Only when a firecracker burst, tossed by someone at a nearby farm, were we shaken away from the song. We opened our eyes and found it was dusk, loaded into Mary’s car, and hightailed it to the fairgrounds for the fireworks show.
* * *
The high spirits stuck with me throughout the next day until I came home from work to find Jenny lying on my bed, facedown. She startled when the door opened, sat up sleepy-eyed.
“I was looking for you, but I got tired,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind that I used your spare key.” She rubbed at her eyes, not her usual self.
“No big deal,” I said, taking a seat beside her on my bed. I told her I had been at work and she groaned in response.
“I need some air,” she said, then stood, walked to the door, put her hand on the knob. “Come with?”
In spite of her mood, Jenny walked so quickly that I had trouble keeping up. We went west on Center, jaywalking between Cypress and Dogwood, and keeping on straight past Fern, but instead of leaving town Jenny veered onto a path that led under the bridge, to a long rocky incline down to the Spirit. We sat down at the top near the abutment and I read aloud the graffiti that had been sprayed with a sloppy hand on the beam nearest us.
“Beautiful day?”
Jenny turned to me with wet eyes, a tear rolled out, dripped off her chin, and then my arms were around her and she was crying into my neck, sobbing. My shirt grew damp with what came out of her. I ran my hand over her hair, a softness I had never felt, and breathed in the roses and violets that always followed her around. Her cries took a rhythm all their own and after a time it slowed, the hitching in her chest softened, and she pulled her head off my shoulder to speak.
“I’m never going to get out of this fucking town,” she said. “All we do is sit around smoking weed, like we’re waiting for something better to come along but what are we waiting for? Will we just get high all day every day until we die?”
She put her head back on my shoulder and we looked off down the slope. The cement pillar that rose out of the water like a ruler was stained orange and, according to the tick marks painted on the south end, the water had once reached as high as twenty-five feet, though that day the current, weak and slow, washed up under the number ten. The traffic above grew heavy as the evening rush hour arrived, the sounds of engines giving way later to the far-off noises of children playing in the park. I didn’t have an answer for Jenny’s question so we chain-smoked and sat there together, my arm around her shoulders, as the evening light faded to nothing more than the rippled reflection of the moon on the river below.
In the darkness I stood and, taking Jenny’s hand, pulled her to her feet, then led her back the way we had come. The streetlamps were on, the amber lights giving an air of mystery to the shuffling leaves of the trees. We took Fern south and walked toward the sheriff’s office, turned right on Old Main, then headed toward the neon A&W sign hanging in the distance. The wind through the trees and a couple stray crickets were the only sounds to be heard. When we reached her house, Jenny stepped up on the curb and turned toward me, taking my hands in hers. We stood in a cone of light from the streetlamp above. That single step up made us the same height.
“I’m sorry I’m so sad,” she said. “This hardly ever happens. Really.”
I didn’t know what to say so I squeezed her hands.
“Come on,” she said and waved me toward the split-level house, dark and empty save for the blue flicker in the upstairs bay window.
Inside was a cigarette haze, and I understood why Jenny always covered herself with perfume. Up five carpeted steps and there she was, Jenny but twenty years older, awash in whatever was in the prescription bottles knocked over on the coffee table before her. Jeopardy! on the television, though I was unsure whether she could see it.
“Mom,” Jenny said. “Mom. Ma! Mother!”
No response. Jenny stepped to the table and bent over her mother.
“Have you gone to the bathroom?” She talked loud and slow but her mother didn’t understand, instead leaned around her daughter so she could see the television. Jenny bent down and took her mother’s hand, pulled her off the couch and, with an arm around her waist, walked her to the bathroom in a way that reminded me of how I helped Russell back to my place on the night we had met up behind the Aurora.
Alone and unsure what to do, I inspected the pictures on the walls. Russell was right: Jenny had been a cow-eyed tomboy and, aside from that, she wasn’t much of a smiler. In each photo she wore a grimace that made it clear she wanted to be anywhere else. Jenny and her mother were in every frame, standing before lakes and mountains and rivers, but in no picture was her father. No aunts or uncles, cousins. In what I took to be the oldest photo, toddler Jenny was being held in the arms of her mother in front of Mount Rushmore. I had no idea who took these pictures. It seemed she had no family at all besides her mother.
A minute later Jenny was back, rustling through the mess on the table to take a look at each of the prescription bottles and, finding what she was looking for, shook two pills into her hand, tossed one back, and held the other out for me.
“What do you have to drink?” I asked as she gulped her pill down dry, no longer concerned with her fate of sitting around getting high all day.
“What is the Compromise of 1877?” Jenny asked the television, echoed afterwards by Alex Trebek, then waving a hand for me to follow her, she said, “Let’s go check in the kitchen.”
Jenny rattled in some cupboards as I ran some water from the sink and dipped my head into the stream. Pill swallowed, I turned to see her pouring whiskey over ice, putting the bottle back in the cabinet above the refrigerator. She handed me a glass. I heard the toilet flush and then Jenny’s mother ambled by the doorway, made her way back to the couch.
