The End of Vandalism (17 page)

“Do you think I’m blind?” said Louise.

“What?”

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I should have been a lot cooler about the whole thing.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Look,” said Louise, “do you love me?”

“Yes,” said Dan. With the spatula he put grilled sandwiches on a plate. “Don’t cry,” he said. He had a way of becoming wooden and emotionless just when she needed him to be the opposite.

“I will if I want,” said Louise.

The next day Louise felt terrible. All day at work she had to talk to some historic preservation people about a photographic survey of houses. Talk, talk, talk, and then they wanted coffee. They were very concerned with authenticity, and seemed to be scrutinizing Louise to see if she was authentic.

Then Louise went over to Russell Ford’s and rented a trailer. She thought this could be the separate roof under which Dan
might get some sleep, and by doing this good deed she could make up for the fight.

Russell gave her a discount, but still all she could afford was a tiny trailer made in 1976. Inside, there was just enough room to turn around. Russell said he would tow the trailer to the farm and set it up for seventy-five dollars.

“And that’s treating you like a sister,” he said.

Russell’s nephew Steven delivered the trailer two days later. He put a carpenter’s level on the fender and turned a crank on the hitch until the trailer was square. He filled the water tank, hooked up the electricity, showed her how the tiny appliances worked.

“Do you think I have a chance with Maren?” he said.

The question sounded to Louise like one you would ask the Magic Eight Ball. “There is always a chance,” she said.

She enjoyed preparing the trailer for Dan. She cleaned it all up and made the bed with new sheets, pillows, and a quilt. She put beer in the refrigerator and cattails in a vase on the table. She plugged in a lamp with a warm yellow shade.

By the time Dan came home she had changed her mind. She opened the door and looked down at him.

“What’s this, baby?” said Dan.

“I want to stay,” she said. “I fixed this up for you, but I want to stay.”

It would be wrong to say that the little trailer solved all their problems. But Dan began to sleep once he had the bed in the house to himself. It is true that his therapist had finally come through with a prescription. He and Louise ate together, and every night had the pure emotions of parting.

One night Dan knocked on her door and read for her a speech he was to give at a seminar on domestic violence.

“Sometimes we get a mistaken notion of what is strong,” said Dan. “Why? Television, for one reason. We see a man lift five hundred pounds over his head, we see another man tear up the phone book of a large city. It becomes easy to conclude that this is what we mean by ‘strong.’ But turn off the set. Aren’t the real strong men and women right at home, looking out for that family? What do we mean when we say ‘strong’?”

Kleeborg’s Portraits won the bid to take pictures of old houses. For Louise this amounted to long walks with a camera around the nicer parts of Stone City.

Not everyone understood the purpose of the project. Some people dressed up, gathering the kids and the dogs in the front yard. One thin old gentleman with a steep-roofed house built in 1897 showed Louise the spools in his garage. He had attached dozens of small sewing spools to the walls and ceiling and connected them by taut loops of string, so that when he turned on an electric motor the spools all spun at once and the knots on the strings danced back and forth.

“Wow,” said Louise.

“Each one stands for someone I know,” said the man.

Louise went to see Dan’s therapist. The office had a soft chair and a huge inverted cone of an ashtray. A handle on the side of the chair operated a footrest, enabling Louise to raise and lower her feet as needed.

She had expected the therapist to be a bombshell, but the woman seemed tired and normal instead. Her name was Robin Otis.

“Where are your parents?” she said.

“My mother lives in Grafton. My father is dead,” said Louise.

“How old were you when he died?”

“Well, how old was I. Sixteen,” said Louise. “He had a heart attack while getting ready for a party.”

“Such loss at a young age,” said Robin.

“Yes, well,” said Louise.

“Do you remember the last words he said to you?”

“He said for us to have a happy New Year.”

“Do you get along with your mother?”

“You could say that,” said Louise.

“Tell me about the trailer. I am curious about this. Why did you claim it for yourself?”

