Northern Lights

by Raymond Strom

  At the pair of bridges, Russell grabbed the bottle from me and ran down the hill, out onto the abandoned bridge. I yelled for him to turn around and take the safe way but he wasn’t coming back. Drunk as he was, I figured he would end up in the river so I wasn’t surprised when I found him dangling from the edge of the first big hole in the deck. It would have been a short fall but the river was very shallow. A rock in the wrong place would break his leg if he were to drop.

  I grabbed him by the armpits and pulled him up, falling down on my ass as he came out of the hole. The forward momentum brought Russell down on top of me, drunk and flailing from the fear of falling, or so I thought until his open mouth came down on mine, his hands behind my head pulling me to him. We tangled there for a long moment, inexperienced and unpracticed, my hands on Russell’s waist as he reached under and over and around to feel what he could, to pull me closer to him, until his hand went between my legs and I pushed him away.

  We lay there on the bridge next to each other for a while, staring up at the stars, neither of us having the words to talk about what had just happened, my desire having grown into a dark yearning that I didn’t understand, a shadow of myself twice my size, hungry, and barely under control. I wanted another drink but the whiskey was gone, Russell having dropped the bottle in the river in his scramble to stay out of the hole, so my buzz was beginning to wear off. Russell had drunk so much that he was still quite tipsy but somehow still awake. As alert and aware as when we had first met up that day.

  “So, what else happened on that farm?” I asked.

  “Every once in a while we’d get a brood of like fifty chicks and I’d get super excited, really, more excited than I’ve ever been since, for sure. They were little and yellow and soft. Once when I was like seven I wanted to keep one but my dad told me we’d have to leave it in the incubator for a few days so he gave me a marker so I’d know which one was mine. They all looked the same so I should have waited until they were more mature to choose, but I picked one up and drew a big red dot on her forehead. That night I couldn’t even eat dinner I was so excited about my new pet, and I couldn’t go to sleep until I saw her again, so I waited for my parents to go to bed and snuck out to the barn. You probably know where this is going.”

  “No idea.”

  “When I got to the incubator her head was split open and the other chicks were pecking at her brains. I screamed loud enough to wake my parents and they came and got me and put me to bed.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Others were pecked to death for much less—we couldn’t even figure out why some of the chicks had been attacked. As far as we could tell, some of them were perfectly normal.”

  “Boys will be boys, I guess.”

  “Ladies in this case,” he said. “These were all egg-laying hens.”

  There was screaming in the distance and the sound of engines. Svenson’s truck was the first to cross the bridge, the other two Klansmen standing in the bed, holding on to the roll bar with one hand, red plastic cups in the other. The rest of the party followed, more tame than the leader.

  “It’s good we aren’t up on the road now,” Russell said.

  Four

  I ate breakfast at the Arlington almost every day that summer, sitting with coffee while the old-timers came and went, the strong gray-haired men wearing flannel work shirts under insulated vests who would show up early and read aloud the newspaper stories about welfare and immigration. They reveled in the accomplishment of Timothy McVeigh. These men had the same swagger and attitude as the boys on the streets, the same confidence and misconceptions about how people should treat each other, but they also shared a general feeling of disgust with the way the world was heading. They came to the Arlington to complain and to tell each other that their complaints were justified.

  “I mean, it’s my money,” I heard that first morning I had breakfast alone. “Why’s some raghead Somali going to spend it in Minneapolis?”

  “I don’t know why we keep letting them in the country.”

  These men lived in Holm or the nearby towns of Karlstad, Mora, Chisago, or Lulea, and many in the rural lands between, and they were all Swedish, of Swedish descent anyway, the remaining shreds of that heritage being the long vowels in their speech and the annual trip to the Holm Swedish Festival.

