Sugar Run: A Novel Page 6

  “Dylan’s got him working full-time.”

  “Uh-huh, and where’s the museum at?”

  Anna closed her eyes.

  Jodi looked past her, down the hallway and into the half-lit kitchen where three cats lay on the wooden table, asleep among scattered dishes.

  “Dylan don’t tell me much of nothing,” Anna said.

  Jodi glanced back at her. Even with all her wrinkles and white hair, she looked every minute more and more like a confused child.

  “How old were you,” Jodi asked, “when you married him?”

  Anna did not move.

  “Did you ever try to leave?”

  She blinked her eyes open and stared straight at Jodi.

  “Get out,” she spat. “Get out of my house now.”

  August 1988

  “All it takes is just one great hand,” Paula says between swallows of beer. “Just one night, with one sweet sugar run, and you’re hooked.”

  She sits across the booth from Jodi, arms resting on the scarred wooden table, hands wrapped around a bottle of Bud. Jodi listens to her speak of sugar runs and thinks of the runs she knows—flashing mountain creeks that appear out of nowhere after a good rain—and she smiles at the appropriateness of this phrasing: luck like a creek that glistens and then disappears, leaving only swirled leaves.

  Paula glances over her shoulder, then pulls her flask from her hip pocket and tips it into Jodi’s glass of Coke. Between them, in the strips of sunlight that sneak through the wooden blinds, dust motes glimmer.

  The bar is called Blue Mine, a long narrow shack, the only business open in a one-road river town. The place is full of sleepy midafternoon heat but Paula’s energy fractures the lull. She is laughing now, telling a story about a dog that eats paper money. Jodi watches her, absorbing every gesture and inflection, grateful for how Paula’s presence shakes off the gravity that’s settled on her over the past few years, the weight of her future. She has not pushed herself to excel in school and she is not beautiful and the pieces of her life are very plain to see. But Paula seems to her to be weightless, free of all normal responsibilities and constantly on the verge of something dangerous and great. There is a velocity to her that pulls you close. Her life lived like the coil before the strike.

  “You’re so damn cute.” Paula reaches out to touch Jodi’s chin.

  Jodi ducks her head. Being wanted by Paula is completely different than being wanted by Jimmy. This is something rare and magnificent. She is afraid it is a mistake somehow and will soon be taken away.

  “You win a lot?”

  Paula shrugs. “I’m saving up to buy a piece of land. Gonna build a house and move my little brother in.” She pauses, pulling the wet label off the bottle of Bud. “He needs a good place to live.”

  Jodi sips her spiked Coke, her tongue bristling under the bubbles and alcohol. A good place to live. She pictures Effie’s house, the row of three small rooms, long porch, and the garden with beanpoles pointed sky high. For the past few months, since Effie’s death, she’s been living at her parents’ place in town but there she still feels like an awkward guest and she has not stopped dreaming about returning to the mountain, has not stopped needing to feel needed by someone.

  “How old’s your brother?”

  “Ten,” Paula says, then knocks back her beer in one long drink.

  The room they find at the River Rest Motel is nothing more than a linoleum-floor box but it has a little balcony and a claw-foot tub. Paula fetches a quilt from the trunk of her sedan and she and Jodi settle on the balcony to watch the sun set over the shallow water. The air smells of thick bottom mud, fish rot, and algae. It hasn’t rained in two months and the streams are crawling away from their banks, leaving catfish skeletons, old refrigerators, and piles of trash and dirt that give off a sweet stink.

  “Look there.” Paula points to where the last rays of sun catch in the neck of a green glass bottle. The world seems so bright suddenly, flush with beauty, and Jodi can’t remember the last time she really looked at anything. Paula lays her hand on Jodi’s thigh and stares off across the water toward a dock jutting out from the far bank. Her hand kneads circles into the soft skin just below Jodi’s skirt. Jodi shifts and moves toward Paula but Paula pulls back, stands up, and disappears inside.

  Jodi hears the hsst of a beer bottle opening and then the sound of water running in the porcelain tub. Dusk settles around her, fuzzy with the blue of night seeping in, and after a while Paula calls.

