Читать книгу Girl Gone Missing - Marcie Rendon - Страница 7
ОглавлениеOn that sunny note, Cash crawled out of bed, got dressed and headed from Fargo to the Moorhead State campus on the other side of the Red River bridge. She nursed a tepid cup of coffee, intended to get her through her first two classes, while she tried to shake the dream from her head.
With a one-hour break between her biology and psychology classes, Cash made a beeline for her Ranchero and retrieved her cue stick from behind the front seat. She took off across campus to the Student Union, heading for the billiard room.
It was beet-hauling season in the Valley, and Cash was driving beet truck afternoons and evenings when her class schedule allowed. Between classes she would stop at the rec hall to practice her game.
The rec hall allowed students twenty-four-hour access to the larger tables and no fee to play with a student ID. Her game had improved considerably since starting college. Barroom pool tables tended to be shorter so as not to take up too much drinking space. But here at the rec hall, the full-size tables were always open. Apparently, Midwest farmer-type college students weren’t pool sharks. They spent more time writing term papers and reading textbooks.
Cash was learning a lot at Moorhead State College. She had already found out that most girls her age considered shooting pool a sin, against their church upbringing. While Cash drank Budweiser and wore straight-legged blue jeans and a clean T-shirt under a Levi jean jacket each day, a good handful of the students preferred smoking weed to drinking. They dressed in bell-bottom jeans and sheer peasant blouses: hippie attire. They talked about making love, not war. They flashed peace signs at each other as they crossed the green campus lawn.
And then there were the college jocks, the students from small-town, conference-winning sports teams who were bigshot scholarship jocks now. They were too undersized for any professional team they might hope to be scouted for. And who knew to look for them in the Red River Valley of the North anyway?
There were also the studious kids—students who in their small towns had been picked on, teased or ostracized because they got A’s in algebra without cheating, who read Macbeth and enjoyed it. The ones who willingly stayed after school to create potions in the under-financed science labs of the high schools ruled by the captain of the football team and his cheerleader homecoming queen.
Cash had always played 8-ball for money, but here at college she had learned how to play 9-ball against fraternity jocks who considered it the only pool game worthy of their time. It kept her in shape for the money-making games at the Casbah—her home bar—over in Fargo, on the North Dakota side of the Red River.
She removed her cue stick from the fringe leather case she had made a few years ago. She screwed the two lengths of stick together and rolled it across the green of the nine-foot table.
She chalked the tip of her cue and broke the rack. She started with the 1-ball, then went ball by ball in numerical order, attempting a bank shot for each one into an opposite corner. She frustrated herself with her failures.
She stretched her five-foot, two-inch frame over the pool table, her cue stick resting easily on the arch made between her thumb and curled pointer finger.
“Cash, there you are!” Cash’s zone was broken. Shhi…t. She nicked the edge of the cue ball sending it toward the 11 but about three inches off. She slid back off the table and turned to see Sharon hopping down the three rec hall steps, her flared bell-bottoms swirling around her platform shoes. Hippie girl.
“I was looking all over for you after science class. I’m in love! Do you think he’s married? Do you think he fools around if he is? Don’t you just love his hair, the way he kinda swoops it back over his forehead? And his bod… man.”
Cash leaned over and aimed at the 11-ball again. “Who are we talking about?”
“Mr. Danielson.” Sharon hopped up on the tall stool, crossed her legs and opened her long sweater jacket, her braless chest visible through the sheer gauze of her Indian-style shirt. “From now on I’m sitting in the front row, just like this.” She tossed her long blonde hair over her shoulder. “You can sit in the back row close to the door all by yourself. I want to be right up front where he can see all of me.”
“You’re crazy.” Cash watched the 11-ball drop smoothly into the far-left pocket. She scanned the table looking for the 12-ball and calculated the best angle for a bank shot. “He’s an old man.”
“He’s only thirty.”
“That’s half dead.”
“Mary Beth said she heard from someone that some of the teachers give A’s for head.”
“What the heck are you talking about?” Cash stood on tiptoe to reach across the table to line up on the 12. She was also learning that college hippie chicks wanted to talk about free love, weed and ending the war in Viet Nam more than anything else.
“You know, head: a blow job, go down on him.”
“There are easier ways to get an A.”
“Maybe for you. Do you ever study? He is so groovy.” Sharon exaggerated the flip of her hair over her other shoulder.
“Thought you had a boyfriend.”
“Haven’t you heard? Make Love, Not War.” Sharon giggled.
“Come on, grab a cue and play against me.”
“Sure, Miss Shark. That’s not a game. That’s just me moving the balls around the table for you.” But she hopped off the chair and grabbed a cue from the wall as Cash racked the balls. Once again, Cash didn’t hit the balls hard enough for any of them to drop. She was going to have to spend a few sessions just practicing her first shot, she could see.
“Open table,” she said to Sharon.
Sharon walked around the table. “So…what should I shoot?”
“Try that solid right there. Nick the edge.” Cash pointed at a spot on the purple ball. “Nick it soft and it’ll drop right in.”
Sharon slammed the cue ball into the solid purple. The ball dropped into the pocket followed by the cue ball. “Argghhh! This is why you ran out of class? To shoot pool?”
“Yeah, I drive shift tonight. Needed a few practice games.” Cash ran five stripes before miscuing. “You have solids.”
Sharon aimed at the 7-ball. “Did you hear about that chick who disappeared from Dahl Hall? Kids are saying maybe she got pregnant and went home. Then someone said she hitchhiked down to the Cities, but she hasn’t come back. Her parents were at the Dean’s office this morning.” Cash watched Sharon get a lucky break, accidently dropping the 7 in a side pocket.
“Nope, didn’t hear that.”
“That’s right, you got special exemption to live off campus. I hate the dorm: curfew, no boys allowed…” Sharon missed her shot. “This chick was in our science class—blonde, used to wear a miniskirt and sit in the front row every class? Danielson was always calling on her. She’d tilt her head and cross her legs before answering the question. His eyes were never on her face Bet she was getting A’s. Your turn.”
Cash took aim at the 10. “Where’s she from?”
“Who?”
“The girl who’s missing, dingbat.”
“Oh. Shelly?” Sharon answered as if asking Cash.
“Shelly. The town of Shelly?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just curious.” Cash had a three-ball run and lined up to bank the fourth. She missed the shot.
