“Burgundy?” he said. Jenny took a big swallow and so did I, then we passed it back to Svenson, who capped it and set it in Jenny’s lap without drinking.
“Y’all been up to the old jumping barn at the Andersen place?”
We both shook our heads and Svenson turned toward the road. The day was so hot we left the windows down, the wind a cyclone through the cab. Svenson reached out and ran his hand over Jenny’s forehead, holding her hair in place.
“You’ve grown up, Jennifer Freya,” Svenson said.
“It’s too bad you haven’t,” she said, jerking toward my side of the truck.
“Don’t say that, Jen. We’re just getting started.”
He took a left on a dirt road and then we reached that part of rural Minnesota where everything looks the same. Tree-lined roads dividing wide, flat fields. The occasional lake in the distance. The same single telephone line rising and falling. Only the numbers on the road signs varied but Svenson knew where we were going, bringing us onto a road marked as a dead end, two ruts with long grass sprouting from the middle. The meandering path through the woods led to an old barn that was once red, flanked by tractors, long unused, rusty, tangled in overgrowth. Three other pickup trucks were parked outside. My heartbeat rose into my ears. I took the jug from Jenny’s lap and took another big drink.
Inside, standing near a mountain of loose hay, were three guys I recognized from town: a set of twins who had been the other two Klansmen at the field party that night, John and Mike, and another boy I knew until then only by face, also named Mike. They were very cordial. They offered me a tallboy and asked me where I was from, but my answers were steamrolled by one of the twins, who had once been caught shoplifting at Tweed’s Discount.
“A fucking fifty-cent can of soda,” he said, “and that asshole called the sheriff. I had to do twelve hours of community service for that. Four cents an hour that was. I’m glad that place went out of business.”
“Did you do your service at the government center?” Mike the non-twin asked. “I vacuumed all the offices out there and once my service leader left me alone I cleaned out the pocket change from every desk I came across. Bought myself a nice bag of weed with that.”
Jenny and Svenson were off a ways in the shadows of the barn talking in whispers. He put his hand on her shoulder and she leaned into him so he could whisper in her ear. She laughed then and lay her hand on his chest. Svenson pointed up toward the loft and a long ladder that led up there and after Jenny nodded and giggled they made their way together. My mind was racing—were they going to go up there together while the rest of us were still here? I noticed I was staring so I turned back to the others, where one of the twins asked non-twin Mike what he had done to earn community service and he told them it was possession.
“Of high concentrations of methamphetamine,” he said, proud that the drugs he was caught with were pure. “None of that vitamin shit that was going around for a while.”
“It’s been super clean since Russell took over.”
They talked awhile about the different dealers in town but they didn’t mention Svenson, which I thought was odd. His friends didn’t know that he and his brother were the ones supplying these people. The non-twin had known J, but there had been others, many others, and they all cut the quality down with fillers before they sold it. Baby laxative, ephedrine, B vitamins. Everyone but Russell, who was selling pills so strong that people around town were complaining of hallucinations.
“I thought he was mixing acid into it or something,” John said. “But it turns out it’s supposed to do that. One of the benefits of buying from someone who doesn’t use what he sells.”
Twin Mike shook his empty beer can and then kicked the cooler under me.
“Shane?” he said. “Another?”
I shook my can but it was still full. “No thanks.”
“Will you grab me one?” he asked, shaking his own can again. “You’re sitting on the cooler.”
I stood to get out of the way when a screaming came from where Jenny and Svenson had gone. The four of us turned to see Jenny jump out of the loft with a running start, her legs pedaling like she was riding a bike, then she fell into the hay, dust and grain mushrooming into the air. A moment later Svenson stepped to the edge and fell backwards, no doubt an attempt to impress Jenny. His dust cloud poofed into the air, then he pawed his way toward Jenny as they descended the stack but she pushed him away, then they were back on the ground with us again, dusting themselves off.
“You got your kiss,” Jenny said, “now take us back to town. Shane is sick of hanging out with these fucking losers.”
* * *
Over the next few weeks, thoughts of the dogs crept up on me, left me rooted in place. I was as distracted and distant while sober as I had been on drugs before. I’d be right in the middle of showering or making a cheeseburger and suddenly I’d find that long stretches of time had passed, that the water had run cold or that my burger was burnt to charcoal. Like in my dreams, I was struck immobile, but from internal distraction rather than muscular failure. In my dreams I wanted to move, but in real life I’d forget that it was even a possibility. Most of July passed in this way. I found myself sleeping more than ever, twelve sometimes fourteen hours a night while during that same time I’m unsure whether Jenny slept at all. Even when I was awake I wasn’t all there, sleepwalking back and forth to the Aurora, cooking on autopilot, forgetful. I more than once had to run back to work in the middle of the night to be sure I had locked the doors.
Jenny showed up at my apartment at odd hours, sometimes letting herself in with her spare key in the middle of the night. More than once I woke up to find her sitting on the edge of my bed, chopping powder on any hard surface she could find. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to get high since the day Svenson killed Sissy and Lucy—I had even given Jenny my stash—but that didn’t stop her from offering me some every time she brought it out. She was using more than I was bringing her from my meetings with Russell. I should’ve realized that Svenson was probably stalking her, plying her with a free sniff here and quarter gram there, but I was lost in my own fog most of the time so I didn’t notice.
