That Monday, I worked my first shift washing dishes at the Aurora, breakfast and lunch, and once I punched out, I ran to the post office to see if my mother had left a forwarding address for her mail. Of course she hadn’t, and I was sitting with my head in my hands on the stone steps out front, pondering the pointlessness of my search for someone who did not want to be found, when the sputtering drunk from the fairgrounds walked up, Twins hat in his hand, feet kicking at the loose rocks on the sidewalk as he asked if he could apologize. Russell he said his name was, and he lifted his shirt to show off an odd bulge in his pants, the neck of a glass bottle sticking out of his pocket.
“Let’s go do something with this,” he said.
I didn’t want to go with him after what he had said at the fairgrounds but his eyes persuaded me. Those sad glances made me want to take him in my arms and hold him. I couldn’t have explained it then, this feeling that drew me to Russell, but I needed to give him a second chance. If my mother deserved one after what she had done, then I could give one to this boy whose only fault was that he had told me the truth.
We walked a couple blocks in silence, awkward silence I thought, before he pointed out the playground across from the library and we each took a swing beneath the water tower still adorned with the words Holm Sucks. I kicked my legs until I was swinging and Russell sat with the bottle between his knees, turning in circles so the chains above him twined together until he finally let go and spun the opposite way, the bottle flying into the grass. When the chains straightened out again, Russell stood, stumbled in his dizziness, and fell to the ground near the whiskey, where he uncapped the bottle and told me he’d had a job for a day. Training as a bar back at the Holm Bar and Grill on Saturday night, he’d slipped the bottle into his backpack the first time he was sent to the liquor room for stock. No one noticed before his shift ended, but he got the call the next morning telling him he need not return.
“Fuck it. Free whiskey,” he said, then put the bottle to his lips and turned it upside down. “They didn’t say it was because I stole, but you know it was. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got other prospects anyways.”
He told me about a party he had heard about, a field party, though he hadn’t necessarily been invited. I had my doubts, which grew into sneaking suspicions, which grew into fear. My first thoughts were that someone had put Russell up to this, possibly bribing him with this bottle to trick me into going to where no one would hear my screams. I mentioned that I hadn’t gotten along too well with most other kids in town, but Russell told me that we could leave as soon as I felt the need so I followed him down Center, past the middle school and the old folks’ home, over the bridge that crossed the Spirit River to where it became the highway. A couple of trucks blew by us but no one whistled or called—they must have thought I was Russell’s woman.
We turned onto a two-lane road that ran between cornfields. Stalks as high as my eyes with no end in sight. Russell handed me the bottle and I took two small sips. He called me a pussy so I took two more. A pinching tightness developed between my shoulders and a looseness behind my eyes. Russell had no problem with it, and with each pull he smiled wider and talked louder. He could drink whiskey faster than I could drink water, moving alone through the bottle as quickly as the four of us at the campground. I wanted to throw up just watching him.
The road curved toward the setting sun, more an inconvenience on this cloudless day than an occasion of beauty and wonder, so we walked toward it with our hands in front of our faces like shields. I pointed out the thin dirt roads that occasionally split off from the pavement, often no more than wheel ruts that disappeared into forests or fields, and Russell claimed to have lived on a farm for the first ten years of his life. He told me that these were mostly access points for tractors and harvesters.
“But some of these rednecks live down roads like these,” he said. “Houses deep in the woods, barns full of guns.”
We came up on a pair of bridges that led over the Spirit, one the road we walked would cross and another set lower on the valley walls, narrow and old. I veered off on a gravel path that cut back and forth down the slope, leading to an orange sign hanging on a chain. DANGER: NO TRESPASSING! A plaque mounted on the portal strut read 1888.
“Hey, what’s the plan?” Russell called from the road.
I told him I would see him on the other side and crouched under the chain. The bracing looked safe enough, a little rusty but intact. The wooden deck was rotting away and, as I carefully stepped around holes so large I could have fallen through without touching the sides, I could see that the the concrete pillar that held the bridge in place was crumbling into the water below. The river ran slowly, indifferent to my peril.
