The End of Vandalism (14 page)

“Against the heat,” said Louise. She folded the paper, fanned her face, unfolded it, went back to reading.

“Well, I guess,” said Mary. “Isn’t this something? And tomorrow’s supposed to be worse than today. Is Perry Kleeborg out of the hospital yet?”

Louise shook her head.

“Who’s he got?” said Mary, meaning for a doctor. “Freiberger?”

“Duncan,” said Louise.

“I don’t care for Duncan,” said Mary.

“A lot of people don’t,” said Louise.

“Freiberger I like, but Duncan, no,” said Mary.

“Kleeborg doesn’t mind Duncan,” said Louise.

“Louise,” said Mary. “I’m afraid this might be it for old Perry. He isn’t twenty-one anymore.”

“How old is he?” said Dan.

“Eighty-seven,” said Louise. “But very spry. He’s still the best person I’ve ever seen with a view camera.”

“I don’t look for him to be back,” said Mary. “I’m sorry, but someone should say it. Let’s not forget, the man walked into the stream of traffic. Isn’t it time to start thinking about retirement?”

“Kleeborg had the right of way,” said Louise.

Dan finished with the corn and picked up a Tupperware bowl full of ice cubes. “She’s right,” he said.

“Excuse me?” said Mary.

“Frank Ray was in the wrong,” said Dan.

“That’s the guy who was driving,” said Louise.

“There’s such a thing as right of way and such a thing as survival,” said Mary.

They thought this over. A puff of breeze came along and they turned their faces toward it.

“But that’s not the point,” said Mary.

“I know very well what your point is,” said Louise.

“We both do,” said Dan. He broke an ice cube in his teeth.

“But I like the darkroom,” said Louise. “I like printing. I like burning and dodging. I like the chemicals and the lights, and I like not being hassled.”

“Louise, you like the darkroom. Fine. We know this. This is a given,” said Mary. “But the darkroom is not a career.”

“You would say that no matter what I did,” said Louise. “If I was an opera singer, you would say that wasn’t a career.”

“Well, I don’t think it is a very stable one,” said Mary.

A white plastic fan swiveled in Dan and Louise’s bedroom. They sat up watching a movie about a bear family. Louise drank a gin and tonic and Dan had a beer. The narration of the movie was from the point of view of the male bear.

“And so, inevitably, our winter sleep comes to an end,” he said. “The warmth of the sun calls us from our den.”

“Quite the articulate bear,” said Louise.

“You know, your mother gives you a hard time,” said Dan.

“I do know,” said Louise.

The bears were batting salmon through the air. “We just saw this footage,” said Dan.

“Is everything all right?” said Louise.

“Yes,” said Dan.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“No reason,” said Louise. “Are you still having trouble sleeping?”

“Are you still talking in your sleep?” said Dan.

“How would I know?” said Louise.

“Well, you are,” said Dan.

“It isn’t supposed to be a contest,” said Louise. “You need to relax. That’s why you don’t sleep, is you don’t relax. Why don’t you have a real drink? The problem with beer is that the water content is very high. You know when they say, ‘It’s the water’? Well, that’s right. It is water. Whereas gin is more distilled. Have some of this. Relax.”

Dan took a drink and reached over to touch her hair. “Kind of fond of liquor, aren’t you?” he said.

“I am,” said Louise. “When I was getting ready for bed just now I couldn’t wait to tear into this g and t.”

“I noticed your clothes flying off,” said Dan.

“The trick is just what they tell you—being moderate,” said Louise. “Too much will actually wake you up. But a little bit helps. It does me, anyway. One generous drink with lime. Certainly no more than two.”

Dan woke up in the middle of the night. It was not just that he was awake. There was always something slightly
wrong. Either his ears rang or his bad knee felt tenuous or his teeth hurt, or he had a hard-on that would not go away. It was always one thing but never two things together. Maybe these distractions did not cause the insomnia but instead resulted from it—as if, once he was awake, some bothersome condition was required to keep him company.

Louise was breathing deeply onto his arm. He could see her dark hair beside him. Her breath was strangely cool in the heat, and he seemed to be breathing in time with her. This in fact was going to be the minor problem of the night. With each breath, he was taking in a little less air than his lungs required. You would have thought that breathing was automatic enough, but on this night Dan was going slowly breathless to Louise’s rhythm.

