The End of Vandalism (18 page)

Being the county extension woman, Bev was practical and utilitarian, but she loved birds with a passion. It was brave of Russell to go to Bev with an illegal kill, but she was the only one Dan or Russell could think of who would know the species.

Bev and Tim asked Russell and Dan into the kitchen for waffles and coffee. The waffles were from a real iron—Bev showed how easy it was to keep the batter from sticking and burning. Tim, a serious-looking young man with wire-rim glasses, was known as the Tile Doctor, because he ran crews who installed drainage tiles in fields around the state. He spoke about the uncertainties of the tiling business and about a kid who had mashed his fingers between two tiles not that long ago but was back in school and playing the clarinet in the University of Wisconsin marching band.

Then Russell said, “Bev, we got a problem. There’s something in the trunk of the car. Well, it’s a bird. There’s a bird in the trunk of the car that perished by accident.”

Bev wiped her mouth with a red and white napkin. “What happened?”

“I shot it,” said Russell. “I think it’s a goose. I hope it’s a goose.

I don’t know what it is. Dan doesn’t agree with me. We need to get some kind of ID on this bird. So naturally we thought of you.”

Bev’s radiant smile had faded, making everyone sad. She left the room. Tim said, “Where did this happen?”

“At the slough,” said Dan.

“Maybe I’ll call the kids in,” said Tim.

“Why not,” said Russell.

Bev came into the kitchen with a bird book and an old sheet, and they all went outside. Dan opened the trunk. The lid came up with a soft
whoosh.
The bird did not look bad. A shotgun from medium range often does little apparent damage.

“It’s a great blue heron,” said Bev.

“It doesn’t seem that blue,” said Russell.

Bev sighed. “They’re not.”

“Well, what’s the sense of that?” said Russell. “Why call something blue if it isn’t? I mean, I should have known. I should have made sure. I’ll admit that. But it’s not like I went out of my way to shoot a great blue heron.”

“They’re really beautiful when they fly,” said Bev. “The neck folds into an S, and the wings move so slowly you can’t understand what keeps them in the air. Do you know what I mean?”

“It was over in a heartbeat,” said Russell.

“They are just intensely beautiful birds.”

“All right. I fucked up.”

“Shh,” said Bev. She wrapped the bird in the sheet. “We’ll bury him underneath the willow tree. There’s a shovel by the side door of the garage.”

“I’ll grab it,” said Russell. He hurried off.

“Well, I guess I’d better report this,” said Dan. “I mean, you can’t not report it because it’s Russell Ford, can you? There are game laws and that’s that. Maybe I should take the bird for evidence.”

“Oh, Dan, no,” said Bev. “I mean, no. And what? Put it in a room, on a table, with a bright light? No.”

So they buried the heron under the willow tree at the Leventhaler farm. Dan and Russell drove away without talking. The day had been a fiasco. On the radio Todd Rundgren sang “Can We Still Be Friends?”

Russell pleaded not guilty to killing the heron. He said it was an accident, and that the county had no case without intent. The law did not require intent, but Russell didn’t care; he had public relations in mind. He said he and Dan had been searching for wounded game when the heron burst from the grass. He said he had merely raised his gun as any sensible hunter might have, positioning the animal in his sights in case it was something legal to shoot, and that his gun somehow went off, fired itself, an accident. People were doubtful. “A gun just doesn’t up and fire itself,” said Mary Montrose. “No gun I’ve ever seen.” A hearing was scheduled for February.

This would be, as it happened, Russell’s second prosecution in the many years that he had been a supervisor. The first was in 1970, for assaulting a young teacher whose political opinions Russell did not agree with. Russell had a restaurant in Stone City at the time, and the teacher, Mr. Robins, and a seventh-grade class were picketing the restaurant for using paper napkins with blue dye, which would pollute the water when the napkins were thrown away, instead of white napkins with no dye. Russell ended up paying a seventy-five-dollar fine on that one.

Both of these cases were embarrassing to Russell, and one might wonder why they were allowed to proceed, since he was such a big shot. But people in Grouse County have an enduring mistrust of those who would put themselves above others, and they are vigilant. There used to be a saying painted on the railroad bridge south of Stone City: “Better to be Nobody who does Nothing than Somebody who does Everybody.” And it was only in the last ten or twelve years that this had faded so you couldn’t read it.