  The room is dim but Paula grabs Jodi’s hand when she reaches for the light. The air is full of the wet heat of bathwater, and Paula undresses her slowly, piece by piece from the top down. Jodi feels every inch of her skin: bony arms with too much black hair and thin legs. She reaches for Paula and Paula leads her to the tub.

  Paula washes carefully between Jodi’s toes and runs the cloth up each leg. Through the open balcony door Jodi sees the lights of the bar, just downriver. The cicadas have gone quiet but the voices of the katydids rise in the branches outside. Paula smoothes the cloth across Jodi’s stomach, then brings it up to her chin. She lifts Jodi’s face and, bending close, kisses her. Her mouth tastes of salt and smoke and beer.

  “Nobody’s ever made you cum before, have they?”

  Jodi’s throat tightens. In the dark she cannot see Paula’s eyes. She pushes away and turns toward the smooth white porcelain, her face hot with shame, but Paula pulls her back. She brings her hand down between Jodi’s legs and the feel of it catches in Jodi’s stomach, throbbing. She lets her head fall back into the water as a breathless pleasure shimmers under her skin.

  July 2007

  The jelly donut oozed onto the china plate as Miranda watched, coffee cup gripped in two hands. Her first bite had punctured the side of the pastry and now it was leaking obscenely and she couldn’t bring herself to eat any more. Powdered sugar stuck to the back of her throat, and her stomach, though empty, did not seem to welcome anything.

  “More coffee?” The waitress leaned over the counter, gold necklace swinging.

  Miranda glanced up. She liked this diner with its narrow row of Formica tables and one long counter with a TV at the far end, dark enough to be anonymous but friendly all the same.

  “Uh, yeah, um, do you think you could fix me a screwdriver too?”

  “Screwdriver?” The waitress paused, coffeepot halfway to Miranda’s cup.

  “Yeah, you know, like some orange juice and—”

  “Oh, honey, I know what a screwdriver is.” The waitress was still laughing when she reached the end of the counter and nestled the coffeepot back on the heating ring.

  Miranda looked away. There were horses racing on the TV, all that weight pounding on those spindly legs. Though the sound was turned off, she could hear their rhythm in her head.

  She flipped her pack of Camels open. She had only three cigarettes left.

  Shit, fuck, what am I doing?

  She’d tried to stay there in bed with Jodi but mornings were the hardest. With too much sunlight and no extra chemicals, her self-doubt exploded until she was afraid it would permanently cripple her. She had to move fast. She’d taken a cold shower, hauled her suitcase out to her car, and brought the remainder of her pill stash up to the front desk to give to Alfredia. Now she needed this one drink and then she’d shove off and go find Lee. Somehow in all their arguing the night before, she’d never managed to get any money from him and the ten-dollar bill curled inside her cigarette pack was all she had left, that and her EBT card.

  She inhaled and focused on her cigarette, trying to coax her mind away from her boys. She should have stayed there in bed with Jodi. Last night was the first time in a long while she’d actually felt happy. She pictured the two of them up on the billboard platform and then later in the dark warmth of the bed, Jodi’s whiskey-tinged kisses and her small, perfect breasts. Miranda shivered and looked up to see the waitress walking slowly toward her, beautiful yellow-orange cocktail on her tray.

  “Screwdri
ver for the lady.” The waitress whisked the gruesome donut away and set the cool drink before her and Miranda nearly wept. The waitress would not make eye contact. Whatever. Miranda lit one of her precious cigarettes and lifted the drink. Glory hallelujah, Christ is risen.

  The fairgrounds were deserted and heat snug over everything, the air unmoving. Miranda climbed in through a cut in the back fence and picked her way past signs for the Exotix Petting Zoo and Pig Races and on toward the little trailer that served as Lee’s greenroom. His greenrooms had gotten smaller and smaller over the years of receding fame but this was an all-time low, more of a camper than a trailer, made of some flimsy material like the surface of an old mattress.

  Miranda hesitated at the door, filled suddenly with the fear of finding someone else in there with him.

  “Lee?”

