Sugar Run: A Novel Page 5

  Jodi blinks and tries to focus. Something is happening and she doesn’t understand. The energy in the room has shifted and she tries to parse out what has just gone on but the vodka is heavy in her head.

  The suit says something that Jodi can’t hear and sets an orange stack of chips on the table. Paula tightens her eyes. “Raise,” she says.

  The suit nods and a tickle of a smile crosses his lips. He reaches for his chips. It’s just the two of them left in the game now.

  Jimmy has gotten up from the Triple Rose machine and he is pacing between Jodi and the poker table.

  “All in,” Paula says.

  The suit moves. He bucks across the table toward Paula and a slurry of words spills from his mouth. “. . . fucking bitch.”

  Paula doesn’t flinch, the air smooth around her like a shield. The room is a sweating, beating organ. It constricts in low, instinctual rhythms: voices from the TV and the music of the slot machines.

  Paula stands.

  All eyes on her.

  Jodi leans forward but Jimmy is blocking her view. She pushes up off her stool but she is too drunk. She sits back down and wills Jimmy away, wills them all away, everything but the clean strength of Paula. She brings her cigarette to her lips. From the speakers overhead a song fogs out: Our land, our land is far through the heart of this snow. Jodi closes her eyes and focuses on the sad lilt of Lee Golden’s voice on that radio—far through the heart of this snow. She takes another drag and in her mind’s eye she sees Paula reach into her jacket and retrieve a silver pistol. She pictures Paula raising it high above her head.

  A shot roars out and then a white rain of plaster filters down over the table.

  Paula brings the pistol level with the suit’s forehead and then, smiling, she pulls back and smashes it into his face. The suit lets out a long wet noise as bright blood runs out his nostrils and into his mouth, blooming in great dark spots all down his white shirt.

  Jodi’s pulse thrums and she opens her eyes. She blinks and the room tips a little, readjusts: that song is still playing, Lee Golden’s lullaby fuzzing out through the speakers, but there is no gun, no blood, no hole in the plaster above. No Paula.

  Her stomach buckles. She looks at Jimmy, slouched back into his cockpit chair, and panic shatters open inside her. Focus. Did she dream her? The bartender is there behind the bar and the men are standing around the table, the dealer, the suit, the trucker, and the rest. Focus. She’s been doing this too much lately, ever since Effie’s death, letting her mind run into wild dreamscape universes. Focus. She pivots on her stool, turns toward the back of the room, and there, shadow-cast under the red exit: a black-haired figure.

  Jodi jerks. She feels the sweaty pressure of her own fingers pushing her body up, her blood suddenly buoyant, and though it is too fast to know, she does know. Everything else smudges out as she focuses and she sees herself choosing. She sees her own legs unfold, her body turn and release.

  Our land, the radio croons, our land is far through the heart.

  She tumbles into the hallway, past the brass elevators and on toward an exit door so heavy she has to slam her hip to open it. The sunlight scrapes her eyes and she stands there, breath ragged and blood still hurtling, until the black dots diminish and she can see: Paula, halfway across the asphalt lot, head turned and eyes on Jodi as a hot wind flaps around her, filling her shirt and lifting it like a billowing sheet.

  July 2007

  Jodi woke alone, the yellow heat of the morning floating around her.

  “Alfredia needs to see you,” a voice called from outside the door. “She says, are you gonna stay another night?”

  Jodi was naked and the air held a faint tang of sex. Below her the sheets were scrambled, the top one drooping onto the floor and the bottom untucked at the corner to expose the dimples of the mattress.

  Day two, already it was day number two. Jodi’s head would not lift from the pillow. She tested other parts. Her legs stretched fine and her arm rose, disrupting the falling pattern of dust motes and sending them gusting off away from the window. But her head stayed there on the coarse pillow. The digital clock blinked: 11:32, 11:32, 11:33. No sounds came from the room next door.

  Jodi managed, without moving her head, to find a cigarette on the nightstand. The wheels of the maid’s cart squealed outside the window, and her muffled radio called out, On this, the Day of Our Lord, July 25, 2007 . . .

