Northern Lights

by Raymond Strom

  “How did people react to your parade today?”

  “I’m not gonna lie,” Svenson said. “We saw a lot of hate on the streets. A couple of my boys got in fights. Others yelled at us as we passed.”

  “Why would you say this needed to be done?” the newscaster asked. “What is it you are fighting for?”

  “I like to think of myself as a good ole boy,” he said. “We need to protect that. It’s a part of our heritage, of all of our heritage, and we don’t want to lose it to political correctness. We’re all good ole boys and there’s no problem with that.”

  His name appeared on the screen. Sven Svenson: high school senior, good ole boy. He smiled at the camera.

  Something about this final presentation of Svenson swept me into a foul mood. I stood up and slapped the television, then paced back and forth in the kitchen for a while. Upstairs I found J’s room silent so I knocked on the doorjamb. When I got no answer, I pulled the sheet aside to find Mary alone, asleep on the bed, the thin blanket atop her disheveled. Confused, I stepped back into the hall but found the bathroom empty. Had J left without me noticing? Walked past the kitchen without looking to see who was watching the television? I stuck my head back into Rick’s room.

  “I should let you . . .” he said, interrupted by his hyperventilation, “suck it before I . . . tell you this . . . but it’s all gone.”

  Maybe Rick wasn’t so bad after all. I sat down. He reached into the shadows around his ankles and found a cigarette pack, took out two and gave me one. Rick continued to breathe deeply, so much so that I had to ask him if he was okay.

  He nodded and held up the pipe he had made from the television antenna. “It’s a good thing . . . I ran out because . . . I don’t need . . . any more of this . . . shit right now . . . that’s for sure.”

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, picking up a long plastic sculpture from the floor and holding it out to him.

  “I . . . made . . . it,” he said. “At . . . work.”

  “You worked at the plastics factory?”

  “Used . . . to,” he said. Eyes wide, he leaned forward with a tight grip on the arms of the chair, then his breath began to slow and he sank back into his seat. When he next spoke, his description of the process that led to the creation of the Indestructible was much more succinct than Jenny’s: “That’s what leaks out of the anus of the fabricator.”

  The guy at the plastics factory had said that all the workers on her shift had been drug addicts, a description that could be applied to Rick, so I told him my mother’s name and I saw him smile for the first time.

  “Good woman, your mother,” he said.

  Jorgenson was the name he told me. My mother had left town with a man named Frank Jorgenson. Gone to South Haven, Michigan, Frank’s hometown.

  “She was a kind person, your mother,” he said again, “no matter what everybody else says. You know, I’ll bet the baby’s been born by now.”

  I was beginning to think Rick might be an all right guy, but I decided I should leave before the drugs wore off and he tried to talk me into going down on him again. I set the Nintendo on the floor.

  “Did you see J leave?”

  “No,” Rick said. “He’s gone? Now that you mention it, it’s been quiet for a while.”

  “Can you make sure he gets this bag? I’m going to set it on the floor in his room. Will you tell him I put it there? I’ll be back tomorrow after work to talk to him about it.”

  I was so excited about what Rick had told me that I got all the way home before I understood how useless the information was. A name and a town—what was I supposed to do, go there and find her? That hadn’t worked too well here. What if she had moved on from that town already? My hopes came crashing down as quickly as they had skyrocketed. A heaviness came over me so I lay down and minutes later, by some miracle, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  The next day I made my way to J’s house after my morning shift at the Aurora to find Rick sitting in one of his chairs in his boxer shorts, as if he hadn’t moved since the last time I had seen him. He held a lightbulb in one hand and a lighter in the other, a straw hung from his mouth. The room was quiet except for birdsong coming through the window.

  “Hey Rick,” I said from the doorway to no answer. I stepped in. “Hey Rick,” I said again, grabbed his shoulder and shook him.

  He jumped. The lighter fell to the floor and the lightbulb exploded in his hand. He held up the broken pieces in his bloody palm. From the blood-stained rags discarded among the plastic figurines on the floor and a growing pile of broken glass along the wall, I assumed he was used to this sort of situation, but he sat there, stunned, staring at the thick flow of blood now running down his arm, dripping off his elbow.

  Taking a bandanna from the small table between the chairs I tied a quick tourniquet around his wrist and blotted at the wound with the loose ends.

  “I crushed it,” he said in a calm whisper. “With my bare hand.”

  “You might need stitches, man,” I said. “Or at least a bandage. Keep it elevated, above your heart.”

  He got up, tossing from his lap the broken bits of bulb, and left the room. I kicked a couple large shards over to the wall and took a seat in the other chair. Having slept, some of my good sense had returned, and though I was grateful that he had shared with me what he knew about my mother, I knew he wasn’t a person with whose bodily fluids I wanted direct contact. A minute later Rick was back with a streamer of toilet paper wrapped around his hand, blood streaked across his chest, carrying a new lightbulb, a screwdriver, and a salt shaker. The straw still hung from his mouth.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “I didn’t even feel it,” he said, turning over in his hands what was possibly the last lightbulb in the house.

  “Have you seen J?”

  “Yeah, I saw him.”

