Northern Lights

by Raymond Strom

  “I thought it’d been a dream at first, but now that I’ve got this shit leaking out of me I know it wasn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

  “Really? How old are you?”

  I didn’t hear Jenny’s answer. A car door slammed and then another. That second one could’ve been the trunk.

  I rolled over to find J facing me, nose as near as I had found Jenny’s the night before, a trail of something blue leaking from his mouth. Startled, I sat up. My head throbbed and my vision grew dark around the edges, narrowed into two long tunnels and returned. I reached for my shoes.

  “So Mary, what are you going to be when you grow up?”

  A crackling sound came from the direction of their voices and the first wafts of bacon seeped into the tent.

  “A secretary,” Mary said.

  “A secretary?” Jenny asked. “That’s different. Most people want to have a secretary, not be one.”

  “I’m not most people.”

  J made a soft choking noise and coughed, spraying blue over where my head had been a moment before.

  “I want to get away from Holm as soon as I can,” Jenny said. “I hate that place.”

  “But you’ve lived there your whole life. How could you move away?”

  “Don’t you want to go to college? Meet new people? Didn’t you graduate from high school the other day?”

  “There’s a college in Holm. And I meet new people all the time. I’ve lived there for eighteen years and I still haven’t met everyone.”

  I unzipped the tent and climbed out into the morning. The sun was screaming white so I held my hand to my forehead like a visor to look around. Mary had a two-burner gas grill set up on the picnic table and Jenny was standing next to it, smoking a cigarette. The morning sun lit the campgrounds in a way that made it all look brand-new, a warmth in the air that I wasn’t used to so early in the day. Aside from the three of us, very few people remained among the canvas bubbles and parked cars. Most were packing up their sites, though no one seemed to be leaving.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “The concert is getting going now,” Mary said. “How do you like your eggs?”

  I told her I’d take mine over-easy and she poured a little bacon grease into a frying pan, then cracked two into it. My joining Mary and Jenny killed their conversation, so while my breakfast crackled and popped in the pan, we watched the stragglers from the other campsites rise and move eastward to where the entrance to the concert must have been.

  After we ate, Jenny took me car shopping. She was never happier, she told me on our walk, than when she was stealing. At the first camp I was afraid of security systems, but Jenny lifted the handle to show that it wasn’t even locked.

  “If it wasn’t for dickheads like these, there wouldn’t be any thievery in this world, would there?” she said, then looked at me expectantly.

  “Umm, no,” I said.

  “You’ve never seen that movie?”

  “I guess not.”

  After that, we tore into every site we passed, except for the ones other scavengers, or possibly the rightful owners, were occupying. Within an hour we had half an ounce of weed, a six-pack of beer, and seventy-five dollars. I found a new pair of jeans, the same brand and size I had lost in the river except strung through the loops was a braided leather belt. I pulled them on over my boxers and then grabbed the bundle of firewood tied up near the fire pit. Our hands full, we turned back toward our camp.

  “I think this small-town living is bullshit too,” I said, breaking the silence between us. “I heard you talking to Mary earlier and I think it’s crazy she wants to stay in Holm.”

  “It’s not her opinion,” Jenny said. “It’s her father’s probably, but you can’t convince anyone of anything. People need to realize this stuff for themselves.”

  “There’s more to life than Holm,” I said.

  “For some of us.”

  J was walking away from the campsite when we returned, Mary yelling after him. He stuck his middle finger up in the air, then vanished into the sea of tents without looking back.

  “I knew he would only get a ticket for himself,” Mary told us. “He’s going to the concert but he can find his own fucking way home. I’m leaving. You two are welcome to come with me but he can walk for all I care.”

  We rolled up the sleeping bags and took down the tent. Once we packed the car, we sat in the grass by the smoldering remains of the previous night’s fire and smoked one last joint. Mary kept looking around the whole time, hoping that J would come back, but in the end we left without him.

  * * *

  When we got back to Holm, Jenny asked Mary if she could drop us at the Walmart, which was fine with me, but once we got there she stuffed all the stolen drugs in my pockets and made me sit on a bench near a child riding an airplane. The plane looped up and down in a way that planes are not supposed to move while the toddler cooed at his mother and slapped his tiny hands at the sides of the ride. A real airplane flew over us and he pointed at the sky.

  “Pane,” he said. “Pane, pane, pane.”

  After ten minutes that drew out into an eternity, Jenny came out of the store with a bag of candy. She sat down next to me, ripped open the bag, and handed me a lollipop.

  “They stole from us, we steal from them,” she said, then went on to tell me that shoplifting at Walmart was one of her favorite things to do in town. She claimed they deserved it, the Waltons, for moving into Holm and taking away people’s livelihoods, then told me again about her mother’s store.

  “You had us dropped off out here so you could steal a bag of candy as revenge for your mother?”

  “No, I bought these suckers,” she said, then handed me what she had taken. “Diamond-tipped drill bits. Small but expensive.”

  They were in six thin packages with price tags reading twenty bucks each. After we sat on the bench for a while, she told me that I was to go in and return them for cash. We had another lollipop each, both Jenny and I forgoing patience and crunching down with our teeth after a minute before tossing the sticks into the parking lot. My heart began racing then and didn’t stop until I lied to the cashier at the return counter.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My dad sent me out here to get drill bits but I got the wrong kind.”