  A car drove fast through the parking lot, sending a slice of reflected light against the floral wall, and Jodi remembered the spasm of electricity every night in lockup. They’d kept her in the holding tank in Atlanta for three weeks, shit scared at seventeen, clinging to her metal bed, surrounded by DTing hookers and puking junkies. Every night, after the guards quit their rounds, a quiet had set in. A silence like you’d never hear a single sound again. And then, from somewhere in the concrete tunnels, would come a scream.

  Jodi never knew who the screamer was, or maybe there were multiple screamers, all she knew was that it happened every night there in the holding cells, and she would wait up for it; through the guards’ pacing, their talk of the new lemon-cream-flavored donuts down at Stella’s, and the size and plumpness of the new nurse assistant’s ass, she waited, and once the quiet set in she began to count. She counted the tiny glow dots that appeared when she blinked her eyes. She counted the rhythms of the other girls’ breath. She closed her eyes and counted the length of the darkness and in the blackest black she saw lights. She’d see the orange glow of Effie’s cigarette—her tobacco smell richer than the scent of the store-bought slims that Jodi’s mother smoked—and her face, the wrinkles etched as deeply as knife wounds, and her dentures, white between thin lips.

  Jodi counted, sometimes all the way to two thousand, and then, finally, it would come. The scream—more animal than anything she’d ever heard in the wild. The scream and then the loudspeakers blaring and a spasm of electricity as the whole bank of lights flipped on.

  Alfredia’s office was deeply cool. A cluster of bells bounced against the glass door as a blanket of cold air reached up and pulled Jodi in. The shades were drawn, covering nearly the entirety of the front windows, just a whisper of movement from the passing cars. The air smelled of clove cigarettes.

  “You gonna keep staying in two thirty-two?” Alfredia’s eyelids were defined with thick green swooshes.

  Jodi nodded. “Tonight, at least.”

  Alfredia brought her pencil down to her records book. “Thirty-seven dollars with tax,” she said.

  On the corner of the oak desk sat a stack of cards, three of them faceup: a drawing of two naked lovers, a lightning-struck tower, and a dazzling moon. Alfredia caught Jodi’s eye as she took her cash. “A reading’ll cost you fifty.”

  Jodi shook her head. “You know that girl staying in two thirty-three?”

  Alfredia counted the limp bills twice. “Miranda checked out this morning,” she said.

  Something kicked in Jodi’s chest. “Checked out?”

  Alfredia didn’t even try to hold back her smile. “Wait, don’t tell me—she promised you a ride.”

  The trees in Forrest Park were lacy and thin leafed, sending scattered bits of shade over the sandy ground. From the green bench Jodi watched the buses come and go on Wauteegan Street; every thirty minutes she saw the red line, number 30, the one Alfredia told her to take, but she wasn’t ready. That fine alchemical body balance that would give her the courage to face Dylan had yet to be met and so she stalked the scant shade, drinking vodka from a carton of orange juice.

  The one evening that she had spent with Dylan—when Paula brought her there, the day they were supposed to rescue Ricky, back in June of ’89—his presence had sucked up all the air in the house. He was not a very large man but violence hung on him like a second skin so that everything about him, even the handsome beauty of his features, was soaked in it. His wife and children had moved about him with a skilled deference, not so much cowering as presenting themselves as if they were n
ot really there. They managed to be the hands that brought him beer and food, and the mouths that laughed at his jokes while their true selves were off somewhere, watching it all from afar. The only moment when Jodi had felt their presence, all together there in the room, was after dinner when Dylan took out his fiddle and played some slow, lovely tune. And as they sat there silently listening, Jodi could sense them—Paula, Ricky, Anna, and herself—all wrestling with the strangeness of that beautiful song coming out of that man.

  The bus ride to the Shady View Mall took nearly an hour. Out the window tract houses spread across parched fields: cream-colored siding and immaculate black roofs, no fewer than two cars, and every three houses there was the sparkling blast of an inground pool. Jodi slept through most of the ride and woke with a terror cementing in her throat. What the fuck are you doing? You really thought that girl would help you? Laughter exploded inside her head as she remembered the night before: Miranda’s nipples stiffening under Jodi’s lips and the cry she gave, her fists clenching as she came.