  She turned the handle and was met with a wall of hot silence. The trailer was empty. She glanced over her shoulder, off past the stage. The tour bus was gone. Shit, fuck. She’d stayed on too long at the diner, chatting with a retired army commander who’d come in when she was finishing her first drink. He’d bought her two more and apparently time had kept on ticking.

  She stood there on the steps, smoking her last cigarette, the rush of highway traffic and the sound of the midway music looping behind her. She felt herself rising up above this particular moment, pushing away from the jagged edges of reality. She was not as drunk as she would have liked but she’d tipped just enough to feel halfway free.

  The faucet in the trailer was dripping. She ducked inside, crossed the room in three steps, and found, there on the counter beside the sink, a single nylon stocking, brown and warm to the touch as if just discarded. She gripped the countertop, feeling sick and unsteady.

  It was she who had left him, technically, but not really, only after too many weeks of being abandoned—she and the boys pushed aside and dumped at Lee’s aunt’s cul-de-sac bungalow in Delray—until she realized that leaving him would be the one way to get his attention. She hadn’t run far, only here to Chaunceloraine, and he’d found her almost immediately and taken the boys back. Miranda herself refused to go with him and now they played this I-love-you / I-hate-you game, her calling him every few weeks but most of the time not answering when he called back—either that or answering just long enough to tell him she needed money. He always found her whenever he was in town, and in hotels and dressing rooms after his shows she flung her pain at him until she was clean and empty.

  Inside the trailer the air was unbreathably hot and smelled of leftover barbecue. Miranda dropped her cigarette in the sink and lifted up the stocking and quite suddenly she saw, very clearly, a memory of Lee’s mother and herself, at age seventeen: A long sash of buttery light fell through the kitchen window, across the table and down along Lee’s mother’s legs. From where she had lain, on a blow-up mattress on the floor of the living room, Miranda could see nothing but legs. The legs of the man in the black suit and the legs of Lee’s mother, encased in panty hose.

  “You know, Bella, for the auditing to work, you have to be completely truthful with me,” the man said. “Can you recall a time of change?”

  Miranda had been sent to live with Bella, to finish up her pregnancy there while Lee completed his tour.

  “I need you to retrieve the memory more fully.”

  Bella brought her heels together, the white leather of her pumps rubbing against each other. Inside the shoes her feet slid up and down, the panty hose sparkling a little each time they crossed the band of light. These auditing sessions were important, Bella had told Miranda, a sort of cleansing, a way to go clear.

  “Either pink or blue,” Bella was saying. “Pastel definitely.”

  Miranda had three pairs of Bella’s panty hose stashed in a wooden cigar box. She had other things too, a nearly empty bottle of eau de toilette, a cotton ball Bella had blotted her lips with, the peel of a Cara Cara orange they’d shared that first day in LA. Miranda’s sadness over being separated from Lee was almost completely eclipsed by her joy at spending time with Bella. She’d been homeschooled her whole life and had never really had any close girlfriends.

  “Stop, stop, go back. It’s that moment.”

  The first thing Miranda had noticed was how different the light was in LA. When she’d stood on the tarmac in Georgia the fat hand of the sun had smothered her and she’d felt she couldn’t breathe properly with Lee there hugging her too tightly and promising he’d join her soon. The light in LA, though, was thin, sifted like cake flour so that it fell always at oblique angles.

  Some days Bella took Miranda to the Celebrity Centre down on Franklin Avenue. She’d kiss Miranda on the cheek and send her up to the terrace while she met with important people. The rooftop terrace was white on white: pale wicker furniture on a tiled courtyard, the tops of the palms reaching just over the roofline like tufts of stiff hair, and beyond them, the scabbed backbone of the San Gabriel Mountains where wildfires sometimes licked, emitting columns of furious smoke. On the big fire days people gathered there on the roof, Bella telling anyone who would listen how the smell of char and smoke turned her on.

  Other days Bella left early and Miranda woke alone in the apartment, the rooms nearly bare and the walls quivering with that pale LA light. On those days she lay on the linoleum floor, hands against her belly, feeling the water-song of her baby and staring up at the clothesline tied across the kitchen window, over which were draped two rows of Bella’s panty hose, the feet still pressed with the impression of her skin. Miranda loved the strength Bella took from her own beauty, even now as she aged, the way she commanded any space she stepped into, not demanding attention so much as simply, naturally eliciting it.