He got up, walked around the bed, and sat in a chair. Now he could make out the shape of her back. She was a being of beauty and tenderness from this vantage point, and maybe they should have met a long time ago. He was thirty-seven years old, and even though the county of which he was sheriff was not heavily populated, he had seen the worst things. Every kind of car accident, involving children, involving infants. And motorcycle accidents, in which the drivers seemed to have been fired into the pavement by a giant hand. He had seen people out of their heads and threatening to do their families harm. That happened every drinking night of the year. He had seen the consequences of a murder-suicide, or whatever it was, in an otherwise neat kitchen with a sampler that said, “Bless This Mess.” He had a hard time squaring these memories with the plain sight of Louise brushing her hair in the morning, simply taking the hair in one hand and brushing the resulting ponytail with the other; or making a
sarcastic statement, with light in her eyes and a glass poised at her lip; or driving the car with her hair tied back and her forearm slung over the door. She was turning now and saying something. He leaned toward the bed. “Wetlands,” she said, just that. “Wetlands,” in a low voice. And then either the breathing problem went away or he stopped being conscious of it.

Dan put on a shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen. It had been Louise’s house, but he was familiar enough with it by now to walk around in darkness. A bar of orange light shone from the dryer, a reassuring reminder that the dryer could be used anytime, day or night. Dan pulled up a chair and turned on a small black-and-white television that sat on a table between the refrigerator and the counter. They got four channels at this time of the night. Ames, Albert Lea, La Crosse, and Sioux City. There was no cable out in the country, and Morrisville signed off at one.

Dan turned the dial with scientific disinterest. Channel 3 had a gold commercial. After a month of little sleep Dan had become convinced that the American people, or at least American insomniacs, loved gold—gold plate, gold filigree, and, most of all, solid gold. On any night you could order bracelets, chains, animals of any species, characters from Les Misérables—all in gold. If you were of a business mind, you could even buy a franchise to peddle this gold to others. And yet in his day-to-day world Dan encountered very little gold, and he wondered, as he sometimes did about all television, whether these advertisements were intended for someplace else and only reached Grouse County by accident. Channel 5 had car racing, followed by an advertisement for a science fiction movie called The Thirty-Foot Bride of Candy Rock,
starring an oversized woman in a sexy tunic that was probably fashioned from a tent or a tarp of some kind.

Moving along to Channel 7, Dan found an old movie in which a woman was singing on a strange and shadowy stage. She had dark curls, pale eyes, a transparent veil. She sang with great power. Her voice soared and trembled—it was hard to tell if she was in control. Violinists and harpists played behind her, and candles shook in the hands of the choir. The piece was almost over, climbing toward some destructive note. Then the camera pulled back, revealing that the woman was singing in an amphitheater in a landscape of dark towers and hills. Was this supposed to be Heaven? Hell? Italy? Dan could not say. He made the short journey to Channel 13, where a man with a Southern accent was hacking up a countertop with a kitchen knife to prove the durability of the knife.

Kleeborg had still not been released that weekend, so Louise and Dan went up to Stone City to see how he was coming along. They had him in Mercy Hospital, an obscure but industrious place where construction was a constant but nothing ever seemed to get built, and where some new machine was always being acquired to do the things that were being done in Rochester or Kansas City.

“I think they forgot me,” said Kleeborg.

“You must want out,” said Louise.

“Not especially I don’t,” said Kleeborg. “They bring food. And it really isn’t bad food either. I hear it’s awfully hot out there. I don’t care for the heat.”

“How are you?” said Dan.

“Dan, I can’t see very well,” said Kleeborg.

“What does Duncan have to say about that?” said Louise.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Kleeborg. “I haven’t seen Duncan since the day I came in. This is what I’m telling you. I think they forgot me. But I have reached a decision, Louise.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about death.”

“Oh, Perry,” said Louise. “There’s no reason.”

“In fact, there is,” said Kleeborg. “Because yesterday I had a roommate—his name was Crawford—and last night he died.”

“No kidding,” said Louise. “What of?”

