Northern Lights

by Raymond Strom

  He came into the Aurora one morning and I watched him through the service window as he waited for Leon near the host stand. He stood tall and straight, so much the son of a soldier that I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it earlier. He called Leon sir and was very polite with the waitress.

  It had been a slow morning at the restaurant so when their order came in I had nothing else to do. Leon got a BLT like he always did—I had never met anyone who ate as much bacon as Leon—and Svenson had two over-easy eggs with hash browns and a side of chocolate chip pancakes. Considering Svenson’s plates, I saw that he and I were more alike than I wanted to admit. Svenson ate slowly and thoughtfully as Leon talked, pacing himself so that he and Leon would finish at the same time. He sat tall in his seat and responded to questions with a “yes sir” or a “no sir.” He knew how to act in public but gave very few people the respect he gave Leon.

  The waitress gave me orders for two more tables and, when I got a chance to check on Svenson and Leon again, I saw that their plates had been cleared and now Svenson was talking over the two cups of coffee between them while Leon nodded, his mullet waving back and forth over his shoulders. I wondered what Svenson would think of that long hair if Leon hadn’t been his dad’s best friend. Would he chase him down on his motorcycle and beat his ass? Would he at least call names after him?

  They finished up and, as they stood, Svenson held his hand out to be shaken but Leon gave him a look of disbelief and spread his arms wide. Svenson resisted briefly but gave Leon the hug he wanted and then, scanning the restaurant to see who had seen it, he locked eyes with me through the window. I don’t think he recognized me, as I stuffed all my hair up into my hat while I was cooking, but he was embarrassed. I grabbed an empty plate and set it in the service window and then turned away to make it seem like I hadn’t been watching.

  “This portion is a little light,” Leon said, taking the plate in his hand as he passed by the window on his way to the back.

  He walked onto the cook’s line and I took the plate from him, put it back where it belonged.

  “Against sound advice,” Leon said, “it appears that the South will rise again. And also, they’re all set over at the other location—no more caterers needed. They are getting rid of someone but he found someone else. I’m glad. I need you over here anyways.”

  * * *

  Jenny and I got caught smoking right in front of the Arlington. On our way to my room Jenny had wanted to take one last hit for the stairs.

  “To make it interesting,” she said. “I hate climbing stairs, you know.”

  She was setting the flame to her foot-long pipe when lights popped, a siren sang, and the HOLM COUNTY SHERIFF car rolled up over the curb. Jenny threw the pipe to the ground.

  “Illegal,” the sheriff shouted through his window, pointing. He opened the door, stepped over to us, bent to pick up the pipe. “Care to explain this?”

  Jenny rocked from foot to foot, stuttering, and the sheriff let her suffer.

  “It’s mine,” I said. “I was smoking it when you pulled up so I threw it on the ground.”

  “Is that so, Shane Stephenson?” The sheriff looked me up and down. “You’re a goddamn liar, but you’re a stand-up guy taking the blame for your friend like that. Lord knows, Jennifer here needs a good friend, isn’t that right, Ms. Freya? If more people were as loyal as all that we wouldn’t need laws in the first place. And though I know that if I had shown up ten seconds later I’d’ve caught you with the pipe in your hands, that’s not what happened, is it?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “And polite too,” the sheriff said. “Where’d you find this one, Jennifer? Now turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

  She did as he asked and he snapped handcuffs on her wrists.

  “Really?” she said as she turned back toward us.

  “You bet,” the sheriff said. “Now I want you to tell me where you got these drugs.”

  “We were at a concert.”

  “Yeah right, everyone in this town gets their drugs at concerts. Not a single drug dealer for miles around.”

  “This was the other week—Shane was there. Some dude with dreadlocks fell asleep and I took it out of his pocket.”

  “You know that’s bullshit.” He pulled out his ticket book. “But I think you’ll remember. Or maybe you’ll find someone else for me. Who knows?”

  The reds and blues of the sheriff’s car washed over us for a time, then Jenny said something that shocked me.

  “Maybe you should take me home and tell my mother.”