  “Do you have a receipt?”

  “No,” I said, not looking her in the eye. “I didn’t think I’d need one.”

  “Be a little more careful next time,” she said, then slid six twenty-dollar bills and some change across the counter.

  Three

  That Monday, I worked my first shift washing dishes at the Aurora, breakfast and lunch, and once I punched out, I ran to the post office to see if my mother had left a forwarding address for her mail. Of course she hadn’t, and I was sitting with my head in my hands on the stone steps out front, pondering the pointlessness of my search for someone who did not want to be found, when the sputtering drunk from the fairgrounds walked up, Twins hat in his hand, feet kicking at the loose rocks on the sidewalk as he asked if he could apologize. Russell he said his name was, and he lifted his shirt to show off an odd bulge in his pants, the neck of a glass bottle sticking out of his pocket.

  “Let’s go do something with this,” he said.

  I didn’t want to go with him after what he had said at the fairgrounds but his eyes persuaded me. Those sad glances made me want to take him in my arms and hold him. I couldn’t have explained it then, this feeling that drew me to Russell, but I needed to give him a second chance. If my mother deserved one after what she had done, then I could give one to this boy whose only fault was that he had told me the truth.

  We walked a couple blocks in silence, awkward silence I thought, before he pointed out the playground across from the library and we each took a swing beneath the water tower still adorned with the words Holm Sucks. I kicked my legs until I was swinging and Russell sat with the bottle bet
ween his knees, turning in circles so the chains above him twined together until he finally let go and spun the opposite way, the bottle flying into the grass. When the chains straightened out again, Russell stood, stumbled in his dizziness, and fell to the ground near the whiskey, where he uncapped the bottle and told me he’d had a job for a day. Training as a bar back at the Holm Bar and Grill on Saturday night, he’d slipped the bottle into his backpack the first time he was sent to the liquor room for stock. No one noticed before his shift ended, but he got the call the next morning telling him he need not return.

  “Fuck it. Free whiskey,” he said, then put the bottle to his lips and turned it upside down. “They didn’t say it was because I stole, but you know it was. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got other prospects anyways.”

  He told me about a party he had heard about, a field party, though he hadn’t necessarily been invited. I had my doubts, which grew into sneaking suspicions, which grew into fear. My first thoughts were that someone had put Russell up to this, possibly bribing him with this bottle to trick me into going to where no one would hear my screams. I mentioned that I hadn’t gotten along too well with most other kids in town, but Russell told me that we could leave as soon as I felt the need so I followed him down Center, past the middle school and the old folks’ home, over the bridge that crossed the Spirit River to where it became the highway. A couple of trucks blew by us but no one whistled or called—they must have thought I was Russell’s woman.

  We turned onto a two-lane road that ran between cornfields. Stalks as high as my eyes with no end in sight. Russell handed me the bottle and I took two small sips. He called me a pussy so I took two more. A pinching tightness developed between my shoulders and a looseness behind my eyes. Russell had no problem with it, and with each pull he smiled wider and talked louder. He could drink whiskey faster than I could drink water, moving alone through the bottle as quickly as the four of us at the campground. I wanted to throw up just watching him.

  The road curved toward the setting sun, more an inconvenience on this cloudless day than an occasion of beauty and wonder, so we walked toward it with our hands in front of our faces like shields. I pointed out the thin dirt roads that occasionally split off from the pavement, often no more than wheel ruts that disappeared into forests or fields, and Russell claimed to have lived on a farm for the first ten years of his life. He told me that these were mostly access points for tractors and harvesters.

  “But some of these rednecks live down roads like these,” he said. “Houses deep in the woods, barns full of guns.”

  We came up on a pair of bridges that led over the Spirit, one the road we walked would cross and another set lower on the valley walls, narrow and old. I veered off on a gravel path that cut back and forth down the slope, leading to an orange sign hanging on a chain. DANGER: NO TRESPASSING! A plaque mounted on the portal strut read 1888.

  “Hey, what’s the plan?” Russell called from the road.

  I told him I would see him on the other side and crouched under the chain. The bracing looked safe enough, a little rusty but intact. The wooden deck was rotting away and, as I carefully stepped around holes so large I could have fallen through without touching the sides, I could see that the the concrete pillar that held the bridge in place was crumbling into the water below. The river ran slowly, indifferent to my peril.

  On the other side of the river was more corn. A lot more corn. We were in the middle of nowhere. I again grew worried that Russell was setting me up. He handed me the bottle and smiled, proving my suspicions. How did I let myself come to be alone with this guy I hardly knew? I felt a bit better when the corn gave way to soybeans because they were so low to the ground that I could see no one was hiding in the field, but those feelings were short-lived as we moved past the soy and back into cornfields. The sun set and the stars came out, so many that I asked Russell if he thought there were as many stars in the sky as there were ears of corn in the fields.

  “Someone should harvest those,” Russell said, now drunk, pointing at the Big Dipper, then turned toward an orange glow in the distance. “There’s the party.”