“I don’t know,” said Louise. “It seems familiar. It’s clean. It’s warm. I don’t really know.”

“Hmm,” said Robin Otis.

“Why, does Dan want it?” said Louise.

“I can never read him,” said Robin.

“Tell me about it.”

“He’s like some incredible ice cube or something.”

“I think he wants to stay married,” said Louise.

“I have no doubt of it.”

Louise walked out of her office through a hallway that served as a waiting room not only for the therapist but for a dentist and an accountant.

A couple sat between a stack of hunting magazines and another stack of
Highlights for Children.
Louise pushed a button and stood waiting for an elevator.

“All I’m saying is that we don’t necessarily need to get into specifics about sex,” said the man.

“Ho ho, you wait,” said the woman.

As part of the architectural survey, Louise took a picture of
a palm reader’s house on Pomegranate Avenue. The house was built from rocks of all sizes. The roofline curved like a roller coaster. A sign out front said, “Mrs. England Palms and Cards.” It was an eclectic house, and the woman who came to the door had huge arms and fogged glasses.

“I’m here to take pictures of the house,” said Louise.

“Let me shut off my story,” said Mrs. England. She went through an arched doorway, leaving Louise in the front room. The house seemed perfectly silent.

“Nice place,” Louise called.

There were framed oval mirrors and a painting of a man with a hammer. Turtles and newts dragged themselves across a sandy tank. A map of the solar system hung on the wall, with a marker saying, “You Are Here.”

“Mr. England built this house,” said Mrs. England. “He built houses all over Stone City, but he considered them very tame. He was happy enough to build the houses that people wanted, but he also wanted the chance to build a house that would satisfy his need for self-expression. This is his portrait. He was a wild man who perished in the war.”

“I’m sorry,” said Louise. Mrs. England took her by the hand and led her to a purple davenport.

“He used the materials of his region and got it all at cost, and I loved him,” said Mrs. England. “How late are you?”

Louise sat down. “Eleven days,” she said.

“You have a lot to think about.”

Louise sank into the davenport. “How did you know?”

“By touching your hand,” said Mrs. England. “Didn’t you read my shingle? I guess you assume it’s all fake. Well, it isn’t all fake. I should say not.”

“I don’t get it,” said Louise. “Can you tell from the temperature?”

“Oh, it’s complicated,” said Mrs. England with a wave of her hand.

“Am I pregnant?” said Louise.

“I couldn’t say for sure that you are,” said Mrs. England. “But I do know how you can find out. You go down Pomegranate another five blocks, and you will come to a Rexall’s.”

“Yes,” said Louise.

“They’ve got little kits that you can do at home,” said Mrs. England.

The pregnancy tests were on a shelf between the condoms and the sinus pills. Louise compared the brands without the first idea of what she was looking for. She passed over two tests that could be accomplished in one step, because that did not seem like enough steps. Another featured a plastic wand that was to be held in the “urine stream,” and she rejected this as well.

Most of the kits were fifteen dollars, but some were eleven, and she ruled out the less expensive ones on the theory that something must account for the price difference, and after all, she wasn’t going to be buying a pregnancy test every day of the week. Beyond these judgments, she went strictly by the design of the packaging. Almost all of the boxes had red lines or red words, as if invoking nostalgia for the menstrual cycle. The model she chose suggested urgency and yet, she thought, not outright panic.

On her way to the counter Louise checked to make sure the package had a price tag, so the clerk would not take a silver microphone and ask all over the store for a price check on the pregnancy test. The salesboy rang up the purchase with the blank and undiscerning face that they must teach in salesboy school. She might have been buying a key chain, or toothpaste, or flashbulbs, instead of embarking on the mystery of life.

DAN TOOK Russell Ford duck hunting that winter because he wanted something from him. He had no reason to expect trouble; Russell claimed to be a pheasant hunter, and whether the game is pheasant or ducks there are certain rules.

