Torch (3 page)

“Or redheads. Them are the ones to watch out for. Them are the ones with the tightest pussies,” Vern had said, and then roared with laughter.

Vern had shown Joshua his anchor tattoo and asked him if he’d ever heard of the cartoon
Popeye the Sailor Man
.

“Yes,” Joshua said solemnly, holding out the money his mother had given him.

“That’s me. That’s who I am,” Vern said, his eyes wild and mystical, as if he’d been transported into a memory of a time when he’d been secretly heroic. “Only I’m the original one, not a cartoon.” And then he laughed monstrously again while Joshua faked a smile.

It had taken Joshua several years to fully shake the sense that Vern
was
Popeye, despite the fact that Vern’s real life was on obvious display. He had a son named Andrew, who was older than Joshua by twenty years. At work, when Vern was in a good mood, he would tell Joshua stories about Andrew when he was young. Andrew shooting his first deer, Andrew and his legendary basketball abilities, Andrew getting his arm broken by Vern when he’d caught him smoking pot in eighth grade. “I just took the little bugger and twisted it till it snapped,” Vern said. “I woulda pulled it clean off if I could. That’s how he learned. I don’t mess around. Messing around’s not how you raise a kid. You mess around and then they never get toughened up.”

Joshua hardly knew his own father. He lived in Texas now. Joshua and Claire had gone to visit him there once when Joshua was ten, but they hadn’t lived with him since Joshua was four. They didn’t live in Midden then. They lived in Pennsylvania, where their father was a coal miner. They moved to Midden without ever having known about its existence until shortly before they’d arrived on a series of Greyhound buses, their mother having secured a job in housekeeping at the Rest-A-While Villa through the cousin of a friend.

Marcy came back into the kitchen and sat on an upturned bucket
that they used as a chair. “I’ll have the pork tenderloin tonight, Vern. With a baked potato. You can keep the peas. You got a baked potato for me?”

Vern nodded and closed the door he’d opened again.

“Is it thinking about snowing out there?” she asked, looking at her nails.

“Too cold to snow,” he said.

All three of them listened to Teresa ask Patty Peterson what she thought the future of dowsing held and Patty told her it was a dying art. The radio show wasn’t Teresa’s real job; she was a volunteer, like almost everyone who worked at the station. Her real job was waiting tables at Len’s Lookout out on Highway 32. She’d started there after the Rest-A-While Villa closed down ten years before.

Marcy grabbed the baseball cap off of Joshua’s head and then put it back on crooked. “Tell Vern what you want for dinner so we can get the hell out of Dodge when it’s time. I’m gonna go sweep.”

“Onion rings, please,” he said, and loaded up another tray of dirty dishes. On the radio, his mother asked what year the showy lady’s slipper was made the Minnesota state flower.

“1892,” said Vern. He opened the oven drawer and took out a potato wrapped in foil with his bare hands and dropped it onto a plate.

At the end of each show, his mother would ask a question and then would tell the listeners what next week’s show would be while she waited for them to call in and guess the answer. She practiced these questions on Joshua and Claire and Bruce. She had them name all seven of the dwarfs, or define
pulchritudinous
, or tell her which is the most populous city in India. The people who called in to the show were triumphant if they got the answer right, as if they’d won something, though there was no prize at all. What they got was Teresa asking where they were calling from, and she’d repeat the place name back to them, delighted and surprised. The names of cold, country places with Indian names or the names of animals or rivers or lakes: Keewatin, Atumba, Beaver, Deer Lake.

“1910?” a voice on the radio asked uncertainly.

“Nooo,” Teresa cooed. “Good guess, though.”

Vern stepped in front of Joshua holding the fryer basket with a pair of tongs and flung it into the empty sink. “That’s gonna be hot.”

“1892,” a voice said, and Teresa let out a happy cry.

Vern switched the radio off and Joshua felt a flash of gratitude. They
wouldn’t have to hear where this week’s correct caller was from, wouldn’t have to hear Teresa say what she said each week at the end of her show. “And this, folks, brings us to the end of another hour. Work hard. Do good. Be incredible. And come back next week for more of
Modern Pioneers
!”

“Your bud’s out there,” Marcy said to Joshua when she came back into the kitchen. She put her coat on. “I locked the front so whoever leaves last go out the back.”

“It’ll be this guy,” Vern said, pulling his apron off. “ ’Cause it sure as shit ain’t gonna be me.”

Joshua changed out of his wet clothes in the kitchen when Vern left and took his plate of onion rings out front, where R.J. was playing Ms. Pac Man.

