Blood Highway Page 6

  “Okay,” Blaine said. “Okay, that’s—”

  “So your next question is, ‘Well, when did she lock up the food’? You’re skipping ahead, but that’s fine. The food was my fault, too. I gave her the idea. I put a dead bolt on my bedroom door. She kept taking my stuff—furniture, clothes, toys, all of it—and setting it out on the curb for trash pickup. I was really lucky I beat the garbageman that first day. The first day I went back to school after—y’know, after.”

  He raised both his hands, the international sign for “stop.” “Hey, Rainy? You can—”

  “No, I can’t.” I’d been watching it this whole time. A highlights reel behind my eyelids. It was such a strange movie, my life. If I could have walked out, I would have. “Your next question is, ‘Why’d she lock up the food?’ And the answer is, I don’t know. Interesting, why don’t I know? Because she wouldn’t talk to me. She never talked to me again. She hasn’t spoken to me in over six years. She ignored me to the point that it seemed like she couldn’t see me, couldn’t hear me. If I dropped something, if my steps echoed on the floor, those things she could hear, and they terrified her. If I touched her, it terrified her. ‘Fascinating, Rainy, why didn’t you tell somebody?’ I did. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Scott. It took me a while, because Mom’d had episodes like this before, one or two days at most, and she always told me afterwards, ‘Mommy’s a little crazy, but that’s our secret, isn’t it?’ I liked that. ‘Our secret.’ I thought that’s what this was, and it’d be over soon. I was waiting, thinking she’d come out of it. Then this one day, at school, I got caught stealing from another girl’s lunch. I was so hungry. I saw the oatmeal pie peeking out of the sack, I took it. Mrs. Scott asked why I would do that, and I told. I about had a panic attack, but I told her. Mrs. Scott told the principal. Principal calls my mom, Mom comes in. Your next question is, ‘How could a schizoaffective anxious-depressive convince everyone around her she’s sane?’”

  “Because she wore a nice dress,” Blaine said.

  “You don’t have to pretend,” I said. “I wouldn’t believe me, either.”

  “She wore a nice dress and nice shoes, and she said, ‘How about this weather.’”

  “Don’t pretend.”

  “She pinned it on you. Didn’t she?”

  I was stumped. How’d he know? How was he guessing right?

  Don’t fall for it, I thought. He’s playing you, he’s laughing inside.

  “Very good,” I said. “But I don’t blame them. She was a phenomenal liar. Better than you. Even better than me. So your next question is, ‘Why didn’t you run away?’ Answer: Because the principal talked with me after his conference with my mom. And he said—I’m quoting—‘Do you know what happens to little girls who steal and tell lies and run away? They go to juvenile hall. Do you know what that is, Rainy? It’s prison for children.’”

  I scoffed, remembering the fear I’d felt at the time. If they could see me now. “After that, I adapted. It wasn’t so different from a video game. Figure out the boundaries and stay inside them. Boundary one: don’t get caught stealing. Boundary two: don’t tell; they won’t believe you. You need mushrooms and flowers to eat so you can grow. You need coins for extra lives.”

  Blaine began to sag on his side of the booth, shoulders folding in.

  “You’re not buying it, right? That an eleven-year-old could do it on her own? It wasn’t instantaneous. It was trial and error, with plenty of error. My lies were too big at first. The best lies are simple. Something you can stick with that still gives you mobility. My cred was shot by the time I worked that out, so I had to change school districts. That’s why I’m at Dewey.”

  “A parent’s gotta petition for that, don’t they?”

  “I sign her name better than mine, dude. Plan was, I’d stick around ’til I turned eighteen. Maybe finish high school, maybe not. It wasn’t that bad once I got used to it—she was basically a crappy roommate—and I figured, after I’m eighteen, I’m not police jurisdiction. Can’t call me a runaway then. If I graduate, even better. Everybody loses track of everybody in college. And when I’ve got just a few months to go, she pulls this.”

  Conventional wisdom states that spilling your guts makes you feel five pounds lighter. I’m like: Well, yeah, your guts are on the floor.