  The sheriff’s face sunk but then he snapped into action. Without a word, he slipped the pipe into his back pocket, then took Jenny by the shoulders and spun her around. After fiddling with his keys for a moment the handcuffs were off and Jenny and I watched the sheriff pull his car down off the curb and back onto the road.

  “What just happened?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” she said, rubbing one wrist and then the other. “He took my pipe but he forgot to empty my pockets. You got any papers upstairs?”

  I unlocked the door and let her in, followed her up the stairs, and we found my room awash in evening light. Jenny got right down to business at my desk as I looked for some rolling papers, then I took a seat on my bed after I gave them to her. Outside the window, the clouds to the west looked like neat rows of purple and pink muffins as they faded to gray.

  “He’s in love with my mother,” Jenny said when she rose from the desk, “or he was at one point. I rode home in the back of his car once a week for a while and you can tell he’s fucking moony. I wish they would get back together. Everything would be fine if he would come back.”

  I was no stranger to thoughts like these, and though I knew it couldn’t be true, that whatever went on between the sheriff and Jenny’s mother was far more complicated than what Jenny thought of it, I also knew there was no talking her out of it. There had been no talking me out of it when I had the same ideas about my parents.

  Jenny sat on the windowsill, the sun setting behind her, flicked her lighter, then blew the smoke through the screen. When Jenny got high you could see her thinking—others, not so much. So many people stare off at nothing, thinking nothing—you could see the animal deadness in their eyes—but Jenny’s mind never shut down. It must have been hell. I’d take a hit off a joint and float off into abstract thoughts about how clouds form or whatever, but she, well, you could tell she had something in there that she was trying to forget and it didn’t seem to be working.

  “I used to get in a lot of trouble,” she said.

  “No,” I said with a smile. “That can’t be true.”

  II

  * * *

  Nine

  The signs said THE FIRST AMENDMENT IS THE BEST AMENDMENT (AFTER THE SECOND) and KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY FLAG. Holmers young and old parked their cars and trucks haphazardly in the abandoned lot of the now-closed Tweed’s Discount, made their way to the makeshift barbecue pit for a free plate of chicken and ribs, and then wandered among the crowd licking their fingers and browsing the southern-themed merchandise for sale on folding tables or laid out on blankets on truck beds. It appeared to be a traditional community get-together, like a swap meet or a rummage sale, until Svenson arrived with a Confederate flag mounted in the bed of his truck, cutting through the crowd like the fin of a great shark. He climbed out to cheering and was handed a megaphone that he took with his bandaged hand, a thick wrapping of gauze around where Lucifer had shredded his wrist.

  “What do we want?”

  “To fly Dixie!”

  “When do we want it?”

  “Now!”

  Some of those not already in western dress returned to their cars for cowboy hats or boots or fringed shirts. A tall boy with close-cut blond hair handed out Confederate flag pins. Music blasted from speakers in the back of a pickup truck, the singer claiming to have the biggest balls of them all. The whole scene was a strange reenactment of
the field party—it was most of the same people. I was surprised that no one pulled out their guns for authenticity.

  Svenson climbed into the bed of the truck mounted with speakers and turned down the music as a news van pulled up next to him and parked. Two men climbed out, one with a camera and the other a microphone.

  “Now we all know why we’re here,” he said, pointing to his truck, the Confederate flag. “I was suspended from school for refusing to take down my flag. Our flag. I was told it was disrespectful. Offensive. But it’s my flag.” He paused for applause. “Our flag.” More cheers, whistles, a woo-hoo. “Of course they don’t like it—it isn’t their flag, it’s ours. It’s the best flag. No better flag than this one.”

  Shouts now. A few more whistles. A fuck yeah.

  “I was suspended from school and I couldn’t catch up with the work that I missed, so it cost me my senior year and now I’ll finish up next fall at the alternative school. Yes, I failed high school because of this suspension and they say I’m disrespectful. They said no one in this town agreed with me. I took my flag down because I thought they were right, but since then so many of you have gone out of your way to tell me how you felt that I put it back up. I had to do it. Now look at us. Look around. We are Holm. I just wish this news team would turn that camera your way so we could show the world all your beautiful faces, all this wonderful support.”