“Your shot.”
“Hey, Cash, you got any enemies?” Sharon asked under her breath.
“Not that I know of, why?”
Sharon rolled her eyes up toward three people—a guy and two girls—standing on the steps leading into the pool table area. They looked like they could be college students, except instead of hippie clothes they wore straight-legged jeans, T-shirts and jean jackets. Just like Cash. One of the girls had her hair in two braids that hung down the front of her jacket, the other had hers pulled back in a ponytail. The guy had messy braids, like maybe he had braided them a couple days ago and hadn’t redone them yet. None of them were smiling. They were clearly looking at Cash and Sharon.
Cash lit a Marlboro. She took a long drag before she lined up on the 8-ball. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the three of them come down the steps toward the table.
They stood watching. Finally the guy said, “Play partners? Me and her”—pointing at the girl with two braids—“against you and her.”
Before Sharon got the “no” out of her mouth, Cash said, “Sure. Rack ‘em up.”
It was a silent game, clearly between Cash and the guy, their partners missing shots each turn. Sharon was so nervous her cue stick shook whenever she attempted a shot. Cash played cat and mouse—not doing exactly her best but not letting him win easily either—playing just well enough to keep him convinced he was better than her but that maybe she was okay.
With one ball left and the 8-ball, he asked, “Straight 8 or last pocket?”
“Straight 8 is fine,” Cash said.
His partner finally spoke. “Where you from?”
“Family’s from White Earth. I live over in Fargo.”
“How come we haven’t seen you at any of the Indian student meetings?” asked the girl with the ponytail.
“I didn’t know there were any.”
“Every Friday night. At Mrs. Kills Horses.”
“Potluck,” said the girl with braids, missing her shot at the 8.
“Where’s that?” Cash had no intention of going.
“3810 10th Avenue,” the guy said. “She makes Sloppy Joes so there’s always something even if no one brings anything.”
“And beer,” said the ponytail. “If you got an ID, bring some beer.”
Cash rethought going. “3810 10th Avenue?”
“Yep,” said the guy, making the 8-ball and laying the cue across the table. “We’re going to talk about bringing AIM up from Minneapolis.”
“AIM?” It was the first time Sharon spoke since the trio had arrived.
“The American Indian Movement,” answered the girl with braids, looking the blonde hippie chick up and down with a frown and one eyebrow raised.
Sharon stared back at her, peace and love gone from her blue eyes.
The girl with the braids looked at Cash and said, “See you Friday.”
The three turned and left the rec hall. Cash re-racked the balls. “One more game. Then I gotta go.”
“My boyfriend attended an AIM meeting down in the Cities when he was there last year for the Miigwetch Mahnomen powwow. They’re pretty radical. Red Power and all.”
Cash wondered to herself how Sharon knew how to pronounce miigwetch and Mahnomen so perfectly, but didn’t ask. Instead she said, “He goes to school over at NDSU?”
“Yeah, that’s where most of the North Dakota Indians go. Something about the BIA money coming out of the Aberdeen office and NDSU being cheaper than sending them to school out of the Dakotas.”
Another thing Cash hadn’t known before starting college: her BIA money came out of Minneapolis because she was enrolled at the White Earth Reservation, which was just about forty-five miles east from where they were standing in Moorhead, Minnesota. When Wheaton, the county sheriff in Norman County, had convinced Cash to register for school, she learned she would be attending on a BIA scholarship. Wheaton told her the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe had signed a treaty with the United States government that guaranteed higher education to tribal members who wanted it. So she may as well go, do something with her life besides farm work, he said.
“Why don’t you and your boyfriend come to the meeting on Friday night? And I can meet Mr. Free Love,” said Cash, breaking the rack with force. This time the 1-ball dropped in a pocket. “I’ve got solids.”
“Sloppy Joes and beer? I’ll see what he says. Can’t imagine he’d turn that down. Only thing sweeter would be some good smoke,” said Sharon. “He liked what those AIM folks were talking about.”
“Yeah?”
“Guess they started a street patrol down in the Cities. The cops were picking up Indians from Franklin Avenue at closing time, just putting them in the trunks of their car and then dumping them down by the Mississippi or beating them up. So AIM started a patrol to get folks home safely. They talk about Indians standing up for their rights. My boyfriend says they’re like the Black Panthers, but Indians.”
Cash had no idea what Franklin Avenue was, but from Sharon’s tone she assumed it was like NP Avenue over in Fargo where all the cheap 3.2 bars were and chronics like Ol’ Man Willie started and ended the day in their favorite booth. ‘Cept up here in the F-M area, it was old white men who were chronics, not Indians.
NP avenue was also where she called home, drinking at the Casbah bar each night—or each night when it wasn’t beet-hauling season. She put in about an hour at the pool table after a day in the fields, playing for free drinks and the occasional dollar or five-dollar bet before heading to her apartment down the street. The only thing she knew about AIM was a couple one-night stands she’d had with a guy she called Long Braids. He had been on his way down to Minneapolis to meet up with AIM for some protest out east when their paths had crossed up Bemidji way.
“Thought those three were coming to beat you up.” Sharon interrupted her thoughts, making a straight-in shot, but missing her next one. “Don’t know why you all look so mean all the time.”
“Hmphh,” breathed out Cash. She had a four-ball run before sinking the 8. She started to unscrew her cue and put it away in its fringed leather case. “Gotta get to work.”
“Are you going by your apartment? Can you drop me off in Fargo?”
“Sure.”
Cash and Sharon left the Student Union and headed for Cash’s Ranchero. They passed groups of students on the campus lawn, studying, flirting, protesting. Get Out of Viet Nam. Sharon talked the whole time about Danielson, then about her boyfriend’s little sister who didn’t like her because she was white, then again how she thought the three Indians in the pool room were coming to beat her or Cash up. Cash half-listened. With the rest of her attention, she drove and daydreamed along to Pasty Cline singing about someone’s kisses leaving her cold.
“Can we find some rock and roll?” Sharon reached for the radio dial and changed the station. “Here we go: the Rolling Stones.”
In Fargo, Cash stopped in front of the Maytag appliance store. Home. Sharon got out, waving as she walked west. Cash watched her go. She figured that after a bit Sharon would stick out her thumb to hitchhike the remaining mile to NDSU.
