Stranded (15 page)

When I had scrambled to my feet, I recognized Kenny with a group of people unloading equipment from the back of a van. He rocked an amp onto his shoulder and stepped unsteadily with it, telling another guy to “fucking be careful” with the load he was carrying. A sputtering sound and the smell of gasoline suggested a generator operating in one of the Quonset huts.

“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked him.

He hefted the speaker farther onto his shoulder, braced it with the hand with the big studded bracelet, and said maybe inside unless I liked freezing my ass off.

“Are these guys in your band?” I tagged after him.

“Fuck no, these guys suck,” he said. “They are just paying me to help with the equipment. Then it’s our show, baby.”

Someone yelled to Kenny from the huts, asking him where to plug an amp in, and he turned, not bothering to excuse himself. He nearly knocked me backward with the speaker.

“Nice shirt,” I said to his retreating back.

He stopped and hitched his load higher. I meant the compliment. He was wearing a plaid shirt that made him look more like a farm kid than an asshole. In an earlier generation, one before large, industrialized harvesting methods nudged the family farms out, he would have been one. Me, too, probably.

“I have to go,” he said, and disappeared into the Quonset hut with his speaker. “I’ll catch you later.”

I wandered in the dark, feeling safe until I heard a familiar squeak.

“Oh my God,” Sherry Wimple slurred. “Is that really you?”

Sherry held a jar with clear liquid that smelled like paint remover clutched against her chest. Her curly hair was disheveled and streaks of mascara stained her face. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

She lurched sideways and pointed her jar at me. I explained that I was with the band.

“I always knew you were a good egg,” she mumbled.

A good egg?

“Drink till you stink,” she toasted me.

The wind peeled Sherry’s curly blonde hair off her forehead. A boy passed between us carrying a roll of toilet paper. Sherry said his name, attempted to follow him, and bumped into a parked car. I helped her to her feet. Fortunately, whatever was in the jar spilled so she couldn’t finish drinking it.

Once I had her arm draped over my shoulder, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with her—she had been my worst enemy. People were still arriving, about a car a minute. I stumbled with her to the Quonset huts, afraid that when we entered the light, she would recognize who I really was and scream or try to stab me with a cross or something, especially since the inside of the hut was brighter than expected, light reflecting off the metal walls from industrial lamps someone had rigged.

Instead, Sherry leaned close and whispered in my ear.

“I miss her.”

“Natalie will be back sometime,” I consoled.

“Oh, no.” Sherry wiped a tear from her eye.

“I mean I love her,” Sherry said.

I began to wonder what Sherry was really trying to say.

“Natalie and I aren’t going to get to be Sisters in Heaven anymore,” she sobbed, referring to some game she must have played with Natalie as kids. It didn’t sound nearly as interesting as Bulgarian Chef, but it obviously meant something to her.

I left what remained of Sherry on one of two battered couches. I found an old blanket and put it over her knees and patted her on her curly head. People had scribbled prayers as well as crosses and sentimental sayings for Baby Grace on the wall behind her. Most of the messages evoked Jesus and reminded Grace that she was loved, but some of them were angry and spooky, vampire scrawl about Satan’s spawn complete with dripping blood and the number 666.

One quote read, “Before you were born, I knew you.” One in black Sharpie read, “Curse all cowardly devils like you who like to whine and fold their hands
and pray,” with the signature
Zarathustra
. Whoever this Zarathustra was, he was crabby like Kenny.

The whole of Heaven’s reactions to Baby Grace had found their expression on the Quonset hut wall. Some messages called Natalie awful names, but there were other topics mentioned too—the death of a local National Guard soldier in Iraq, the name of a girl who had a convulsion recently and died in the emergency room. There were peace signs and doves and a drawing of Bart Simpson with his pants down urinating on a Cornhusker. Led Zeppelin was celebrated every five feet. There had to be a hundred hearts with initials, some of them scribbled out, new initials stuck in. A discussion of Mr. Gruber’s homosexuality filled a space over the entry, but other peoples’ sexual preferences were also widely discussed. There had to be at least twenty fags—all of them with exclamation points.

You would have to have been living a pretty cloistered life not to be written about on the wall at least once. It was either the devil’s call list or it was who God planned to forgive. If I had a spray can at that moment, I would have written, “Steve Allen is an ass,” because in my opinion, he was. But people don’t think alike, and my message would draw another that might say I was something ugly.

