Sugar Run: A Novel Page 10

  “Donnie and Ross are hungry.” Kaleb broke Miranda’s gaze and lowered his arm.

  Miranda smiled. “Oh,” she said, “yeah, let’s go get some food.”

  She set Ross on the bed and sifted through her suitcase, searching for something she hadn’t already worn during the past three days.

  “How long are we staying here?” Kaleb followed her as she walked to the window. She hated to leave the room. Jodi managed to diffuse some of the tension but outside—alone with just the boys—she felt like an impostor, some shoddy caricature of a parent whose skills came from daytime television. The boys were uncontainable and she knew that everyone could see that she didn’t have the upper hand.

  “Come on Donnie, Ross, put your shoes on.”

  She pulled the curtains all the way open. The parking lot was almost empty. No white Mercedes. Lee only ever drove white cars. It was the first thing Miranda remembered noticing about him, that long white car with gold rims parked at the end of her father’s driveway.

  She’d met him when she was sixteen and her father had been in the midst of his training plans for her. He had homeschooled her all through her childhood and as she grew older his techniques had become more elaborate—oil painting lessons, violin, and of course, piano. He held on strong to some strange, dated image of his daughter’s future as an eligible southern lady. What exactly her adult life was supposed to hold in store for her was never very clear but he had used any and every tactic to cultivate her toward it, including enlisting the help of one of his dental patients, Lee Golden, who took one look at Miranda and agreed to give her lessons whenever he wasn’t away on tour. The piano lessons had not interested teenage Miranda half as much as Lee’s stories of LA and Paris. His every word and move seemed to her to carry with them a delicious foreignness and she was pregnant before six months had passed.

  Jodi pulled the Chevette into the Belmont Motel parking lot, looked over at Ricky in the seat beside her, and then kept driving toward the far end of the lot where Miranda, Kaleb, and Ross stood, staring up at a tall chain-link fence.

  “That’s a little boy up there,” Ricky said.

  At the top of the fence, behind a green Dumpster, Donnie clung, his hands gripping tight to the metal.

  Jodi opened the car door and climbed out. The trees all along the edge of the lot were neon green, their leaves wet and quivering in the slight breeze.

  “Sweetie, can you climb back down?” Miranda cried.

  “Ouch,” Donnie said. His fingers were turning white.

  “Miranda?” Jodi walked closer, eyeing the nearly ten-foot distance between Donnie’s dangling feet and the concrete below. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, God,” Miranda said. Her hands shook. She dropped her cigarette. “I let him out of my sight for one second.” She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a fresh cigarette. “I told Kaleb to watch him.”

  “Mom?” Donnie cried, and his chin trembled, the line of stitches looking monstrous there. “Maw-um?”

  “Can you reach your arms down?” Jodi called to him. “Like you did to get up there but backward.”

  She could not stop staring at the stitches on his tiny chin. That, she thought, would have been the moment to turn things around, take him to the hospital and straighten everything out, but no, she’d decided she wanted to try to be some kind of rugged hero and now she was implicated.

  She looked over at Ross’s tiny body and Kaleb’s worried face. It was all coming on so fast and at this pace the decisions seemed to have already been made. There was so much about life outside of prison that she had forgotten or maybe never really known.

  “We need to help that boy down,” Ricky said, and Jodi turned toward him as he moved past, squeezing in behind the Dumpster and reaching up to grasp Donnie’s legs.

  Donnie squirmed and pumped both arms high. “Iron Man and Captain America take on the Trash!”

  They drove east, Miranda navigating in the front seat, a map spread across her lap, and Ricky squished in the back with the boys.

  “Mom, there’s not enough seats,” Kaleb said for the tenth time.

  “Wait, wait, that was our turn,” Miranda yelled. “Yeah, turn around, we need 82 East.”

  “There’s only three seats.”

  Jodi slammed on the brakes and swung the car around, turning up the radio.

  We’re all about big, a woman’s voice trembled through the speakers. Big savings and big readings. We want you to save big with Miss Lia of the Magic Hand and her ninety-nine-cent psychic palm readings!