Cash ran up the stairs to her apartment, threw her schoolbooks and notebooks on the white enamel kitchen table that served as a place for her to study and eat. She lit a match, turned the gas burner on low under the tin coffee pot that still had coffee from the morning. She went into the next room and pulled off the clothes she had worn to school and tossed them over the overstuffed chair that held her “almost” clean clothes. She grabbed a different pair of jeans off the floor and jerked them on. It was the same pair she had been wearing all week while driving beet truck. She shook out a T-shirt and flannel shirt from the floor and put those on too.
Driving beet truck wasn’t as dirty as driving during combine season when chaff and wheat bits got into all the creases of your clothes and the dust coated your hair like baby powder, but the smell of the beet plant clung to your clothes. Cash figured it would be Christmas before the smell washed out completely. She wore a flannel shirt because the heater didn’t always work in Milt Wang’s trucks.
She quickly braided her waist-length hair into one long braid and pulled on her jean jacket. She filled her red Thermos with hot coffee and opened the fridge as if there might be food in there. Two bare shelves with a half-dozen carton of eggs looked out at her. She’d have to grab a tuna sandwich at the Silver Cup.
The evening waitress was used to Cash running in and saying, “Tuna sandwich.” The waitress, who wore her hair in a black beehive, must have seen her coming through the front window because she was already wrapping the sandwich in wax paper: tuna, mayonnaise and a leaf of lettuce between two slices of white Wonder Bread. She put the sandwich in a small brown paper bag and folded it over neatly, just as Cash imagined all the wives of the men she worked with prepared their liverwurst or roast beef sandwiches, neatly wrapped in wax paper, too, but with homemade chocolate cake or chocolate chip cookies thrown in. Some day, Cash might ask Beehive for a slice of chocolate cake to go with her tuna sandwich.
Cash put the Ranchero in reverse, then headed east to Highway 75 going north of Moorhead. Just as she was signaling to turn on 75, she changed her mind, decided to keep going straight east to the neighboring town of Hawley, where she turned north on Highway 9, a highway that would take her directly into the county seat of Ada. After a few miles she cruised through the small town of Felton, noticing several grain trucks lined up at the elevators. She drove a few miles farther, past the Lutheran Church that sat on the edge of Borup township. Still going north, she rounded a curve on the highway and crossed a bridge over the Wild Rice River, which was not much more than a narrow creek this late in the fall.
As she came out of the curve, she saw the county sheriff’s car sitting at a gravel county crossroad. She braked to a slow crawl and pulled in alongside the tan cruiser so her driver’s window was directly across from the police car window. She rolled down her window at the same time Wheaton was rolling down his. “Funding the Thanksgiving turkey giveaway?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Nah, football practice is about to get over in Borup and the Ambrose boys will be speeding into Ada. One of them is dating the head cheerleader in Ada and he tries to get there just as soon as they get out of practice. One of these days he’s going to come around that curve and end up in old man Peterson’s field. Figure after a couple more days of seeing me sitting here, he’s going to learn to slow down a bit before taking that curve. On your way to work?”
“Yeah.”
“Why you coming down 9? Aren’t you driving for Milt over in Halstad?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s school?”
“Okay.”
They sat there, quiet. Cash watched the sun dip toward the western horizon. Sheriff Wheaton watched the occasional car pass on the highway.
Cash finally spoke. “Hear anything about some girl missing from Shelly?”
“Huh? So that’s why you’re tracking me down.”
More silence, more sky and road watching.
“Well?” asked Cash.
“You just focus on your schooling, girl. Leave the police work to me.”
Cash watched the sky turn to orange, pink and purple stripes over the Red River tree line twenty-some miles west across the flat farm prairie. Almost all the fields were plowed, row after row of black dirt clods stretched for acres. To the north a corn stubble field sat unplowed, most likely being left to winter over. A green John Deere tractor, slowly pulling a plow, raised dust behind it as it traveled down a gravel road a couple of miles over.
“So where is she?” Cash finally asked. “Who is she? One of the hippie chicks at school said she’s missing from our biology class.”
Wheaton looked over. “You know her?”
“No. This chick just says she was in our class and now she’s missing. They live in the same dorm.”
“She’s the oldest Tweed girl. Three younger sisters. She’s in college over there to get a teaching degree.”
“But she’s gone.”
“Yeah, I drove to Shelly Tuesday to talk to her parents after they called me. Good kid. Valedictorian. Her mom’s working at the dime store in Ada to help pay her college tuition. They’re heartsick. The sisters crying. Not a wild kid. Not one you’d expect to just take off and not say anything.”
“Good kid, huh?”
“Why, you know something?”
“Nah, just that the hippie chick said she sits in the front of the class and flirts with the science teacher to get a good grade. Just talk. I better get to work.” Cash put her arm over the back of the car seat and looked both ways down Highway 9 before backing out onto the road and heading toward Ada. In her rearview mirror, she saw Wheaton give a slight wave. She waved back before rolling up her window.
It was just on the edge of getting dark as Cash pulled into Halstad. She didn’t stop in town but drove on out to Milt’s farm where she exchanged her Ranchero for an International Harvester dump truck. She spent the next eight hours hauling beets back and forth from Milt’s fields to the sugar beet plant just on the northern edge of Moorhead. She figured she made four trips.
Hauling beets meant driving alongside the John Deere harvester while it topped the beets, removed the green leaves, then picked them up out of the ground and carried them on a conveyor belt to the dump truck. Once the dump truck was filled, Cash drove it to the beet plant and waited in a long line with other trucks. The trucks were weighed and the farmer’s name collected, assuring that the farmer would get paid the correct amount for his crop.
Some of the drivers sat in their trucks and read the daily newspaper. Others catnapped. Cash often used the time to read her homework assignments. Tonight, her curiosity was on the Valley gossip. After her first truck was weighed, she climbed down out of it and walked to where a group of other drivers were standing around shooting the bull.
“Hey, Cash, thought you were too good for us already. Too busy stud-y-ing to hang out with those of us still got shit on our shoes.”
Cash laughed. “Nah. Never too good for you, Bruce.” Throughout junior high and high school, she and Bruce had been regulars in the wheat fields or corn furrows drinking six-pack after six-pack, listening to the country music station piped in from Oklahoma. They would drink until the beer was gone, and neither was able to walk a straight line. But he always drove her back to whatever foster place she was calling home that month.