  Rick held the lightbulb by the metal base, letting the glass end hang toward the floor. Gripping the screwdriver by the shank, he smacked the bottom contact with the handle until the coil and filament came loose inside.

  “He was pissing and moaning in his room this morning, talking to himself,” he continued. “I asked him what the fuck he was going on about and he said he had to go make up with Mary.”

  Rick shook the bulb until the filament and coil fell out, then uncapped the salt shaker and poured in half its contents. Thumb over the hole, he shook the bulb until the salt removed the thin layer of white powder that lined the inside, then reached over and dumped it all out the window.

  “He sold me this shit and then he left,” Rick said. “Said he’d be back with the car.” He opened his hand to reveal one of J’s folded envelopes. From that he took a pinch of powder and dropped it into the lightbulb. He offered it to me but I refused.

  Rick brought his flame to the glass. The powder melted and he rotated the bulb to stretch the puddle into a long streak. Another few passes of the flame turned the liquid into gas and the chamber filled with a stringy white smoke that braided and twisted around itself. He dipped the straw into the hole and inhaled. At the peak of his breath he leaned back in his chair and held it in. He exhaled and his arms fell into his lap, the hot glass coming to rest on a pink hairless spot above his knee. His leg kicked, knocking the bulb from his hand to shatter on the floor, but Rick didn’t notice—his eyes out the window at something far away.

  “J’s gonna suffer some shit if he keeps cutting with vitamins,” Rick said when he came back around. He picked up a long shard of the lightbulb and pointed at two spots where the powder had burnt black and crusty instead of melting into the air. “Some people are pissed off. I’m one of them but not the only one.”

  “It’s not his fault,” I said. “He sells what he gets.”

  “This isn’t the same shit you get. I can see it in your eyes.”

  He picked up the screwdriver, held it in his fist, then left to find another lightbulb. I went to wait outside, more t
o put a safe distance between me and the screwdriver in Rick’s hand than anything else, and found J pulling up in the car as the door closed behind me. He got out and went to the dogs, slapping at Sissy’s back with the force she liked, but didn’t unchain her. Scratched under Lucy’s chin, then made his way back to the car, waving at me to come along, leaving Lucy standing at attention next to his sister.

  “Bitch won’t let me take the dogs in the car anymore,” J said as we pulled out onto Ash. “Said I’ll never drive again if she finds one more hair.”

  Black T-shirts had been pulled over the backrests of the front seats and the floor was free of garbage. The floor mats had been straightened with care. In the backseat, the trails from the vacuum cleaner could still be seen in the faux plush.

  “So this is how it’s going to be then?” I asked. “You’re the one who wants it more now?”

  J didn’t answer; instead he flicked on the radio, spun the knob through the stations back and forth, then, finding static and talk shows, gave up with a weak sigh. He turned the radio off and put his hand back on the steering wheel. He hadn’t said, but we were heading to Svenson’s brother’s place again—outside my window the familiar sod farms, the loping power line, the occasional Pump ’N Munch.

  “How’s the Nintendo?” I asked when I remembered, hoping it would lighten his mood.

  “What Nintendo?”

  “You were busy with Mary when I first got to your place yesterday and when I came back inside later on you were gone so I left it on the floor in your bedroom and asked Rick to make sure you got it.”

  “You don’t leave stuff with Rick,” he said. “He’ll sell anything. Where do you think all the doors went? If anything goes missing around my place you can be sure that Rick took it.”

  I apologized.

  “You know he went in there and looked at my naked girlfriend too.”

  He shook his head in a way that made me think I had disappointed him as he pulled off the highway. A couple blocks later he parked and asked me for money. I gave him two fifties, then I lit my last cigarette and threw the empty pack out the window. I watched J walk away and turn the corner, leaving me alone with my smoke.

  When a truck with a Confederate flag mounted in the back appeared at the end of the road, I locked the doors and rolled up the windows, crouched as far under the dash as I could. It was Svenson, of course, and he stared me down as he passed, bandaged arm out the window, pointing, as he slowed his truck to a near stop before revving his engine and spinning his tires. I turned and watched him go, staring in that direction long after his truck dropped out of sight, until a knocking on the window brought me back. J, returning with the drugs.

  J’s mood hadn’t broken and he flew into a rage when he saw that, since the car was clean, there were no longer any old take-out spoons on the floor, ready to use. We drove to a Pump ’N Munch because J couldn’t wait to get home for us to fix up and I was surprised to see that even the extra-large dose J mixed up in a bottle cap didn’t bring a smile to his face. Although I hadn’t known him for long, it wasn’t like J to hold on like this and it worried me.

  When we returned to J’s house Lucifer was gone, and Sisyphus was lying in the grass at the end of her chain. J made his way over to the dog with a treat and I hung back by the door. I heard a sound that I assumed to be Sissy, but when I looked I saw J dropping to his knees, the beef jerky falling to the ground. J yelped like a dog again and I knew there was trouble. I ran to them to see that Sissy lay in a pool of her own blood, a jagged gash in her neck where she had bled out. I kneeled by the dog and put my hand on the wound but I felt no pulse, no heaving of breath in her body. Seeing that nothing could be done, I ran a couple long strokes down her back, bloodying my hand, then I stood and followed Sissy’s chain to the willow tree. I had seen death before but not murder, and the bloody flap in Sissy’s neck triggered in me feelings I didn’t know I had. Even the drugs couldn’t stop them. The world spun around me. I put my hand out to the trunk of the willow and puked.