“This is how she is now,” Jenny said, leading me back to the living room. “She has always been a little depressed, but after the pet shop closed down she’s been like this more and more.” She sat down next to her mother and slid an arm around her neck. “Mother? Mom? Kristina? Are you in there?”
I sat in a chair to the side and watched Jenny destroy the competition on Jeopardy! Jenny’s mother sat by, bleary-eyed and silent, and I watched her for a time, wondering what it must feel like to be that far gone, that far removed, but I would soon know myself.
“I’d do anything if she would get better,” Jenny said at the commercial break. “Whatever it takes.”
I don’t remember leaving or walking home that night, I don’t even remember the end of Jeopardy!, but I woke up in my bed the next morning groggy and tired, head ringing, Kristina’s medicine having dropped me into a time warp.
* * *
I was still having trouble thinking that afternoon at work when I was counting the money at the beginning of my shift. My eyes faded in and out of focus and I couldn’t contain my thoughts—I’d begin something in my mind but forget how it had begun by the time I reached the end. Scanning the room, my wandering eyes landed on a collection of photographs tacked up on the wall. Most of them were taken in the restaurant and Leon was in every picture. Some were with customers I had seen once or twice, one of him and a waitress I didn’t recognize, another of him on the cook’s line in his white jacket and hat, but the last photo was taken outside the restaurant. I took the picture off the wall to get a closer look and found a much younger Leon with his arm around someone who appeared to be Sven Svenson, but older, both of them pointing up at what was then the new sign that read THE AURORA. I flipped it over to read Grand Opening, 1990 in a script I had come to recognize as Leon’s.
“Are you going to sit here on the clock looking at photos all night?” Leon asked me from the doorway. “You’re supposed to be up front with the cash at four.”
“I’m almost done,” I said, then held the photo up for him to see. “Who’s this?”
He took it from me and frowned.
“That’s my old business partner,” he said and sat down in the other chair. �
��The one that used to run the catering. We were army buddies.”
I laughed.
“You were in the army?” I asked. “What did you look like with a buzz cut?”
“I was pretty funny-looking. We all were. But growing up around here there isn’t much else to do. Neither of us were college material.”
He looked down at the photo again.
“So you guys made it back from the war and opened this place?”
“We were in Vietnam, not the Gulf,” he said, flipping the picture to see the caption. “Got back in seventy-one and this was taken in 1990. I bummed around getting high for a while, taking classes on the GI Bill, but that didn’t turn out too well. Not much to do around here—factory work, farming, you know—but, in any case, I was cooking at the Arlington for a while, a long while, nearly fifteen years I guess. One day Sven came in and asked me if I had any money, if I wanted to pitch in and be his chef. And now, here I am.”
At the word chef, the bell sounded from the kitchen. The waitress had an order.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“Sad story there. Some drunk came down an entrance ramp the wrong way and took him out on his motorcycle a few years back. I mean, how do you even get on an entrance ramp the wrong way?”
He rubbed his thumb along the side of the photo, then handed it to me and I tacked it back up on the wall.
“Three kids left behind,” he went on. “A lot in common with you actually. Mother went who-knows-where and the kids left to fend for themselves. I’ve tried to help them out. I do what I can. I see them from time to time. They help me out with the catering for extra cash.”
“That is sad,” I said and turned back to the money, now understanding why Chelsea had looked so familiar when I saw her: she was Sven’s older sister.
“Shit, Shane, you got me all misty-eyed over here,” Leon said. “Why don’t you run up to the kitchen and cook? I’ll bring that money up in a bit.”
* * *
Once my training was over and I had the place to myself, Russell became a frequent visitor to the Aurora—he wouldn’t go away. Those last weeks of June he was everywhere I went and he was always drunk. Most nights that I worked he showed up near the end of my shift, ordered a Coke, and sat in the back of the dining room mixing into his drink whatever booze he had found that day. Other nights, bottle in hand, speech slurring, he found me on my way home from hanging out with Jenny or Mary and J. When he got drunk enough he would pull me into some dark corner and try to kiss me, and I would let him. It wasn’t anything we talked about, even at our breakfasts at the Arlington on the mornings after he ended up crashing at my place, in my bed, as if what happened in the dark when Russell was drunk didn’t actually happen, but it seemed to me that something was growing between us. One day I even found myself able to put it into words.
“It was an accident that I stopped getting haircuts. My dad was too busy to bring me in and by the time we got around to it I decided that it was better long. My dad didn’t care—he liked it too—but almost immediately the other people in Grand Marais began questioning me, though the word questioning makes it sound more polite than it was. My hair wasn’t even to my shoulders when I first got pushed into a wall and called a faggot. Most people would have fought back or denied it, but I didn’t know, I still don’t know, how is anyone supposed to know who they are when they haven’t had a chance to figure anything out for themselves? I feel like most people go along with the rest of the world, without asking whether or not it is right for them. I’m attracted to girls, but I’m also attracted to guys—I think that a lot of people are this way but are afraid to admit it.”