  “If the truth is weird enough, people think you’re telling a story. Fine, tell a story, one people can feel comfortable with. They’ll decide it’s the truth. It fits better. It fits this.” I waved generally: Denny’s, street, city, country. Blaine. “You’ll go home tonight, and tomorrow you’ll tell your buddies about this whopper you heard. This grand epic—a mother ices her daughter out for six years, yeah right. They’ll laugh and laugh, and you’ll laugh right with them.”

  Blaine revived, sitting up, his nostrils two delightful black holes of rage-flare. Nobody likes being seen through. They blame the seer.

  “Or you’ll tsk-tsk about kids today. These rotten, shallow, lying little narcissists that make it so much harder for hardworking men like you to pretend they’re doing their phony-ass best.”

  They revile her, and if she’s smart, she learns to love their hate. She masters the fine art of throwing kerosene on the kitchen fire.

  “You go ahead, man. Go right ahead. And fuck you very much for supper.”

  Four

  The plows had done their first pass on the main arteries. Our tires gripped through three inches instead of a foot. Blaine brooded. He excelled here, much as he excelled at driving. When he did both at once, they fed each other. Symbiotic skills. He glared at the road like he had a grudge against it, and it answered by becoming magically navigable, afraid of him, as I still should have been.

  Instead, I found the journey exotic—not the landscape, white and flat, but the novel circumstance of sitting beside a human being who knew . . . who knew. I’d told Blaine the outline; I could fill it in. I could tell him I knew what grass tasted like: about how you’d expect—the greener, the better—though you forage mostly at night, so it’s hard to be fussy about color. You get annoyed how much you have to eat in order to feel full, so you move on to neighbors’ garbage. Scouting in the wee hours, a bipedal raccoon. I knew what it was like to surprise a raccoon and go running for my life across way too many backyards. To move on to restaurant Dumpsters. And it’s while you’re noshing through the mother lode of Red Robin fries one night that you realize it’d be more high-risk (getting-caught-wise) but less high-risk (getting–E. coli–wise) to infiltrate the restaurants themselves. Don’t steal fresh meals from the kitchens; steal leftovers from the patrons. Nothing goes missing. Nothing gets missed. Become a bipedal garbage disposal. But how? Then working out the how, and how it isn’t impossible, it’s not even difficult. Favor low light and busy hours. Learn the restaurants that are friendliest to your MO. It’s masterful, if you do think so yourself. Fourteen years old, lipstick and a wig, you’d say you were a gymnast if anyone asked—“I was a gymnast, ’til I got too tall”—so that your slight frame made sense.

  I told him nothing. What would it get me? What had it gotten me so far, other than a terse ‘C’mon’ back at Denny’s, and silence?

  We split off the interstate, took a few turns, and came to a building that could have been a DMV or a community arts center. There was a decal on the glowing front entrance, a shield with fourth precinct stamped in the middle. I wondered how criminals felt when they saw it. I saw it and felt like a criminal.

  Blaine read my mind while we drove down the ramp of a parking garage. “No reason for you to be scared.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Good. No reason to be.”

  The sublevel was wall-to-wall cop cars. The only empty space was marked car 75. Blaine parked, we got out, and our shadows merged, shortening and lengthening again with each brazen halogen. A pretty, petite woman waited at a desk ahead of us, a camera above her head. There was a door to her right labeled employees only.

  “Some weather,” she said to Blain
e. Her tone was glacial.

  He took a pen that was chained to the desk and filled out a line on a clipboard. “How’ve you been?” he said while finishing his signature. He waved as we went, as if she’d replied, and opened a door that gave on a tunnel and up some stairs to a maze of halls, where the occasional uniform passed us. Labels like interrogation, evidence, vending: I couldn’t muster any interest in them. I was occupied by the great wall of noise we’d be hitting any second. Whenever I thought we must be close, another turn gave on another hall.

  “You all right?” Blaine said, growling.

  “Fine.”

  “You love that word, don’t you? ‘Fine.’”

  “Yep. Good word.”

  He hooked left. Finally, here was the noise I’d been waiting for. Fifty or more desks were packed together in a mammoth space. A cop at every one—and often two cops, dialing landlines while telling cells to hold, shoving sandwiches in their maws, chicken-scratching, and setting paper in trays. The ceiling was so high I expected basketball hoops to come down and a game to get going, but this illusion was dispelled by a staircase rising on either side, to offices a tier above. Those doors were closed, their windows dark.