“I learned how to work it so we can play for free,” he said, once all of R.J.’s players had died.

“I don’t wanna play no more. Can I have some pop?”

Joshua poured them each a Mountain Dew from the dispenser. The café was peaceful without the overhead lights on, without any people in it but him and R.J. All the chairs sat upside down on the tables. R.J. wore jeans and a big sports jersey that wasn’t tucked in, his body a barrel. His dad was Ojibwe, his mom white. Like all the Ojibwes who lived in Midden, each fall he received free Reebok shoes from the Reebok company, which meant the guys at school sometimes dragged him into the boy’s bathroom, shoved his head into the toilet, and flushed it. Despite this, he and Joshua had been best friends since fifth grade.

“I got something if you ever wanna stay up all night.” R.J. pulled a glassine envelope, the kind that stamps come in, from his pocket. “Bender gave it to me.” Bender was his mom’s boyfriend.

“What is it?”

R.J. gently opened the envelope and shook the contents into his chubby palm. Gray crystals the size of salt fell out. “Crystal meth. Bender made it,” R.J. said, and blushed. “Don’t tell anyone. Bender and my mom did. Just to see.” His eyes were dark and bulbous. He resembled his father, a man whom R.J. seldom saw.

“Let’s try it,” Joshua said. He smoked pot often but hadn’t done anything else. R.J.’s mom and Bender kept all of Midden supplied with marijuana, growing it in a sub-basement under their front porch that only R.J. and Joshua and Bender and R.J.’s mom knew existed.

“Right now?” R.J. poked the meth with one finger.

“What’s it do?”

“Wakes you up and makes you hyper.”

Joshua licked his finger and dabbed it into the crystals and then put it in his mouth.

“What are you doing?”

“Rubbing it on my gums. That’s what you’re supposed to do is wipe it on your gums so it gets into your system,” Joshua said. He didn’t know this for a fact, but he vaguely remembered hearing something like this, or seeing it in a movie.

“You’re supposed to snort it,” R.J. said. “Bender told me.”

Joshua ignored him and sat down at a booth and closed his eyes, as if he were meditating.

“Are you a total fucking head case?” R.J. asked.

“You’re the head case,” Joshua said, keeping his eyes closed. “I’m letting it get into my system, you dumb fuck.”

“What’s it taste like?”

“Like medicine.”

“What’s it feel like?”

Joshua didn’t answer. He felt a small swooping sensation but couldn’t tell if it was a real feeling or if his desire to feel it had brought it on. He opened his eyes and the sensation went away. He said, “Let’s go drive around.”

R.J. carefully scraped most of the crystals back into the envelope, and then licked the rest of the meth from his palm.

Joshua drove. They drove through town without passing another moving vehicle. Ten
P.M
. was like the middle of the night. They drove past the dark storefronts—Ina’s Drug, the Red Owl grocery, Video and Tan, past the Universe Roller Rink and the Dairy Queen and the school and the Midden Clinic that sat in the school parking lot, a converted mobile home, double wide—and past the two places that were open, the Kwik Mart and Punk’s Hideaway, where Joshua knew that Vern would be—he went there every night. On the way out of town they went slowly by the Treetops Motel, where they could see Anita sitting on a flowered couch in the front office, which was also her living room, watching the news. They drove out Highway 32, past Len’s Lookout, where Joshua’s mother worked, and continued east for fifteen miles so R.J. could see if Melissa Lloyd’s car was in her driveway, and then they drove fifteen miles back to town to R.J.’s house, and then Joshua drove himself another
twenty-six farther south to his own house. When he was alone in the car he realized that his jaw ached, that he’d been clenching it without his being aware. He tried consciously to let it hang, as if it dangled from the rest of his face. He did not feel high so much as acutely aware of the edges around him and within him, and he liked that feeling and knew that he wanted to feel it again.

When he pulled into the driveway and got out of his truck, he could hear Tanner and Spy barking their hello barks from inside the house, pushing against the front door to greet him. He hurried in and tried to get them to hush up so he might avoid waking his mother and Bruce. He didn’t turn any lights on and walked quietly into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator to look inside, though he wasn’t hungry. He took an apple and bit into it and then regretted it, but continued to eat it.

“Josh,” his mother called to him.

He could hear her getting out of bed. “I’m home,” he said, irritated, not wanting her to. He considered bolting immediately upstairs. He loved his room.