I smelled kerosene. All it would take was one cigarette ash to exterminate all this expression, this ever-changing feeling and emotion. There couldn’t have been a better place to be on a Friday night, not a parent in sight, sort of like a film set for a postapocalyptic adventure. I had not really expected to find a place like this.

Near the corner of the stage I found a packing crate that was unoccupied and climbed on top of it. The height allowed me a view of the door and of the band and of Kenny, who was helping organize equipment. Why perfectly sane upperclassmen had put Kenny in charge I will never know.

After ten or fifteen minutes of arguing and configuring, one of the band members, a senior, waltzed onto the stage and twanged his instrument and muttered, “Test, test, test” into the microphone. Kenny shouted, “Not yet,” and feedback squelched from the speakers. People clapped. Soon, four other members of the band stepped onto the stage. The lead singer wore a cowboy hat, the bass player furry green pants that must have once belonged to the bottom half of the school mascot—the Fighting Soybean. All of them were dressed strangely, with wristbands like Kenny’s or their hair gelled or under baseball caps worn sideways.
They appeared to be some kind of urban-punk-reggae-country-gangsta-rap band who played the blues.

“It looks like they are going to start soon,” one of three girls near the packing crates turned to tell me. She recognized me, then whispered something to her friends.

“About time,” one friend responded.

The lead singer of the band strode to the microphone, took it in his palm, and drew it to his mouth.

“We are Bland,” he announced in a voice that went deeper toward the end, a voice that was meant to be casual but had probably been practiced.

He began to play his guitar, and the music was anything but bland if you took into consideration all their influences. The three girls in front of me provided a steady commentary to fill in one of them who had come from out of town. I heard murmurings that Bland, the number of people who had showed up, that this might be the last time anyone partied in this place, had made the event a historic moment even before it happened.

The inside of the Quonset hut filled and warmed with bodies. I pulled off two of my three sweaters and dropped them by the crates. I scanned the crowd, about one hundred people. Bland’s lead singer put the microphone in its stand, where it thumped and squelched.
He picked up his guitar, and he and the other musicians played a self-styled number about love in the fast lane while Kenny winced and spun knobs behind a table built out of sawhorses.

Reverberation made it hard to distinguish the song’s exact lyrics. The tune was mostly an instrumental anyway, and there were moments of solo jams that the artists definitely got into—with bobbing heads and down-on-their-knees guitar licks. When Bland finished the number, the lead singer introduced another about a boy who grows up in the cornfields of America. He, the bass player, and the guy behind the electric piano jumped three times, living for the someday when they had their own YouTube video. The keyboardist miscued his landing, and the rest of the band had to stop and start into the song again, jumping one more time, one, two, three.

Kenny pushed his way through a group of seniors and climbed up next to me on my boxes.

“These guys suck,” he said.

“Don’t you have a job to do?” I asked.

“Believe me, I’ve done all I can,” he answered.

He had a cold beer and handed it over.

Bland kicked off another song that was either “Stairway to Heaven” or heavily influenced by Led
Zeppelin or just lead guitars in general. The group of girls near me began to dance and soon there were more girls dancing, partnered with each other in the center of the Quonset hut floor. They were surrounded by a ring of weaving male bystanders holding bottles and appreciating their moves. Every so often, a beer was knocked off a surface or dropped and smashed. I noticed Sherry perched on the knee of one of the seniors who had helped Kenny unload the van. Her hair was a little gold cloud reflecting the silver of the hut.

“They’re pretty hot,” someone down below me shouted over the music, referring to Bland, and meaning it.

“You are the world’s biggest fucking appreciator of losers, Sorensen,” Kenny shouted back, thinking it was me who had spoken.

I kissed him.

A loud cheer broke out and a couple of people whistled. A hand brushed my waist—Boog’s. He had obviously had a few. He tugged his pants higher on his hips before he came around to talk to me.

“Howdy, partner,” he said.

A guy near him handed over a plastic bottle of vodka, which Boog took a drink from and passed off to me.

“Good to see you again,” he said.

A group of his friends filed in behind and in front of the packing crates. One of them grabbed the bottle before I could decide what to do with it. Boog must have been dancing somewhere else or running. He smelled of sweat and his hair was damp. When Bland finished “Friends in Low Places,” he leaned over and slurred in my ear, “Howdy, partner” a second time. His breath was killer and he lurched into the melee and flung himself into his friends, all big like himself and wearing letter jackets from schools towns and towns away. Steve Allen wasn’t with them.