If Russell Ford was angry at Dan for pushing the issue of the dead heron, he did not let on. In fact, he saw to it that the board of supervisors sent Paul Francis to the state police training school at a time when Russell was still being ridden pretty hard by the Stone City newspaper, which printed, for example, a large illustration showing the many differences between the mallard duck and the great blue heron, including size, coloration, shape, and manner of flight.

The police school at Five Points was situated in a former Baptist Bible camp in the southern part of the state. Dan went along as Paul’s sponsor on the first day of the two-week course. He did not have to appear in person, but his father lived in Five Points and Dan figured he would take the opportunity to see him.

To get to the main lodge of the police campus you had to cross a ravine on a rope bridge. The bridge swayed as Dan and Paul crossed it, and Paul accidentally dropped his shaving kit into the ravine. The office was not open when the two men arrived, and they stood under a large oak tree in the dead grass. With a pilot’s sense of curiosity Paul spied something
red in a knothole on the tree and reached in and brought out a moldy pocket version of the New Testament that must have been there since the days when the camp was occupied by Baptist children. Being a religious man, although a Methodist and not a Baptist, Paul felt that this discovery meant he was on the right track. But Dan could not shake the uneasy feeling that the police and trainees milling around in sunglasses and the uniforms of their respective towns were about to be asked to sing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and so once the lodge had opened he delivered the check that was signed by Russell Ford, shook Paul’s hand, wished him luck, and left.

Dan’s father was a retired pharmaceutical salesman named Joseph Norman. A stern, sorrowful man, he lived in a yellow bungalow on two acres of thick and untended trees. His first wife had drowned while on a picnic at Lake Margo in 1949, at the age of nineteen. His second wife, Dan’s mother, was also dead. She died five years ago. Joe Norman’s job had taken him all over the upper Midwest but had seemed a relatively small position in a region where many men, through no special effort of their own, had wound up running farms of hundreds of acres. He was once reprimanded for failure to account for some pharmaceuticals but there were no hard feelings, and he retired on a full pension.

Joe Norman had tried various hobbies, but few had worked out. He had golfed but his eyesight was not good, and when he ran a motorized cart into the corner of the clubhouse, his membership was restricted. Then he tried woodburning, but lost interest once he had put decorative brands on every wooden item in the house. Now he carried a video camera everywhere, and so far nothing terrible had happened. When Dan visited, which was not often, his father would play tapes
for him on the television. “This is a Buick LeSabre bought by a friend of mine, and here he is washing it… This is Denny Jorgensen, who delivers the mail… Some people don’t like Denny. Denny and I get along fine.”

This time Joe played a tape of wild animals eating white bread and cinnamon rolls at night under a floodlight in the back yard. This was fascinating at first, and then weirdly monotonous.

“Look at the raccoon, how he uses his hands,” said Joe.

“Boy, I guess,” said Dan.

“They call him the little thief,” said Joe. “Well, I say ‘they.’ I don’t really know who calls him that. I guess I do.”

“We missed you at the wedding,” said Dan.

“I wasn’t feeling that good.”

“I’ve got a picture,” said Dan, reaching into the pocket of his shirt.

“There’s a pain that comes and goes in my eye. I don’t know what that’s about.”

“This is Louise.”

“She’s a very pretty girl, son.”

“You can keep that,” said Dan.

His father got up and stuck the picture to the refrigerator with a magnet. On the television, skunks were shimmying around with slices of bread in their jaws. “Well, have you been to the doctor?” said Dan.

“What is a doctor going to say?” said Joe.

“Maybe he’ll be able to figure out what’s wrong.”

Joe pulled out a drawer in the kitchen counter and rummaged through it. “I’m old,” he said.

“That’s no attitude,” said Dan. He took from a coffee table an orange rubber ball covered with spiky nubs. “Didn’t they use these for something in the Middle Ages?”

Joe looked up. “That’s for my circulation. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“As weapons,” said Dan.

Joe finally found what he was looking for and brought it into the living room. It was a Polaroid of the headstone of Dan’s mother’s grave.

“See a difference?” said Joe.

“What am I looking for?”

“I had them redo the letters.”