On the other side of the river was more corn. A lot more corn. We were in the middle of nowhere. I again grew worried that Russell was setting me up. He handed me the bottle and smiled, proving my suspicions. How did I let myself come to be alone with this guy I hardly knew? I felt a bit better when the corn gave way to soybeans because they were so low to the ground that I could see no one was hiding in the field, but those feelings were short-lived as we moved past the soy and back into cornfields. The sun set and the stars came out, so many that I asked Russell if he thought there were as many stars in the sky as there were ears of corn in the fields.
“Someone should harvest those,” Russell said, now drunk, pointing at the Big Dipper, then turned toward an orange glow in the distance. “There’s the party.”
We stepped into the field and followed the rows until we could hear the crowd. Russell knelt down and laced his hands together. I stepped in and he lifted me above the corn so I could point the way to the party, then we walked for a while at a sharp diagonal, trampling cornstalks.
We came out of the corn to a half circle of parked trucks, headlights pointed at a crowd of people milling in pairs and small groups, most of them holding red plastic cups. A bonfire, the orange glow we had seen in the distance, burned between us and them, and next to that, a girl pumped beer out of a silver keg, five people behind her waiting for refills. One of the trucks played what might have been Led Zeppelin. I thought I recognized a couple of the guys from the streets of Holm but I couldn’t be sure—the only person I knew, by truck or by face, was Svenson.
“I don’t see my guy yet,” Russell said, then led me over near the fire.
Russell drank from the bottle and then passed it to me. No one had yet noticed who I was, but I was certain that someone soon would. I was about to suggest we slip back into the corn when a girl wearing overalls and pigtails, obviously drunk, stumbled up to the fire and yelled, pointing beyond us at a set of headlights on the road from where Russell and I had come.
“That’s them!”
The lights rolled past the party and turned back toward us at the next road. A few guys climbed up into the beds of their trucks, taking turns whistling with two fingers in their mouths. We all turned toward the entrance, if you can call a path of trampled corn an entrance.
I took three steps back when I saw the truck was cherry red. Russell turned and I signaled for him to ease away from the crowd. We were at the edge of the standing corn when three ghosts got out of the truck to whooping cheers from the party. When the newcomers moved toward the fire I saw that they weren’t dressed like ghosts. They wore white robes and masks with tall pointy hats. On their chests, above their hearts, were red circles with white crosses. The first Klansman put his hands over his eyes, the second over his ears, the third over his mouth. This must have had some meaning beyond what I associated with it because the crowd grew very loud, a chorus of cheers and laughter. Cameras appeared and the partygoers posed with the costumed newcomers. Flashbulbs popped in the night. Rifles and shotguns were fetched from trucks and given to the Klansmen. “For authenticity,” someone kept yelling.
I pulled Russell into the corn and turned back the way we came.
“Hey, where are we going?” he called from behind me, but I didn’t turn back. “That was my guy. The party was just getting started.”
I stopped to wait. Russell caught up and handed me the bottle, now less than a quarter full.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did you spill some of this?”
“Spilled it right into my mouth.”
Russell had drunk more than half the bottle but was still walking straight and making sense when he talked. I wasn’t sure what he would have to gain by pouring out the liquor and claiming to have drunk it, but it worried me more that he could drink this much and still function. I choked down a big swallow, more to keep it from Russell than from any desire to keep drinking, and held on to the bottle as we walked.
“What was going on back there?”
“They’re trying to be their fathers,” Russell said, “just like anybody else. Makes me wonder what your father is like with you running away like this.”
“Better to run away than to be that,” I said.
“They ain’t really KKK. They don’t mean it.”
“What is it that they do mean?”
“They like to dress up,” Russell said. “Boys’ll be boys, ya know? It’s not a big deal.” And then, when that line didn’t get the reaction he wanted: “Look, they’re idiots. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not like they burn crosses or anything.”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
Russell caught up and moved into the row next to me, corn tassels rustling against our arms as he told me about his uncle, who had lived for a time with him and his parents on the farm. He had seemed like a nice enough guy, to Russell anyway. An early riser and a hard worker, he was a great help with the morning chores, and on those lazy afternoons afterwards, he taught Russell how to throw, how to play baseball. But on weekends he underwent a mysterious change—when he would go out for an evening on the town, he came back a stranger. In one rage or another, he returned from wherever he had gone in a fit of yelling, punching holes in the wall, kicking chairs. Broken glass, usually plates or windows, often featured in those Sunday mornings, Russell and his father tiptoeing around the house as Russell’s mother tried to calm her brother. The last time he would see him, Russell awoke to find his uncle passed out in the dining room, cheek flat on the table, eyes open and staring but seeing nothing. A large bowl of coleslaw was overturned on the floor and strands of cabbage were strewn around the house.