  “Is it shift change?” I half yelled.

  Blaine’s voice, however, was made for this. “No. The storm. Every car’s got ten accident reports to fill out.” He pointed. “We’re headed for that guy.”

  I had no clue who he meant, but I started walking. Blaine reached to set a hand on my shoulder and steer me, then thought better of it, settling on a process that was more usher-like. He created a buffer zone between me and the cop mob—a border of arms that much bigger men respected as they made plays for the coffeemaker, copy machine, or any of the hallways that wheel-spoked from the center. I wondered if they were inventing excuses to cross our path, since each of them seemed to need to tell Blaine hello.

  Blaine didn’t speak. He nodded where appropriate, while I focused on the progress, the directionality, the man under the office overhang, watching us approach. An office beside him had captain john kunz stenciled on the glass.

  I thought Blaine would introduce me, but he herded me into the office, where he could say with normal decibels, “Wait here. Soft couch.” I processed the couch, and bookshelves, and a desk with ten trees’ worth of paper hiding its whole surface. A fish tank in the corner, nothing demonstrably alive in it. There were windows all around, which would have been terrif had it not been for men passing, staring in at me. A freak guppy alone in my roomy bowl.

  I groped for the door as Blaine pulled it shut. “Could I wait at your desk?”

  “It’s kind of in the middle of everything.”

  “That’s good. That’s better.”

  He led the way. I didn’t follow immediately. I looked at Kunz, and that was a mistake. I was so amped—I’m talking out-of-this-dimension stress overload—and whenever that happened, my paranoia-penchanted DNA kicked in. I had this ridiculous momentary intuition that Kunz knew me from somewhere. He raised his cup, indicating I should tag along with Blaine. I did, happily, because I hated feeling like that. It always made me wonder if I was one bad episode away from going permanently bugfuck, same as her.

  “It’s this one. Have a seat.” Blaine knelt, running a hand over his hair, flattening a buzz cut that was flat to begin with. He ripped a drawer open, handed me a bottle of Evian—“Drink that”—and left.

  Phones jangled. Paper fluttered. Shoes squeaked.

  His desk was immaculate. I picked up the lone picture frame, the only personal thing on Blaine’s desk. I brought it close, confirming it was indeed a photo of a car and only a car. Candy-apple red, the crossed-flags hood ornament centered perfectly. I set the photo down and picked up a paperweight, leaning back in the chair, turning the circle between my hands. It was a stone. There were three of them. I grabbed the other two, compared sizes. They were the smooth, ovular rocks people took from the lakes up north while on family vacations.

  Every other desk in the place was a mess. Brass badges twinkled on a shocking number of flabby man boobs and a sad minority of fit pecs. Fierce male voices, fierce male smells.

  I set the rocks down and used my toe to turn the chair.

  In Kunz’s office, Blaine was speaking with the verve of a lawyer pleading a case. The captain interrupted. When Kunz quit talking, Blaine delivered a parting comment and turned his back. As he exited the office and came my way, I understood how badly I needed sleep. I was wired-tired, caffeine bridging the gap between my willed vigilance and a crash I could see ahead. A bad one.

  “Ready to get outta here?” He got on a knee, tearing his bottom desk drawer open. He took out a cop hat and put it on.

  We did our journey in reverse. The parking garage lady made no attempt at conversation, and it spoke volumes, as did Blaine’s tight smile at her. He went loose behind the wheel, at home there. We were the only car on the road. Plows were out, but they’d moved on to highways. Their attack formation stormed the ramps to I-94 and 35W. The rest of the city was a starched white shirt. Nobody wanted to wrinkle it.

  “I tried. I really did.” Blaine threw his hat on the dash. “CPS doesn’t have a housing situation for you. A lot of fosters return kids around the holidays. Overflow goes to children’s centers, so they don’t have any beds. You’re seventeen. Powers that be decided either an open cell in lockup or a halfway house. I didn’t want you in the clink for the night. Tomorrow, I’m giving it both barrels. I’ll find you a decent spot if I’ve gotta cry blood. Okay? My word, okay?”

