Delivery
Tristan’s Story — Part 5: Shit goes down
What do we do now?
Each of us asked the question. No one had an answer.
Again and again, Melissa tried to reach Brandon. “He has got to come over and pick this shit up.”
Every time, voice mail.
“I have to deliver these masks,” she insisted. “The customers will know something’s up if I don’t.”
By now, we were pretty sure that Melissa’s mysterious South Dakota customers were, in the parlance of the vice world, dirty. With more than a passing acquaintance with her brother.
We had been taken as fools. And now we had to get ourselves out of this mess. The delivery had to be completed, yet transferring drugs across a state line was a felony. Hence our dilemma.
“Do you absolutely have to drive them over in person?” Niko wondered. He suggested UPS.
“I don’t know how things work in Finland, but here, if they search a package and discover drugs, you’re fucked.” Melissa had worked at a pack-and-ship store in college. She had seen things go down, namely a DEA agent busting a customer for cramming pot into a box of cookies and sweatshirts. “People in logistics watch out for these things.”
“Tell your customers you’re sick and you can’t make the drive,” I suggested, inspired by my own condition.
She shook her head. The delivery had to happen.
“Then I’m going with you,” said Niko. “I’ll call in sick to work. You’re not going alone.”
Lighter fluid-esque or no, the scotch bottle was now empty. We considered Niko’s microbrews in the kitchen but all of us were too paralyzed to move.
“I’ll go as well,” I volunteered. “I’m more familiar with these types of people than you two are.”
“You’re sick, Tristan,” Melissa protested.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“And you’re not white,” Niko pointed out.
“Really?” I exclaimed, rolling up my sleeve and holding out my arm for further investigation. “A day full of revelations.”
“They’ll throw you into prison for life if we’re caught,” he continued. “Or the police will beat you and kill you first.”
“Not if they don’t find any drugs in the car.”
Was it Melissa’s idea or Niko’s idea? In any case, I wasn’t sure if it was going to work: Deliver the masks, but don’t deliver the drugs. Actually, I doubted it. Men like this don’t enjoy being deceived, especially when thousands of dollars, maybe even hundreds of thousands, lie in the balance.
But it was the best — and the only — idea we had.
Niko concurred: We were tricked. We have children. This can’t be our problem anymore.
So I kept my mouth shut. And so we all agreed.
Niko unearthed an old duffel bag. Melissa re-packed and re-wrapped the boxes, now substantially lighter than Brandon had left them. And I, with rubber kitchen gloves up to my elbows to conceal my fingerprints, transferred the stash.
Where did I tuck it away? In the treehouse, of course, hurling myself from rock to rock across the landscaped yard to avoid footprints in the snow.
A child’s treehouse, in a backyard owned by a white hipster and a Northern European engineer. Who would dream of looking here?
Melissa’s phone buzzed. Brandon? No, her customers. Due to the impending blizzar, they moved the delivery point to Watertown, a larger town off the highway, to a parking lot where the old Shopko had been. I knew that strip mall. I knew that Shopko, before it had been turned into a pawn shop and second-hand store.
The next question: child care. “The neighbors next door,” Melissa suggested. The retired couple, friendly and accommodating, was always around. They never asked questions.
“They would have watched the kids on our anniversary weekend, too,” Niko added against his better judgment.
In lieu of filing for a divorce, as Joan Didion would have put it had she ever been stupid enough to get herself into such a situation, Melissa shot him a glare. “We’ll tell them it’s a family emergency. Because it could be. I could kill right now.”
We prepared the vehicle with snacks, flares and blankets. Melissa retrieved a small bundle from the uppermost shelf of the laundry room.
“Yes, this is a firearm,” she informed her husband. “And don’t get all European on me. This is in case bad they suspect something or ask us to open the boxes in front of them.”
“Fair enough,” Niko conceded. “I have protection of my own.”
With that, he unwrapped the pearl-handled antique knife. Damn, I couldn’t help myself from gasping. No wonder the settlers had conquered my people.
We all lingered, hoping for that last-minute call from Brandon, that last-minute reprieve.