  “He used a knife or maybe a screwdriver,” J guessed, now able to talk.

  Between heaves, I told J that Rick had a screwdriver in his hand the last time I had talked to him, that he had been angry about the vitamins.

  “Not so strange that he’s nowhere to be seen now.”

  J rounded the house, then returned a moment later with a shovel in each hand, spearing one into the ground before going to work with the other. I wiped my mouth and hands on my shirt, then took the other shovel to join J in his labor. In silence we dug the hole, taking turns with the earth in an even rhythm of metal on dirt and stone.

  When the hole was deep enough, J threw his shovel to the ground, then stripped off his flannel and threw it in the grass. His T-shirt was soaked through with sweat. Long purple and brown bruises ran up the insides of his arms. Clearly, he was using much more than I was. He unchained Sissy from her collar and rolled her into the hole. Picked up his shovel and stood at the head of the grave.

  “This is all Mary’s fault,” J said, his attempt at a eulogy. “If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have had to leave these two behind with that dog-killing crackhead.”

  “You really think Rick did this?”

  J didn’t answer, rather, he sunk his blade in the dirt and dropped the first shovelful over Sisyphus, then I joined him in the effort until her grave was a dirt mound in the middle of the front lawn. That done, we left the shovels sticking out of the ground and went inside to split and measure. After he gave me my share J worked on his knees over a mirror on the floor, hands shaking as he scooped the mixture of drugs and vitamins onto the little squares of paper, and I watched from the chair, an ignored notebook sitting in my lap. A single tear fell onto one pile, so he swept it into a spoon and prepared it as his next dose. This time I didn’t get any—only when he pulled the needle out of his arm did he look my way.

  “You don’t want to be here when Rick gets back,” he said. “I’m gonna fucking lose it.”

  * * *

  I didn’t want to be alone so I set out toward Jenny’s, but halfway there I noticed a familiar truck trailing me so I veered off course. It was Svenson, and I knew he was after me when I made four rights around the same block and he was still there. I zigzagged through the streets back toward the Arlington and he fell off my trail a couple times but was quick to pick it up again, the last time screeching to a stop as I crossed Center. He lay on his horn as I stood there face-to-face with the grille of his truck, and then I ran down Cypress as fast as I could. Svenson floored it, took two rights without stopping, then he was coming down North First as I crossed. Behind me, he swung left and paced me at the speed I was running.

  “Look at that pretty hair,” he called.

  I crossed another street onto a fenced-off block that was all grass, a spare field that belonged to the middle school. Halfway down the block I cut to the fence, swung myself over, and ran to the center of the field. Dropping his speed to a crawl, Svenson drove around the block, making lefts, Confederate flag billowing. Each time he made a left I turned with him, watching, waiting for him to stop his truck and get out, climb the fence so I could turn and run the opposite way. He circled the block once. Twice. He stopped at the corner, leaned out the window to let me know he was watching, then got moving again. Three times around the block. Four. Just when I thought it might go on forever, he jumped his truck up over the curb and crashed through the fence, barreling straight toward me.

  Stunned, I did not run. Svenson fishtailed to a stop, tearing up the grass with his back wheels, then jumped from the cab. He didn’t say anything, merely floated toward me with his fists before him, swung, and then I was on the ground. He dropped to his knees beside me and opened his hand. In his palm was a folding knife with an ivory handle. Sweat popped out on my forehead as I tried to struggle away from him but he held me down with one hand. When I gave up the fight, he swung a leg over me, straddling my chest with his knees on my shoulders.

  “
Are you nervous?” he asked, running his fingers through my hair almost lovingly with his left hand, the loose threads from the bandage tickling my neck. He sat there a moment with his hand on my head, and I thought he might lean forward and kiss me. He was beginning to remind me of Russell.

  “I tried to go easy on his dogs,” he said, opening the knife with a click. “But one got greedy and ate both steaks.”

  He took a thick lock of my hair and sawed at it with the knife until it came free. The blade wasn’t sharp, but he made up for the dullness by pulling and tearing what wouldn’t be cut. When the last strand snapped he put the point of the knife to my neck, my fear got the best of me and a patch of wet warmth spread in my pants.

  “I had to use this on the other one,” he said, sticking the point into the skin of my neck not quite hard enough to puncture. “It was easy and it was quick.”

  He stood up and snapped the knife shut.

  “Your friend won’t be so lucky,” he said and stomped the heel of his boot down on my forehead. “If you see him before I do, tell him I did this to the dogs for the vitamins. My brother may have gone easy on him, but I’m in charge now.”

  He climbed up into his truck and slammed the door, my clump of hair still in his hand, then he drove a couple of circles around me, tearing rounded grooves into the grass with his wheels, before he left the way he came.