The End of Vandalism (4 page)

“Do you want help?” the man with blue eyes asked Mary. His voice was constricted by his daughter’s arms around his
neck. “I guess he tried to steal some candy. My understanding is, he put a roll of candy in his pocket.”

“Him and the other guy must know each other,” said Louise.

“Oh, yeah!” said the man. “I’m sure they go way back. I guess this Pete guy thought the other one would just play dumb while he made off with the candy.”

Mary took out her barrettes, brushed her hair, and put the barrettes back. “So you think the guy in the red,” she said, gesturing at the herbicide sign, “knew the cook beforehand?”

Louise took her cigarette case, unsnapped it, and bent to light a cigarette. “He just said he did, Ma,” she said.

“Oh, yeah!” said the man. “No question but what they know each other. Ease up, honey. You’re strangling Dad. I would definitely call 911 if I was that guy. I don’t know why he isn’t calling them right now. I would be. You bet I would.”

“You know what, though,” said Mary. “I’ll bet that guy got away with the candy anyway.”

The man nodded. “Pete did,” he said.

“Well, wait,” said Mary. “Pete, or the one in the red coat?”

“Pete
is
the one in the red coat,” said the man.

“Pete got in the van,” said Louise.

The man nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Pete got in the van.”

“Be quiet about Pete!” said the little girl. She touched a hand to her forehead. “I’m sick.”

“You’re fine,” said the father.

“Put a Band-Aid on my eye,” said the girl.

Louise and Mary ordered the California hamburgers, and French fries, and mugs of root beer. Louise gave the counterman a cigarette and reached across to light it for him. His fingers trembled as he formed a shield around Louise’s
lighter. Then he set out two red and white cardboard baskets for their fries. Louise and Mary ate in the car, returned the heavy glass mugs to the counter, and drove home to Mary’s house. They watched a television show about murder; Louise discovered a large flaw in the plot, and Mary had a glass of milk and sat on the davenport. During a commercial, Louise looked at the clock on the wall and turned to Mary.

“Do you really think I’m that isolated?” she said.

Mary looked at her blankly, touched by something profound. She walked out to the hallway, speaking to Louise from the dark.

“I didn’t get home with my stick,” she said.

The next day Louise helped the portrait photographer Kleeborg with high school graduation photos. She applied makeup, tilted and adjusted lights, put film holders in Kleeborg’s old hands. The day went normally except for one girl who did not look very promising from the start. She had short, straight blond hair, but her eyes were red and her clothes crooked. She was supposed to have her portrait taken in the outdoor setting. This was in the corner of the studio and amounted to a section of rail fence with plastic leaves and an evergreen backdrop. While Louise was trying to get some Murine drops in the girl’s eyes, however, the girl just hunkered down with her back to the fence and moaned.

“I don’t want to go away to school,” she said. A drop of Murine spilled from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. “I don’t want to go away to school. And I’m so hung over. I will never pick up another glass of wine in my life.”

“Why is she on the floor?” shouted Kleeborg. He lifted the cloth from his head and stood beside the camera. “Your
whole life is in front of you!” he said. He had been using this expression all week, but now it sounded like a threat. Louise helped the girl up, took her into the bathroom, and got her some Alka-Seltzer. The girl’s name was Maren Staley, and it turned out that she had been accepted at the University of Oregon but didn’t want to go there and leave her boyfriend, Loren. But her mother, who hated Loren with a passion, had her mind set on Oregon and had gone as far as forging enthusiastic letters to the college and signing Maren’s name.

Maren threw her head back and drank the water with the Alka-Seltzer. She set the glass on the toilet tank and, panting softly, said, “It’s just that I don’t want to go away to school.”

Louise put an arm around her shoulder. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said.

They went out in the hallway. There was a brass bed that had been used in advertisements for Brown’s department store, and Maren lay down on it. Then she got up, went in the bathroom, and threw up. She came back drying her face with a towel and lay down again. “Whatever made me think I could drink,” she said. “Whatever, ever made me think I could drink.” Louise knew the kind of hangover the girl had—it helped to say things more than once. Soon Maren fell asleep, and she did not wake up for about two and a half hours, when she went out and bicycled slowly away.