“Oh… O.K. How did that come about?”

“I happened to be at the cemetery when some fellows came by offering the service. And do you know what the problem is? Acid rain. It turns out that acid rain is eating away at the stones. It’s the same thing that’s happening to the statues in Rome and Vienna.”

“So what did they do exactly?” said Dan.

“Well, they had what I would call a router.”

“And it helped?”

“I’m not saying it leaps at you across the cemetery, but yes, there’s a difference.”

“What does a thing like that run you?”

“It’s paid for.”

“Well, it sounds a little bit like a con.”

“You could see the erosion.”

“I believe you,” said Dan. On the television the animals scattered and Joe himself came onscreen, casting more bread into the yard. His back and arms seemed stiff. He wore a red plaid shirt, gray pants with suspenders.

“When did you film this?” said Dan.

“Last night,” said Joe.

Dan left his father watching the tape of the greedy animals,
and on his way back to the highway he visited the cemetery where his mother was buried. He knelt and examined her stone but could not tell any difference in the letters, which said, “Jessica Lowry Norman, 1922-1987. What a Friend we have in Jesus.” His mother had died of a heart attack on Flag Day in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. One of Dan’s strongest memories of her was the time she broke a knife. The three of them were eating supper one evening when there was a loud clatter and his mother inhaled sharply. A stainless steel table knife had broken in the middle, separated blade from handle, cutting her hand. She cupped the base of her thumb in a napkin and hurried to the sink. There was a perfect silence in the house except for the running of the water. Dan had never heard of a table knife breaking under normal use, or any use, and the whole thing seemed to suggest or represent some deep psychic turbulence in his mother.

The cold weather took a long time coming that winter. It snowed maybe three times before Christmas, and the snow did not stick. The fire department wore shirtsleeves while stringing lights across Main Street in Grafton. It was sixty-three degrees for the football game between the Stone City Fighting Cats and the Morrisville-Wylie Plowmen, and the game drew nine hundred fans, although Stone City had a bad team that could do nothing with a conventional approach and was reduced to trying desperate sleight-of-hand plays that resulted in losses of six to thirty-six yards. Dan waited until two weeks before Christmas to cut a tree. He paid twenty dollars and walked across the hills of a tree farm outside Romyla. The sky blazed with a blue so strong that he could hardly take his eyes away long enough to look where he was
going. Louise was three months pregnant, beginning to show. Accordingly Dan selected a full and abundantly branched tree. “Tree” is maybe even the wrong word; it was more like a hedge. Dan lay with his back on needles, sawing through the trunk. He dragged the thing over the grassy fields and struggled to confine it to the bed of a borrowed pickup.

The tree took up the whole north side of the living room. Dan had to run guy wires from the window frames on either side of the tree to keep it from falling. At first the large tree seemed wrong somehow in the house. Why this was so Dan could not explain. Either it seemed like the tree of a showoff or, by its sheer expanse, it revealed something sinister and previously unknown about the whole concept of having a Christmas tree. The only thing to do was decorate it. Being the kind of people they were, Louise and Dan had not really considered what they would use for decorations. Louise found some ornaments that dated back to her days with Tiny, but they decided not to use these, and in fact burned or at least melted them in the trash burner. They went over to see Mary, who gave them six boxes of bird ornaments that she had got years ago and never opened. Louise hung these one afternoon while Dan straightened a snarled ball of lights that had been seized in a drug raid and stored for several years in a closet at the sheriff’s office. Louise glided around the tree, breasts and belly pressing sweetly against a long colorful dress. The flimsy silver birds responded to air currents, turning and glittering when doors were opened or closed.

So all in all it was a good Christmas, though Louise was still spending her nights in the trailer by the garage. Robin Otis had advised against changing anything that was working and especially not during the holidays, a stressful and for many
people a hideous time to begin with. So it was that Dan woke alone on a windy Christmas morning and made bacon, eggs, and coffee with “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” playing quietly on the radio. The broadcast had that strange, nobody-at-the-station quality that you don’t find at any other time of the year. Louise came over at about seven forty-five in a nightgown, robe, and sneakers. There was no snow on the ground. She kissed Dan on the neck, and the smell of sleep in her hair made him shiver. Out the window above the sink, the sky was the yellow color of dust.