  The police car console had a lot of tech built in. I found the regular radio and flipped it on, hitting presets ’til I heard an oldie. The Mamas and the Papas. “Monday, Monday.” Jaunty major key, basic rhythm.

  Blaine’s undertone contained a hum of unsaid, subliminal bull, further assurances he’d figure it out tomorrow. ‘It’ being me. It was going to prison. It was fine. I was fine.

  I was fine until the sweet resolution of that song melted into fingerpicked acoustic. Stevie Nicks took her love and she took it down. I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t a weeping fit; that would have been infinitely preferable. I discovered I’d curled up in my seat, as best I could with the seat belt to negotiate. I was rocking, and I was holding my hands near my ears but not on them, like I was trying to catch the music and keep it there. Blaine pulled over, saying my name, like it meant jack-all to me when Stevie’d been afraid of changing because she’d had somebody to build her life around.

  “Just drive,” I shouted. “Just go, just take me there, I don’t care, it’s nothing, I’m fine, go, drive—” and so on, until the tires sloughed back into a lane. A radio ad screamed about a holiday sale. I made an effort to sit up, my cheek flat against the ice-cold window, dry heat blasting my face. Blaine took a ramp.

  “It’s south?” I said.

  “Scenic route. Here.”

  A weight settled on my knee. I’d seen one before, but only on TV. “I don’t know how to use it.”

  Blaine showed me, twirling a thumb around the iPod’s dial. Not once did he look away from the highway—freshly cleared and sanded, it stretched under a bright half-or-more moon that was parting the clouds. We crossed the 35W bridge, the Mississippi black and churning below us while every building and lot and house glowed wicked, freaky white. Christmas lights blinked, doing little to alter the monochrome of a city buried in powder. It was like driving through an old photograph.

  He exited onto County Road 42 while I found my way to Rumours. It didn’t surprise me he had it. I hoped he wasn’t one of those posers who’d found Fleetwood Mac all of four years ago, when The Dance came out. I’d been thirteen at the time and I was like, I’ve loved them my whole life, buttheads! The iPod let me pick which tracks I wanted to hear. This seemed a sacrilege to an album crafted for vinyl, when the order of the songs as a whole mattered as much as each on its own. I hit “Second Hand News,” set it to play in sequence, and watched that white world. Water towers with whit
ed-out town names I could name anyway: Rosemount, Apple Valley, Burnsville.

  “You ever climb one?” he said, pointing at another water tower, this one for the thriving metropolis of Savage, Minnesota.

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Yeah, it is. Teenagers do it all the time, though.”

  “Did you?” I said.

  “Sure. Prom. You go to prom?”

  He would not get another recital from me. Not a single number, not a note.

  “Prom night,” Blaine said, “you go to the dance, then you do something stupid. We climbed up there and drank scotch.” He laughed fakely. “It was warm for May. Only reason I’m here to tell you about it.” There was a U-y ramp that civilians weren’t supposed to use, but Blaine slowed onto it and turned us north. “You should climb one sometime.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Blaine fiddled with dials. The wipers quickened, and the radio’s bass thickened.

  “Could we climb one now?”

  “Little cold for that,” he said. “And slippery. You wipe out off a water tower, it’s no joke.”

  I repeated “Go Your Own Way.” “Why’d you guys go up there on prom night? Didn’t you have an after-party?”

  “They didn’t do those yet. You know why they do after-parties, right?”

  “So we don’t go climbing water towers.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Better to keep us in one place.”

  “Yep.”

  “Keep the cattle penned.” I rerepeated “Go Your Own Way.”

  “This your favorite?” he said, drumming the beat on the steering wheel. He got on 55, then took the exit at Lake.

  “How long were you guys up there?”

  “All night. ’Til the sun came up.” Blaine braked gently, his face souring. I looked out my window.

  “Wow.” I said it with reverence. Most buildings this butt-ass had been torn down out of a sense of civic duty. This one sat between Lake and Twenty-Eighth, west of 35W, set back from the street. A strip mall with a Blockbuster, a Panera, and three empty suites hid this eyesore from view. Pastel tiles in random clusters failed spectacularly at breaking up the uniform depressive gray, succeeding instead at highlighting how this was a jail, a whole jail, and nothing but a jail.