“No one seems to know,” said Kleeborg. “There is a great deal of confusion here. A very great deal. But I have made a decision, and I called my lawyer in today. You know, Ned Kuhlers. And I said, ‘Ned, when I die, the studio belongs to Louise. And you see to it, and you do what has to be done.’ “

“Perry, this is really, really jumping the gun,” said Louise. She picked up a buzzer and pushed it. “And I don’t blame you. No one’s talking to you, and you’re sitting here getting all worked up.”

“Well, I talked to Crawford yesterday,” said Kleeborg. “Talked to the man a lot. He couldn’t go anywhere, and I suppose I took advantage of this. I hope it wasn’t what killed him.”

Louise went to the door and looked down the hall. “I’m going to go find somebody,” she said.

This left Dan and Kleeborg alone.

“She gets so emotional,” said Kleeborg.

“Oh, yeah,” said Dan. He went to the window. Bulldozers crawled silently through a dusty lot. “So anyway, what did you say to this Crawford?”

“I told him about my sister,” said Kleeborg.

“Lydia.”

“Yes. You see, when we were young, she wrote many letters to her boyfriend,” said Kleeborg.

“I remember.”

“But our parents did not agree with this,” said Kleeborg. “Whether they were correct in their apprehensions I don’t know. But they made an arrangement with Dean Ross, who ran the post office and the store in Romyla, in which Dean would hold Lydia’s letters for my parents to retrieve when they came into town. Of course, this was unfair to Lydia. But back then you didn’t see the strictness about the mail that you see today. Anyway, I don’t think a one of her letters got to where she thought they were going.”

Dan came away from the window and sat in a chair. “It’s a sad story,” he said, “but I don’t think it would have killed anybody.”

Someone knocked on the door. It was not the doctor or nurse as they had expected, but Grace, the woman who had ridden in the car that hit Kleeborg. She crossed the room in sandals and a tight green dress, and gave Kleeborg his broken glasses.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really wanted to get these fixed. I took them to one place where they said they couldn’t help me because the glasses were too old. And I took them to another place where they said that was completely wrong, they weren’t too old, and when did I want them. So fine. Then I went back today, and they said, ‘Come to find out about it, they
are
too old, and we can’t fix them.’ I said, ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot for wasting my time.’ Anyway, here’s your glasses, and I’m sorry I couldn’t get them fixed, and I’m sorry this whole thing ever happened in the first place.”

“Well, thank you, Miss,” said Kleeborg. He turned the mangled glasses over in his hands. “I appreciate the fact that you did try.”

And then she left, and of course he had to ask who she was, because he couldn’t remember. Then Dan and Kleeborg played cribbage.

“Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, a pair is eight, and nobs is nine,” said Kleeborg.

Louise returned and said, “Has anyone been here?”

“Just Grace Ray,” said Dan.

He was awake again that night. At ten after three he was sitting at the kitchen table doing the bills when Louise walked into the kitchen in her nightgown. He said hello to her but she only stood by the table gathering the bills in her hands. There was such a calm look in her eyes that Dan understood she was sleepwalking. Once she had all his paperwork, she went out the screen door, letting it bang behind her. Dan followed, being careful not to wake her. The only thing he knew about sleepwalking was that you had to be careful not to wake the person. Louise glided over the grass in the dark. She walked out from under the shadow of the trees, and leaning down she spread the bills on the ground. Then she straightened and looked at the sky. It was a warm, clear summer night. Stars glittered like towns, and the Milky Way seemed to be a real road, going somewhere. After a moment Louise folded her arms and walked back to the house. Dan picked the bills from the damp grass and carried them into the kitchen, where he arranged them according to paid and unpaid and went back to work.

TINY DARLING came back to Grouse County, as everyone always does. He drove past broken corn stalks, tall blue silos, and the handwritten roadside reminder that Sin Is Death. He tried to imagine these as scenes from a documentary about his life, with a soundtrack by John Cougar Mellencamp. He drove east through Margo and over to Grafton. The Johanson farm looked too perfect in the smoky autumn light. The fields were stripped and the drying bins arranged neatly, like polished steel replicas of the family. “Grafton,” said the town sign. “Pop. 321. Stop and Have a Look Around.”

