The End of Vandalism (7 page)

The cleanup took place during a week when Dan was testifying before a grand jury in a drug case involving a restaurant called Rack-O’s on Highway 41. Once, returning to the office, he found Albert dangling his legs over the side of the desk, smoking a cigarette.

“I just used the phone,” said Albert. “I hope that’s all right. I was calling Lu Chiang. She’s the exchange student from Taiwan. They put her out on Kessler’s farm.”

“Long way from home,” said Dan.

“You wouldn’t believe how hard they make her work,” said Albert. “She has to take care of these chickens all by herself.
If it wasn’t for her, the chickens would all be dead. Candy Kessler stays in town every night, but Chiang has to go home to feed the chickens. She has to get up at six in the morning to feed the chickens. One of the chickens stayed out in the rain and got sick, and none of the Kesslers would speak to her until it got better.”

“I never knew anyone with chickens where they weren’t always getting sick,” said Dan.

“There’s a foreign-exchange guy named Marty in Kansas City, but he just kisses the host family’s ass,” said Albert. “He says she knew this was a farm area when she left Taiwan, so too bad.”

“Something came up about Taiwan the other day,” said Dan. “Oh, yeah, that’s where they make our radar guns. One of them went on the blink, and we had to mail it back. Forty-three dollars postage.”

“Chiang says she’s not getting a very favorable impression of America,” said Albert. “I said, ‘Just wait.’”

The rain let up gradually, day by day, and the weather warmed into a wave of Indian summer. Farmers got back to work, and the combines were going around the clock. You could see the headlights through the stalks at night, dust plumes during the day. On the highway, every other vehicle seemed to be a tractor pulling a green wagon full of corn. The sunlight was golden. Lu Chiang’s chores became less burdensome, and she got to go up to Pizza Hut with Albert Robeshaw.

Meanwhile, Quinn had not been forgotten, and various towns and clubs and churches struggled, not in an undignified way, over the right to carry his banner. It was felt that something should be done, no question, and that one
large thing would be preferable to a lot of small things. So it was decided that a Big Day would be held for Quinn on Sunday, October 14, in the town of Romyla. A Big Day was what you called it when a town held a street event for any purpose other than to celebrate a conventional holiday. You could have a Big Day for sending a sick child to the Mayo Clinic, for new axes and boots for the fire department, or just for everyone to drink and dance on Main Street. Romyla was chosen because it had never had a Big Day, although it had conducted an Irish Fair for several years in the seventies and was considered capable of holding a well-run event—unlike, say, Boris, which was regarded as something of a joke town, barely able to keep a tavern in business.

They asked Dan to bring out the sheriff’s department cruisers for the parade, and they also asked him to take his turn in the dunking booth. Dan agreed to the cruisers, and bought some hard candy for himself and the deputies to throw to the spectators. Ed Aiken was lukewarm to this idea, and Earl Kellogg said flat-out that it was sissified for anyone in a cruiser to acknowledge the crowd in any way, and that this was doubly true when it came to throwing candy, to which Dan said, “And we wonder why people hate the sheriff’s department. And I don’t mean not like, I mean hate.”

“Well,” said Earl, “if you want to do something people would get a charge out of, they already asked you to sit in that cage where they dump you in the water.”

“Lester Ward broke his collarbone that way,” said Dan. “You want to try it, you be my guest.”

“Lester Ward,” said Ed. “Isn’t he the guy with all the decoys in his yard? Why would anybody want to dunk him?”

“No,” said Dan, “but I know who you’re thinking of. That’s
Lyle Ward. Lester Ward’s dead. He ran the hatchery in Pinville. You remember him—he always wore a hat.”

“Oh,
Lester
Ward,” said Ed.

Dan met Earl Kellogg and Ed Aiken in Romyla at ten-thirty on the Sunday morning of the benefit. They were all in their reflective sunglasses, and they stood in front of the Cotter Pin Tap watching the Methodist women unloading a van full of cakes for the cakewalk. The sun was bright, and it seemed that all the grass in town had just been mowed. Romyla had a hostile kind of pride that you didn’t find anywhere else in the county, Dan thought. Earl Kellogg sneezed eleven times in rapid succession, and Ed pounded him on the back to help him stop.

A new red pickup pulled alongside them, with Claude Robeshaw, Lu Chiang, and Albert inside. Claude said good morning and went into the Cotter Pin, and Albert introduced Lu Chiang to Dan, Ed, and Earl. Lu Chiang had brown eyes and long black hair. She was one of those foreign students whose fresh clothing and generous expressions make the local kids seem edgy and strange. She, Albert, and Dan walked down the midway, which was in this case Main Street between the old telephone office and the tracks.