  By the time the bus reached the mall it was almost empty, the only other passenger a teenage girl with hoop earrings that pulled the lobes of her ears low. Jodi stood in the scrambled heat of the parking lot and watched the girl walk toward the gleaming building.

  Out past the mall the blacktop lost its shine and crumbled into dusty ruts. Half a mile away the subdivisions hovered on the horizon like props, with puff-painted clouds and too-bright light. And there, at the head of Fairchild Road, the peanut fields resumed. A memory jumped in Jodi’s mind, something familiar but not quite surfacing.

  It would have been that field over there, or this one right here. This land that she and Paula had sped past on that June night. We’ll be back soon, Ricky, real soon, okay? The fields had been planted with melons then. Under the quarter moon Jodi had seen their smooth, green forms, like pregnant bellies all up and down the field. We could have just taken him, I’ve got a gun, she’d said, staring at the empty backseat of the sedan. Paula had insisted they weren’t ready, that Ricky needed more than they could give him right then, but watching her drive away, white knuckled, Jodi had seen in Paula’s face not forethought but shit-scared cowardice.

  The house was a two-story clapboard, dusted in red clay and choked with kudzu. The vine looped across the power lines, down the walls and out across the yard toward an empty driveway, the place where Dylan’s Skylark had gleamed hot silver, the car that had been driven only on Sundays but cleaned or waxed by the children every day of the week.

  Jodi studied the house, blinds drawn tight against each windowpane, the porch set with a glass ashtray and a metal folding chair. The air did not move. She glanced again at the empty driveway and felt her thoughts and emotions scrambling over top of one another. Perhaps, with a little luck, it could be true that Dylan was not home right now, but then, what about Ricky? Maybe none of them lived here anymore?

  “Hello?” she called, walking up the drive.

  Above in the flat blue sky a red-tailed hawk dove straight toward some invisible prey. Jodi followed its movement with her eyes and was reminded of Ricky, on that June evening, whispering to her about his highest hiding place. Anna had been in the kitchen, cooking, while Dylan and Paula talked and smoked on the porch. You’re Paula’s best friend? Ricky had asked, and Jodi had smiled and nodded. You wanna see something secret? he’d said, reaching for her hand and leading her out the back door and along the fence row to a towering live oak. You can’t tell no one, he said as he climbed up into the branches. Jodi had followed, scrambling from limb to limb until she heard, somewhere above them, the flapping of wings and looked up to see a huge crow peering down from the top of the tree. Ricky held out his arm, his wrist still swollen and bloodied from where Dylan had tied him to the chair. The bird skimmed down to land on his shoulder. Seeing him there in the tree with his strange pet, Jodi was reminded of her own younger self, wild and lonely on the mountain with nothing but her solitary grandmother and animals for company. This is Darling, Ricky said. I found her in the tall grass when she was a baby and now she brings me things. The crow balanced on his arm as he scrambled the rest of the way to the top to show Jodi her nest full of shiny trinkets: strips of foil, beer tabs, a watch chain, glass marbles, a few rings. From the top of the tree Dylan and Anna’s house had looked small and far away and for the first time since arriving there Jodi felt like she could breathe. Every day she brings me new things. The huge black bird lifted up off Ricky’s arm and swooped away across the open field. Ricky had watched, smiling as her strong wings beat against the sky. She’ll go off like that, he’d said, but then she always comes back to me.

  “Hello?”

  The front door opened just a crack.

  Jodi froze in the worn dirt, below the porch steps.

  “What you need?” It was Anna’s voice, smoke tinged and raspy.

  Jodi’s tongue stuck to the inside of her cheek. She tried to find the kick and surge that the vodka had put in her veins but it was all gone.

  “Car break down?” Anna offered, her voice a bit softer.

  Jodi shook her head. “No, ma’am, no. I’m with the Georgia Department of Human Services.” She stepped onto the porch.