Tiny drove directly to Lindsey Coale’s beauty shop. Lindsey was sitting in the chair nearest the door, looking out the window at the empty street.

“Hi, stranger,” she said. “I heard you went to be a cowboy.”

“That’s an unfounded rumor,” said Tiny, lowering himself into the barber chair. “I worked on bridges in the state of Colorado.”

Lindsey fastened a sheet around Tiny’s neck with a safety pin. “And how short today?” she said.

Tiny took out his billfold and produced a picture torn from a magazine of a man holding a bottle of after-shave and
looking at dolphins in the ocean. The man had wavy black hair.

“Can you make me look like this?”

Lindsey studied the picture and looked at Tiny’s red hair. “I can try,” she said. “Given your coloring, understand, it won’t be identical. But we can give it a whirl.”

“I mean the coloring,” said Tiny.

Lindsey looked at him uncertainly. “What? You want your hair tinted?”

“I don’t know what to call it,” said Tiny. “Make it black.”

Lindsey Coale turned toward the mirror and lit a cigarette. “May I ask why?” she said.

“For a change.”

“Tiny, are you in trouble?”

He leaned forward with his hands on the arms of the barber chair. “Why would you assume that?” he said.

“Because I could go to jail,” said Lindsey. “And that’s happened.”

“I’m not in trouble,” said Tiny.

“In Oklahoma,” said Lindsey, flipping through a trade magazine. “A hairdresser altered the appearance of a postal employee who had stolen federal checks. The mailman made it out of the country, but the hairdresser went to jail for three months. Here it is.
U.S. v. Hair Skin Nails
.”

“You’re reading a lot into it that isn’t there,” said Tiny. “My life has changed but my hair is the same tired color.”

“I understand,” said Lindsey. “A lot of people feel that same way. But the fact is I can’t help you, Tiny. I don’t do tints anymore.”

Tiny stood, swept the sheet behind him like a cape, and reached for a bottle on a shelf. “Then what’s this?” he said.

“It’s conditioning gel,” said Lindsey Coale. “Please put it back. Please put it back, Tiny.”

“All right,” said Tiny. “Here, it’s back.”

“Do you want a haircut or don’t you?”

Tiny unpinned the cloth around his collar. “I do not,” he said. He had business in Morrisville, so he might have taken the Pinville blacktop, which headed southwest out of Grafton. Instead, he decided to swing over to Boris to see his mother. This took him by the Klar farm, which he had not visited in almost two years. The house looked about the same. It needed paint more than it had. It was a white farmhouse with a tall gable and a lower ridge. Dan and Louise had hung a tire swing from the elm. Big deal. Dan’s gold Caprice was up on blocks. Tiny drove in, sounded the horn several times, waited, and wheeled his car behind the hedge that separated the yard and the barnyard.

He walked into the garage and paused at the window onto the kitchen. Then he raised it and stepped inside. He walked through the house. In the living room he found a shiny blue photo album from the wedding. Tiny carried this back to the kitchen, got some cheese slices from the refrigerator, and ate the cheese while sitting at the kitchen table looking at the wedding pictures. One of Louise embracing Dan generated a pain that seemed to begin in his earlobes and travel down his neck to his shoulder bones and from there into his arms until his elbows hurt. Tiny took the album upstairs to the bedroom. This was completely changed over. What could be as foreign as someone else’s bedroom, especially if it used to be your own? The bed was so high it seemed like a children’s clubhouse. It was half made, with an airy plaid quilt (new) lofted over tangled sheets, and Tiny could picture Louise
running late, pulling on clothes, pausing to finish a cigarette with her shirttail hanging down. The walls had been stripped of paper, the scarred plaster painted white. A cool white nightgown (new) hung on a hook on the back of the door. The room smelled of lemons and soap. Tiny held the photo album to his chest and lay on the bed. He kept whispering Louise’s name, and after some time he fell asleep. It was early afternoon when he awoke. The sky was rough and gray, and there had been a loud noise downstairs. Tiny went down the steps quietly and replaced the album. The kitchen window had fallen shut. Tiny lifted it and went out.