He was one of her boy friends, never a boyfriend. White farmers were okay with their sons drinking with an Indian girl, but dating was off limits. She had learned from Bruce that his father beat his mother—“not that much really”—but Bruce had hoped to enlist and head to Viet Nam as soon as he turned eighteen to get away from home. No one ever really seemed to leave the Valley. Sure, they might move to Moorhead or Crookston and get a job inside the sugar beet factory. Or maybe sell shoes at some shop on another small-town Main Street. But really, none of them ever left. They soon found themselves back plowing fields and driving beet truck for their dads or uncles, waiting for one or the other to die so they could take over the family farm.
For Bruce, some 4F reason kept him out of Nam. So here he was, standing in the chilly October air, smoking Salem cigarettes and bullshitting about who was going to win the World Series, who was knocked up and had to get married, and how that would never happen to him, followed by loud guffaws and back slaps. Soon the conversation would drift back to farming and the best fertilizer to put on the ground in the spring.
The guys were so used to Cash, who had been working with them in various farm labor jobs since she was eleven, that they didn’t change their talk around her.
“Give me a cigarette, I left mine in the truck.” Cash reached out a hand to Bruce. She lit up and took a deep drag and coughed. Bruce slapped her on the back. “Don’t choke.”
“Damn, forgot you smoke these menthols.” Cash coughed but took another smaller drag anyway.
“You’re going to school up in Moorhead?” Steve Boyer asked her.
“Yeah.”
“Know anything about that Tweed girl that disappeared?”
“First I heard about it was today.”
The men all jumped in, a chorus of baritones.
“Her folks are really worried.”
“Valedictorian of her senior class.”
“Remember when Connie Bakkas ran off with that carnie one year after the county fair and her dad had to go down to some place in Kansas to drag her back?”
“Knocked up.”
“But this is Janet. That girl is smart.”
“Got some legs on her too.”
“Wahooo!!”
“You wish.”
Some more backslapping, puffs of cigarettes. Sips of coffee from foam cups that American Crystal had provided in the warm-up shack. But Cash could tell from the looks on their faces that they were worried. Bad things that happened in the Valley were the occasional fight, sometimes a car rollover from kids drag racing down a deserted road, someone got someone pregnant and had to get married. But a town’s top student didn’t just disappear.
“So what happened?” Cash asked.
Bruce answered. “I don’t know. Folks say she was going to the Cities for the weekend with a friend from school—go see the big city and all. But her family doesn’t know who she was going with or if she went or came back or where she is.”
One of the other guys jumped in. “Last they heard from her was on Friday when she called home and said she was going and would call them on Sunday when she got back. She never called.”
“They got phones in the Cities—I know that,” another guy added.
“Let’s go, trucks are moving.”
They dumped the coffee cups on the ground, ground their cigarettes out in the gravel. A roar of truck engines filled the night air as the engines turned over all at once. Gears were shifted into first to move the trucks a couple spaces forward. The trucks that had been weighed were in line to dump their beets on another conveyor belt that would move them to an ever-larger pile of beets waiting to be moved once again into the processing plant.
Cash dumped her truckload after another half hour and then returned to Milt’s field, where she waited in line for another load and another trip back to Moorhead. And so the night went. She read her English assignment and decided she would talk with Mrs. Kills Horses about testing out of English, which she had overheard from some of the other students was possible. There had been one summer in the fields where she read the entire works of Shakespeare, two whole years before anyone else in her grade level ever heard of the guy. Diagramming sentences and reworking dangling participles had been an evening pastime in various foster homes where punishment often meant long hours isolated in a bedroom. This freshman English class was not only deadly boring, it was an early morning class. If she was able to test out of it, it would give her a couple more hours of free time.
She read her psych assignment, all about Freud being the father of modern psychology. When she finished her biology reading right around her midnight run into Moorhead, her mind went back to the Tweed girl. As she munched on her tuna sandwich, she closed her eyes and scanned her memory, searching for the girl in class. Cash always sat in the back row in every class, on whichever side of the room was closest to the door. Some of the students always sat in front. Whenever a teacher asked a question, they were the first to raise their hands. From the back of the room it was a sea of blondes. Scandinavian stock clearly dominated the educational system.
Last Thursday Cash had gotten to class early because Sharon wanted to copy the work Cash had done the night before. They sat at the back of the room. While Sharon cribbed her homework, Cash watched the other students file in, some in groups of three, some alone. The jocks with slicked-back hair and the hippies with scraggly, oily locks lying on their shoulders. Girls came in bell-bottoms or miniskirts.
Cash had uncanny recall ability. She could pull up a page in her science book in her mind’s eye and re-read it from memory. Likewise she could pull up a day or an event and run it across a screen in her mind as if it were happening in present time. Which is what Cash did now. In her mind, Cash watched the students from last Thursday enter the room. Ah, there she was, the girl who must be the Tweed girl. A tall blonde. Not Twiggy model thin but well-fed farmer thin—walked into the room, wearing a plaid miniskirt and a mohair sweater, a book bag slung across her shoulder. She sat in the front row, front and center. Put her bag under the chair and books on the desk. Still, with her eyes almost shut, Cash scanned the room. Nothing else to see. Sun outside the window. More students coming in. Sharon closing her notebook with a sigh of relief. Mr. Danielson came into the classroom and class started. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Now Cash knew who folks were talking about when they said the Tweed girl.
Cash heard the other beet truck engines around her roar to life. Stretching her short frame, she pushed in the clutch with her left foot, right foot on the brake and turned the key in the ignition. She kept the truck in first as she let it roll forward to fill the space left by the other trucks. The air smelled of river mud and sugar beets mashed under truck tires. One would think it would be a syrupy, sugary smell, but it was more like stale cabbage. This fall smell was nothing compared to the rotten egg smell that would permeate the Valley come spring when the beets, which are mostly water, unfroze and the resultant fermented water filled the runoff storage ponds at the beet plant.
Cash was done hauling by two in the morning. She fetched her Ranchero from Milt’s graveled farmyard, lit only by a halogen yard light, hollered See ya, followed by the obligatory hand wave to the other drivers. She sped back to Fargo, where she ran a quick bath, smoked a couple of Marlboros and drank a Bud before collapsing in bed.