On Wednesday night after work, Louise drove over to Walleye Lake to pick up her mother’s walking stick, which someone at the Lighthouse had leaned against the counter near the lost-and-found shelf. The stick was ugly to Louise, and she dropped it in the back of the car and buried it with old newspapers. She decided to drive by the lake on her way
out of town. The street to the water was narrow and flanked by bars, a barbershop, a small park, and a consignment store with a broken window. Some old men in fishing caps looked up, and one of them waved at the sound of Louise’s car, and Louise got the impression that he was toothless, although she did not get that good a look.

She parked and walked down Town Beach. The water was choppy and gray, and Louise’s hair swirled around her face. She stopped at the edge of the water to wet her hands. The lake was sparse and wild, like a place where TV scientists would go to find blind fish from the beginning of time. The sand was covered with black weeds and tiny gray rocks. Up the beach, someone called her name and waved from the corner of the stone picnic shelter. It was Johnny White, who had graduated with Louise from Grafton High School in 1974.

Louise had seen him a few times since then. Once she saw him at a car wash, wrestling a towel from a coin machine. Once she saw him sitting on a bench in Grafton with a large black Afghan dog. She and Johnny had dated in high school. She remembered watching from the bleachers as he performed in the class play, a musical about labor conflict in California. He sang a ballad called “Peaches (Find Me a Girl).” He flung his strong arms wide. “Peaches! Peaches! These two arms grow weary of peaches.” Louise had had some Wild Irish Rose before the play, and she remembered thinking that she didn’t know anyone else with the sheer guts to get up and sing that song. Johnny sang in a smooth tenor voice that sounded very false to Louise, but somehow that did not take away from the accomplishment. Now Johnny worked for the county, and he was wearing a knee-length denim coat over a green shirt and tan pair of pants. When he was in high school his face had had
a boyish appeal, but now he looked heavy, and on his head he wore one of those puffy leather caps that rock stars wear when they go bald. But his eyes were still sort of handsome.

Louise and Johnny sat under the wooden rafters of the picnic shelter. It turned out that these days Johnny lived in the former First Baptist Church in Pinville. (Pinville was a very small town on a back road between Grafton and Morrisville.) The church had been purchased from the Baptists several years before by Johnny’s father, a wheeler-dealer farmer who was often said to be “rich on paper.”

“Dad was going to make it a supper club,” said Johnny. “It could still happen. Probably not, though. He just bought a quonset full of auger parts from a guy in Sioux City. He thought he could turn them over fast. But there’s something wrong with them. I’m not sure what. I think they might be impounded.”

“Is that right,” said Louise.

“It’s like when I went to Cleveland,” said Johnny. “This was after Lisa and I had been married one year. We rented her uncle’s house in Cleveland, and we started a restaurant on East Superior. We took a Sinclair station and converted it into a restaurant. But they put out the word on us. They said our hot dogs tasted like gasoline.”

“Did I hear something about this?” said Louise. “Was there an explosion or something?”

“No, there wasn’t any explosion,” said Johnny. “There wasn’t even any gasoline by that time. We had emptied out the tanks, and the man from the county came down and
watched
us empty out the tanks. But we were ruined by this gas rumor, because hot dogs were the mainstay of the restaurant, hot dogs and franks.”

“I’m sorry,” said Louise.

“If we hadn’t gone bankrupt, I bet Lisa and me would still be married,” said Johnny. “Once I accidentally put my hand on the grill, and she just watched. You can’t really see the scar in this light. Wait. Here it is. It’s sort of like the whole hand is a scar. I don’t know. We have two kids, Megan and Stefan, and I will say I miss those goddamned kids.”

“They stayed in Cleveland?” said Louise.

“Well, Parma,” said Johnny. “Same thing.”

Louise and Johnny talked for a while longer, and then Louise left him sitting under the picnic shelter and walked to her car. Leaving Walleye Lake, Louise turned on the radio. Johnny Cash was singing about an auto worker who built himself a car out of parts he had smuggled out of the factory over a period of many years.

The lighter popped out, and Louise put a cigarette in her mouth. She looked at the orange ring of the lighter. “Give me that car,” she said.