The trip from the Klar farm to Boris was all on the gravel, and it had been dry, so Tiny was accompanied by a cloud of rolling dust. His mother’s house was in the dead center of Boris. The house had been painted years ago in a flesh tone that must have been cheap to make, judging from the number of poorly maintained places that you see in that shade. There was a long porch to the left of the front door, and this was laden with junk and sinking into the ground. Colette Sandover’s house was a mess, and no sense could be made of the disorder. There were engineer boots in the sink, an animal trap shedding flakes of rust on the television set, and stacks of
Photoplay
magazines in the bathtub. Tiny found his mother standing in the backyard weeds, telling a story to some children from the neighborhood.

“And so, the wolf went home hungry,” she said. “He was so hungry that he ran around his cave, and the geode that he had worshiped fell upon him. The wolf howled and howled until the townspeople heard his terrible cries. ‘Help me, I can’t move,’ said the wolf. Then the mayor reported to the people, ‘The wolf is pinned. He has no food. It is only a matter of
time.’ ‘Good,’ said everyone. And they waited three months until they were certain that the wolf had perished. Then they went into the cave, carried his bones out, and made a boat that carried them to the new land across the lake.”

“Hello, Mom,” said Tiny.

“Go home, children,” said Colette. She and Tiny went into the house.

“I don’t want to see you,” she said.

“Well, this is a hell of a thing,” said Tiny.

“I can’t give anymore,” she said.

“Name something you ever gave,” said Tiny.

“When you fell, I picked you up. When you were hungry, I handed you food. There are other examples. I’m not the endless well you seem to think I am. I’ll be happy to see you children at Christmas. But that’s it. Possibly Easter. Otherwise, I must ask you to keep your distance.”

Some parents get their children mixed up, calling one sibling by the name of another. But Colette seemed to have confused Tiny with the offspring of some other mother. “I don’t think I’ve been in this house in five years,” said Tiny.

“Christmas or Easter, take your pick,” said Colette. “Tell you what. Why don’t you choose now and Jerry will have to take the other. What could be more fair?”

“I don’t want either one of those.”

She sighed. “Well, what do you want? Everyone’s needs come before Mother’s needs.”

Tiny went to the sink, moved the engineer boots, and got a drink of water. “Are you getting enough nutrition and stuff?” he said. “Do you cook for yourself? What do you do?”

“What I cook or don’t cook is no concern of yours,” she said. “If I were you, I would worry about my own plate. Your
father was a fool. Jerry’s father was mean, and Bebe’s father was weak, but yours was the fool of the bunch.”

“A stroll down memory lane,” said Tiny.

“And stay away from my meter,” said Colette. “I know you’ve been turning it forward to make it look like I’m using more power than I am.”

“Oh, yeah. I do that all the time,” said Tiny.

“Christmas or Easter,” said Colette.

Tiny went south to Highway 56 and west to Morrisville. His mother was crazy, and maybe insanity was all that he had to look forward to. The drunk-driving people in Colorado had given him the address of something called the Room. This was a counseling group with an office in a brick building above a jazz-dancing studio by the South Pin River. Tiny watched the jazz dancers in their colored tights for a while and went upstairs, where he found two rooms with the sort of sad, anonymous furniture that can be purchased in bankruptcy auctions from coast to coast. There was a metal desk with a wood-veneer top, a green file cabinet scarred by the removal of unknown stickers, and half a dozen flimsy chairs of orange plastic in a seventies contour. Over in the corner Johnny White was hitting golf balls at a putting machine.

“Johnny?” said Tiny.

“Shh,” said Johnny. “If this goes in, I’ll be a success in life.” He hit the ball past the machine and into the baseboard. “That doesn’t bode well.”

“Johnny?”

“I know you,” said Johnny. He had large red eyes that always made him seem either hung over or very sincere. “We used to have belt-sander races in shop class.”

“Those were the good days,” said Tiny. “Listen, I’m looking for something called the Room.”

“You got it,” said Johnny. “Tell you what, though. I’m running behind in my schedule. I’m giving a talk up by Margo in about twenty minutes. You want to come along, see what we’re all about?”

“All right,” said Tiny.

Johnny and Tiny went to Margo in Johnny’s Bronco. It was a new truck with a black interior, and although it was only forty-some degrees outside Johnny kept the air conditioner blasting.