When she woke in the morning, she made coffee and a fried egg sandwich. She didn’t have a toaster or butter so once the egg was fried, she slapped it between two slices of white bread. She ate the sandwich on her drive to school. It took a few turns around blocks near the campus before she found a free parking spot. She grabbed her books off the seat and walked to Mrs. Kills Horses’ office in the administration building.
Mrs. Kills Horses was talking on the phone, her long black braids hanging over her full breasts. Dangly turquoise earrings matched her squash blossom necklace. She waved Cash in with a hand wearing three turquoise and silver rings. “Gotta get to work,” she said into the receiver before putting the handset back in the cradle. “Good morning, Renee, how are you?” Cash could see that she was dressed in a long denim skirt. With the turquoise and braids, it made Mrs. Kills Horses look all Southwestern-y.
“Good. I was wondering what I have to do to test out of my English class?”
“Only the very best students do that, Cash.”
“I’m getting all A’s.”
“It’s kinda late in the quarter to think about that.”
“Well, I’m kinda thinking about it. Maybe if you just tell me who I need to talk to?”
“You would have to do it this week or it really will be too late in the quarter.”
Mrs. Kills Horses leaned over her desk and made a show of shuffling papers. When Cash didn’t leave, she picked up a school catalog and made a show of flipping through the pages. Cash sat in a chair and waited. “Ah, here. Professor LeRoy is chair of the English Department.”
As if you didn’t know.
“You would need to talk with him about testing out. His office is in Weld Hall. You should really think about this, though,” she said, looking motherly at Cash. “I can call over to the department and check on your grades if you want.”
Cash, who rarely smiled, smiled. If Mrs. Kills Horses had been the observant type she would have noticed the smile didn’t reach Cash’s eyes. With her fake smile—another skill she was learning at college—Cash lied, “Nah, that’s okay. I’ll talk with my dad about it tonight.” She stood up and turned to leave the office.
“Tezhi said you were going to come to the meeting on Friday night. You’ll get to meet the rest of the Indian students.”
“Tezhi?”
“He said he ran into you shooting pool in the rec center?”
“Oh, yeah, Tezhi.”
“It’s potluck. All the Indian students come. I always make Sloppy Joes.”
“Yeah, that’s what Tezhi said.” Cash said, rolling the new name off her tongue.
“We’re going to plan a powwow and symposium, try to bring AIM in to discuss the rights of Indian students here on campus.”
“I’ll see. I might have to work.”
“Work? Where are you working? You know, any job has to be reported and that could affect your BIA grant monies.”
Damn, thought Cash. Seemed like there was more stuff to learn about going to school than there was actual course work. Thank god most farmers had no problem paying cash to their workers. Looking Mrs. Kills Horses straight in the eye, she said, “My aunt might want me to babysit. Would I have to report that?”
“Gracious, no,” exclaimed Mrs. Kills Horses, her long earrings swinging with her side-to-side headshake. “Just if you are working a job, you know, like waitressing or something.”
“I wouldn’t know how to do that,” Cash said. She was already out the door.
“See you Friday! 6:30,” Mrs. Kills Horses called after her.
Cash walked quickly out of the administration building and took a big gulp of fall air. Being in the brick school buildings, sitting in the classrooms, even those with large windows where she could watch the clouds move across the sky, left Cash short of breath, edgy. She took another deep breath before heading resolutely across campus to Weld Hall.
Cash paused before knocking at the oak door of Professor LeRoy. She didn’t know what to say to most of the people here on campus. They talked a lot, mostly about nothing. She was used to men who knew what kind of fertilizer to put on a corn field or whose main conversation was about when to spread manure on the plowed fields. And, always, the price of grain on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. The men she knew spent little time talking and a lot of time working. The men here on campus, their work was to talk about books, authors, ideas. But rather than talk about the day’s assigned reading material, class discussions often veered off into anti-war discussions or debates about civil rights. Cash wasn’t sure what either of them had to do with her.
Just as she raised her fist to knock on the door, a short bearded man wearing tortoise-shell glasses opened it. Cash stepped back.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to scare you,” Professor LeRoy said, speaking with a rapid cadence, with an accent Cash had never heard before. “Come in, come in. I saw the shadow of your feet under the door. That’s how I knew you were there. I don’t have you in a class. Are you a freshman? Take a seat. What can I help you with?”
Without giving Cash a chance to answer, Professor LeRoy plowed on. “Great weather we’re having, isn’t it? When I moved here from New York everyone told me to appreciate the fall, that the winters would be real kickers. They weren’t kidding. Just a matter of time before the snow falls, right? So what can I do for you? You want to drop your class? Switch teachers? In my experience, one teacher is as good as the next, present company exempted. Ha.” He took a breath while shuffling papers on his desk from one pile to another.
In that space Cash blurted out, “I want to test out of English 101.”
Professor LeRoy stopped shuffling papers mid-air and stared at her.
“I’m a straight-A student.”
“College is a little different than high school. I’ve been teaching here for fifteen years, and the English teachers at these farm schools have barely heard of Shakespeare, let alone Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote. Even with straight A’s, I don’t know how you can expect to pass a college-level test without taking the course.”
“I can do it.”
“Who is your teacher this quarter?”
“Mr. Horace.”
“You don’t like him? Other students love having him. He grades on the curve. Makes it easy to pass. You don’t want to get up that early, is that it?”
“I was told students had the option to test out if they wanted. I want to test out.”
LeRoy shuffled more papers. Cash watched him silently. She wondered to herself what it was about her request that was driving Mrs. Kills Horses and now Professor LeRoy crazy.
“Most of the students who make this request were the top of their high school classes.”
More silence. More shuffling of papers.
Cash lit up a Marlboro. LeRoy pushed a green glass ashtray across his desk. Smoke filled the air. Some of the anxiety left Cash’s chest.
“You’re a freshman?”
“Yes. Do I have to fill out some papers or something to take the test?”
“Well.” He moved more papers around, pulled a drawer open and brought more papers out. “This is the form to request the test.”
Cash reached for the paper. Dean LeRoy put it down on his desk. “You sure you want to do this?”
“What happens if I fail it?” Cash asked.