  The crowd was fifty or sixty people, I’d say. Not a majority of the town. Not even close. But they were excited, I have to give them that, and vocal. Skirmishes popped up here and there, horns and yelling, punches thrown. I was happy to see some opposition.

  The ruckus went on until Svenson’s truck started, over-revved, then burned rubber in place for a solid thirty seconds, shooting a jet of smoke out above the gathering. The crowd parted and he sped down the road, flag whipping behind him. The others pulled out of the lot, mostly pickups but also a few cars with flags hanging out the windows, until more than twenty vehicles were moving down the streets of Holm promoting the revival of Confederate values. I watched the parade snake out onto Old Main and turn north, the news crew following in the rear, and then I went back to the Arlington.

  The sudden silence in my room was thick. As soon as I arrived I had to get away, had to get high. Spying my Nintendo in the corner of my room, I remembered finally that I was supposed to bring it to J, so I put it in a plastic bag and made my way outside. A block down Old Main I ran into Jenny on her way to Walmart.

  “You’re going to trade that for drugs?” she asked. “Are you even trying to find your mother anymore?”

  I had been so successful in blocking my mother from my mind over the past few weeks that I had forgotten all about it. Embarrassed and guilty, I muttered something about how I had been working a lot and how my leads had dried up.

  “Well, don’t give up,” she said softly, a murmur. “You don’t want to end up like the fucking losers that live in this town.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Did you see those assholes with their stupid parade?” she said. “Where are we, Mississippi? Anyways, I’ve gotta get to the drugstore.”

  “I’ll be at J’s,” I said, then watched her walk to the end of the block and turn down Center.

  Heavy breathing and rhythmic creaking let me know that J and Mary were busy. Can’t get a girl pregnant if she’s already pregnant, J had said once or twice. Unsure what to do while I waited, I paced the hallway for a time before J’s roommate, Rick, called me into his room.

  The first time I met Rick, I thought he was one of the walking zombies that fed on speed and vitamins, which he indeed was, but he also owned the house where he and J lived. His short blond hair receded up his forehead and deep pockmarks pitted his cheeks. He sat in one of two chairs that faced the window, wearing only boxer shorts, his thin legs looking like someone had stretched old leather over a classroom skeleton. A single mattress with no sheets lay on the floor in the corner under a rumpled blanket. He motioned toward the other chair. As I sat, Mary moaned in the other room.

  “Damn, they get straight to it, right?” he asked. “I swear they walked in there a few minutes ago.” Then, when I didn’t answer: “What’s in the bag?”

  “Something for J,” I said.

  On the floor before us were a number of what I took to be sculptures. Thick bases with thin stems that leaned one way or the other. Some were as small as baby squirrels while one was the size of an end table and had a small dip in it that Rick had been using as an ashtray. I picked one up and saw that it was the same hard, gray material as J’s dog stick, the Indestructible.

  Rick tipped his head back and flicked his lighter, bringing the flame to the end of a thin silver cylinder.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said, holding out the makeshift pipe for me to take. “This is a real treat, not like that shitty sprack that’s going around.”

  Turning the pipe over in my hands, I could see it was made out of the missing half of the television antenna. A white residue caked the steel wool Rick had stuffed down into the hollow of the cylinder. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I figured it couldn’t be worse than some of the other things I had been doing, so I brought the pipe to my mouth. The flame made it crackle as it warmed and then my lips went numb. My heart sped up and my vision faded, smoothing out my surroundings. I looked over at Rick to see that his hair appeared full and his pockmarks were gone, as if I was looking into the past. This new youthful glow made him look strangely like Russell.

  “Now is when, if you were a girl, I’d let you have more if you, you know—”

  Squeaks and creaks from the other room. Rick reached into the hole of his boxer shorts and pulled out his cock. Stroked it twice so it stood at attention.

  “You’re a little girlish,” he said. “Girl enough for me.”

  I thanked him for the offer but declined, and then Rick put himself back in his pants and grew meditative.

  “I have a girl of my own, a daughter,” he said after a moment, possibly to himself. “And a wife. I’m gonna fix this place up and we’ll all live here together again.”

