The End of Vandalism (9 page)

“I don’t either.”

“I’ll tell you what, though,” said Hans. “I’m going to bill her for that tow.”

“Well, O.K., but I’m not paying for it,” said Louise.

“Well, I don’t think you should,” said Hans. “You didn’t call me, she called me.”

“That’s right.”

“I know it is.”

Louise called the Chevy place. The mechanics had worked up a long list of repairs they said were needed.

“The car runs O.K.,” said Louise.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said the mechanic.

“Just don’t touch it,” said Louise.

Dan waited for Louise at the Strongheart at four-thirty that afternoon. This was a diner on Hague Street in Stone City, within walking distance of Kleeborg’s. The restaurant was small and not clean but featured excellent tenderloin sandwiches.

“Hello, Daniel,” said Louise.

They ordered food from an old man named Carl Peitz, who had been at the Strongheart forever. He smiled constantly, as if there were something wrong with him.

“Now, I had a key made for you,” said Dan. He emptied his pockets on the table. There was a red comb, an Allen wrench, a ball of string, a tape measure, a dog biscuit, fingernail clippers, and a skeleton key. “Don’t tell me I lost it already,” he said.

“How did you get to be sheriff?” said Louise.

“I don’t remember,” said Dan.

“Man, I’m about hungry enough to eat this biscuit,” said Louise.

“Don’t,” said Dan. “It’s a knockout biscuit.” He got up and went to look in the cruiser.

Smoke rose from the grill. Carl Peitz removed his apron, fanned the smoke.

“Is that ours?” said Louise.

She went home that night to the farm. It occurred to her that sometimes you need to stop and catch your breath. She went to Hy-Vee first, to get groceries and some candy for the trick-or-treaters who might or might not show up.

Some did. There were vampires, dinosaurs, a ballerina, a hobo with a sawdust beard. Louise stood in the doorway shoveling Red Hots into plastic pumpkins with black straps, giving while the giving was good. The parents stayed back, by pickups and station wagons, out of the light. The white dog knocked down a little girl dressed as Paula Abdul and, taking advantage of the confusion, sprinted into the house.

By nine o’clock or so, no one else seemed to be coming, and Louise poured some Canadian Club and turned on a movie featuring the Wolf Man and his wife. The wife was a prosecutor in Michigan, and she was looking into a string of murders, for which her husband was responsible. But the wife didn’t even know the guy was a werewolf. He himself took his time facing the truth, and there were long, uninteresting scenes with him in a research library at Ann Arbor, looking at the ancient and horrific picture books that are always found in such movies. Then he tried to figure out some way to tell his wife, because she wanted to have children, and he had to keep putting her off, while his wolf side was all for killing her and getting it over with.

The prosecutor was crashing through the trees along Lake Huron, her husband at her heels, when a commercial
came on. Louise stood and stretched, rubbed her stomach. The movie was falling apart, and she could sense thousands of people across the Midwest rising to rid themselves of it. She turned down the sound, heard a noise, and went to the window.

She cupped her hands around her eyes. Four or five people were coming up the driveway. At first she thought they were trick-or-treaters, because she could see the bobbing yellow features of a jack-o’-lantern. But the people were too tall to be children, and no one turned toward her door. Up the driveway they went, a group of shadows, traipsing into the farmyard. It was something to see. They had come to drag out a hayrack, or push over a shed, or let something loose from where it was supposed to be. A car would be up the road, waiting. Louise snapped her fingers, and the white dog trotted from the kitchen with a red plastic flower in his mouth. “Give Louise the flower,” said Louise, and she took it from him. Then she opened the door and pushed the dog onto the steps. “Make us proud,” she said.

TINY DARLING was still living with his brother Jerry Tate down in Pringmar. This was going better than might have been expected. Jerry, who worked for the post office in Morrisville, liked having his brother’s company. He liked Tiny’s sense of humor and Tiny’s conviction that everyone and everything was out to get him and his kind, although when you looked around it was hard to identify anyone of Tiny’s kind. He was an advocate of the laboring class who would say things like “It’s the working man who gets a ball-peen hammer between the eyes every morning of his life,” but he hardly ever did lawful work. He could handle rudimentary plumbing, and when it came to getting a raccoon out of an attic, he was thought to excel. He was a steady drinker who sometimes seemed unusually intent on losing consciousness. One night not long after Louise divorced him, he wandered into Francine Minor’s house and fell asleep on her kitchen counter, a loaf of bread for a pillow.

He would have preferred to stay married, because without Louise there was no one he respected to listen to him discuss his ideas. But he could handle being divorced. It was only when he heard that Louise and Dan had moved in together that he decided to leave the area. It just slowly dawned on
him that this was more than he could bear to hang around and observe. Jerry thought this was an unproductive attitude. Grafton and Pringmar were thirteen miles apart, and the orbits of the two towns did not much overlap. But Tiny was stubborn, and Jerry’s reasoning had no impact. “Stealing is like being a chef,” said Tiny. “You can find work anywhere.”

He left in November, when the weather in Pringmar was characterized by a combination of wind and freezing rain known locally as spitting. Tiny sat in his car with yellow box-elder leaves blanketing the windshield. Jerry, a heavyset man in a purple turtleneck and a down vest, brought out a broom and swept the leaves away.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” he said. “There is no reason for you to run away. You’re divorced? I’m sorry. A lot of people are divorced. The statistics are frightening. I don’t know what you’re worried about.”

