The End of Vandalism (20 page)

“Well, see, that’s wrong,” said Mary. “They live together. She might sleep in her little trailer. That’s eccentric but it’s not the end of the world. You of all people ought to agree with that. She’ll move to the house when the baby comes. Who said this, anyway? It sounds like a classic piece of Lime Bucket exaggeration.”

“I forget who said it,” said Hans. “Should we go?”

“Let me get my coat.”

Wind swept the countryside, and the pickup bounced along
on gravel roads that were, as Mary would say, “washboardy” from the winter snow and the spring rain. Halfway to the farm, the tailgate banged open and the boxes fell from the truck.

“Trouble in paradise,” said Hans as he pulled over. He and Mary stepped down from the truck. Two of the boxes had broken open, their contents spilling into the ditch. Red, yellow, and gray clothes were all over the lush grass.

“Guess I didn’t get it shut,” said Hans.

“Say, maybe not,” said Mary.

They walked down into the ditch and gathered the clothes. This was on the south side of the road, where the abandoned utility poles were leaning so badly that you had to duck to get under them.

“They ought to do something about these,” said Hans.

“I have said that for years,” said Mary.

Hans scooped up a pair of corduroy overalls. “She may want to give some of these a spin in the dryer,” he said.

“There is a bootie by your foot,” said Mary.

Hans secured the boxes with rope and slammed the tailgate. As an afterthought he walked back to the ditch and unscrewed six insulators from the electric poles. The insulators were heavy and made of rounded blue glass.

“If Louise washes these out, she’ll have a perfectly usable set of drinking glasses,” he said.

Louise found the cardboard boxes in the kitchen when she got back home. It looked as if June had sent every piece of clothing ever worn by her two children, from infancy to the present. There were also many toys—roller skates, Lincoln Logs, alphabet blocks.

Louise sat down and shook her head. Sometimes June seemed in rather light touch with reality. And some of the clothes were damp, as if they had been rained on in transit. Louise decided to wash everything. The insulators she did not know how to interpret. She lined them up on the kitchen table.

When Dan came home, the first thing he did after putting his gun away was to walk over to the table and examine the insulators. “What are these?”

“Mom left them,” said Louise. “My guess is they are paperweights.” “We don’t have this much paper.”

“What do you think they are?”

“Insulators,” said Dan.

“Well, obviously.”

“They’re from the utility poles up the road.” He picked one up and turned it in his hands. “Maybe they’re supposed to be drinking glasses.”

“Wouldn’t they fall over?”

“You sand them or file them.”

“That’s something we’ll get to right away.”

“Hey, how did the ultrasound go?”

“Oh, I wish you could have been there. The baby looked at her hands.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes.”

“How’s the heartbeat? Did the guy talk about that?”

“Jimmy said she has a really good heartbeat.”

“She?” said Dan. “He said ‘she’?”

“He said ‘her.’”

“No kidding. Maybe they just do that, you know, as a nonsexist thing.”

Louise shrugged. “Could be. I told him I don’t want to know.”

“That takes a lot of restraint.”

“Thank you. Did you have your debate?”

“Yes,” said Dan. “And I have to say, I cannot see anyone going into the privacy of the booth and pulling the lever for Johnny White.”

“You’ll win the primary,” said Louise.

“He’ll go Independent after that,” said Dan.

“Really?”

“Sure,” said Dan. “Jack would never put up the money if he was just going to drop out. And everybody is aware of that. The Lions were treating him with kid gloves like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Give an example.”

“Foot patrols,” said Dan. “As you know, we have three people working a county that is two hundred and ninety six square miles. And Johnny says they should be on foot. Say, what a good idea. We’ll walk from Morrisville to Romyla when somebody wraps their car around a tree. But these Lions, they lap it up. Johnny says we’re understaffed. The Lions nod seriously. Well, no kidding. But I don’t have a printing press. I can’t make money.”

Louise washed out an insulator, poured a beer into it, and handed the insulator to Dan. “Don’t worry. Johnny won’t win.”

“He’s calling himself John,” said Dan. “John White.”

“He can call himself John Shaft, he still ain’t gonna be elected,” said Louise.

“Miles Hagen is one thing. I don’t mind Miles Hagen. At least he was a police officer at one time.”

“Who is Miles Hagen?”

“The guy the Republicans always put up.”

“Isn’t he deaf?”

“No.”