  They passed dirt roads with crumpled mailboxes, defunct gas stations, and vegetable stands with signs announcing tomatoes, cantaloupes, and peaches. When Miranda fell asleep, cigarette smoldering in her right hand, Jodi took the smoke and rested it between her own lips. She drove the same route they’d taken just two days before but it all looked different now, more hopeful. Rain washed and green, towns with names like Enigma, Alapaha, Axson, and Reaching Branch.

  “No, four hundred and thirty-six,” Ross mumbled.

  Miranda stirred and blinked awake, the impression from the doorframe pressed into her face.

  “Mom?” Kaleb said. “When are we gonna go back to Neenee’s?”

  Miranda rubbed her eyes.

  “I want a story,” Donnie said. “When Neenee drives us she tells stories.”

  “Fuck Neenee,” Miranda said.

  In the rearview mirror Jodi watched Kaleb’s lip tremble. “You should tell us a story,” he said to Ricky, who sat rigid beside him, one hand on each knee.

  “I don’t think I know any stories.” Ricky stared at the windshield, his black hair curling down over his left eye.

  “But you’ve got books and papers.” Kaleb pointed to the folder resting on the floorboard between Ricky’s feet.

  “I don’t know,” Ricky said, but Kaleb had already grabbed it and started pulling out bits of newspaper.

  “Atlanta,” he read. “All five members of the Rounder family of 1609 Daylily Drive passed away last night in their sleep. A natural gas leak and lack of vent-ee-lat-shun are to blame.”

  “What?” Miranda sat up taller in her seat.

  “Bright Beach, Georgia.” Kaleb gripped a new clipping. “The Hunt family from Turner, Georgia, were vay-cat-shun-ing in Bright Beach when a traffic axed-id-dent cost them their lives. The Hunts pulled to the side of Route 2 to consult a map when an eighteen-wheel semitruck carrying a shipment of oranges coll-ee-ded with the family car.”

  “What is that?” Miranda turned around in her seat and grabbed the folder, little pieces of paper sifting out.

  Jodi glanced back at Ricky. He looked away.

  “Mom!” Kaleb squealed.

  “Look at this.” Miranda lifted handfuls of papers out. “Whoa, look, it’s all clippings about dead families. Oh, this is so sad.”

  Jodi kept her eyes on the road.

  “Except this one. Look at this one.”

  She held up a ripped page with a photograph showing a giant pig laid out in clean straw and suckling at her tits, one orange-and-white fox kit, one brown-and-black puppy, and three pink piglets. The caption read 1984 Guinness Book of World Records: The world’s strangest family.

  “Those”—Ricky’s face rose up behind Miranda’s head, his eyes flat and distant—“are my personal things.”

  “Mom, Mom, Maw-awm.” Donnie vaulted his voice high over the others.

  Miranda turned so that Donnie could see the pig picture and in one quick motion Ricky lunged over the seat and grabbed the photo and then the whole folder. “I said, my personal things.” His voice boomed louder than Jodi had imagined possible.

  You ain’t here, Paula, you don’t see how he blows.

  Jodi gripped the steering wheel.

  “Mom?” Kaleb moaned.

  “Be quiet now,” Ricky said. “You’ll like this story better anyway.”

  He put the folder back down between his feet and opening his Bible he bent his face close and read, “The P
hilistines stood on a mountain on the one side, and Israel stood on a mountain on the other side: and there was a valley between them. And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span. And he had a helmet of brass upon his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail; and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of brass.”

  “What’s shickles-a-brass?” Donnie leaned past Kaleb to look at Ricky’s book.

  “Quiet,” Ricky said, moving his finger along the thin page. “And he had greaves of brass upon his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders. And the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam; and his spear’s head weighed six hundred shekels of iron and—”

  “What’s shickles-a-aaron?”

  They joined I-95 North at Brunswick and the Chevette’s engine strained as Jodi urged it up the entrance ramp. The highway shuddered in front of them, semi after semi, the whole flow of it, moving impossibly fast. She pressed the gas deeper, her heart slamming as she pushed in to merge, but the stream of traffic did not break and she was forced off the road, drifting to a stop on the side of the highway. The trucks buffeted by in booming flaps of wind.