  Another look around the room led me to wonder how he planned to bring a child into this mess. The broken glass on the floor, the bloody rags. I would have been disgusted if I wasn’t so suddenly sad for him, a lonely skeleton abandoned by his family, now living in this empty room and smoking what I assumed to be crack. Maybe his daughter was somewhere looking for him like I had been looking for my mother.

  I wanted more than anything for J and Mary to finish so I could trade J my Nintendo for more speed, but the creaking from the next room showed no signs of slowing. Six hours, J had told me this had lasted, but this was when both of them were high so Mary couldn’t be expected to keep up now. I would have to wait, but not here. It was too much for me to take, Rick’s skeletal appearance and his odd glances my way when Mary’s moans came floating into the room, so I went out to the front yard, found the Indestructible, and tossed it to Lucy while Sissy sat and watched. They barked at me, I barked back. After I looked to be sure the grass was free of slimy surprises, we all sat down together under the willow tree and watched the people come and go at the Dairy Queen.

  The sun moved across the blue expanse between the willow tree and the house across Ash and I found myself wanting more of whatever it was in Rick’s antenna. The initial feelings had lasted no more than fifteen minutes, but the lingering aftereffect was a longing for more. I knew the cost, the image of Rick’s cock pulled through his shorts was burned into my eyes, but as I lay there in the grass, I considered it. After all, I reasoned with myself, I had let Russell do what he wanted for free.

  Both dogs were dozing with their heads in my lap when Sissy startled. She stood and walked as far as her chain allowed, growled toward the north. Lucy trotted out to join her. Jenny came walking up the road with a bag from the pharmacy at Walmart and plopped down onto the grass next to me, but the dogs had their eyes on something else.

  The para
de was heading our way. It had dwindled down to three pickups, a small sedan with its hatchback raised, flag waving behind it like a cape, and a news van taking up the rear. Svenson’s truck still led, Svenson tapping his horn with no rhythm at the front of the line. As they approached, the dogs’ growls grew furious. Jenny and I stood between Sissy and Lucy to watch the parade pass.

  “Shouldn’t those be Swedish flags!” I yelled. “You’ve never even been to the South!”

  Svenson slowed his truck and stuck his head out the window. He shouted and waved his bandaged hand toward me and Jenny but I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say. The commotion continued for a moment, engines revved and horns sounded, then the parade moved on. I sat back down on the lawn. As the afternoon turned to evening the dogs calmed and so did Jenny and I.

  “Swedish flags?” Jenny said. “You’re funny.”

  “It just came out,” I said, then picked up the Indestructible and threw it to Lucy but he brought it back to Jenny.

  “What is this?” Jenny asked. “Where did you get this?”

  “Why? What’s the big deal?”

  “Plastic products are made from pellets. You take your mold, fill it with pellets, warm everything up, scrape away the extra, let it cool, and there’s your product. The waste gets pushed into the discard chute.” She showed me what she thought was a ridge caused by a pipe angled at forty-five degrees, then twisted the sculpture to show me how it had been created. “This plastic drips and hardens like an icicle, a plasticicle. Whoever gave you this either worked at the plastics factory or knew someone who did. It’s about time you came up with a clue.”

  “I’m no detective,” I said. “We’ve been throwing this to the dog for weeks.”

  “What would you do without me?”

  I must have lain long in the grass after Jenny left to take her mother’s pills home, maybe napped a little, for even the twilight had faded into night as dark as the dogs’ fur when I came to, the Indestructible still tight in my grip. I was happy for the clue but not looking forward to talking to Rick again, to testing my resolve when faced with another offer of whatever that was we had smoked earlier. Knowing it had to be done, I made my way back into the house but, instead of climbing the stairs, I veered into the kitchen and tried to tune something in on the television. The signal was weak due to the missing half of the antenna but I found the station from Minneapolis playing the ten o’clock news. A live feed of Svenson’s truck, now parked again in the Tweed’s parking lot. Svenson stood tall as the newscaster recounted the alterations he had made to his truck to mount the flag. Then the camera cut to Svenson, who hid his bandaged arm behind his back.