Torch

  Marcy pushed her way back into the kitchen through the swinging door, holding a stack of dirty plates with uneaten edges of food and wadded-up napkins. She set them on the counter where Joshua had just finished cleaning up and then reached into her apron for a cigarette. Joshua watched her, trying to appear not to, as he scraped off the dishes. She was in her late twenties, married, with two kids, short and big-breasted, which made her look heavier than she was. Joshua spent a lot of his time at work trying to decide whether he thought she was pretty or not. He was seventeen, lanky and fair, quiet but not shy.

  His mother was talking to a dowser named Patty Peterson. He could hear Teresa’s animated voice and then Patty’s quavering one. Marcy stood listening, untied her apron, and tied it again more tightly. “Next thing you know your mom will go down to Africa and teach us all about it. Maybe the way they go to the bathroom down there.”

  “She would like to go to Africa,” Joshua said, dumb and steadfast and serious, refusing to acknowledge even the slightest joke about his mother. She would go to Africa, he knew. She’d go anywhere, she’d leap at the chance.

  “They got an African over in Blue River now. Some adopted kid,” Vern said from the back door. He had it propped open with a bucket despite the cold. Marcy was the owner’s daughter; Vern, the night cook.

  “Not African, Vern. Black,” said Marcy. “He’s from the Cities. That’s not Africa.” She adjusted the barrette that held her curly hair up at the back of her head. “Are you trying to freeze us all to death in here?”

  Vern shut the door. “Maybe your mom will interview the African,” he said. “Tell us what he has to say for himself.”

  “Be nice,” Marcy said. She went up on her tiptoes and pulled a stack of Styrofoam containers down from the top shelf, clenching her cigarette in her mouth. “Nothing against your mom, Josh,” she said. “She’s a super nice lady. An interesting lady. It takes all kinds.” With great care, she tapped the burning end of her cigarette on a plate, then she blew on it and put it back into her apron pocket and buzzed out the door.

  Six years ago, when his mother had first started the show, Joshua hadn’t felt ashamed. He’d been proud, as if he had been hoisted up onto a platform and was glowing red-hot and lit up from within. He believed his mother was famous, that they all were—he and Claire and Bruce. Teresa had made them part of the show; his life, their lives, were the fodder. She made them eat raw garlic to protect against colds and heart disease, rub pennyroyal on their skin to keep the mosquitoes away, drink a tea of boiled jack-in-the-pulpit when they had a cough. They could not eat meat, or when they did they had to kill it themselves, which they did one winter when they’d butchered five roosters that as chicks they’d thought were hens. They shook jars of fresh cream until it congealed into lumps of butter. His mother got wool straight off a neighbor’s sheep and carded it and spun it on a spinning wheel that Bruce had built for her. She saved broccoli leaves and collected dandelions and the inner layers of bark from certain trees and used these things to make dye for the yarn. It came out the most unlikely colors: red and purple and yellow, when you might have expected mudlike brown or green. And then their mother would tell everyone all about what the family did on the radio. Their successes and failures, discoveries and surprises. “We are all modern pioneers!” she’d say. Listeners would call in to ask her questions on the air, or would call her at home for advice. Slowly at first, and then overnight it seemed, Joshua didn’t want to be a modern pioneer anymore. He wanted to be precisely what everyone else was and nothing more. Claire had stopped wanting to be a modern pioneer well before that. She insisted on wearing makeup and got into raging fights with their mother and Bruce about why they could not have a TV, why they could not be normal. These were the same fights Joshua was having with them now.

  “You’re going to have to clean the fryer too,” said Vern. “Don’t go trying to leave it for Angie.”

  Joshua went back to scrubbing, turning the hot water on full blast. The steam felt good on his face, opening the pores. Pimples bloomed on the rosy part of his cheeks and the wide plain of his forehead. At night in bed he scratched them until they bled, and then he would get up and put hydrogen peroxide on them. He liked the feeling of the bubbles, eating everything away.

  “You hear what I told you?” Vern said, when Joshua shut the water off.

  “Yep.”

  “What?”

  “I said I did,” he said more harshly, turning his blue eyes to Vern: a gaunt old man with a paunch and a bulbous red nose. One arm had a tattoo of a hula dancer, the other a hooked anchor with a rope wound around it.

  “Well, answer me, then. Show some respect for your elders.” Vern stood near the door in his apron and T-shirt, which were caked with smudges the color of barbeque sauce where he had wiped his hands. He opened the door again and tossed his cigarette butt into the darkness. Outside there was a concrete landing, glazed with ice, and an alley where Joshua’s truck and Vern’s van were parked along the back wall of Ed’s Feed.

  Joshua lifted the sliding hood of the dishwasher, and the steam roiled out. He slid a clean rack of flatware out and began to sort the utensils into round white holders as he wiped each one quickly with a towel.

  “Running behind tonight, ain’t you?”

  “Nope.” On the radio he heard his mother laugh, and the well-witcher laughed too, and then they settled back into their discussion, serious as owls.

  “Ain’t you?”

  “I said no.”

  “Maybe you’re gonna have to learn that when a man’s got a job, a man’s gotta show up on time, ain’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “I seen you left the lasagna pan for Angie last night. Don’t go thinking that I don’t see. ’Cause I see. I see everything your shit for brains can think up about two weeks before you get to it. And I knowed you’re always thinking things. Trying to see what you can get away with. Ain’t you?”

  “Nope.”

  Vern watched Joshua, slightly bent from the waist, a cigarette smoking between his lips, as though he were trying to come up with something else to say, running down the list of things that pissed him off. Joshua had known Vern most of his life, without having known him at all. It wasn’t until they worked together at the café that he even knew that Vern’s name was Vern—Vern Milkkinen. Before that, he’d known him as the Chicken Man, the way most people in Midden did, because he spent his summers in the Dairy Queen parking lot selling baby chicks and eggs and an ever-changing assortment of homemade canned goods, soap, beeswax candles, and his special chokecherry jam. It had never occurred to Joshua to wonder what the Chicken Man—what Vern—did to occupy his time in the months that he wasn’t selling things until he walked into the kitchen at the café and saw Vern standing there, butcher knife in hand.

  On that first day working together, Vern did not indicate that he remembered Joshua, seemingly unconscious of the fact that he’d actually watched him grow up, from four to seventeen, laying eyes on him during those fourteen summers at least once a week, first as a child, when Joshua would go with his mother to purchase things from the Chicken Man, and then later when he was sent on his own. The DQ parking lot was the closest thing Midden had to a town square because it also shared its parking lot with the Kwik Mart and Gas, and Bonnie’s Burger Chalet. Every week he and the Chicken Man would exchange a nod or the slightest lift of the chin or hand. Once, when Joshua was ten, the Chicken Man asked him if he liked girls, if he had a girlfriend yet, if he’d ever kissed a girl, if he’d preferred brunettes or blonds.

  “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.