The guy who Boog collided with dropped his beer. The music started again. Bland played something that sounded like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and Boog and his buddies began knocking into each other so hard that some of the lawn chairs had to be abandoned. Kenny and I slid off the packing crates before they toppled. One of the speakers tipped and the sound board fell from the top of the sawhorses. The music kept playing.

“Hey,” I heard Kenny yell, “careful with the fucking equipment!”

I didn’t see if he was able to save it. I plunged through a crowd of bodies, unsure which way to escape being trampled. A shoulder slammed into me. To my right, Boog careened my way and all 207 pounds knocked
me to the floor. The music stopped as another speaker toppled.

“Kelly,” Kenny said, pushing his way toward me.

He pulled at my elbow, heaved me to a sitting position, and brushed the glass off my back. People stepped around me.

“Talk about fucked up,” someone said as they saw me sitting in a puddle.

The generator hummed and popped. I wasn’t bleeding, but Kenny led me from the building. Some of the chaos spilled out with us. Fog from running car engines choked the air. Pete and his friends turned sticks in a fire and melted plastic cups, which rose and scattered toxic sparks.

“We aren’t going to get to play, man,” Kenny told Pete.

A roar of voices smothered the night noises and popping fire. Down at the end of the access road, wheels of red spun in the sky, rotating like alien ships. Beyond it, the night landscape crouched. I wondered if I had a concussion.

“What is that?” someone asked, pointing toward the flashing lights.

“Shit,” Kenny said.

“It’s the law!” cried a voice by the Quonset hut.

“They are busting the party.”

“No.” I grabbed Kenny.

People fled; car horns began to sound as partiers tried to leave before they were trapped. The first set of revolving lights was followed by another, and after that another, so that soon the whole sky was awash in color. There was nowhere for everyone to go. Only one road led in or out.

I held on to Kenny. “What if we’re caught?” I asked him.

“Jesus, Sorenson.” Kenny shrugged my arm off. “Chill out. It’s not like they didn’t come and do the same thing last month.”

“They did?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “This is Heaven.”

He smiled his sly smile.

“COULD I HAVE POSSIBLY DONE SOMETHING WITH
the soap?” I asked Nana fourteen months later.

“Good lord!” She glanced at the evidence that I was hopeless when it came to domestic chores.

I held a basket of laundry that I had done for her. Some of the things that used to be white were now pink. The tablecloth we planned to use for Mom’s wedding feast was tinged the color of a fuzzy stuffed piglet. We were headed for Harvey’s farm that afternoon. Natalie was coming home on her first supervised visit. Mom and Harvey were getting married, and Mr. Gruber, still the principal at Carrie Nation, had arranged Natalie’s temporary release and had driven her in from Des Moines.

Natalie had once told me that a murderer was the
very last thing she was. In her pretrial statements, she said almost the same thing and further explained that she believed that the baby would survive, like Moses in the bulrushes. She also believed that if she left Grace under God’s blue sky, God would watch over her and whatever became of her would be God’s will. He would rescue her. When no one accused or suspected Natalie, she thought that was God’s will too. Natalie’s attorney’s motion to have her found not guilty by reason of mental incapacity was accepted by the judge, and she had spent the year in a closed facility but was now in a minimum security center. This was because the bearded boyfriend turned out to be Jesus. I had suspected as much when I saw the gold lettering she used to describe him in her journal.

For most of the evaluation hearing, Natalie maintained her calm, talking to the judge in the same voice she used to complain about my rubber hamster. She told the truth like she had never meant to hide it. At the time, I had been a little afraid by how composed she was.

“Don’t forget the Dust Buster.” Nana loaded supplies into the back of her car as we prepared to make our way to Mom’s wedding. She decided to change Mom’s color to pink instead of trying to bleach the
tablecloth white again. Nana was prepared to wage a war, though, with the cat hair at Harvey’s. In addition to the Dust Buster, she was bringing along a Swiffer, three lint rollers, and the wedding cake.

