LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

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