“Albert tells me you have a basement with heads in it,” said Chiang.

“That’s right,” said Dan.

“It must be very comical,” said Chiang.

“They’re gone now,” said Albert. “I threw them out.”

“Now, Lu Chiang,” said Dan, “how long does it take a person to get here from Taiwan?”

“The flight from Taipei to Tokyo was three and a half hours,” said Chiang. “At Narita there was a long delay, and I
fell asleep in my chair. Then I awoke and boarded a flight to Chicago, which lasted twelve hours. From Chicago there was a flight in a small, barren aircraft to Stone City, where Ron and Delia Kessler were waiting for me. I believe it was twenty-one hours from the beginning to the end.”

Dan whistled. “Was this the longest you’d ever flown?” he said.

“Yes,” said Chiang. “Seven hours from Tokyo, the flight attendants appeared with facecloths for everyone.”

“I can’t even picture Tokyo,” said Dan.

The parade was late because the Morrisville-Wylie marching band was late, but the band members finally arrived, in a yellow bus, and led the way playing “On Wisconsin,” “Quinn the Eskimo,” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” They were followed by blue-ribbon rider Jocelyn Jewell on Pogo, by a group of Korean War veterans pulling a cannon, and by floats representing the discovery of the infant in the grocery cart, the marriage of Julien Dubuque and Princess Petosa, and the complete line of Arctic Cat snowmobiles sold by Wiegart Implement in Wylie. The sheriff’s cruisers ended the procession, and no candy came from their windows.

After the parade, Albert and Lu Chiang went down the line of musty blue tents, trying to win a prize. They threw baseballs at a row of stuffed cats that seemed to be nailed down, lost eight dollars at blackjack, and had their weights guessed almost to the pound in an unsuccessful attempt to win a plaster cow. Then they examined a red tractor that had been modified to run on LP gas, but it looked to their eyes like any other red tractor, and they wandered by the table of the Little Church of the Redeemer, where Joan Gower and a thin boy named Russ were giving away coin banks in the
shape of a church to anyone who could recite a Bible verse from memory. Albert responded with the one about Caesar Augustus’s decree that all the world should be taxed, and Joan said very good and handed him a church bank. Then she turned to Chiang, and when she learned that Chiang was a Buddhist, she picked up a stack of pamphlets, thumbed off five or six, and pressed them into the girl’s hands.

“I want you to have this literature,” said Joan. “I want you to take these home to your family. This part is about the death on the Cross, and this shaded area has to do with the Resurrection. This is a beautiful message for people of all nations. And I’ll bet when you get down to it you will find that Jesus and Buddha have a lot in common.”

“I think the Buddha is much heavier,” said Chiang.

“You just take these home,” said Joan.

Albert and Chiang headed for the Cotter Pin in search of old Claude. Along the way, Chiang let the pamphlets drop into a green barrel, and Albert gave her the church bank he had won.

The Big Day in Romyla raised more than two thousand dollars for Quinn, but it turned out that he did not need it. A rich couple came down from Minneapolis one weekend and made him their foster child. Because of the privacy laws, not even Nancy McLaughlin of the Children’s Farm could give out the identity of the couple, but it was Mark and Linda Miles, who, with some foresight, had made their fortune selling soy-based eye makeup in northern Europe. Quinn was renamed Nigel Bergman Miles and given a bedroom about the size of Dan’s trailer, overlooking one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.

Meanwhile, Dan kept looking for Quinn’s mother. He never got to see the clinic records, and had to make do with rumors, anonymous tips, and crank phone calls. He ended up with a list of thirteen names, and during the month of October he was able to clear eleven of them. One had given birth in St. Louis and put the child up for adoption, five had miscarried without providing adequate explanation to their neighbors, two were men with female-sounding names, and three were elderly nuns at Sacred Heart Academy in Morrisville.

That left two possibilities: a woman who would not discuss the case over the phone, and a woman who had no phone.

Dan ruled out the first woman when, in the middle of their interview, she excused herself to turn up the radio to hear the theme song from
Cats
. This was at the laundromat where she worked, in Walleye Lake. Also, her story made sense and was verifiable. (It had to do with a troubled young man who once had a crush on her and now waged a relentless telephone campaign against her. Since the establishment of the Crimebusters Hot Line in Brier County, for instance, he had called up to link her name to well-publicized instances of arson, hit-and-run driving, and window-peeking.)