When we pulled into Harvey’s drive, Natalie sat on the porch tucked into a swing. She hugged Nana and me and told us both it was good to see us in the stiff, polite voice that I knew was meant to hide her real feelings. I snared the two of us a couple of Popsicles from Harvey’s fridge. It was my fridge now, as I spent most of my time on the farm, visiting Nana on the weekends, sassing her to keep her from turning to rust and leaving behind little messes that she lived to clean. A gray cat with a white bib sidled up and leaped onto Natalie’s lap. We talked about what her life was like at the juvenile facility and what she might want to do when she was released. Natalie had plucked her eyebrows since the last time I had seen her. She was still pretty but somehow harder, like Lenore Boogman. The cat brushed Natalie’s chin with its tail. Harvey had four indoor cats and six barn cats and I was always picking one of them up and removing it from somewhere: the kitchen sink, the top of the television set, my head when I was trying to sleep at night.

Since I hadn’t seen Natalie in a long time, I didn’t
know how to talk to her. The media had given her a lot of attention—she was interviewed by
20/20
,
Nightline
, even Dr. Phil. She was star material, and I had this uncomfortable feeling that because of her fame and how long we had been apart, she would find me sort of boring. I set my almost-finished Popsicle down on the edge of the porch and attempted to remove the cat from her lap, who for whatever reason—cats have very odd brains—sank his claws in and refused to release her.

Natalie became hysterical. Fur flew. Purple Popsicle stuck to bare skin. The cat skedaddled under the porch, for the first time in its life taking a hint. I couldn’t translate everything that Natalie sobbed because she was reliving a long time all at once—our childhood, her absent mother, her feelings for Steve, whom she had written but who had never written back. I held Natalie until she settled down. I learned there had been other outbursts in her counselor’s office.

We would have been different people to each other if her lies had stayed concealed. She would have remained a doll on a shelf in its box. She would have been preserved, but maybe not as alive as she was meant to be. I might have become another Aunt Denise.

After the Quonset hut party, I transferred to school
in Collinsville, which I am sure was a relief to Ernie Connigan, the bus driver.

I see kids from Carrie Nation at parties. Some of them try to put me down, some of them don’t care, most of them have moved on to other worries and scandals. Even though the Quonset huts were finally knocked down, an abandoned milking shed close to Collinsville took their place. Lenore Boogman got pregnant and had a boy, who she named Raul Boogman. Her mother kicked her out of the house, but I see her because she moved into Collinsville and lives over a Laundromat with her boyfriend Raul Sr.—a nice guy. Boog, older than I thought he was, enlisted in the National Guard. He’s the first boy of my acquaintance to look anything like a man. He’s firmed up. His pants stay put. He gets a six-plus on the Maximum Man scale.

Kenny Stockhausen, meanwhile, moved to Binghamton, New York, to live with his mother after his uncle was arrested for distributing meth. Where Kenny will ultimately wind up is anybody’s guess. Jail maybe. He’s one of those coins you toss that could come down either way. Last time I shot him a note on Facebook, he sent me a vampire bite.

Katy gives me a flower for my little Green Patch every once in a while too, but she’s moved on. Her
mother has remarried and the word is her new step-brother is remarkably hot. When Katy and I last talked, she knew that I was going to warn her not to sleep with her brother even before I got my mouth open. That’s one thing I liked about Katy—she was sharp.

After my mother’s wedding ceremony, Nana, Natalie, Mom, me, and the Gruber brothers ate a ham dinner together. Uncle Robert made the first toast.

The best thing about living on the Gruber farm is that I am no longer an outsider to farm life. Every day, I argue biodiesel feasibility with Harvey and find ways to keep him from catering to pork processors in issues of feed and fertility. It makes up for not having Natalie around to wrangle with about unicorns.

I have my work cut out for me. Harvey heats his barns into the nineties so that his boars will produce more semen and his sows will ovulate faster. His pig poop slurry overflows during heavy rains and makes a mess that Harvey is going to have to fix with better irrigation and a free-range pen. I am working to convince him that his pigs will procreate no matter what and that the most essential thing for the universe is not to play God but to be satisfied with being human instead. He takes what I say the same way he listens to my grandmother carry on about the cat fur on the
furniture—patiently. He no longer drops all his tools on the kitchen table, and he’s stopped trying to increase insemination rotations to six-week cycles.

It’s not so bad living in his house.

He loves my mother. She loves him. Perhaps when you are in love, the whole world can be turned over and reconceived without it hurting. Uncle Robert
is
GAY!!!! by the way. I guess I was warned by the bus seat, but the good news keeps sinking in.