“You’re late,” she said, appearing in the kitchen, wearing her long fleece nightgown and fake fur slippers. The dogs went to her, forced their noses into her hands so she had to pet them.

“We closed late. Three tables came in right at the end.” He tossed the apple at the garbage bin and could tell by the sound it made that he’d missed, but he didn’t go to pick it up. “We don’t have school tomorrow anyway. It’s teacher workshop day.”

“You’re supposed to call when you’re later than ten. That’s the deal we made when you took the job.”

“It’s only eleven.”

He poured himself a glass of water and drank the whole thing in one long chug, aware that his mother was watching him. “
What?
” he asked, filling the glass again, running the water hard.

“I’m not tired anyway,” she said, as if he’d apologized for waking her. “You want some tea?” she asked, already putting the kettle on.

“Did you see the moon driving home?” she asked.

“Yep.”

She took two mugs from their hooks above the sink and placed the tea bags into them without turning any lights on.

“The chamomile will help us sleep.”

The kettle began to whistle. She picked it up and poured the water into the mugs and sat down at the table.

He sat too, sliding his hot mug toward him.

“It’s that I worry when you’re late. With the roads being icy,” she said, gazing at him by the dim light of the moon that came in through the windows. “But you’re home safe now and that’s what matters.”

She blew on the surface of her tea but didn’t take a sip, and he did the same. He wore his headphones around his neck. He ached to put them on, to blast a CD. Instead, he imagined the music, playing a song in his head, its very thought a beacon to him.

“So, you were busy tonight?”

“Not really,” he said, and then remembered his earlier lie. “Until just before closing and then the place filled up.”

“That always happens.” She laughed softly. “Every time I’m about to get out of Len’s a busload of people shows up.”

She’d tried to quit her job there once. She started up her own business selling her paintings at flea markets and consignment shops. Scenes of northern Minnesota. Ducks and daisies and streams and trees and fields of grass and goldenrod. Most of them were now hanging in their house, much to Joshua’s chagrin. His mother had taken R.J. on an unsolicited tour of them once, telling him her inspiration for each painting and their titles. The titles embarrassed Joshua more than the paintings themselves. They were indicative of all the things that irked him about his mother: fancy and grandiose, girlish and overstated
—Wild Gooseberry Bush in Summer Marsh, The Simple Sway of the Maple Tree, Birthland of Father Mississippi
—as if each one were making a direct appeal to its own greatness.

Joshua took a tentative sip of his tea and remembered a game he and Claire used to play with their mother called “What are you drinking?” She’d make them drinks out of water with sugar and food coloring when she didn’t have enough money for Kool-Aid and then she would ask them to tell her what they were drinking, smiling expectantly, and they would say whatever they wanted to say, whatever they could think up. They would say
martinis
, even though they didn’t know what martinis were, and their mother would elaborately pretend to put an olive in. They would say
chocolate milkshakes
or
sarsaparilla
or the names of drinks they’d invented themselves and their mother would add on to it, making it better than it was, making the water taste different to them too. This was before they met Bruce, after they’d just moved to Midden, when they lived in the apartment above Len’s Lookout. The apartment wasn’t really an apartment and the town didn’t yet feel to them like a town, so
outside of it they were that first year, not knowing a soul in a place where everyone else knew each other. Their apartment was one big room, with a kitchen that Len had devised for them along one wall, and a shower and sauna and toilet out back. There was a couch that they pulled out into a bed, and they all slept on it together and usually didn’t fold it back up, so that the apartment was really a giant bed, an island in the middle of their new, Minnesota life.

In the afternoons when Claire and Joshua had returned from school and their mother was home from work they would lie on the bed and talk and play games they’d made up. They would say that they could not get off the bed because the floor was actually a sea infested with sharks. Or their mother would close her eyes and ask, in a snooty voice that she used for only this occasion, “Who am I now?” and Joshua and Claire would shriek, “Miss Bettina Von So and So!” and then they would transform her. Softly, they touched her eyelids and her lips, her cheeks and her face, all the while saying which colors they were applying where, and from time to time their mother would open her eyes and say, “I think Miss Bettina Von So and So would wear more rouge, don’t you?” They would rub her face for a while longer and then she would ask, “What on earth are we to do about Miss Bettina Von So and So’s hair?” and they would rake their fingers through her hair and pretend to spray it into place or tie it into actual knots. When they were done, their mother would sit up and say, in her best, most luxuriously snooty voice, “
Darlings!
Miss Bettina Von So and So is so very pleased to make your acquaintance,” and he and Claire would fall onto the floor in hysterics.