later.

  “Look, we’d love for you to stay, Shane,” she said, “but we have plans. We’re very busy. Next time, you should call first.”

  I looked down, studied the table. An ashtray. Two beer cans. A lighter. A small book with the word ZIG-ZAG on the cover. A pair of scissors with a clamp on the end instead of shears. All under a layer of dust.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I don’t know your phone number,” I yelled. “I didn’t even know where you lived until today.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m your mother.” She took me by the arm, dragged me to the door, pushed me outside.

  “How can I call when I don’t have your number?” I asked quietly, politely.

  “I’ll call you,” she said and shut the door.

  “That call didn’t come for a couple of years and when it did it was the last time we spoke,” I told the group, finishing my story.

  “That’s horrible,” Mary said.

  “It sounds like she might not want you to find her,” Jenny said, a thoughtful sadness in her voice.

  “I told you,” J said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “She was so young. You can’t blame her. What would either of you do if you got pregnant now?”

  Neither Jenny nor Mary answered, all of us staring into the fire, wordless. I thought for a moment that I had killed our good time for the night, but soon J said something, then Jenny and Mary, and after some time we were laughing and happy again. I’m not sure if it was the whiskey or the weed or the festival itself, or it could have been getting that story about my mother off my chest, but after a time I found that talking came a little easier, that the pressure I usually felt to restrain myself, to hold back my words, was gone. My mouth started moving, and Jenny, J, and Mary all turned toward me with curious looks as I spoke. I had a sudden understanding of the stars above us, the Milky Way being particularly vivid that night, and us down below, stars in our own right. Jenny again took up my words and made them her own, adding at some point that the iron that runs through our blood was made in stars like those, millions of years ago.

  “Everything is starlight,” she said, and I felt that this was so close to my point, that she had understood me so finely, that I reached out and put my hand on her leg. She put her hand over mine, cocked her head, and squinted in a way that made me think she was confused, but then went on: “The nature of the universe is dependent on these chemical reactions, these constant explosions propelling matter to collide in new and more complicated ways. We are the accidental result of the slapping together of a few elements from here and there in the universe. Some of us must explode and die so others can go on.”

  “You don’t think God has anything to do with it?” Mary asked.

  “Don’t be messing with my God now,” J said, suddenly serious. “He’s all I got, you know.”

  Mary’s and J’s words grew garbled and hard to follow once they started grilling Jenny about religion and soon after that I began having trouble keeping my eyes open, so I stumbled over to the tent and fumbled with the zipper until Jenny came and helped me get it open. I thanked her and fell into the tent but she climbed in and lay down next to me, shaking me out of my stupor. I wasn’t sure what to do so I didn’t do anything. She nuzzled in close and looped my hair behind my ear with her finger. I opened my eyes to find her face before me, our noses nearly touching, her arm resting against my neck, hand at the back of my head. Outside, J’s and Mary’s voices grew loud.

  “Come to bed,” she yelled, standing outside the tent. “You don’t need any more of that shit.”

  Point made and ignored, Mary zipped us in and dove over us, landing next to Jenny before rollin
g to the side, leaving a wide space between her and Jenny for J to take if he ever came back.

  * * *

  That night I had a dream that had been recurring all that year, but this time it was set in Holm. Legs locked beneath me, I stood in the middle of the More-4-You parking lot unable to go any farther. I wanted to move—I had been on my way to the store before I had become trapped in this position—and I did my best to get my feet off the ground but a tremendous weight held them immobile. I could only stand there as the world moved around me, shoppers coming and going, hoping that no one would come careening my way, unable to stop.

  “J, no,” Jenny said, “you drunk motherfucker. I’m not Mary. Stop it.”

  Her words penetrated my sleep, her voice entering my dream over a loudspeaker in the parking lot, and then her knee came down hard on my stomach as she tried to climb over me, bringing me back into the world. The sun hadn’t yet risen but the sky was lightening, the tent barely bright enough to see. Four, maybe five, in the morning.

  “I know who you are,” he said. “I thought you were into it.”

  “I was sleeping,” she said. “How can I be into it?”

  Jenny folded herself into the corner of the tent so that my body lay between her and J. We settled back into silence until the pulling of a zipper and the shifting of fabric.

  “Baby,” J said. “Baby, get up.”

  I opened my eyes to see J on his knees between Mary’s legs, her pants pulled down to her ankles. He spit on his hand, rubbed it where he needed it wet, and then moved into her. Mary groaned. The rustling of blankets and clothes grew into a steady rhythm. The bubble of the tent swayed above us.

  “No, J,” she said. “J. No, stop it. J. Oh, oh, J.”

  Jenny leaned up on her elbow and tried to look over me at their coupling, watched for a while before she put her head down on my chest and fell asleep.

  * * *

  It wasn’t her voice that woke me but the first thing I heard the next day was Mary apologizing to Jenny. They were outside the tent, Jenny having climbed out at some point without me noticing.