It was just before five o’clock on a Sunday morning in November when Dan drove up to Russell’s house. Russell lived in the area known as Mixerton, which took its name from the Mixers, a utopian society that existed around the turn of the century but broke up under the strain of constant squabbling. There is nothing in Mixerton now, really, except the Mixerton Clinic and some houses.

Rain fell steadily. It was the kind of rain that might fall all day—fine weather for ducks. Dan sat in his car looking at Russell’s house. The wipers went back and forth as he unscrewed the metal lid of his thermos. Steam rose from the coffee. Hunting was considered recreational, but when you got up in the dark to go hunting, the act seemed to acquire unusual gravity. The radio played softly “Hello, It’s Me” on the second day of a Todd Rundgren weekend.

Russell came out of his house with a shotgun and a box of doughnuts. He was a fat man, and in fact his nickname
used to be Fat before he got to be chairman of the board of supervisors and received once again his given name. He was dressed in the mixed greens of camouflage.

He opened the door and slid into Dan’s police car. Dan could tell that Russell’s costume was stiff and new. “Brought you some breakfast,” said Russell.

“And I thank you,” said Dan.

“I wonder about this using the cruiser for off-duty.”

“My car is broke down,” said Dan.

“You always say that.”

“It always is.”

“Why don’t you take the thing to Ronnie Lapoint and have it fixed? Good God, you make twenty-two thousand dollars a year.”

“I’ve been thinking I could cut some corners by working on the car myself. I got a Chilton’s manual and a good ratchet set, but it seems like there’s always something to sidetrack a person.”

“I know that feeling,” said Russell. He looked around the car as Dan pulled onto the road going south. “I guess you don’t have a dog.”

“No. That’s true.”

“I would have thought for some reason that you had to.”

Dan took a bite of a doughnut. “Not if you have waders and the water isn’t deep.”

Russell shook his head and folded his arms with a great scratching of material. “See, there, I’m learning,” he said.

“I used to have a dog,” said Dan.

“That right?”

“His name was Brownie.”

“I remember that dog,” said Russell.

“He was good.”

“What ever happened to him?”

Dan slowed for a corner. “Well, that was a funny story. He ran away, and I never did find out where he went.”

“Isn’t that something.”

“He must have got in a car with somebody. Because you know dogs will always come home. I heard a thing on Paul Harvey the other day where a dog walked all the way from Florida to Quebec looking for his owner.”

“Quebec, Canada?”

“They just said Quebec. I assume it’s Canada.”

“If they didn’t say, it probably is Canada.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Son of a bitch. Now, that’s interesting. What did he do, take the interstate?”

Dan shrugged. “I don’t know. We also have the white dog on the farm. But he isn’t a retriever. I don’t really know what kind of dog he is.”

They parked on the southern end of Lapoint Slough and walked to Dan’s blind, a distance of about half a mile. They moved along with their guns resting on their shoulders. Russell was slightly ahead of Dan—he could not stand walking behind anyone. Rain drummed their hats. The sky was dark except for a line of red light on the eastern horizon. Grass batted their legs, the ground rose and fell beneath their boots.

“Be looking for a fence,” said Dan.

“What fence is that?” said Russell.

“Lee Haugen’s,” said Dan.

“That’s east of here. Way east.”

“No. We’re not talking about the same fence.”

“Hulf,” said Russell, or something like that, as he ran into the fence.

“That’s the one I mean,” said Dan.

Dan’s blind was a plywood shed separated from the water of the slough by a screen of marsh grass. He had decoys inside and with Russell’s help carried them down to the water.

Russell and Dan sat in the blind smoking cigars and watching the clouds turn gray and white. The rain seemed to fall a little harder as the light came up. Soon they could see across the water to the other side. Dan reached into the blind and brought out a bottle of blackberry brandy. They each had a drink and shuddered.

Dan laughed. “It is pretty bad,” he said.

“It’s bitter,” said Russell.

“That brandy belonged to Earl Kellogg. And I don’t think I’ve hunted with him in two years. Every now and then I’ll have a drink, but there always seems to be the same amount left.”