  We stepped into the field and followed the rows until we could hear the crowd. Russell knelt down and laced his hands together. I stepped in and he lifted me above the corn so I could point the way to the party, then we walked for a while at a sharp diagonal, trampling cornstalks.

  We came out of the corn to a half circle of parked trucks, headlights pointed at a crowd of people milling in pairs and small groups, most of them holding red plastic cups. A bonfire, the orange glow we had seen in the distance, burned between us and them, and next to that, a girl pumped beer out of a silver keg, five people behind her waiting for refills. One of the trucks played what might have been Led Zeppelin. I thought I recognized a couple of the guys from the streets of Holm but I couldn’t be sure—the only person I knew, by truck or by face, was Svenson.

  “I don’t see my guy yet,” Russell said, then led me over near the fire.

  Russell drank from the bottle and then passed it to me. No one had yet noticed who I was, but I was certain that someone soon would. I was about to suggest we slip back into the corn when a girl wearing overalls and pigtails, obviously drunk, stumbled up to the fire and yelled, pointing beyond us at a set of headlights on the road from where Russell and I had come.

  “That’s them!”

  The lights rolled past the party and turned back toward us at the next road. A few guys climbed up into the beds of their trucks, taking turns whistling with two fingers in their mouths. We all turned toward the entrance, if you can call a path of trampled corn an entrance.

  I took three steps back when I saw the truck was cherry red. Russell turned and I signaled for him to ease away from the crowd. We were at the edge of the standing corn when three ghosts got out of the truck to whooping cheers from the party. When the newcomers moved toward the fire I saw that they weren’t dressed like ghosts. They wore white robes and masks with tall pointy hats. On their chests, above their hearts, were red circles with white crosses. The first Klansman put his hands over his eyes, the second over his ears, the third over his mouth. This must have had some meaning beyond what I associated with it because the crowd grew very loud, a chorus of cheers and laughter. Cameras appeared and the partygoers posed with the costumed newcomers. Flashbulbs popped in the night. Rifles and shotguns were fetched from trucks and given to the Klansmen. “For authenticity,” someone kept yelling.

  I pulled Russell into the corn and turned back the way we came.

  “Hey, where are we going?” he called from behind me, but I didn’t turn back. “That was my guy. The party was just getting started.”

  I stopped to wait. Russell caught up and handed me the bottle, now less than a quarter full.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did you spill some of this?”

  “Spilled it right into my mouth.”

  Russell had drunk more than half the bottle but was still walking straight and making sense when he talked. I wasn’t sure what he would have to gain by pouring out the liquor and claiming to have drunk it, but it worried me more that he could drink this much and still function. I choked down a big swallow, more to keep it from Russell than from any desire to keep drinking, and held on to the bottle as we walked.

  “What was going on back there?”

  “They’re trying to be their fathers,” Russell said, “just like anybody else. Makes me wonder what your father is like with you running away like this.”

  “Better to run away than to be that,” I said.

  “They ain’t really KKK. They don’t mean it.”

  “What is it that they do mean?”

  “They like to dress up,” Russell said. “Boys’ll be boys, ya know? It’s not a big deal.” And then, when that line didn’t get the reaction he wanted: “Look, they’re idiots. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not like they burn crosses or anything.”

  “Let’s talk about something els
e.”

  Russell caught up and moved into the row next to me, corn tassels rustling against our arms as he told me about his uncle, who had lived for a time with him and his parents on the farm. He had seemed like a nice enough guy, to Russell anyway. An early riser and a hard worker, he was a great help with the morning chores, and on those lazy afternoons afterwards, he taught Russell how to throw, how to play baseball. But on weekends he underwent a mysterious change—when he would go out for an evening on the town, he came back a stranger. In one rage or another, he returned from wherever he had gone in a fit of yelling, punching holes in the wall, kicking chairs. Broken glass, usually plates or windows, often featured in those Sunday mornings, Russell and his father tiptoeing around the house as Russell’s mother tried to calm her brother. The last time he would see him, Russell awoke to find his uncle passed out in the dining room, cheek flat on the table, eyes open and staring but seeing nothing. A large bowl of coleslaw was overturned on the floor and strands of cabbage were strewn around the house.

  “I didn’t know he was a drunk until much later,” Russell said. “I thought he was crazy.”

  We reached the end of the cornfield and then walked along the road. Darkness had fallen hard and, since there were no streetlights, the stars and moon were left to guide us back to town. Crickets sang the melody to the rhythm of our feet in the gravel.

  “They kicked my uncle out after that thing with the coleslaw,” Russell said, “told him never to come back. Said he was no longer part of the family and acted that way too. Took his pictures out of the photo albums, tore up his letters, refused his collect calls. When I bring him up they act like I haven’t said anything.”

  “That’s how it was with my mom, too,” I said. “Once she was gone, my dad acted like they had never met.”

  “My uncle had this darkness hanging over him,” Russell said, “but sending him away was the worst thing we could have done. My mom doesn’t listen when I tell her that. ‘Tough love,’ she says, ‘someday you’ll understand.’ But I won’t. If anything, I’ll be the next one kicked out of the family.”