  The door opened just the tiniest bit more but Jodi still could not see inside. She waited to hear Dylan’s footsteps but when no sound came she took a deep breath and barreled on. “This is the residence of Patrick Dulett, correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you must be his mother, Anna Dulett?” Jodi’s voice marched out and she listened to the tone of it, so disconnected and confident. “I’m Ricky’s new caseworker. I’ll just need to speak with him for a moment.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Oh.” Jodi paused and licked her lips, trying to recalibrate her plan. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and the porch boards squeaked. “May I speak to Dylan Dulett?”

  The door opened a little more and then swung back, almost closed. “You ain’t the same worker Ricky had last time we come up to Human Services,” Anna said. “And they never sent nobody out to the house before neither.”

  “Ma’am.” Jodi looked back over her shoulder, scanning the road for Dylan’s Skylark. “I’m sorry to bother you but—”

  “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to steal his identity.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Happened to a man down in Sarita Springs. And I says to myself when I seen that on the TV, I says sure as the day is long they’re going to try to get me. I’ve been waiting for you.” She paused, overcome by a deep, phlegmy cough. “I knew you’d pick somebody like me. You ought to be ashamed going after people’s identities like that.”

  “Ma’am,” Jodi said. “Ma’am, that was not my intention. I just need to verify the whereabouts of my client.”

  “I know how to protect myself.” Anna stopped, no more words, just a small wheezing breath in the crack of the doorway. At the edges of the frame the chipped paint revealed layers of past colors, powder blue and faded mint.

  “I don’t put none of our mail in the trash. I keep it all in here. Ricky’ll carry the bags up to the attic for me and—”

  Jodi stepped in closer. “Where is Ricky?”

  The door opened then, just enough for a small, perfectly round face to fit. Anna’s white curls stuck to the sweat along the edges of her cheeks. Her eyes swam fast, all up and down.

  “Wait,” she said, letting go of the door. “That ain’t it at all, is it?”

  She stepped out onto the porch, her purple housedress giving off gusts of talcum scent. Something moved along the floor in the hallway behind her and Jodi leaned in to better see but Anna’s words snapped her attention back.

  “I know who you are.” Anna’s eyes met Jodi’s and then flitted off to a point just over her shoulder. “Oh, God, I remember you.”

  Breathe, Jodi told herself. Just breathe.

  The therapist always said count and breathe and follow your breath but Paula
was on the floor and the blood would not stop coming. All the hotel towels were wet and yet the blood kept coming.

  Breathe.

  “Why ain’t you in that prison?” Anna leaned out toward Jodi.

  “Where’s Ricky?” Jodi said, glancing again over her shoulder, sure now that she heard the rasp of tires on gravel, but when she turned, the road was empty.

  Anna’s hands fluttered, her handkerchief shaking, and Jodi grabbed her arm.

  “I need you to tell me where Ricky is.”

  Anna’s skin felt dry and too thin under Jodi’s fingers, her bones brittle and body as light as a child’s.

  “I’ll scream,” Anna said. “I’ll scream till somebody comes.”

  Jodi pressed her hand against Anna’s mouth. She felt the wet heat of Anna’s breath and something stirred in her—the old ache-rage.

  “How come you never screamed before?” she said, the anger rising like a drug in her veins. “How come all these years you watched Dylan beat them and you never once thought to scream?”

  Anna thrashed and bucked and Jodi pushed her back into the house.

  The hallway was shadowed inside and the heat hung thick and mixed with the smell of urine and curdled milk. As her eyes adjusted, Jodi noticed a movement all about their feet. Cats. All up and down the hall, the constant movement of slippery, long-haired cats . . . ten, no, twenty or more of them.

  The sickness of their smell and the sickness of the house flared up in Jodi and she smashed Anna backward, up against the wall. “Where is he?”

  Anna trembled and then relaxed, submitting to Jodi’s grip. Dylan must have beaten her too, Jodi realized, a senseless anger pulsing in him just like this.

  “Off at that museum.” Anna looked down the hall.

  Jodi loosened her grip. “Where’s that?”

  “The music museum.”

  Jodi let go of Anna’s arms and smoothed the sleeve of her housedress down over her shoulder. “In Chaunceloraine?”