  The story in the backseat had stopped.

  “I haven’t driven on the highway in a long time,” Jodi said, looking off at the frantic traffic.

  “Let me do it.” Miranda opened the passenger’s door and stepped out.

  She drove them up to I-26 and then I-77, through the Carolinas, past Columbia, and on toward Charlotte. They stopped for dinner at a Bojangles’ and then again for ice cream. At eight fifteen the sun set all orange red through a forest of tall pines, their thin branches outlined like claws against the bright sky. The boys fell asleep, all except Kaleb, who sat with his brothers’ heads in his lap and stared straight ahead, eyes wide and white in the dark night.

  In Statesville Jodi drove again and let Miranda rest. Miranda had wanted to find a motel where they could stay but Jodi said she’d drive on through the night, not wanting to mention her dwindling money and mandatory parole meeting.

  Even before they hit Virginia the mountains began, a soft rising at the edges of the sky. The car was all quiet, save for the ripple of sleep breathing. Up ahead the lights of the semitrucks climbed, as if ascending into the night sky, the road wreathing the ridges gradually.

  After Wytheville the highway narrowed and dipped into the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel. The squat block face of it was like some huge institutional building and then the tunnel itself was so suffocatingly narrow, with streaks of overhead light slashing across the windshield and those concrete walls mocking Jodi’s memories of Jaxton’s endless yellow halls.

  On the far side the view was nothing but ridgelines, the craggy silhouettes rising up against the night sky like the body of some dormant god. Jodi felt her breath go tight in her chest. This road went only one way, it seemed, in under the mountains until you were circled, the broad backs of the Appalachians blocking out everything. As much as she had desired to return here this place was itself a prison of sorts and she could feel herself dissolving into it. Coming home was like disappearing in a way, she thought, slipping back into the past. Until a week and a half ago she had thought she would not return here until death—a body shipped to a family that barely remembered it, a body to be laid back into the mountains to rest—but now here she was, not just a body but a jumble of wild thoughts and emotions, coming home. She glanced at Miranda in the seat beside her and Ricky’s sleeping face. She told herself this was different, this was new, but still she could feel the weight of those mountains, even unseen, the heaviness of all that familiarity.

  September 1988

  Paula pushes the Cutlass up to ninety, ninety-five, one hundred, and the air gusting in the window chills Jodi’s arms. The sun is strong but the day has changed in that special September kind of way; they went to sleep in summertime and woke this morning to a cut of cold breeze.

  welcome to virginia whirs by in a burst of bright sunlight. Jodi turns in her seat and squints back after it.

  “What you thinking?” Paula asks.

  Jodi watches the sign grow small. The land looks all the same on this side of the border, ditches of thistle and milkweed, mountains spotted with yellowing birch trees, huddles of wood houses, and a coal tipple there on the far bank.

  “You’re in a whole new state now,” Paula says, smiling.

  Jodi likes the smile on Paula’s face, the way she seems to take pride in each of Jodi’s new experiences. Already Jodi can see the two of them, years down the line, Paula’s hair gone gray and both of them talking and looking back on the speed and beauty of this day.

  The first palm tree comes just after the South Carolina sign, and Jodi makes Paula pull over in the McDonald’s parking lot. She climbs from the car, her legs wobbling. In southern Virginia the mountains had disappeared but it only looked like an absence and not something truly new. Jodi presses her hands against the scaly skin of the palm tree, listening to the wind in the reedy branches until Paula hollers and lays on the horn.

  They eat drive-through food and keep on moving, the burger papers drifting around between them and blowing into the backseat. Farther south the day warms and Jodi props her feet in the window, feeling the wind run up her legs and under her skirt.

  Randy Owen belts out “Song of the South” on the radio. There ain’t nobody looking back again.

  There are peach orchards in Georgia, advertised on giant orange-and-yellow signs. But Paula says they shouldn’t stop, wrong season. She says they can’t stop in Salamanca Springs for the snakeskin belts or palm-frond baskets. They’ve got to keep going because they’re headed to a place with luck in its name.