  “Again,” the man said. “Tell me again.”

  That first day, after Bella greeted Miranda out on the landing strip, the wind from the blades gusting her curls all across her face, after the man, who maybe was but probably was not this black-suited man, drove them up into the hills later, in the evening, when the heat had soaked out, they’d walked together, just the two of them. They left the apartment carrying oranges, Bella scattering the peels like a trail of crumbs to follow later. They seemed to be walking in no particular direction, the gulls flying overhead like little paper planes, and children screaming in the street. Bella’s sandals slapped the sidewalk confidently, until they reached the sea. A smell before it was a sight. A salt and fish-rot mist that lay over the whole neighborhood, and then there, on the corner, a two-story-tall painting of a young Bella. She said nothing but looked up casually at her own long legs, bare all the way to where the white skirt began, and on the wall, her lips: as large as a window, pink and parted with a word bubble: sipsa cola, the lady’s drink!

  The booths at the Ali Bar were long enough to lie down in, wide and deeply leather scented. Jodi was the only customer in the whole place but Alister pretended not to remember her until she wandered up to the bar for her third drink.

  “You find your friend?” he said finally.

  “Miranda?”

  “No, out by the Shady View Mall.”

  Jodi shook her head. “You ever heard of a music museum around here?”

  “This woman I was seeing drug me along up to a museum in Savannah.” Alister shrugged. “Something-Something of the Fine Arts. It looked to me like any two-year-old could’ve made those paintings with his eyes closed.”

  On the wall above Alister’s head were shelves and shelves of antique clocks with little owl faces, images of suns and moons, and gilt hands stilled under fuzzy coils of dust. The quiet timelessness of the bar and Alister’s ramblings felt like they could trap Jodi eternally and so she finished her drink and headed back across the street.

  Her motel room was still also but the weight of time was not so enormous there. She settled into a chair beside the open window and listened to the wind flap a foam life preserver against the swimming-pool fence. There goes day two, she thought. An airplane tore up from the horizon and smeared a bleached tra
il across the sky. Someone headed north, flying up toward the mountains fast.

  She took a swig from her whiskey bottle and felt the alcohol gliding inside her veins. She closed her eyes and pictured her mountains and how before the mountains were mountains they were a sea. An ancient weedy sea, crawling with centipedal beings. And water over all of it. The rush and purr of giant waves.

  “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes,” Paula says, “that means they let me in.” She pushes the car door open and slides away across the seat.

  There is nothing but the tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine and the chemical smell of warm vinyl seats. Sweat forms on Jodi’s upper lip, damp patches on the backs of her knees. Day by day she is evolving, slimming and straightening, turning to salt.

  “You love me?” she calls out.

  Paula turns toward her, mouth breaking open into a full grin. “Love with a capital L,” she says, holding out a wrinkled ten-thousand-peso bill.

  Her voice hangs warm and full inside the car even as she walks off, shoulders tense under a starched white shirt, hair slicked back and attention fixed on the four stories of colonial brick at the far end of the lot. Even the gravel here is immaculate, white stones bordered by pale sand. In the windows, on the third floor of the hotel, thin lace catches and swells with the wind.

  Jodi fingers the velvet paper of the peso bill and listens to the slap of a broom on the old boards. A small brown man in loose blue clothes sweeps and resweeps the front porch. She flattens the money against her wet thigh. Despite all those zeros the bill is worth less than a dollar back in the States. She feels it fold under her fingers and calculates what they have spent, do spend, are sure to spend—fish soup, 24,000 pesos; bread, 2,000; fruit cocktail, 5,000; sweet rice milk, 4,000; flask of rum, bottle of tequila, hotel room, two grams of cocaine, a bottle of Dexedrine, valium. . . . They are hemorrhaging.

  Mexico was supposed to be a warm, cheap place to pass the winter but none of the expat resorts will let Paula into their games. Here she has no history, no name. Her savings, their land money, is almost gone and in the smaller local games it’s just inflated pesos and no one bets enough.