Melissa tried again. Straight to voice mail.
“We’d better get going,” she finally declared. “I’ve packed a cooler. Make sure you have enough Kleenex, Tristan. And please chill with the Vicks VapoRub. We’re going to be in a confined area for several hours.”
We buckled up. We slammed the doors. Melissa’s hand paused at the ignition.
“It’s going to be okay.”
Her husband whispered this into her knit hat as her head slumped against his shoulder. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.
And then we drove off, packages in our vehicle, contraband far behind.
They took turns in the driver’s seat. I slept in the middle, wedged among the boxes. We couldn’t have picked a crappier day for a drive, the clouds turning black and the scent of incoming snow thick and sweet in the air.
For music we started out with NPR then switched to satellite radio, punching the menu’s dozens of channels to distract ourselves. It wasn’t until the town of Dawson, well past halfway, that human voices made an appearance.
“I spoke with my cousins this morning,” Niko said. “The arrangements are made.”
The next thing I glimpsed was a tiny dive bar I knew all too well from an earlier life, peeking out from behind gusts of snow. Melissa checked her phone.
“They texted me back. They made it to the parking lot. Told us to drive safely.”
Then Melissa was shaking me. “Wake up, Tristan!” On one side of the highway, the neon swirl cone of the Zesto. On the other side, the old burgundy brick motel with the run-down sign. Did anyone ever stay there? I always wondered, every time I drove past in this town.
“Get out here,” they ordered, practically shoving me out of the car. “We’ll pick you up at the Zesto when we’re done.” And so I rolled out into the wind and snow.
But for two large pick-up trucks we assumed to be Melissa’s customers, our rendezvous parking lot was empty. I watched the SUV drive in and park, Niko and Melissa button their coats and pull on their hats and gloves under the dome light.
“Cold out there today, huh?”
Illuminated by the neon soft-serve cone out front, two slack-jawed teenagers manned the till. These places never shut down, not even for Armageddon.
I ordered my cone. For an eternity, I waited, playing it cool. Because who doesn’t want a frozen treat in the middle of a snowstorm? And finally I let the cold, cold ice cream slide slowly down my burning throat, eyes glued to the parking lot across the highway.
Just so the teenage clerks wouldn’t get suspicious — because you never know who’s in on what in these small towns — I shifted my gaze around to give every angle equal time. Hello employee parking lot, with your rusted-out Jetta and a putty-purple Neon, bumper held up with duct tape. Hello motel lot, with your El Camino — damn, it had been years since I’d seen one of those — and a really nice Lexus.
And hello Brandon’s blue pickup.
The hell? A break in the snow revealed Minnesota plates, the gleaming paint job, the small dent on the side.
Should I call? I could no longer see Niko and Melissa in the blowing snow. I could barely make out the headlights of the vehicles.
What were they talking about? What was going on?
Hunched over the filthy counter, I clutched my crumpled napkin. Breathe, Tristan, breathe. It felt like a movie. I wondered how the fuck it all was going to end.
“You okay, dude?”
Just ordering a frozen treat in the middle of a blizzard. Nothing to see here.
Then a loud pounding of bare fists against the glass. Melissa, backlit by blazing headlights. “Get the hell out here, Tristan, we’re ready to go!”
Now the slack-jawed youth really stared. But who cared. I was out of that Zesto and back into the SUV, buckled up with the heat blasting.
Our flight out of Watertown was a blur. “Don’t panic. Don’t do anything that looks suspicious,” Melissa cautioned as Niko drove.
I could not tear my gaze away from the rear-view mirror. I waited for accelerating headlights to fill it up. I listened for shouts and gunshots.
Nothing. Just darkness.
Really?
Only 200 miles ahead of us in a flurry of snow, visibility zero.
Brandon’s truck, the words caught in my throat.
“What?” Melissa glanced back. “Did you say something, Tristan?”
Just clearing my throat, I told her. It was too late. We were too far out of town. The deal was done.
The satellite radio cut out at the Minnesota border, leaving us at the mercy of the FM dial. God, talk radio, classic rock. God, talk radio, classic rock.