Day or night, Jenny would talk and talk and I would tune in from time to time, catching snippets. Often I found myself losing track of what she was saying and staring out the window at the fluffy white clouds that floated over Holm. Although she moved from topic to topic often without transition, one thing that came up again and again was her mother. She very much wanted her mother to be well, but thought for some reason that only the sheriff could fix the problem. Everything she did was an attempt to get the sheriff’s attention: smoking weed on the street, painting graffiti, shoplifting. One day, fading back in from my ongoing depression, I asked her why it was so important that the sheriff and her mother get back together.
“I can’t do this all by myself,” Jenny said. “Not if I want to go to college or leave town or even get a job. I need someone to take care of her. If I could just get him to my house, to see how she’s been since he left.”
Then I gave her a plan that would cause everything to come crashing down.
“He’s looking for a drug dealer,” I said. “Why don’t you turn in Svenson? Tell the sheriff to come over so you can tell him who gave you the weed that day. Call him from your house and tell him you have some information you want to share in person.”
“Now that’s interesting,” she said, and this opened another flood of words under which I was soon lost. After a time I noticed she had gone quiet and looked up to find she was expecting an answer from me.
“What?”
“The problem with that is we’ve been buying from Russell,” Jenny said after a thoughtful silence. “You still like him, don’t you? We could turn him in and he’d probably give up Svenson.”
“What?” I asked again, rubbing my eyes with my fists.
“Russell,” she said. “Do you still like him?”
In spite of th
e way he treated me, how he had abandoned me, I did have feelings for Russell but I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to tell anyone so I kept quiet, but Jenny knew what my silence meant.
“If only J were still around,” she said. “I’d’ve turned on him in a heartbeat.”
* * *
I was working the dinner shift a few nights later when the waitress said a guest was asking after me, so I walked out into the dining room to find the sheriff sitting before a plate of pork chops.
“How goes the search for your mother?”
“We found her,” I said.
“That’s great,” he said. “You were pretty torn up about it that day.” He picked up his knife and cut into his meat, took a bite.
“Is that all you wanted to ask me?”
“You ever think your buddy Jenny is an overachiever?” the sheriff asked.
“You could say that,” I said, thinking of all the HOPE pieces that must have been traveling the country on the sides of trains. “Definitely, I’d say.”
“She’s going to get herself in trouble,” he said. “Sven Svenson is a bad dude.”
“She finally told you he was our drug dealer?”
“We got off the phone an hour ago,” he said, then after a pause, “Jenny and I go way back.”
“You mentioned that,” I said.
“She was the cutest little girl,” he said, forking a slice of pork and using it to scoop up some mashed potatoes. “Big thick cola-bottle lenses in her glasses, eyes ten times the size when you looked at her straight on. The first time I met her was going on eight years ago, when I got called to the Pump ’N Munch about a shoplifter. Of course, it was her. She was eight years old and, like I said, cute as a button, so I talked the manager into not pressing charges and took her home.”
He took a bite and swallowed, then sipped his water.
“Great pork chops, by the way,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“So I took her home and met her mother, Kristina. We talked for a long time and I have to admit I fell in love with her, her mother I mean, not Jenny, before I left their house that day. I was done for, slain. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops but Kristina wanted to be more cautious. We met up when Jenny wasn’t around, went on lunch dates but only when Jenny was at school. Her daughter was her number one priority and rightfully so, I thought, so I did what I could to help out. Mainly I talked local business owners out of pressing charges when Jenny got caught stealing, which happened a lot. This worked for a while, but I had no leverage when the principal of her elementary school called to tell me that she had seen Jenny get out of a car that she herself had driven to school that day. Clearly, she was having problems.”
The bell dinged in the kitchen, the waitress letting me know I had an order. I left the sheriff with his dinner and after I checked the ticket I threw two hamburgers on the char-broiler and two buns to toast on the grill, then portioned out two orders of fries and dropped them in the deep fryer before I hustled back to the sheriff’s table.
“She stole a car?” I asked. “She’s just a kid and steals a car to get to school?”
“It was her mom’s car,” he said. “No big deal really. She was an excellent driver, even at ten. She still is, actually.”
Jenny was right. He was delusional with love for Kristina.
“The principal pressed charges,” he said, stopping for a bite. “Reckless endangerment. So I had to take her to the station but I made it into something good instead of punishing little Jennifer. We got them into a new house and Jenny got some psychological testing. Kristina got a small loan to open her store and these two nearly had it turned around. By the end, it was almost a good thing that it happened the way it did.”
I got up and went to the kitchen. Flipped the burgers and rotated the buns, pulled the basket of fries from the fryer and shook away the extra oil. On my way back out to the dining room I noticed that my apron was covered in grease and tomato sauce so I took it off and tossed it on the cutting board near the broiler.