“Who am I thinking of?”

Dan said he didn’t know.

“Johnny won’t get past the primary,” said Louise.

“Like I say, he’ll become an Independent.”

“So that’s what’s up his sleeve.”

“Yeah, I just said that.”

Louise smiled. “I guess I’m not paying attention,” she said. “I keep thinking about the baby moving her hands. It was about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I wish I would have been there.”

“Let me tell you something else,” said Louise. “They gave me a handout on anesthetics, and I’ve decided I don’t want to be knocked out. I want to be awake. Whatever you do, don’t let them knock me out.”

“I won’t let them knock you out,” said Dan.

“You have to be my advocate,” said Louise.

Dan cooked hamburgers and broccoli while Louise dropped baby clothes into the dryer. After supper, while they were doing dishes, Claude Robeshaw dropped by to advise Dan about the campaign. Claude was still very influential among Democrats around the county.

Dan and Claude sat down at the kitchen table, and Claude lit a cigar and rolled it slowly on the edge of an ashtray. He tipped his head back and looked downward through his glasses to read Dan’s campaign brochure. He said nothing, leading Dan to think that he must hate it.

“First thing I’d do is schedule a pancake supper in Grafton,”
said Claude. “Grafton is the heart of your support and the geographical heart of the county.”

“I’ve done that,” said Dan. “Actually it’s a spaghetti supper. Jean Jewell has agreed to play the folk guitar.”

Claude shook his head.

“You don’t like the guitar,” said Dan.

“I have no problem with the guitar,” said Claude. “I haven’t heard Jean play but, in general, music is good.”

“Jean is amazing,” said Dan.

“No, it’s spaghetti I don’t like, and I’ll tell you why,” said Claude. “Pancakes are cheaper to make. Thus you raise more funds, and after all, it is a fundraiser. Pancakes are easy on the system. If you keep a person up all night because your spaghetti sauce hasn’t agreed with them, they tend to remember. Lastly, spaghetti has a foreign connotation that you avoid altogether with pancakes. Steer clear of tacos for the same reason.”

“Oh, come on,” said Dan.

“Do you remember Everett Carr?” said Claude.

“The name is familiar.”

“He was a state senator, and once upon a time at a campaign supper he served a goulash that made a number of people ill. When Election Day rolled around, we had a new state senator.”

Louise took an armload of clothes from the dryer. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” she said.

“It is dumb,” said Claude. “It’s very dumb. Politics is a dumb game.”

Louise went upstairs. She felt slightly strange about the election, having gone out with Johnny White, married Tiny, and then married Dan. She felt as if she were exerting some
improper influence on public affairs. She felt like the sun to their revolving planets.

Dan had painted the baby’s room a deep and soft color called Shell Ivory. It was a small room with a dresser, a wicker rocker, and a boxed and unassembled crib that leaned against the wall.

Louise folded the clothes and put them in the drawers of the dresser. They felt great in her hands. She loved the softly coarse fabrics, the pebbled rubber feet of a pair of pajamas. She looked into the mirror above the dresser. Could she be a good mother after all the false starts and wrong turns? She had her doubts. But she also had a feeling she rarely got—of life as a path leading directly to this moment. She was rocking in the chair and thinking about this when Dan and Claude came clinking and clanking up the stairs with beers and a socket set.

“We’re going to put up the crib,” said Dan.

This took longer than might have been expected. Twenty minutes after starting, they were still sifting through the pieces and frowning at the instructions. Dan would say, “Fit cotter pin A to post flange D,” and then he would repeat the words “cotter pin A” very slowly, and he would ask Claude if cotter pin A didn’t look shorter than the other cotter pins in the instructions, and if so, where was the damned thing. But they worked on, joining the pieces and components in a painstaking and bewildered fashion, until all of a sudden they were done, with pieces left over.

“Maybe those are extras in case you lose some of them,” said Claude, but they didn’t look like extras, and the gate on one side would not lower the way it was supposed to. “Push that side up against the wall,” said Claude. “Then it won’t matter if it opens or not.” This is what they did, and then they
sat on a braided blue and white rug in the middle of the floor, drinking their beers and talking about the weather, as Louise rocked gently with one hand resting on her stomach. The baby kicked, turned, settled.

Claude finished his beer and stood. “You two seem good,” he said. “Now I have to go see Howard LaMott, the fire chief. He wants to talk about my son Albert.”