“You would have to continue in Mr. Horace’s class. Did you talk to him about this? Does he know you want to test out?”
“No. I talked to Mrs. Kills Horses. She gave me your name and sent me over here.”
“Well, I don’t know that it’s such a good idea, but if you have your mind set on it, I suppose you can give it a try. You can fill out the form and then schedule a time to take the test. You would have to sit in my classroom and take it. Take it under observation.”
“Today?”
“No, no, no. Fill out the form, sleep on it. Come back tomorrow and let me know if you still want to do it.”
Cash put out her cigarette and reached across his desk for the form. She picked a pen up off his desk and began to fill it out. LeRoy stood up and opened the window behind his desk to let some of the smoke out. He sat back down and shuffled more papers. Cash pushed the filled-out form toward him. “I’ll stop back tomorrow for you to tell me what day I can take the test.” She turned and almost ran out of the building, taking big gulps of air.
She walked at a fast clip all the way to her Ranchero three blocks away. She jumped in, turned the key in the ignition and drove away. She used the cigarette lighter to light up. She drove straight to the Casbah, her home away from home. It was too early in the day for the brothers, Ole and Carl, to be there. None of the other regulars were there either, except ol’ man Willie.
Cash realized she had never been at the bar in the morning. She usually arrived later in the evening when Willie, more often than not, was passed out in the farthest back oak booth. This early in the morning, he was sitting up at the bar, hunched over a glass of 3.2 tap beer. He looked at Cash, tipped his glass at her and said, “Oh, what is the world coming to when the young ones show up for breakfast?” He took a big gulp.
Shorty Nelson, owner and bartender, stood behind the bar, a white towel slung over his shoulder. His shirt actually looked ironed. He looked neat and put together. Not how he normally looked at the end of the night. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you s’posed to be in school?”
“Give me a Bud.” Cash pushed money across the polished counter. “Those folks drive me crazy.”
“You drive me crazy,” Willie slurred, wrapping a gray-haired arm around Cash’s waist and pulling her against his side. The smell of stale armpits mixed with morning-after beer almost made Cash gag as she pushed away and jerked out of his arms.
“Creep!”
Willie rubbed his thigh, close to his crotch, with the hand that wasn’t holding his beer glass. He grinned, yellow tobacco-stained teeth appeared beneath his Hitler-style mustache. For a split second Cash wondered how, in his constantly drunken state, he managed to maintain the perfect square above his upper lip, but then an involuntary shudder shook her body as she noticed the bulge in his pants, the pants still stained from last night’s drunk.
“Jeezus,” she said, grabbing the Bud, taking a big drink and heading to the coin-operated pool table. She dug four quarters out of her jeans pocket, put them in the coin slot and listened to the comforting sound of billiard balls dropping. She grabbed a house cue because she hadn’t even thought to bring her own, rolled it across the green felt, saw that it was warped a bit, put that one back and grabbed another. That one was a bit straighter, if a tad lighter. But it would work. She racked the balls into the familiar triangle. In one fluid movement she removed the wooden triangle, grabbed the cue stick, leaned over the table and sent the cue ball flying into the racked balls, causing three of them to drop into separate pockets.
Shorty leaned on his forearms across the bar, watching Cash play against herself. “You know, Cash, Willie here used to be one of the richest farmers in the Valley.”
“Still am,” interrupted Willie.
“Until he took to coming in here mornings. Soon he was spending more time drinking than plowing.”
“I can still plow.” He leered for Shorty’s benefit, rubbing his thigh again, tipping his glass in Cash’s direction before killing it off. He wiped the beer foam from his mustache with his forearm and pointed the glass at Shorty. “Another. That’s why I had sons. They run the farm for me since my arthritis kicked in. They don’t need a college degree to farm.”
Shorty refilled his glass saying, “Just shut up and drink, old man. Cash, you got a good thing going, kid. What are you doing here instead of at class?”
Cash leaned on her cue stick. She stared hard at Shorty, willing him to shut up.
“Don’t you know Ole and Carl are in here every night bragging to anyone who will listen about how you are going to college. Everyone’s proud of you.”
“Damn straight,” said Willie, lifting his refilled glass.
“Shut up,” Cash said under her breath, sending the 9-ball into a side pocket. To Shorty, she said, “I just don’t know, Shorty. It’s a whole different world.”
“You’re smart, Cash.”
“I don’t think smart is the issue,” said Cash, lining up the cue ball on the 2-ball, sitting three inches off a corner pocket. “These folks talk a different language. Dress different. Sit inside brick buildings all day and think of fancy ways to string words together instead of just saying things plain out. And I think the teachers all think I’m stupid just because I’m Indian. I’m not used to folks treating me like I’m stupid. Being mean, or calling me names or being disgusting,” she said pointing her cue stick towards Willie, “that, I’m used to, but being thought of as stupid just because I’m Indian? Pisses me off.” She dropped the 8-ball into the same corner as the 2. With the table cleared, she put four more quarters into the table and racked the balls.
As she broke and started shooting, she said, “And these beginner classes are dumb. I learned all this stuff in high school. I don’t see why I have to take it all over again. I heard that students can test out of these baby classes, but when I asked, everyone treats me like I’m just a dumb Indian.”
“Are they gonna let you though?” asked Shorty, flicking his rag across the counter again.
Cash stood up from the table and looked at him across the bar. She took a drink of her Bud and a drag of her cigarette. “I filled out the form to test out of English this morning,” she said, with heavy sarcasm. “I’m going to go talk to the chair again tomorrow to find out when he’ll let me take the test.” She shot a couple more balls into the table before continuing.
“Then I’ll go talk to the chair of the science department about trying to test out of his class too. I can already recite the periodic table frontwards and backwards. I know photosynthesis is what makes us rich here in the Bread Basket of the World.” Cash waved her cue stick and beer bottle in a wide arc. “I don’t think I need to be in a classroom, getting a sore ass sitting on hard chairs, smelling some strange oil these hippies wear to cover the smell of the marijuana they smoke, just to have some old guy tell me that corn and sugar beets need sun to grow.” Cash started furiously shooting balls into pockets. “If I test out, I can just take my psychology and judo classes. Classes I might actually learn something in.”
“Can you do that? I mean, do they let students just test out of classes?” asked Shorty.
