Sugar Run - Mesha Maren Page 0,3

low enough to hold on to. Just past Dawsonville the bus skirted a lake, the water dark and high to the brim, and from there they raced on toward the shadowed spikes of a city.

The highway ducked straight into the downtown and Jodi watched the buildings emerge, rocket ships of glass and chrome stretching so tall she couldn’t see the tops. Streams of people rolled across the sidewalks, clutching newspapers, cardboard cups of coffee, and cell phones. Jodi had seen the new phones on TV over the years but out here they looked even more odd: oversize metallic insects gripped tight in every hand.

“Atlanta,” the driver hollered. “Fifteen minutes.”

Jodi stayed in her seat, knowing for certain if she got off she’d somehow manage to get left behind. She craved a cigarette but opened the bottle of Jack instead and let the scent burn up all her thoughts.

Three sips in, the door to the bathroom opened, letting loose the smell of cigarettes and a chemical reek. She could have sworn the bus had emptied out but there, right in front of her, was the mustached man. He smiled a false-sweet smile and ducked his head down under the luggage rack.

“Hey, honey.”

Jodi pulled the paper bag up around her bottle.

“Hey, now, hey.” The man hunkered beside her. “Hey, I ain’t like that. I ain’t gonna tell nobody.”

Jodi shrugged and held out the bottle to him. Men like this were always popping up right in that moment of pleasant silence. Always jumping at you, like the groundhogs Effie taught her to shoot back down into their holes.

“You’re going to Jacksonville?”

Jodi swallowed her sip of whiskey slowly. “Chaunceloraine.”

Every time she said the name it sounded stranger and she’d have figured she made the place up if the ticket man hadn’t nodded and printed it on her slip. The word itself was like something she’d bitten off, too big and complicated to chew. And her plan was nothing but a thin line connected by fuzzy memory dots, an invented constellation that only she could see. Paula’s parents’ address was gone, stoved up somewhere in her brain with the other memories she’d worked so hard to pack away. All that remained was the name of the town and Paula’s little brother, Ricky Dulett.

Past Atlanta the rain-choked rivers gave way to flooded fields. Raw clay banks, limp tobacco plants, and peach trees. The water was a skin pulled tight between long rows, dimpled now and then by a gust of wind. Through the tangled branches the orange fruit glimmered, and around the edges of the groves, men huddled under tarps and stared at the gray belly of clouds.

They stopped in Montrose and Soperton, Cobbtown and Canoochee, and each time the bus rolled onto an exit ramp Jodi’s gut pinched and she turned toward the window, searching for road signs, relieved only when she saw it was not her stop. She did not want the ride to end. Once the bus stopped there would be the street and all the new decisions that would come with it. She got the bottle back from the mustached man, took a long swallow, and quite suddenly those eyes—Ricky’s blue, blue eyes—hovered in the near distant space.

She knew he must have grown into a man’s body by now; still, the only thing she could picture was little Ricky in that wooden chair—hands and legs tied behind him with violet-colored rags. Been acting the devil again, Paula’s father, Dylan, hollers from the porch, his eyes blue too but sunk deeply into his liver-spotted face. I had to tie him up. You ain’t here, Paula, you don’t see how he blows. Paula cuts Ricky loose and peels his dirt-stained jeans away from the wounds. The lash marks swell red all up and down his legs and while Paula inspects him Ricky sings her a song—They told us the illusion, the illusion was life. Paula smiles. I’ve got my very own personal jukebox, she says, and Ricky blushes and ducks his head.

Out the bus window towering trees whipped by, waxy green leaves and wisps of gray moss, and over it all the bleached sky clarified into a seamless blue.

“Chaunceloraine,” the driver called, but nothing looked familiar to Jodi and the bus was picking up speed now, passing out of the downtown, past faded beauty shops, blinking tattoo parlors, men on the corners wearing too-big T-shirts, and women in butt-hugging spandex shorts —freddie’s fried chicken . . . we buy gold . . . rooms $29.99