  I stirred sugar into my coffee and listened with my head cocked, staring off into a corner or out the window as if I wasn’t there, but I saw it all. They tipped in coins, some leaving a single quarter on the counter, and assumed this bought the right to pinch Karen’s ass on the way out the door, every last one of them. When the old men left, the whole mood of the Arlington would change. The waitresses were quick to bring the discarded newspapers over with the coffeepot. Laughs were a bit easier to come by. Life got less serious once all the rednecks cleared out.

  Later in the summer the old men caught me listening, noticed I was a little off, sitting at a table near the counter, alone, looking like a girl, but those first days I heard everything, unedited and unfiltered. They sat nearer each other at the counter after that and, voices quieter, always with their backs between me and what they were saying. It was easy to see where Svenson got his attitude.

  * * *

  The shiny chrome pipe Jenny bought with her drill bit money was a foot long and she wasn’t afraid to whip it out. After a long morning of coffee and newspapers, I found her leaning against the wall of the Arlington, bowl sunk deep into a plastic baggie, corralling green crumbs.

  “Couldn’t we at least go up to my room for this?”

  “Most people wouldn’t understand,” she said. “And even if they do know, who are you trying to impress? You’re heading off to college at the end of the summer—you’ll never see any of these people again.”

  She put flame to the bowl, holding the long stem to her chest as if she were doing nothing more than adjusting a pendant, then we walked off down Center trailing sour clouds behind us. Until then I thought Jenny was reckless and a bit edgy. I admired her blatant disregard for the rules but it became clear to me that she wasn’t testing boundaries with her nonstop shoplifting and public smoking and stealing from cars, rather she was trying to get caught. I couldn’t say why then but every one of Jenny’s actions seemed to be directed toward getting arrested. The only thing I could get her to do that didn’t include at least the threat of arrest was look for my mother.

  The plastics factory was a fortress of ugly: three stories of reflective silver metal and two blocks long, in the same spot as the strip mall that housed the More-4-You but on the wrong side of the tracks. We had no luck at the front door where two security guards checked appointments and IDs and, since neither of us were old enough to work there, they wouldn’t even let us in to fill out an application. Outside, I started back toward the Arlington but Jenny stopped.

  “You aren’t very good at this, are you?”

  “No, I guess I’m not.”

  “Follow me.”

  She turned us around and led me down a sidewalk that ran the length of the factory. Noontime beat down on the building’s facade and up from the hoods of the parked cars, catching us in the middle with the heat of three suns. At the end of the building was an area fenced off with chain link, picnic tables lined in rows shaded by big square umbrellas.

  “How are we going to get in?” I asked. “Climb the fence?”

  She reached in through the neck of her blouse to take her smokes from her bra strap, tapped two out and lit them. “We don’t need to go inside,” she said, handing me a cigarette.

  We puffed for a moment before the lunch whistle sounded and soon the door crashed open, the picnic tables filled with men and women in matching gray slacks and collared T-shirts, unrolling brown paper bags and lighting cigarettes. They grouped themselves by age, a few old-timers together at one table and a few that may have just finished high school at another, but all the other tables were taken by people my mother’s age. I half expected to see my mother herself bu
t she wasn’t in the crowd. The sound of chatter and laughter was loud but Jenny yelled over it.

  “Does anyone know this boy’s mother?” she shouted. “She used to work here.” She called my mother’s name a few times and soon a woman seated at a picnic table went inside and came back with a stocky man carrying a clipboard.

  “You kids can’t hang out here,” the man said.

  “My mom—”

  “Look, kid, your mother was a fuckup,” he said, “and it’d probably be better if you stop looking now and get on with your life.”

  My face must have dropped to the ground because Jenny looked at me and then snarled through the fence. “You fat fuck,” she hissed. “You come out here and say that.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” he said. “In any case, she worked the night shift and I fired all of them. Every last one. Bunch of drug addicts, your mom included.”

  He turned and walked back inside. Jenny stuck her fingers and cigarette through the fence and flicked her butt at the man but it fell short.