“Can you please change the station, Melissa?”
“I know, I know. I hate Tom Petty as much as you do. But nothing else is coming in.”
“Did you text the neighbors?”
“They don’t text, remember?”
“What do you think they’re up to right now?”
“Who, Niko? Our neighbors? The kids?”
“No, the people with our masks.”
“Driving back to their house. Eating dinner. Plotting how to kill us. I don’t know.”
“Any word from Brandon?”
“No reception.”
“I don’t want our kids to be around when he picks his things up.”
Silently, we returned to a slumbering neighborhood, the streetlamps twinkling in the snow. When cell phone connectivity returned, a message lit up Melissa’s phone. The neighbors did know how to text after all. The kids were tucked in, sleeping soundly. All worn out from playing outside.
Niko pressed the button of the garage door, then coasted the vehicle into darkness. Every crunch of the ice was the boot of an enforcer. Every shadow of a shelf or plastic storage container was an assassin in wait. He paused a good five minutes before he opened his car door, looking like he was going to throw up or pass out or both, and I wouldn’t have blamed him for all of the above.
As he bolted from the car to the wall with the light switches, then flipped the lights, first for the garage, then for the house, I steeled myself. I anticipated figures against the wall, cocked weapons, cold eyes. It was inevitable.
Everything was the same as when we had left.
Morning came with the brilliant blue sky and unearthly quiet that follows a blizzard. I roused myself, blinked, wandered around. No sign of Melissa and Niko. What the hell?
I found them on the porch, bundled in blankets, her cradling the gun, him the knife. I waited for them to wake themselves up.
Melissa fetched the children and held them close. Niko spoke with his cousins. Still no word from Brandon.
As for me, I drugged myself with a double dose of NyQuil. Burn this cold off once and for all. And I was almost there, drifting off, limbs slowly disintegrating, brain like velvet.
And then the phone.
Brandon?
No, the police. From South Dakota.
They had tried to reach Shelly first but couldn’t find her phone number, the man on the phone explained. So when they discovered Melissa’s name in the directory, they figured she might be a good place to start.
Niko and Melissa made the second and infinitely more horrific drive back to South Dakota on their own.
When they returned, their neighbors greeted them, brought over the kids. Or so I guessed. I was down in the basement at the time, unabashedly stoned on Nyquil, slathered in Vicks VapoRub, feverish and unsure if it was day or night. And I woke to the stank of my sickroom, the wool blanket sweaty against my body and the humidifier vapor thick in the air.
Niko stood in the doorway. I sensed that several hours, if not days, had passed.
A scar on the hand, slash from a skate blade in high school. That’s how Melissa was able to identify him…a shotgun they suspect…face blown off.
How’s she doing? I believed— I sincerely hoped — I asked.
Sleeping, was the reply. She’ll be in rough shape for a while.
After he left, the room spun. This conversation was just a dream, I told myself, just like Brandon’s truck in the motel parking lot. NyQuil makes you hallucinate some weird shit sometimes.
Sunrise. Sunset. Night. Every so often, I heard a door slam shut or the garage shudder open. Niko left for work. He took the kids to the park.
Then Shelly stopped by for something. I would have recognized her voice anywhere.
“Twenty unheard messages. Batteries drained all the way down,” she was saying.
Melissa finally appeared in my doorway, sat herself at the foot of my bed. She was pale, a quilt wrapped around her flannel pajamas.
“The funeral’s tomorrow, Tristan, if you’re well enough to join us.”
Where did things go wrong?
We could have just made the delivery. Kept the boxes intact. If we had, Prairie Drug Lord Brandon and Shelly might be together now, playing darts at the bar, laughing, starting fresh. Those kids might be attending school student loan-free, maybe even moving on to grad school as well, such was the value of the product we failed to transport.
We could have stalled, called in sick, waited for Brandon to pick up his messages then pick up his goods.
We could have called the police. Two responsible white people, never mind the Indian. A nice house in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb. Our story might have been believed.
“We’re screwed.”