The woman with no phone was Quinn’s mother, although she never admitted it. She lived in a house on a woody hill across from the county shed on the outskirts of Wylie. It was a house that had been moved to the site years ago, but it still looked out of kilter and always would. The doors would not close; winter wind would sweep through the cracks in the foundation. The house needed paint, and for some reason there was a rusted barbecue grill on the roof of the porch. There was no sign of children, no sign of animals, no sign of anyone except this woman, who was a little older than Dan
had expected, wore a cotton dress, and had her hair tied up with a frayed green ribbon. She and Dan sat on the steps of the porch.

“I went to the doctor the one time,” she said. “It wasn’t for the baby. There was no pregnancy. That’s where the confusion lies. It turned out to be a false alarm. I wrote it on my calendar.”

“Who’s your doctor?” said Dan.

“He’s on my calendar,” she said.

She got up, went inside, and came back with a wall calendar from the cooperative elevator in Wylie. It did have writing on it, lots of it, but it was unreadable, and had been scrawled across the days without regard for when one ended and the next began. Dan got up. The woman’s eyes were still—she was watching the orange county trucks across the road. “Let’s go for a ride,” said Dan, and she said, “Where to?”

IT WAS NOT long after this that Louise broke into Dan’s trailer. She had broken into one other place in her life—the Grafton School, in 1972. Louise and her friend Cheryl Jewell had climbed a drainpipe, raised a window, and spray-painted thirty-one football helmets hanging on the wall of the gym.

Louise and Cheryl were sophomores, and they felt—and they were not alone—that too much importance was being placed on football at a time when the rest of the school was without money. Meanwhile, there were those helmets, like dinosaur eggs pegged up in a row, and the two girls took their spray paint and wrote the following, one letter per helmet: SEE THE LONELY BOYS OUT ON THE WEEKEND.

The words came from a Neil Young song, and were actually not about football but about buying a pickup and driving down to L.A. All Louise and Cheryl had to do was make it “boys,” plural. Some football players protested in the school paper. “With the many activities available to us, such as pep rallies, snake dances, etc., we are far from lonely,” they wrote.

No one ever found out who painted the helmets. The equipment managers were able to scrub the letters off using steel brushes dipped in turpentine, but there were those who
felt the team played lightheaded all year due to the fumes. Louise was sixteen at the time. Now she was thirty-four, and the school was closed, and frost coated the windows of Louise’s house. Also, the big white dog was in the living room. He sat on the couch, looking luminous and pleasantly surprised. Halloween was coming, and that seemed to be the extent of his message. Louise had a set of blue drinking glasses, and she was enjoying her third blue glass of red wine.

“You’re supposed to be outside in the cold shed,” said Louise to the dog, “but instead you’re in the warm house. What are you doing on the warm davenport in the comfy house? You’re not going to answer me, are you? I’ll bet I could talk for a long time before I got an answer. Couldn’t I talk a long time before getting an answer?”

Louise’s mother then called her on the telephone. Hans Cook had acquired some venison, and it had ended up in Mary’s deep freeze, and Mary wanted Louise to distribute it. Louise and Mary had been arguing recently, and this was clearly Mary’s way of patching things up.

“The dog’s in the house,” said Louise. “He’s sitting here watching TV.”

“I don’t think Les Larsen would like that,” said Mary. Les Larsen rented the fields and outbuildings of the Klar place. “Isn’t that dog supposed to be guarding the farm?”

“The farm is quiet as a mouse,” said Louise. “How did Hans get this venison, anyway? Does he hunt?”

“I don’t know,” said Mary. “It was some trade he made. They were playing cards. I didn’t get it all.”

They talked a little more and said goodbye. Louise sipped wine and turned the television up.

“Now, watch,” she said to the dog. “See what this lady’s doing? Look at the TV. She’s taking the real pearls and leaving the fake ones.”

The next day was Saturday. Louise stood in front of her mother’s deep freeze, down in the basement beside the stairs. Louise had a headache, and wore an ugly, shabby sweater. She kept bumping a coat rack bearing the little coats once worn by herself and her sister June.

“Why me?” said Louise. “Just curious.”

“If I have you do it,” said Mary, who was sitting on the basement steps drinking sherry, “it shows the importance I attach to it. Also, it gives you the chance to make some lasting friends.”

“Can I have some of that sherry?” said Louise.

“It’s all gone, sorry,” said Mary.

“I have lots of friends,” said Louise, who seemed to be drawn by the presence of the little wool coats into the tone of voice of an eight-year-old.

“Take some to Dan Norman,” said Mary. “You like him.”

Louise considered this remark. She and Dan had been brought together by the breakup of Louise’s marriage, and now that it was good and broken up, they had not seen each other in a while. “He’s never home,” said Louise.