“I didn’t know he was a drunk until much later,” Russell said. “I thought he was crazy.”
We reached the end of the cornfield and then walked along the road. Darkness had fallen hard and, since there were no streetlights, the stars and moon were left to guide us back to town. Crickets sang the melody to the rhythm of our feet in the gravel.
“They kicked my uncle out after that thing with the coleslaw,” Russell said, “told him never to come back. Said he was no longer part of the family and acted that way too. Took his pictures out of the photo albums, tore up his letters, refused his collect calls. When I bring him up they act like I haven’t said anything.”
“That’s how it was with my mom, too,” I said. “Once she was gone, my dad acted like they had never met.”
“My uncle had this darkness hanging over him,” Russell said, “but sending him away was the worst thing we could have done. My mom doesn’t listen when I tell her that. ‘Tough love,’ she says, ‘someday you’ll understand.’ But I won’t. If anything, I’ll be the next one kicked out of the family.”
At the pair of bridges, Russell grabbed the bottle from me and ran down the hill, out onto the abandoned bridge. I yelled for him to turn around and take the safe way but he wasn’t coming back. Drunk as he was, I figured he would end up in the river so I wasn’t surprised when I found him dangling from the edge of the first big hole in the deck. It would have been a short fall but the river was very shallow. A rock in the wrong place would break his leg if he were to drop.
I grabbed him by the armpits and pulled him up, falling down on my ass as he came out of the hole. The forward momentum brought Russell down on top of me, drunk and flailing from the fear of falling, or so I thought until his open mouth came down on mine, his hands behind my head pulling me to him. We tangled there for a long moment, inexperienced and unpracticed, my hands on Russell’s waist as he reached under and over and around to feel what he could, to pull me closer to him, until his hand went between my legs and I pushed him away.
We lay there on the bridge next to each other for a while, staring up at the stars, neither of us having the words to talk about what had just happened, my desire having grown into a dark yearning that I didn’t understand, a shadow of myself twice my size, hungry, and barely under control. I wanted another drink but the whiskey was gone, Russell having dropped the bottle in the river in his scramble to stay out of the hole, so my buzz was beginning to wear off. Russell had drunk so much that he was still quite tipsy but somehow still awake. As alert and aware as when we had first met up that day.
“So, what else happened on that farm?” I asked.
“Every once in a while we’d get a brood of like fifty chicks and I’d get super excited, really, more excited than I’ve ever been since, for sure. They were little and yellow and soft. Once when I was like seven I wanted to keep one but my dad told me we’d have to leave it in the incubator for a few days so he gave me a marker so I’d know which one was mine. They all looked the same so I should have waited until they were more mature to choose, but I picked one up and drew a big red dot on her forehead. That night I couldn’t even eat dinner I was so excited about my new pet, and I couldn’t go to sleep until I saw her again, so I waited for my parents to go to bed and snuck out to the barn. You probably know where this is going.”
“No idea.”
“When I got to the incubator her head was split open and the other chicks were pecking at her brains. I screamed loud enough to wake my parents and they came and got me and put me to bed.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Others were pecked to death for much less—we couldn’t even figure out why some of the chicks had been attacked. As far as we could tell, some of them were perfectly normal.”
“Boys will be boys, I guess.”
“Ladies in this case,” he said. “These were all egg-laying hens.”
There was screaming in the distance and the sound of engines. Svenson’s truck was the first to cross the bridge, the other two Klansmen standing in the bed, holding on to the roll bar with one hand, red plastic cups in the other. The rest of the party followed, more tame than the leader.
“It’s good we aren’t up on the road now,” Russell said.