“That’s what it says in the student handbook,” answered Cash. “If I can test out, I’ll be free for the rest of the quarter.” She swung her cue over the pool table. “And I can get my game back. I don’t think I was cut out to sit inside brick buildings.”
“You’re still driving truck at night, right?”
“Yeah, that’s why I haven’t been in to shoot. School all day, driving truck at night. I just couldn’t take it anymore this morning. At school, they have these big 9-foot tables. I go over there and play between classes, but I miss this,” she said, waving her cue around the bar, taking another drink of beer and a drag of her Marlboro. “Did you hear about that girl from the college who is missing?”
Shorty wiped the bar with his rag, sopping up the beer Willie had spilled while pushing himself off the bar stool for an unsteady walk to the bathroom. At least he was making it there, not using the back booth as was his nightly habit. All the regulars knew never to sit in that booth. Newcomers soon moved because of the stench.
“Some of the folks were talking. Then there was an article in The Forum.”
“Oh? I didn’t see that.”
“Yeah, just how she seems to have gone to the Cities and hasn’t been heard from since. Her folks are all worried.”
“She’s in my science class. Was.”
“Whaddya think happened?
“I don’t know. I talked to Wheaton last night. He’s asking around.” Cash cleared the table of all the billiard balls. “I s’pose I better go back.” She returned the bar cue to an empty slot on the wall rack. “Guess I’ve missed my English class, but I can still make science and then this afternoon, my last class is judo. Soon I’ll be able to kick fools off bar stools.” She pantomimed a sidekick in Willie’s direction.
“Keep your nose in the books,” Shorty hollered as the bar door closed behind her.
Back at campus, she lucked out and pulled into a parking spot just as another car left, right in front of the main buildings. She grabbed her science book and papers off the passenger seat and went to class. The stream of students passing in the halls from class to class made her feel claustrophobic. She was used to the open fields of the prairie. The crush of human bodies, people rushing with no regard for the space around them or the presence of another being, made it hard for her to breathe. She clung to the brick wall and sidled past folks in a hurry, not wanting someone else to grab her seat at the back of the class.
This classroom had old-fashioned wooden desks, leftovers from the ’50s. The English Department had newer metal desks and plastic chairs. These desks had names and chemical formulas carved into the wood, which meant you had to write your notes on top of a book or your paper would end up with holes every time you hit a carved indent.
Mr. Danielson was at the front of the room, erasing the previous teacher’s scientific equations from the chalkboard. He was wearing blue jeans with a white shirt tucked in. Close to six feet tall, he had his pale blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, loose strands escaping the rubber band. Cash supposed he looked “hot” in a Rod Stewart kinda way. He started writing notes on the board.
Sharon walked in the door, wearing a miniskirt that barely covered her hind end. She winked at Cash and then took a seat in the front row, crossing her legs seductively just as Mr. Danielson turned around from the board. Cash shook her head and opened her science book to the day’s assigned page.
She had just started re-reading the assignment when she heard a soft cough from Sharon. She looked toward the front of the room where Mr. Danielson had gone back to writing on the board. Cash could tell from the way Sharon was leaning back grinning at her that she was sitting with her legs sprawled wide open. When Sharon caught Cash’s eye, she laughed and sat up straight. Mr. Danielson turned around at the laugh, looking at Sharon, who turned back to look at Cash again. When she did, Mr. Danielson followed her eyes to the back of the room. Damn, thought Cash, dipping her head downward, pretending to read from the book.
The classroom filled. For the next forty minutes, Mr. Danielson expounded on the virtues of photosynthesis, all the while talking about the hibiscus plant and trees in the rain forest. It wasn’t until he briefly mentioned that algae also use photosynthesis that Cash wrote in her notebook—horse tanks.
Cash was more intrigued by the interplay of personalities happening at the front of the room anyways. Sharon would raise her hand and ask a random, useless question. When Mr. Danielson looked at her to respond, Sharon would posture in ways that sent a signal to everyone in the room that she was flirting with him. Her antics weren’t lost on Mr. Danielson. He stood a little straighter when answering her. By the end of the class, he was sitting on the large wooden desk facing the class, his long legs, in blue jeans, stretched out in front of him, feet crossed at the ankles, while he and Sharon talked about whether or not plants needed photosynthesis to reproduce. No one in the class was taking notes. They were all watching the not-at-all-subtle dance happening between teacher and student. When one of the male students slammed his textbook shut, some kids in the class jumped. They all looked at the clock and started shifting out of their chairs, getting their books and other belongings together as Mr. Danielson stood up quickly and said, “Read Chapter 7, pages 212-245. There will be a test tomorrow. See you all then.”
Cash was walking out the door when Sharon called her back. Cash turned. Sharon was standing by the desk with Mr. Danielson standing right next to her. “Cash, do you have a piece of paper I can borrow, to write down tomorrow’s assignment on?” Sharon asked with wide-eyed innocence.
Cash almost kept on walking, but Mr. Danielson said, “Cash. I haven’t seen that name on the class roster. Is that a nickname?”
Cash took a step back into the room and looked up at him. He was looking at her the way she had seen farmers look at livestock—curious, interested, assessing the livestock’s temperament, determining how easy they could be led into the chute that got them on the truck to take to the slaughter market. Cash shivered, pulling her books close across her chest.
Sharon answered for her. “She just goes by Cash. Her real name is Renee. Do you have a piece of paper?” she asked again.
Without moving farther into the room, Cash set her books down on the closest desk and ripped a piece of paper out of her notebook. She held it out at arm’s length so Sharon had to walk toward her to get it. “Come on, let’s go.” Cash looked hard in Sharon’s eyes as Sharon took the paper. “Come on.”
“I have to get the assignment,” said Sharon, smiling stupidly.
“Looks like you have gotten all A’s on your quizzes so far, Renee. Renee Blackbear?” said Mr. Danielson looking through his grade book.
Cash stayed where she was, close to the door. The thought flashed through her mind that maybe it would be a really good idea to test out of this class for more reasons than just not having to sit in class. Cash stood silent as Sharon walked back toward Mr. Danielson, her hips swinging under her miniskirt. When she bent over the desk to write, the skirt rode up indecently. The move was not lost on Mr. Danielson. “Sharon, let’s go,” said Cash.