Russell took out a box of shells and loaded his gun, which was a twelve-gauge with a bolt action and modest carving on the stock. A good part of hunting’s appeal is loading the shotgun. The shell is very satisfying, its coppery base and forest-green plastic. The weight and balance seem natural, as if shells grew on vines.

“Where are the ducks?” said Russell.

“You have to be patient,” said Dan. “This is the time when you can sit and think. That’s what I like about duck hunting—the thinking.”

“That’s pretty deep,” said Russell. “What do you think about?”

“I just let my mind wander,” said Dan. “But I’ll tell you what you should think about, and that’s making Paul Francis a constable.”

Russell ignored this. “Tell me what we do when the ducks come in.”

“Don’t get flustered. Don’t turn your safety off until you’re shouldering the gun. If you think something is too far away, you’re right—it is.”

A flock came in after a while with beaks and webs reaching for the water. Dan and Russell stood and fired. They got three, and Dan waded into the slough to retrieve the birds. There were two males, with green velvety heads and copper breasts, and a speckled brown female. All the wings had traces of blue. These were mallards, and Dan felt the exhilaration and sadness of having killed them, as if he were a wheel in the machine of the seasons.

Then a long time passed with no action, although they could hear gunfire from other places around the slough. Russell clipped his fingernails, Dan laid his gun down and leaned back on his elbows. He thought about Louise. She was two months pregnant, and according to a book they had, the baby was an inch and a quarter long and the heart was beating. Dan considered for a moment the outlandish fact of reproduction, and it struck him that even Russell had been a fetus at one time, hard to visualize as this might be. Then Dan thought how one day his and Louise’s child would be as old as Russell, who had to be at least sixty, and that by then he, Dan, would probably be dead, and Louise probably would be as well, and he hoped that the child would not be too upset at their deaths—wouldn’t turn to booze, or get gouged by the funeral men. A plain pine box would be fine with Dan. He considered the large number of people who would be satisfied with a plain pine box versus the fact that he had never seen such a box, let alone seen anyone buried in
one, except in historical dramas on television. In this county even paupers went to their graves in a coffin that looked like it could withstand rifle fire.

Dan decided to get away from this line of thinking by lobbying for the hiring of the pilot Paul Francis as a constable.

“In the first year this would cost us twelve thousand seven hundred dollars,” said Dan. “That includes thirteen hundred for state police training school in Five Points, eight thousand for estimated part-time salary, twenty-one hundred dollars for flight insurance, and approximately thirteen hundred for medical insurance.”

“This is just the kind of thing that I’m always railing against. What in hell are we doing paying medical insurance for a constable?”

“This is a very conservative policy,” said Dan. “He has to be dying, practically, before it kicks in.”

“So why have it?”

“The state requires it.”

“That fucking state,” said Russell, and then he ranted about the state for a while.

“The way it is now, we can’t fly anywhere,” said Dan. “We used to be able to fly, but the insurance company has now decided that they will not insure our flights because Paul is freelance. So we would be able to fly again, and sometimes we need to fly. Secondly, Earl, Ed, and I all work at least sixty hours a week, without overtime. Now, for me, that’s not really a problem, because I’m management. But if AFSCME were to find out about Ed and Earl, they would definitely have a grievance, and defending that, as you know, would cost a lot more than hiring Paul Francis and giving these guys some relief. Now, I’m not going to call AFSCME, but can I guarantee
they’ll never find out? No, I can’t. And the third point is, once Paul is licensed to fly as a constable—and I checked into this, so I know—he will be able to fly for other county functions too. Say you want to go to, I don’t know, a conference in the Ozarks. Well, you jump in the Piper Cub and Paul Francis takes you down there. Sounds kind of nice, doesn’t it?”

“I just cannot see adding a constable when all the county towns are getting police of their own.”

“You’re wrong about that, Russ,” said Dan. “Five of the towns don’t have any police coverage at all. Ever.”

“The trend is toward town police.”

“Like where? Grafton?”