The town council met in the lunchroom of the former Grafton School, which had been built out of brick in 1916 and left mostly vacant since 1979, when the Grafton School merged with Morrisville-Wylie. The official name of the resulting school district had been Morrisville-Wylie-Grafton, but that was too long, and although people suggested taking some of the first several letters from each town and calling the district Mo-Wy-Gra, this was plainly foolish, and so the district went on being Morrisville-Wylie, as if Grafton had floated off the map. Louise, who had stopped by the meeting in order to return her mother’s walking stick, came in just as four firemen were finishing a request for new axes. They had brought some
of the old ones along to show their decrepit condition, but the council said to wait until the state money came in, to which Chief Howard LaMott said, “What state money? There is no state money. I’ve been chief four years now, and guess how much state money there has been in that time. None,” and the four firemen picked up their axes and left, looking dismayed enough to go out and chop something down.

Louise watched them go, and noticed Hans Cook sitting two rows back. The chairs were small, especially in relation to Hans. He wore a red Tyrolean hat and smoked a Tiparillo, the ash of which he deposited in the cuff of his gray pants. He seemed to be rocking slightly in his chair. Next up was the issue of Alvin Getty’s dog biting Nan Jewell. Nan Jewell was a good eighty years old and made her way to the front of the room wearing a dark blue dress with a white lace collar—a beautiful old dress, a dress a Jewell
would
wear. Alvin Getty stood among the chairs with his German shepherd, King, on a leash. King wore a red bandanna, kept his head down, and moved a chair around with his tail.

“King is not a bad dog,” said Alvin Getty. “He bit you the one time—O.K., that’s true. But you were in his garden. That makes no difference to me, but this is a dog. Wrong, yes, it was wrong. This is why I’m willing to do what I’ve been saying all night, since six-thirty and it’s now nine-thirty, and that is, I will build a great big cage and stick him in it.”

“That’s no garden,” said Nan Jewell. “It’s an empty lot strewn with tires. I hardly think I would be walking in such a mess. I walk down the middle of the sidewalk, because if I don’t, I could get dizzy and fall. And this is well known.”

“You show me a tire on that property and I will swallow it whole,” said Alvin Getty.

Hans Cook laughed heartily. Louise’s mother stood. She wore a black turtleneck and a green jumper with large pockets. “Thank you,” she said. “There’s only one thing you can do with a German shepherd who bites, and I don’t think it’s any great secret. The idea of a cage does not impress me. Jaspersons’ dog was supposedly kept in a cage, and we know how that turned out. Looking at King here tonight with his pretty scarf, naturally we all want to scratch his head. But I say put him to sleep. Who’s with me?”

“Wait,” said Alvin. “I have a witness. Mrs. Spees owns the pet store in Stone City. And that store has a good selection, too. Go ahead, Mrs. Spees.”

But before Mrs. Spees could begin, Louise stood and raised her hand.

“What is it, honey?” said Mary.

“The floor yields to Louise Montrose,” said Alvin Getty.

“Darling,” said Louise. “It’s Louise Darling. Mom, I got your stick back from the lake.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Mary. “Just leave it by the door. That’s my walking stick, everybody.”

“I also have something to say about the topic,” said Louise. “I think you should give the cage a try. I don’t think Jaspersons’ dog is a fair comparison, because they never made a sincere effort.”

“Thank you for your opinion,” said Mary. “Nobody wishes a cage would work more than I do.”

Louise went home and had spaghetti and asparagus for supper. She took a bath, turned on the TV that was perched on her dresser, and got in bed. The wind came up and seemed to lift the windows in their frames. Louise fell asleep and dreamed that ivy was growing over the top of her. When she awoke, it was that late hour in which they play the strangest
commercials. Here was one for a 900 number you could dial in order to talk to people with serious illnesses. On the screen a beautiful young woman sat wrapped in a blanket with a telephone in her lap. Louise got up and turned off the TV. She got back in bed. The wind blew, the house made one of its mysterious cracking sounds, and the phone rang.

“I’ve been trying to sleep,” said her mother. “I can’t sleep, and it’s your fault. I know I’ve made mistakes, but please tell me what compels you to stand up in front of people and say I’m wrong.”

“Well,” said Louise, “you were being so mean to that dog.”

“You care more about a dog than you do about your own mother,” said Mary. “Why can’t you be on my side? I stand up there all alone, and all you’re concerned about is a dog.”