“And so for a time I was a silent partner in Jenny’s life,” he said when I sat back down. “We were together for a while, though she still never introduced me to Jenny as anything beyond the sheriff. Her store, Kristina’s Pet World, was making money. The psychologists told us that Jenny was a kleptomaniac because she wasn’t stimulated enough in school, she was too smart for her class and they had her skip sixth grade.”
“She is very smart,” I said.
“It all went well for a while but Kristina’s mood changed when Walmart came to town, and then when her store closed things got tense,” he said. “I couldn’t make her happy anymore.”
He took the last bit of pork, then pushed his plate away from him.
“But no matter my history with Kristina, I still care about Jenny and I want to see her succeed in life. I don’t want her to get caught up with drugs and these idiots. I was only trying to scare her when I busted you guys that day. In any case, I’ve seen her driving her mom’s car a few times, out by Svenson’s place, and now that she’s called me I know what she’s up to.”
The bell dinged again as if to punctuate my thought. Then a voice from the kitchen:
“Shane?”
“You need to arrest her if she’s breaking the law,” I said. “Even if that means you have to talk to her mother.”
“I don’t think that’s the answer,” he said. “She needs to get her shit together and she doesn’t want an arrest record when she finally does.”
“That sounds both generous and dangerous to me.”
“Look, I can’t watch her every move. You’re a good friend. Be with her. Can I trust you to keep an eye on her? Help me out a little?”
“Shane?” the waitress called. “I see flames! Something’s on fire!”
Before I could agree to the sheriff’s request, I ran to the kitchen to find that my apron had caught fire so I pulled it onto the floor and stomped it out before the flames spread to the food. The new order called for a steak and two pork chops so I threw those on the grill before I put together the two burgers and fries from earlier. When I got back out to the dining room the sheriff was gone.
* * *
Jenny let herself into my room with my spare key before sunrise.
“I got you something,” she said, then dug an envelope that had been folded in half out of the small purse she carried. “Two somethings,” she said. “Round trip.”
I opened the top flap to find bus tickets, the same company I had ridden with to come to Holm. South Haven, Michigan, listed in the destination box, transfer in Chicago. She had swung by the Pump ’N Munch where the bus stopped and bought them from the cashier. My eyes filled. In a week, I’d be meeting my mother again.
“I got you a return trip two days later, just in case,” she said. “If she’s batshit crazy, you’ll want to get out of there as soon as you can—if she isn’t, you can always change your ticket.”
I blinked back the tears, climbed out of bed, and gave Jenny a hug that she wasn’t expecting, pinning her arms down at the shoulders so she couldn’t quite hug back.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “I helped you get your mother back, now you have to help me get mine.”
“How do you plan to do that?” I asked.
She told me then how her call to the sheriff had gone. When she told him that she had some information, he had replied, “Everyone knows that Svenson is selling drugs, but no one has any proof. Have you bought anything from him? Could you set up a sale?” Of course, she had to say no to the first question, but she took the second as a call to action.
Eleven
I didn’t see Jenny that weekend or for most of the next week. She didn’t answer the phone when I called—neither did Kristina but that didn’t surprise me—and no one answered the door when I stopped by. I thought I might not see her again before my trip to Michigan but then she called me at work on Wednesday.
“You need to come over here tonight
,” she said. Her voice was tight and forced in the way it got when she hadn’t slept for a few days.
I got to her place around midnight and entered through the open garage door like she had asked. I climbed the carpeted stairs and turned a quick left to find her sitting on the edge of her bed, very high, inspecting a small plastic box that she held in her hands.
“Jenny,” I whispered, startling her out of her trance.
She jumped up, slipped the object she held into a small purse that hung from her shoulder on a thin strap, then led me through her house in the dark, stopping me in the crease of shadow cast by the living room wall, and stepped into the light.
“Mom,” she said. “It’s drafty in here. Let me close these curtains.”
No response. It sounded like The Odd Couple was playing on the television but I couldn’t be sure. Jenny came back and pushed me toward the door I had come in, grabbed a set of keys from the hook on our way out.
This is when the sheriff wanted me to step in and stop her but it all moved so quickly that I had no control. Before I knew it, we were on the highway heading south. The road was empty. A sliver of moon hung in the sky. The clock on the dash read 12:34.
“When you told me to come over I wasn’t expecting that we’d be stealing your mom’s car,” I said. “But this is nice.”
“It is nice,” Jenny said. She rolled her window down and her hair blew back behind her, the floral scent of her perfume trailing through the car.
We took a few turns, back roads off of back roads, to where houses became compounds camouflaged and otherwise hidden from sight. Jenny slowed to scan the brush on my side of the car, tall trees with long grasses and ferns growing below. She turned onto what I didn’t think was a road, two wheel ruts running straight into the woods, like the path to Andersen’s jumping barn. The going was bumpy but the trees had been trimmed back into a tunnel that opened onto a wide grass field with a house at the center. Jenny parked her mother’s car among a number of other cars and trucks angled on the open lawn without any order. A single flood lamp on a tall pole shed orange light over the scene, casting long, eerie shadows from the vehicles and illuminating the face of a huge barn on the edge of the property. Parked beneath the light was Svenson’s pickup—so this was where Jenny had been driving when the sheriff saw her on the road.
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