Mary nodded. “You think you hold office, when in fact the office holds you,” she said.

Louise loaded her arms with white packages. “How many goddamned deer you got in here?” she said.

Mary stood. “I realize it’s a lot,” she said. “Don’t feel compelled to take it all at once. Get that little Coleman and
put some in there with some ice. That’s what I got it out for. And don’t forget to smile. It takes less muscle effort to smile than it does to frown.”

“When my face is completely relaxed, people still think I’m frowning,” said Louise.

“You have a beautiful face,” said Mary. “An angel’s face.”

“Even you must admit my forehead is on the large side,” said Louise.

“I’ve never believed that stuff about your forehead,” said Mary.

Louise delivered venison to three people before bailing out of the task, and even those people—Nan Jewell, Jack White, and Henry Hamilton—lived more or less on her way home.

Nan Jewell had the southernmost of the Three Sisters, the big blue houses on Park Street in Grafton where the various members of the Jewell family lived. Nan was a rich and restless widow who held people to such a high standard that they usually fell short. When Louise arrived, the old lady was practicing the line of attack she would follow in church the next morning. She always thought people were taking negligent procedural shortcuts.

“They’re not posting the hymns anymore and I would like to hear someone tell me why,” she said. “They’ve always done it and now, lo and behold, they’re not doing it. What about the people with arthritis? What about the people who need a little time to find the right page? Are they not welcome in our church? And another thing while I’m thinking about it. I don’t know who’s slicing the Communion bread lately, but they’ve got a lot to learn about what is meant by a wafer. I don’t think
a Jewell would cut Communion bread in this haphazard way. I don’t think a Montrose would. Nor a Robeshaw, a Mason, a Kellson, a Carr.”

“Boy, I know it,” said Louise. But that was just what you said to Nan unless you wanted to be trapped with her all day. The fact was, Louise didn’t know anyone named Kellson.

From Nan’s house it was out in the country to Jack White’s farm on the Margo-Chesley road. Jack White was the father of Johnny White.

Louise found Jack in his horse barn with the veterinarian Roman Baker. Jack had five Belgian horses, named Tony, Mack, Molly, Polly, and Pegasus. They were enormous animals with jaws like anvils. Louise started to tell Jack about the venison, but he said it would be a minute before he could concentrate on whatever it was she had to say. The problem was that some of his horses were walking backward.

“When did this start?” said Roman Baker. His face was narrow, his hair thick, his eyes widely spaced. He’d been working with horses a long time. “Change their diet recently? Might there be something spooking them?”

“Not that I know of,” said Jack White. “But there again, I’ve been gone.” He put his boot up on the rail and crossed his forearms on his knee, like someone in a fertilizer commercial. “Just yesterday got back from Reno. Spent five days in Tahoe and three days in Reno. That Tahoe is some of the prettiest country there is, and I saw Juliet Prowse in Reno. What a pair of legs on that lady. What a radiant complexion. Anyway, my son Johnny was watching the place for me while I was gone, and when I asked him, he said as far as he had noticed, the horses were not walking backward. I said, ‘You mean to stand there and tell me if a horse was walking backward you
wouldn’t notice it?’ He said he might not. Well, the boy has personal problems, and that’s no secret. As I always tell him, ‘Johnny, you missed the boat.’ I say, ‘Johnny, see that little speck on the horizon? That right there is the boat.’”

“I saw him up at Walleye Lake last spring,” said Louise. “We had a talk. He seemed very friendly.”

Jack White dusted off the sleeve of his shirt. “He always liked you,” he said. “And it’s too bad he didn’t marry somebody of your caliber, instead of that nut he did marry. Although it’s certainly hard to put more than a tiny fraction of the blame on her.”

Roman Baker took a silver penlight and examined Tony’s ears. “You got anything unusual growing in the field?” he said.

Jack stood, adjusted his belt. “Boy, I sure don’t think so,” he said.

“Have you checked the fencerows?” said Roman.

“Sure,” said Jack. “Well, no. Not really.”

“It could be in the fencerows,” said Roman.

“Let’s do it right now,” said Jack.

They took a pickup out in the bumpy pasture. Jack drove, following the fences, Roman Baker occupied the passenger seat, and Louise sat on the tailgate, weeds sweeping against her ankles. The southwest corner of the field was thick with dark green growth. The truck came to a stop. Roman got out and walked to the fence, where he crushed some spade-shaped leaves between his palms and raised his hands to his face.

“This has to go,” he shouted. He filled his arms with weeds and pulled them from the ground. “All this,” he said. “Everything from here on down.”