Russell had stopped eating midbite, fork loaded with french toast halfway to his mouth. “Why are you telling me this?”
“That’s why I’m living here and not with my uncle. My dad was fine with my hair, with everything else—he wanted me to be whoever I wanted to be—but my uncle, even before my dad died, was always asking what it meant, and when I tiptoed around it, he came out with it and asked me if I was gay.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I wasn’t sure. I told him I had never kissed a boy or a girl so I didn’t know, but I’m pretty sure he took that to mean I was gay but didn’t want to admit it.”
“That’s what it sounds like to me,” Russell said, setting down his fork. It appeared that he had lost his appetite. “But, again, why are you telling me this?”
“Is this when you tell me you don’t remember what happened last night or any of those other nights?”
Russell sat, silent, while I recounted the first night on the bridge, dropping his eyes from mine at the mention of the punch on the second night behind the Aurora, and finally slumping forward in his seat when he heard about the nights that followed. I didn’t believe him at first, that he couldn’t remember spending almost every night for two weeks in my bed, but maybe this was supposed to be a secret, our secret, so secret that I wasn’t even supposed to tell him about it.
After I stopped talking he picked up his fork again, ate the rest of his breakfast, then got up and left without a word.
Eight
I hadn’t considered Jenny’s weight and split her off an equal dose. She receded into herself, pupils swallowing up the deep blue of her irises, body limp, eyes out the window. Breathing deeply but vacant, the wave had come for me but I wondered what it was for her.
When she came back around, I saw that getting high with Jenny was different than it was with J. Where the speed had made J quiet and more self-involved, it made Jenny talk without end, skipping from topic to topic sometimes without even a breath between, from snippets of songs to conspiracy theories to elaborate practical jokes. I sat on the floor, staring at the shifting shadows on the wall, while Jenny lay on my bed talking, her words materializing before me.
“We should write up a letter and sign it with Jim Morrison’s name, then stuff it in a bottle and toss it in the Spirit,” she said. “It would float until someone found it and then they would think he was still alive. Just to fuck with people, you know?”
I made a noise that could’ve been taken as a laugh, the familiar pressure of the drugs in my body holding back my words. I found my notebooks and gave one to Jenny and we went at them with pencils. Jenny doodled while she talked and I wrote about her doing that, transcribing as much as I could of what she said. The shadows shifted as the day rolled on.
“I’ve spent all this time angry,” she said.
I didn’t look up from my notebook.
“But I should be thankful to my father. I should be glad that he made me an aware and thoughtful person. And your mother has done the same by leaving you. You should thank her.”
“What?”
“I know you know what I mean,” she said. “I’ll find her for you. I’ll find her.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve looked everywhere.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
She launched off the bed, walked over to the window, peeked outside. Hours had passed. Night had fallen uneventfully.
“Come with?”
Down the creaky stairs and out on the sidewalk, we saw the streets were empty except for a couple cars parked in a circle down at the laundromat. We ran out across Center, cut around the bank and past Taco John’s and behind the More-4-You. She led me over to the loading dock and kicked at a couple wooden shipping pallets before she grabbed one and struggled to get it out of the stack. I took the other end and we walked it out toward the train tracks, angling it between the trees, and dropped it next to a train car where we leaned it against the side like it was a ladder.
Jenny told me to wait and she walked off into the darkness, the crunching of the rocks beneath her feet echoing off the back of the strip mall so that each step sounded like two, then disappeared for a moment into a copse of trees on the far side of the yard. She came back with a large backpack, hauled it over by the train cars, dropped it
onto the rocks, and took out a can of paint.
“Go keep lookout.”
At the end of the string of cars, I saw a set of headlights pull up the hill where the tracks met Center, slow for the crossing, roll on, and then the night was quiet and peaceful, the clicking of the mixer ball and the slow fizz of the paint taking turns with the crickets, the stars out strong and bright above us.
The shadows fell into a silent stillness, so I turned back to Jenny and watched her climb up and down the slats to reach the different high points of her piece, dancing back and forth between them while she painted. After a few finishing touches, she stepped down and dug in her backpack, took out a flashlight, and lit up her work. It appeared to be two women facing each other, each reaching with one hand, HOPE spelled between them in a flowing cursive, but then when I saw that one of the ladies was wearing jeans and a flannel I knew she had painted a picture of us. The shiny metallic blue she had used for our eyes gave us both a haunting glare.
“Beautiful,” I said, “just like all the others. I can’t believe that you are HOPE. I’ve been checking out all your pieces since I got here.”
I couldn’t help myself, so high and so proud, I walked over and gave her the strongest hug I had ever given anyone.
“Of course it’s you,” I said. “Who else could it be?”
“I usually do this when I’m sad,” she said into my neck.
I didn’t say that I had seen hundreds of these tags since I had moved to town, didn’t want to bring up how sad she was, how sad she had to be to have painted them all.
“But I’m happy today,” she said. “Thanks, Shane, I really feel good.”
* * *
Had I known what was coming, I might have poisoned Svenson when I had the chance. I could have sprinkled floor cleaner on his pancakes instead of powdered sugar.
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