  “Bee-luck-see?” Jodi pronounces, tapping her feet against the air vents.

  Paula sucks on her cigarette. “X, it’s spelled with an x.”

  Jodi thinks she might climb in the backseat and sleep but Paula says she needs the company and something loosens up inside Jodi at the thought of Paula needing her there. She doesn’t really understand it—the giddy lifting in her body—and it seems a little fragile, one of those things best left unexamined. She is happier than she ever remembers being. Happy just to be here in the car with someone who wants her beside them. The kind of someone who wakes up in the morning and says let’s go to Mississippi and then puts her hand on the wheel and does it.

  “Here,” Paula says, “take these.” In her outstretched palm she holds two salmon-colored capsules.

  Jodi lets them lie on her tongue too long and the pills open up. Their bitter shock covers the inside of her lips. Paula stops for gas and Jodi goes to pee. When she gets back in the car someone has turned the volume up on the whole world. The windshield is a movie screen all lit from behind and she doesn’t ever want them to stop driving; the rhythm of the wheels matches the patterns in her brain and suddenly she knows that what her life has been lacking is motion. She looks over at Paula’s sharp face and the beauty of it hits her like a fist; she’s only known her for one week but already she sees that she won’t ever be able to let Paula go, already she has become the prism through which Jodi wants to experience everything. Before Paula, even the wildest decisions she made—like fucking the new chemistry teacher—felt utterly predictable and somehow without consequences. With Paula, though, each moment takes on a texture of delicious unfamiliar risk. With Paula each moment itself feels roomier, as if the two of them are moving about together inside each second, generating possibilities.

  They drive into a sunset that lasts for over an hour. Smears of pink and gobs of red turning down to purple. When the dark stumbles in, the mile markers tick by, perfectly spaced in the tunnel of headlights, pulling the future toward her.

  They stop finally, in a parking lot, under a shining tower of lights that spells out bayou queen. The world is still moving at eighty miles an hour, even here outside. Jodi breathes in the scent of parked cars, old oil and gasoline. It is 3:30 a.m. and black dar
k. She stretches and walks toward the lights but Paula grabs her hand and pulls her back the opposite way.

  “Hey, wait,” she says. “I want to see your first-time ocean face.”

  Paula stays at the poker tables through the rest of the night and in the morning they keep driving. They drive and talk and they do not stop until the gas gauge hits the orange marker.

  “You know that moment,” Paula says, “when it really, really sinks in and it’s so much more than just the planetary models and all that—that moment when you feel it, how fucking tiny we all are in comparison to the universe, and your stomach drops right out and so do your lungs.”

  Jodi does not want to take her eyes off Paula. She is the most capable and crazy person she has ever seen. She drives without watching the road at all. She is demonstrating something, turned sideways in her seat, her arms stretched to show the breadth of a bear or the length of a snake.

  In the middle of the night outside of Omaha Jodi looks at Paula and realizes that she will never know the difference between the things that Paula has told her about herself and the things she has dreamt about her, in snatches, in the backseat, at half-lit rest stops and gas stations: how at fourteen she followed a man she saw in Tupelo, Mississippi, a man who won poker games with his eyes only half-open. She shadowed this man for two years until he broke down and taught her, trained her to count cards out on his ranch in Nevada. When they weren’t playing poker he took her up in his prop plane, flew her over the desert, and pointed out the silent, hooded mountains that would one day be stuffed full of nuclear waste.

  A dry grass wind hits the side of the Cutlass with an ancient rhythm and when Jodi opens her eyes she cannot tell if the sun is setting or rising.

  In Dallas she eats a steak so thick it swallows up her whole knife. Out the window, buildings stretch into the smog and she has to keep reminding herself that she is not just watching this on TV.

  They drive and talk and Paula’s father’s name etches its way into their conversations like a poison. She tells how Dylan beat them, how she promised Ricky she’d be back to take him away. Dylan. It’s a strangely pretty name, Jodi thinks. Dylan. She watches Paula’s face and wonders how you can possibly protect someone from their own past.