Jack stepped out of the cab. “What’s he saying?”

“He says it all has to go,” said Louise.

Henry Hamilton’s farm was just up the road from Louise’s place. The milkweed that had once been properly confined to the ditches along the road had come up the driveway into the yard, and at this time of year the air was thick with flying seeds. The fences needed work, and pigs seemed to come and go as they pleased. Driving in, Louise saw one come out from behind a propane tank and tear through the long grass to the grove.

Henry’s house was dimly lit and warm and smelled of boiled cabbage or boiled greens of some kind. But it wasn’t as if he had just boiled the greens—it was as if they had been boiling for years. On the kitchen table he had spread the comics from the Sunday paper and was carving a jack-o’-lantern. Mossy seeds spilled over the newspaper.

“These kids from
The Family Circus
don’t have any sense,” he said.

“I agree,” said Louise. “There is a pig out.”

“I’ve been after that guy for two days,” said Henry. He turned the pumpkin toward Louise. “Do you think this looks like Tiny?”

“Kind of,” said Louise. “The mouth does.”

“I haven’t seen him in the longest time,” said Henry.

“Well, you know we’re divorced,” said Louise.

Henry put down his knife. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

“Henry,” said Louise. “You remember. You notarized my statement.”

Henry thought for a moment. “O.K. That’s right. So I did.”

He resumed work on the pumpkin. “I try to get one of these out every year. Sometimes I see a fair amount of children. Other times, the night goes by and I don’t see anyone. One year I made divinity and I’ll be goddamned if one person showed up.”

“It doesn’t look like Tiny anymore,” said Louise.

She was right. There had been something subtle that was now gone.

Henry shrugged. An old Moorman’s Feed clock ticked like time itself. “How does divorce suit you?” he said.

“It’s all right,” said Louise. “I don’t have to cook anything I don’t want to eat. That’s a plus.”

“Hey, my new tractor came in,” said Henry.

“Good for you,” said Louise.

They went out to see it. It was a large red tractor, and the wheels were already caked with dried mud. Henry let Louise climb up and drive it around the yard.

“She’s a beauty,” said Louise. “You’re going to love this cab.”

“I had to sell my oil well to get it, but I think it’s going to be worth it,” said Henry.

“I didn’t know you had an oil well,” said Louise.

“I had an oil well in Oklahoma,” said Henry.

Louise went out with the girls that night. This had been planned weeks ago. Perry Kleeborg had suggested it. He had accused her of moping around to the point where it was affecting her performance. He received a business magazine called
Means of
Production
free in the mail, and evidently he’d been reading it.

“Oh, my performance,” said Louise. “You must excuse my performance.”

“You ought to go out with the girls,” said Kleeborg. “Do something to relax your mind a little bit.”

Louise pressed wet contact sheets to the wall. “I don’t know any girls,” she said.

“I have Five Hundred Club every Thursday,” said Kleeborg. “I know it’s helped me. Do you play five hundred?”

“I’ve never understood the concept of trump,” said Louise. “I like slapjack.”

“Not really a club-type game,” said Kleeborg.

“No,” said Louise.

“Do you bowl?” said Kleeborg.

“I have bowled,” said Louise.

“Well, you ought to do something,” said Kleeborg.

Not long after this, as it happened, the chairman of the county board of supervisors had his picture taken at the Kleeborg studio. His name was Russell Ford, and his skin was bad, and he seemed to think that if he got just the right pictures, it would somehow make his skin better. Removing scars and bumps from a photograph is not hard, but Russell was after something elusive, and Louise eventually had to take the photographs to Big Chief Printing in Morrisville to have them touched up. The airbrushers there were two women named Pansy Gansevoort and Diane Scheviss. They roomed together in an A-frame on the south shore of Walleye Lake, and were somewhere in the lost years between twenty-seven and thirty-two. The three women had some laughs over Russell’s homely features, and decided to get together one Saturday night.

Louise found Pansy and Diane in the Hi-Hat Lounge on Route 29 in Morrisville. It seemed they had already been drinking hard among the Halloween decorations. Pansy’s face was a high red, and Diane had broken a glass. If alcohol, for Louise, was like a slow train through hills and scenic lowlands, for Pansy and Diane it seemed more like an elevator after the cable had snapped.

Louise tried to impose some order. The table at which they sat was a video game pitting a giant bat against a humorous
figure representing the player. Louise suggested they try this, and they did, but without success. The stream of quarters required was more or less continuous, and no sooner would they get the little person moving than the bat would sweep in, ending the game. Louise said, “I don’t even get the object.”