  I turned back the way we came and Jenny followed, taking my hand in hers as we made our way back downtown but I wasn’t looking to be consoled. I had known it wouldn’t be easy.

  “All the money I have, I got from my mother,” I told Jenny after I recounted the day I had graduated from high school, the note from my uncle, and the bus ride to Holm. The Christmas card that led me here had a hundred-dollar bill inside. I got so excited when I opened it: a hundred dollars—I was thirteen then and had never seen so much money at once before, let alone a single crisp bill. My father and my uncle were my whole family in Grand Marais and sitting around our Christmas tree I told my father all the things I wanted to buy—bike parts, video games, candy—but I didn’t see the tears in his eyes. My father was so softhearted that he couldn’t speak up as I kept talking and talking until my uncle stood, towering over me, and yelled about all the times my mother had crossed my father, all the times she had ignored me. He listed her boyfriends’ names from both before and after they were married, the long nights when she had left us alone, one of them a week after I was born. “She flashes a hundred-dollar bill and you forget all of that,” he screamed into my face. “You’re just like her!” And now I don’t know if it was his rage or my final understanding that my mother abandoned us that sent me into a sadness days long, ruining my winter vacation. In the end, I stuffed the bill back in the card and promised myself I would never use the money, but having nothing and nowhere to go after my dad died, I needed it.

  “I’d be sad if my father died too,” Jenny said when I finished my story. She moved her hand to my shoulder and I tried to smile at her.

  “It isn’t my father’s death that makes me sad, but that he never lived,” I told Jenny. “He spent his whole life in Grand Marais: finished high school, met my mother, had me, and then raised me until his heart gave out. My mother went out to see the world, if you can call Holm and wherever she is now the world, and my father stayed home with his responsibilities.”

  We had made it back to the Arlington by the time I finished my story but instead of going upstairs, I rang the super. He came out in the same paint-splashed jeans he had been wearing when we had breakfast.

  “Did you find her?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. I dug out my money and gave him two twenties, stuffing the single dollar that remained back in my pocket. “So it’ll be twenty a week through July too? And August if I stay?”

  He told me I was right about the price, then told me to wait and ambled off. He returned with a square of paper, the words RENT RECEIPT across the top in blue, and a spare key. Unsure what to do with the spare, I held it out to Jenny and she took it without a word.

  “I can see why you’re staying in town,” he said, hooking his thumb at Jenny. “What a beautiful woman, no? If you don’t find your mother, at least you found her.”

  Five

  Sisyphus was large and round and sat at the end of her chain’s length, head tilted, watching the cars and people pass on Ash. Lucifer was much smaller. He was allowed to run free but never went far from his sister, who was tied to the trunk of the willow tree. Like any pair of pit bulls, they looked ferocious and were capable of ripping a person apart, but Sissy and Lucy were soft and gentle and friendly. The huge willow stood between us and the sun, the slight wind blowing the fronds of the tree so the long ropes of shadow swung back and forth across the four of us as we lazed about.

  J and I were sitting on lawn chairs that I would never see again—apparently, there were many things that disappeared from this house—while he told me about the short time he and Mary had spent apart. The best three days of his life, he said, and then she was back, knocking on the door, waking him up at the crack of noon, apologizing. It seemed to me that it should have been J who said he was sorry, but it doesn’t matter who is wrong in situations like these, J told me, rather, who wants the other person more.

  J reached down between our chairs and pulled out of the grass what looked to me like a long gray icicle, then threw it so it flew end over end into the street. Lucifer jumped up and ran for it, dashed into the road without looking, picked it up in his teeth, and brought it back to J. He kept throwing and Lucifer kept fetching, bringing it right back to J’s hand until finally he dropped it at our feet before turning back to his sister and lying down next to her. I climbed out of my chair and picked up the icicle. It was solid but very light, dotted with tooth marks up and down.

  “What is this thing?”