Melissa roamed the house with her baby in one arm, her gun in the other. With the bullets safely stashed in a Tupperware container in the freezer, Niko insisted. For his part, he propped himself against the living room wall and watched his son play, sprouting a sad excuse for a beard, knife in one hand and a bottle of ale in the other.
“You need to get the hell out of there,” Randolph told me.
No one stays in one place anymore.
That’s what the guy at the Midtown Global Market told me when I said I was moving full time to South Dakota. What could I say? Such were the times in which we lived. I think I quoted something by David Foster Wallace, too. In any case, the guy just stared at me, handed me my empanadas and wished me good luck.
When I reached Sioux Falls, Randolph apprised me of everything he knew about Watertown, which wasn’t much. Death by shotgun? Yeah, it sometimes happened. That place was the sketchiest motel in town after all. But no one had ever discovered any drugs in the room. “Must have cleared the joint out quickly,” he said.
Did anyone mention hockey masks? I asked.
“Hockey masks? What the hell are you talking about, Tristan? All they found was a body, a truck and no motive. The police would have believed it to be a suicide, but there was no way a person could shoot his own face off from that angle.”
So I told Randolph everything. And when I was done, he told me to stay here, in the west. My home.
“You’re going to have to tone it down a little though,” he added. “Do things a bit more on the down-low.”
Like I was out there blasting Erasure and covering myself in glitter. Stereotype much?
Or maybe move back to the rez entirely, he suggested. People miss you.
“It’s not my place anymore,” was my reply. I wanted more for myself, I didn’t add. Better.
Randolph heard it anyway. “Like the city is always better? Fucking farm to table, artisanal cocktail gentrified hipster bullshit. Did you not learn from this experience, Tristan? Just find your place. Live your life. Be your fucking self.”
He had a point. Randolph often did.
As I lived my life as best I could, I wondered what was happening back in the Twin Cities. I wondered about that farm, the Muslim Somali woman and her goats. I wondered about those two kids in their third-rate state school. And I wondered about my old client and her flower shop.
“Shelly knows everything.”
Melissa had muttered this beneath her breath, right after the funeral and right before I moved out. Then before I knew it, an email. She and Niko were living in Finland now. The fuck?
Melissa didn’t give me the details when we Skyped. “Say hello to Uncle Tristan, Lucas. In both languages,” Niko instructed, then led him off the screen to join his little sister.
How’s the new homeland? I asked.
“I’m freezing my ass off and the language is impossible,” she rolled her eyes, irritated but not really. “But the people are nice, the kids are adjusting and everyone’s really happy to have Niko back. You’ll need to visit us sometime.”
Sure, like I’d ever have the money for a vacation in Helsinki. Or anywhere for that matter, with even more bills stacked up thanks to my lengthy cold and extended recovery. For an independent business owner, sick days are merely days away from the hustle, days without revenue.
How are you? I asked to change the subject.
She shrugged. Her face darkened. “You know how it goes, Tristan.”
I did. I did indeed.
When business opportunities brought me over that state line again, I drove past their old farm. It stood vacant. Amina the Muslim and her herd of goats had moved out for greener pastures. Vermont possibly? Amish country? The clerk at the convenience store wasn’t sure. But the farm had been up for sale for a long time now. Someone could have easily purchased it, at a low price, too.
But other real estate moved quickly in Minnesota, like a fancy modern-art log cabin in the wooded suburbs. I cruise past this place as well, more often than I should, and case out the new family that moved in. Typical white couple — blond, fit, Minnesota nice with an SUV in the driveway. From Wisconsin, I’m told. No kids.
For the summers of 10 thousand lakes, they brought with them titanium bikes and matching kayaks. They stack snow shoes and cross-country skis against the side of the garage and professionally cut firewood against the fence. Every so often, the house is dark during the weekend. Where did they go — to the farmers market, to the lake by Duluth? Or maybe to the St. Paul Hotel for an anniversary weekend.
Here in the east, they lived their lives completely oblivious. They had no clue about the tree house out back.
See what happens next.
Go back to how it all began.
Read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 of Tristan’s story.
© 2016 People and Places. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Views of the characters do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.