“Do you offer a way to get extra credit for those of us who don’t quite understand the sciences?” asked Sharon, finally standing up and tucking her pencil behind her ear. A couple students entered the classroom, jostling past Cash who was still standing by the doorway.
“You could stop by my office at the end of the day,” he answered Sharon with a smile that made Cash want to gag. “I have a class in here in three minutes.” He gestured toward the students filing into the classroom.
Sharon turned toward Cash, hips still swinging. At the same time, a slender blonde approached the teacher. He turned his full attention, the attention he had just poured out on Sharon, on the blonde, who laughed and smiled hello to him.
In the hallway, Cash said, “Are you out of your mind? That guy’s a total creep.”
“No, he’s not. He’s hot.”
“Drop it, Sharon.”
“I’m going to see what kind of ‘extra credit’ he offers.”
“Don’t.”
“Come on, don’t be such a fuddy duddy.” Sharon was almost skipping down the flight of stairs that would take them out of the building. “I’m in looooove!”
“You already have a boyfriend. Don’t be stupid. He’s old enough to be your dad.”
“He is not!”
Cash pushed open the door to outside. “He’s a creep.”
“Renee! Renee!” A male voice called out behind them as they reached the bottom step outside the science building. Sharon turned around, almost tripping. She whispered, “He’s calling you!”
“Huh?”
“Renee.”
Mr. Danielson was standing right behind them. He held her notebook in his hand. “You left this on the desk. You might need your notes for the quiz tomorrow. If you wanted to stop by the office sometime…even A students can use extra credit. Gotta get back to the classroom.” He sprinted back up the stairs. “See you later this afternoon, Sharon,” he called back.
Cash looked at Sharon and said firmly, “He is a creep. Stay away from him and his stupid extra credit.” Sharon pouted until they parted company midway across campus.
Cash went to judo. Self-defense was a priority after she had been grabbed twice earlier in the fall. The first time was by the Day Dodge kids up on the Red Lake Reservation where she had gone to help after their dad was murdered and their mom died. The second was when the guys who had killed their dad had nabbed her off the main street of Halstad and threatened to kill her. Though Cash traveled with a .22 rifle, she felt she needed some maneuvering skills. Both times she’d been nabbed, her rifle was tucked behind the seat of her Ranchero.
After judo class, she grabbed a tuna sandwich at the Silver Cup and then headed north out of town to spend anther night driving beet truck.
The evening was dull until Jim Jenson climbed into the cab of her truck while she was waiting to dump a load of beets. Jim was wearing a plaid wool shirt, his thermal undershirt visible at the neck, and the standard farmer blue jeans. Grinning, he slid across the cracked leather seat of the International Harvester truck and nuzzled her neck. “Where you been, Cash? I need me some Cash.” The hair on the nape of her neck tickled.
“Ahh, get away,” she said, pushing against his skinny chest. “Stop—that gives me the shivers.”
“Where you been? You’re never at the Casbah anymore. And your door has been locked every time I’ve come up to your place. You never used to lock me out. What’s going on?”
“I gotta get up and get to school.” She tapped the book on the seat between them. “Drive truck half the night, sleep a bit, and then I gotta get to school.”
Jim kept his arm across her shoulders, pulling her into him. “Haven’t seen you since we lost that pool tournament at the Flame. You still mad at me about that?”
“We? Don’t count me in on that. You lost that one all yourself.”
“Come on, Cash, don’t be so hard on me. I miss you.”
His hand slid up her leg.
“Go on.” She pushed away again. “I have to study. I got a quiz tomorrow in science I gotta study for.”
Jim backed off and slid over to the passenger side of the truck. His grin was gone. He gazed out the truck window then back to Cash. “You gonna come to the Casbah this weekend?”
Cash looked at him. She and Jim were pool partners. Had been “sleep together” partners until a month ago, when he had lost a pool tournament that cost her her rent money. Cash had been pretty drunk and had gotten 86’d from the Flame when she had upturned a couple of tables on her way out of the bar. She’d also cleared a few with her other arm, busting glass all over. All because the barmaid had accused her of hiding beer in her purse at closing time.
Cash had never carried a purse. She had tucked two bottles in the back of her jeans, but that wasn’t a purse. Cash looked at Jim. He was built thin, hair slicked back, his farmer tan from the summer fading. His Scandinavian whiteness would be fully back by Thanksgiving. He was looking at her with a hopeful grin. “Why’d you go crazy that night anyways? Not the first time we lost.”
Cash started to laugh in spite of herself. “I don’t know. She just pissed me off. Only white girls carry purses. Maybe if she’d just accused me of taking the beers, I woulda put them on the table. But it was the purse that got me.”
Cash laughed harder.
“You’re crazy.”
Cash looked at him. He was smiling. That smile reminded her that earlier in the day of the lost pool tournament she had seen Jim and his wife and kids at a restaurant in the new mall west of town. The smile he had now was the same happy smile he had had that day eating with his family. Cash quickly looked away.
“What?”
“Nothin.”
“Criminy, one minute you’re laughing like crazy and the next you’re looking at me like you want to kill me.”
Cash took a drink of lukewarm coffee from her Thermos. “I’m just tired, Jim. School. Work. I’m just getting used to school.”
“Let me come over after we’re done with the shift here. I’ll just stay for a minute.”
“That wouldn’t be much fun.” Cash laughed again.
The truck ahead of them was moving forward. Jim opened the passenger door. As he hopped down he said, “Leave the door open, okay?”
“Okay, for a minute.” Cash laughed.
Cash watched him in the side mirror as he walked back to his truck. He told her he was married before they ever slept together. Mostly he would come to her apartment after a night of drinking and shooting pool together. They would have sex and he would leave. The wife and kids he told her about weren’t real to her until that afternoon when Cash saw them at the mall eating dinner as a family.
Cash finished her shift, retrieved her Ranchero and drove back into Fargo. Out of habit, she drove by the Casbah even though it was a couple of hours past closing time. The bar was dark except for the neon light of the Hamm’s Beer sign, which hung above the bar inside, shining through the window. Back at her apartment, she took a quick bath, grabbed a Bud from the fridge and crawled into bed. Halfway through the bottle, Jim arrived, stayed a bit longer than a minute, and then headed northwest out of town to his wife and kids. Cash was asleep before he pulled the door shut and locked it after himself.