  “No idea,” J said. “I found it here—there’s a bunch of weird shit like this kicking around the house. Lucy loves it though. He snaps through regular sticks, even branches, with one chomp. I call it the Indestructible.”

  I turned the stick over in my hands a couple of times, found no name brand or other markings, then dropped it back into the grass before sitting back down.

  “So why do you stay with Mary if you aren’t really into her?” I asked.

  “What’s your favorite sandwich?”

  “Peanut butter and butter,” I said without hesitation.

  “PB and butter?” he asked. “Really?”

  I nodded.

  “Two kinds of butter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s different,” J said, “but anyways, let’s say that you’ve eaten lunch and someone walks in with a tray full of peanut butter and butter sandwiches, sets them right in front of you and tells you to eat. Do you eat? Or do you let them sit?”

  Lucifer was a jumper. Up and down, over his sister, running circles around her. Sisyphus, big and slow, snapped her jaws at Lucifer, reached out with a paw and missed.

  “I’d definitely eat,” I said. “But I don’t see how this works. Is Mary the lunch or the peanut butter sandwich?”

  “C’mon, Lucky, you know what I mean.”

  I knew from the beginning that J wasn’t nice, wasn’t a thoughtful person, but he had developed some sort of attachment to me, and I to him. I was like some sad cat he had fed once and, as with strays, when I had nowhere else to go I would wander back to see if he had anything else for me. Not that I didn’t like J, he was friendly to me, but I was aware of how badly he treated others.

  “I usually don’t think of women as sandwiches,” I said.

  “Clearly, you think too much.”

  We sat there silently for a while, my comment a nonissue, then he pulled a small plastic bag and his keys from his pocket. He dug a key into the bag and the tip came out with a small pile of an off-white powder.

  “Hey, try this,” he said. “Maybe it’ll stop that overworked mind of yours.”

  I may have been a bit naive but I didn’t think J would give me anything that would hurt me. When he brought the tip of the key to my nose, I sniffed back and felt good instantly. More than good. Great. The best I had ever felt. My heart pulsed in my eyes, I inhaled to deep parts of my lungs I had never used before and, with a wave of tingling pins and needles that moved over the top of
my head and down my back, a tremendous sense of relief washed over me.

  “What was that?” I asked, though a tension in my jaw made it difficult to speak. “I feel like I could do anything.”

  “It’s got a lot of names,” he said. “Sprack, I guess they call it now, speed.”

  “You aren’t going to do any?”

  “I did a little earlier,” he said. “You should see what this stuff does to Mary. We were busy for six hours last night.”

  He made some lewd pantomimes while he rocked his hips and I wasn’t sure what to say to that so I let it be what it was. Feeling the way I did then, letting go was very easy. I smiled violently. It hurt my cheeks to sit there and be alive, merely looking into the grass, watching the dogs. The sounds of the world became a symphony: the wind through the trees playing percussion and the distant traffic pairing with birdsong to make a soft melody.

  “I love my fucking dogs,” J said after a while, maybe a few hours. “They’re big and mean-looking and everyone is scared of them.” He got out of his chair and ran at Sissy, tackling her near the tree. Lucy jumped in and bit at J’s pants and shirt. They rolled around on the ground for a while until J played dead and the dogs took to whimpering and tried to lick him back to life.

  When he came back to sit down I saw a chunky streak of brown slime across the back of his flannel.

  “Dog shit,” I said. “You got dog shit all over your shirt.”

  “You’re either ankle-deep in shit or you’re lonely,” he said, taking off his flannel and inspecting it before throwing it to the ground. “My dad used to say that.”

  J settled back into his chair and grew silent except for the loud sighs he let out every few minutes and the near-constant gravel of his grinding teeth. We didn’t speak again for hours, sitting there in the waning day with the dogs until sunset, dusk, dark, when we were nothing more than two glowing embers in the night, the fiery cherries at the ends of our cigarettes.