“I’m not talking about Grafton, or Boris, or Pinville, or any of those ghost towns—Lunenberg is another—where they can’t sell houses.”

“We are in those towns all the time,” said Dan. “They are the county.”

“Let me tell you something, Dan,” said Russell. “Twenty years down the road, there won’t be a sheriff’s department as we think of it now.” And as he said this he made a slashing gesture with his right hand. “There might be a sheriff, and I say
might,
but he’ll be mostly a figurehead. And this was ordained many years ago, when Otto Nicolette had the opportunity to solve the Vince Hartwell murder but could not before the Morrisville police stumbled on the weapon by pure chance. Ever since that time, the sheriff’s department has been like, like, well, you know what it’s like. And I don’t mind telling you that, because I said the same exact thing when you first ran for sheriff back in… whenever it was.”

“You and that Hartwell business,” said Dan. “Living in the past.”

“Don’t slight the past. People were better back then. I remember those times with great fondness. Today I look around me and I don’t see much. By the way, did you know that Johnny White is thinking about running against you next year?”

“Good,” said Dan. “He’s not much of a threat.” This was a fairly common opinion to have about Johnny White. When you looked at his experience it was hard to see what it was that might justify his being sheriff. He had run that restaurant in Cleveland that went bust. He had been an assistant in the county clerk’s office. And he now ran the Room, but he didn’t get much respect for this position of authority because his father, Jack White, was on the board of directors and provided a lot of the money to run the thing.

“Well, Jack is a friend of mine,” said Russell. “We often play pool together at the cigar store in Chesley. Eight-ball, last-pocket, scratch-you-lose. He may seem scattered, but I wouldn’t sell him short.”

“You mean Jack.”

“Yeah,” said Russell. “You’re right, by and large, about Johnny. He was a file clerk for the county there for a while, and I happen to know that some pretty important papers have yet to turn up. But he’s not doing that anymore. He’s leading that group of addicts called the Wall or the Hall or something. They have taken the abuse issue and are running with it.”

“The operation seems pretty specious,” said Dan, “but who knows? Maybe they do some people good.”

“They do Johnny good,” said Russell. “You know who his partner is over there, don’t you? Tiny Darling.”

“I’ve heard that,” said Dan.

Probably they should have left earlier than they did. That’s easy enough to say in retrospect. Either way, everything would have been all right had Russell followed Dan’s advice about not shooting at distant targets. After the first few passes by the mallards and teals, the banks of the slough were more or less exploding with gunfire, and no duck with any instinct at all was going to come near the water until sundown. But unable to leave well enough alone, Russell raised his gun to the sky and fired at something overhead, then swore that he had brought a duck down at the curve of the slough to the north of them.

Dan was skeptical. “It would just fall,” he said.

“No, it coasted.”

“Then you didn’t hit it.”

“I’m pretty sure I did.”

“If you hit it, it would fall.”

They retrieved the decoys, put them away, gathered their things, and went looking for the duck that Russell claimed to have hit. They never did find it, but they did scatter a dozen or so red-winged blackbirds and a large and unfortunate waterfowl, which got up with a slow and graceful ripple of wings only to have Russell Ford shoot it.

“Russell, quit shooting.”

“Got you, son of a bitch.”

“Don’t shoot anymore.”

Russell walked over to the bird and picked it up by the neck. It was gray and brown with a long body, reedy legs, a black patch on the head. “It’s a goose,” guessed Russell.

“I don’t think so.”

“It might be in the goose family.”

“It’s a crane, I’ll bet you anything.”

Russell folded the bird carefully in his arm. “You’ve been hard to get along with this whole trip,” he said.

There was nowhere to go now but the Leventhaler farm. Bev and Tim lived in a cedar house on Route 29 north of the slough. They were very proud of their house, and when they invited you there they would mention it specifically, as if it were something marvelous that had just appeared one day.

The rain had stopped and the sun was coming through the clouds in discernible rays. The Leventhalers had just got back from church. They attended the Methodist church in Margo. Their children were running across the wet grass in green and red coats.