“You hear a lot, Tiny—or I hear a lot, anyway—about the twelve steps,” said Johnny. “At the Room we don’t have twelve steps. We have one step. Step into the Room. Don’t leave until you’re clean. It’s that simple. Once you’re in the Room, the idea is always to be moving toward the Door of the Room. This must be gradual. You can’t just waltz out, because if you do, you’ll fall. By the same token, you do have to step out eventually. Understand?”

“No,” said Tiny.

“The Room is not an actual room,” said Johnny.

“I’m confused,” said Tiny. “If you step in and then step out …”

“Right,” said Johnny.

“That right there is two steps,” said Tiny.

“Let’s not get hung up on the number of steps,” said Johnny.

The Little Church of the Redeemer was dark brown with frayed red carpet on the floor. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and Tiny could see the gray hills and board-and-batten cottages out the window. This was an area on the edge of Grouse County where it was too hilly to farm. Joan Gower
met Johnny and Tiny at the back of the church. Tiny did not know her. She was a wide-eyed woman with blond hair, and she wore a long white gown with a rose-colored cross on the front. Johnny introduced Tiny and Joan, who sat together in the front of the church as he gave his talk. Tiny turned around a couple times. Some of the people in the audience were blind, and they aimed their ears at Johnny and consequently seemed to be looking right at Tiny. This made him nervous, even though they could not see him.

Johnny White told his own story—the bankruptcy, the divorce, how he missed his kids. He had told the story many times, but now, instead of being merely sad, it established his credentials as leader of the Room. Johnny had grown his hair long enough in front that he could smooth it back to cover his bald spot. But this long front hair tended to fall forward, and as a result he leaned his elbows on the pulpit and kept both hands free for managing his hair. There was a new part in his story, about drinking. Johnny did not really have an ongoing drinking problem. Judging from this anecdote, he had got drunk once and run into some spectacularly bad luck. Maybe this was a nitpicking distinction. He had ended up getting stitches. It’s also possible that Joan Gower had not heard Johnny’s story before. As Johnny spoke about his children, Megan and Stefan, she took Tiny’s hand and held it tightly, and Tiny saw the tears on her face.

At the end of Johnny’s talk an old man came up the aisle with a whiskey bottle. “I’m a big drinker,” he said. “I fought with George Smith Patton in Sicily but I can’t fight this.”

“Not alone, my veteran friend,” said Johnny. “That’s why the Room exists. Most people can’t fight it alone. Some can. If anyone here can, I would advise them candidly to hit the road, because they don’t need us.”

“I just get so thirsty,” said the man. “During the day I’m right there. But when night comes on, I don’t know, that’s when it’s bad.”

“You’re in the grips of a disease,” said Johnny. “It’s like anything. It’s like breaking your ankle.”

“Something’s broke,” said the man.

“We will mend it in the Room,” said Johnny. “Out here is the land of make-believe. You might as well uncork that container and have a cocktail.”

“Really?” said the man.

“That’s how much I believe in what I’m doing,” said Johnny.

The man looked at the bottle. “No, I wouldn’t feel right.”

Afterward, Johnny White stood under a musty tent beside the church and answered questions. There was a great deal of confusion about the Room and why, if it wasn’t an actual place, did Johnny talk about going into and out of it. What did he mean by that? And if it isn’t a place, what is it? And where? Meanwhile, Joan Gower took Tiny for a walk.

“This is our duck pond,” she said. “As you can see, it’s almost time to skim for algae. Continuing up the hill, we get a good view of the repairs being done gradually to our church roof. And here are the cottages. Aren’t they the greatest? These were manufactured in Sioux City in the nineteenth century for farmers who would come to town on Saturday and wish to stay overnight for church in the morning. In that sense they are the first prefabricated houses, and here they are in Margo. Our campers or residents come from the cities primarily—Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Louis—and they study with me and Father Alphonse Christiansen. Stepping in, we see the nice detailing and bead-board that tell us these cottages are from a different time. The setup is pretty spartan. We
provide a hot plate, a desk, a chair, a dresser, and a plain but sturdy bed. This particular cottage has a nice view of the duck pond that we were just at. Look, some mallards are coming down for a water landing. Oh, hold me. Please hold me.”