“What did Albert do?” said Dan.

“He put cake in the boots of the firemen,” said Claude.

“That sounds like Albert,” said Dan.

“Howard claims this delayed them responding to a fire.”

“Howard LaMott is a big windbag,” said Louise.

“I’ll hear him out,” said Claude.

He left. Louise and Dan went down the hall and to bed. Dan read aloud from a book called
Planets, Stars and Space,
which he had found in the attic with the inscription “For Jeannie with love on her ninth birthday, July 20, 1962.” Dan remembered hearing somewhere that infants in the womb liked being read to.

“Considering its influence upon the lives of people, animals, and plants on the earth,” Dan read, “the moon is the second most important object in the sky. It is the illuminator of the night. It is responsible for the month as a calendar unit, and, working with the sun, it produces the important rise and fall in the earth’s waters—the tides. In ancient times, calendars depended solely upon the moon, and lunar calendars are still used by many people for religious purposes. The dates of Easter and Passover are determined by the motions of the moon.

“Because the moon goes around the earth instead of around the sun, it is not a planet, even though it resembles the planets in many respects. It is a satellite, one of 31 in our solar system.”

While this was going on out at the farm, in town Mary went to see Alvin Getty. Alvin lived in a tall and nearly paintless house, one block north of the park and not far from the Three Sisters of the Jewells. Mary almost tripped on an uncoiled Slinky on the sidewalk. She saw Alvin standing on the porch in the hazy glow of a bug light.

“What’s happened to the store?” said Mary.

He took a long drink from a bottle of Falstaff beer. “I’ve persuaded new investors to lend me their backing,” he said.

“Alvin, you are bankrupt.”

“Says who?”

“Well, aren’t you?” said Mary.

“Pammy,” called Alvin. “We have company.”

Pam Getty was in the kitchen. She had black hair and moved heavily in a quilted housecoat. Mary could see her through the open door.

“It’s Mary Montrose,” said Alvin.

“Leave me alone, Alvin,” she said, searching violently through the pantry. “I’m making a Fizzy and I don’t want any of your shit.”

“Hi, Pam,” said Mary.

“Pam, Mary is speaking,” said Alvin.

Pam’s hands shook as she got the Fizzy into water. “I don’t care. That was my money.”

“It was both of our money,” said Alvin. “Why not cool it for one second and say hello to a guest in our house.”

“Not after what she did to King,” said Pam. She left the kitchen, and Mary did not see her again.

“Pam is angry at the world tonight,” said Alvin.

“It was not me that let a biting dog run loose,” said Mary.

“You were hard on that animal,” said Alvin.

“I don’t think so,” said Mary. “But I’m not here about King.”

“There is no reason to panic,” said Alvin. “Pam and I are working closely with our creditors. We will be open again on Monday, and if not Monday, then the following Monday. Everyone will get their groceries in due time.”

“But people are hungry now,” said Mary. “Alvin, they took your cash register. The store isn’t going to open again.”

Alvin sat on the steps. “No, it probably won’t,” he said.

“What happened?” said Mary.

“People didn’t shop.”

“Goodbye, Alvin,” said Mary.

Alvin shook her hand. “Go quietly,” he said.

“And yourself.”

Mary walked through Grafton in the dark. Two cars sat in front of the Lime Bucket, looking lonelier somehow than no cars. The rest of Main Street was deserted except for a dented maroon van by the old Opera House. Vans disturbed Mary, although she could not have said exactly why. She passed through the business district and into her neighborhood. In the windows of the houses she could see people washing dishes, huddling before the flickering fire of television, reading magazines in chairs. Arriving home, Mary found her back door standing open. She turned on the light in the kitchen as she always did, put her keys on the counter, and went into the living room. A deer stood not ten feet away, eating from the tangled vines of her ivy plant.

In the broken light Mary could see the steely black eyes and the stiff bristled hair along the shoulders. She could see the mouth tearing the dark leaves that she had been growing for years. The deer was not afraid of Mary. It wanted the ivy and
would have it, that simple. It looked at her out of the corner of its eye. It smelled like a river. The head butted the coffee table as the teeth made that soft ripping sound. Mary turned and left the way she had come. She raised the garage door, got into her car, locked the doors. She did not know what to do. She had been a schoolteacher early on in her career and had always taught the children that the answers were near at hand for those who would look. But at this moment she didn’t know where to look or what she would find.