“Do you know that I am thirty-nine years old?” said Tiny. “I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon. I’ve never seen the Four Faces. The world is passing by me.”

“You’ve been to Las Vegas,” said Jerry.

“I’m talking about wonders of nature,” said Tiny. “Look around, Jerry. Tell me what’s here.”

“Your car, and my car, and my house,” said Jerry.

“Everything is plowed. Everything that isn’t nailed down, they plow. What happened to the great wild country? This is where I would like to go.”

“You’re talking about something that never existed.”

“Well, goodbye.”

“And what about your indictment? You have a court date coming up.”

“What a shame, I’ll miss it,” said Tiny.

“You can’t run from your problems,” said Jerry.

“I’ve never been able to follow that logic,” said Tiny. “Assume the problems are at point A, and I get in the car and drive to point B. Are you with me? Problem here, me there. What have I just accomplished?”

Jerry took the broom over to the house and laid it on the steps. “What do I tell the police?” he said.

“Say I went to Owatonna. That’s the last thing you know.”

“So, lie.”

“If it’s the sheriff, tell him Louise likes her toast so light, most people wouldn’t consider it toast.”

“Laugh, clown, laugh,” said Jerry.

“Well, I’m off.”

“Isn’t June Montrose in Colorado?” said Jerry.

Tiny had dated both Montrose sisters, taking up with Louise after June joined the Army and went to Germany.

“Maybe our paths will cross,” he said.

“That would be a pleasant social event,” said Jerry.

“Goodbye, then,” said Tiny.

“Goodbye,” said Jerry. “You should at least stop and see Mom before you go.”

“Not hardly,” said Tiny.

Their mother was Colette Sandover of Boris. She’d had three marriages, each of which resulted in the birth of a child and ended with the death of the husband. For this reason she was sometimes called Killem instead of Colette. She had been a redhead all her life and one day woke up with perfectly white hair. The children of Boris regarded her as a witch, an impression she encouraged by casting spells and walking in her garden calling, “O Lucifer, appear to me now. O Lucifer.” She read
Consumer Reports
and
The New England 
Journal
of Medicine
and took cough syrup every day whether she was coughing or not. Her tax bills were so delinquent that even town officials skirted the issue. Tiny blamed her subconsciously for his failures. He had inherited her red hair, which, like a child’s cap, made him seem foolish and insubstantial the nearer he got to middle age.

Jerry Tate was the oldest, and then Tiny Darling, and then Bebe Sandover. Bebe was the one who got away. She had graduated from hotel management school in St. Louis and now worked for a hotel in San Francisco. She almost never came home, and people took this as proof of her remarkable good sense.

Tiny had been indicted for knocking apart the vandalism display at the high school dance. Reading the court documents, you would have thought he had leveled the town of Grafton with his bare hands. But all indictments seem slightly out of proportion when you read them in black and white, and Tiny definitely did a number on that little shop project. People assumed that Dan and Tiny had been struggling for the affections of Louise. And that was part of it. On the other hand, smashing up a dance was something that Tiny might have done anyway, to make some philosophical point known only to him and that even he would be unclear about the next day. The public defender Bettina Sullivan considered a free-speech defense but decided to argue that Tiny’s childhood had been tough on him. She asked him to think of some examples and write them down for her.

“My stepfather worked for Rugg Molasses in Morrisville,” Tiny wrote. “This was when Rugg took up that whole lot to the south and actually manufactured molasses. Now I believe that there is just research left there, because the molasses
smell has almost completely gone away. One day they called in my stepfather and fired him from his job. He had been a Rugg man eleven years and was therefore disappointed at this turn of events. He was not one to sit and think of his troubles so he hunted a lot after being fired. He would walk down the railroad tracks smoking a cigarette and in late afternoon he would come home. He always got something, whether it be rabbit, pheasant, possum, squirrel, etc. One winter afternoon my sister Bebe and I were sitting and watching television when my stepfather came home from his hunting and asked us to come outside. He had killed two squirrels and set them up on the hood of his car with their backs to the windshield and he had lit two cigarettes and put them in the squirrels’ mouths. He asked us if we had ever seen animals smoking before and we replied that we had not. There was smoke coming from the cigarettes which is a mystery to this day. Then he approached the squirrels and pretended to carry on a conversation with them, arguing as to the reasons why he should not be fired from his job. I caught on to this but Bebe did not and she began crying. I told Bebe that he was playing a game. She still did not understand and continued crying and then ran into the house.”

Bettina Sullivan may have read this, but she never mentioned the childhood defense again. She said she wanted to talk about a plea bargain. “What do I mean when I use this term ‘plea bargain’? Think of a bargain in a store. It’s similar but different …”

She probably would not care that Tiny had left town, and might even be relieved. She public-defended in three counties, and every time Tiny saw her, he had to refresh her memory of the charge against him, which seemed to emphasize his guilt in a gloomy way. She was very busy and also coached youth
soccer, which Tiny knew because he had found the rules of soccer in her briefcase.

Tiny drove south and west, crossing seven counties, and by dark he was westbound on Interstate 80. His car was beat up but picturesque—a Pontiac Parisienne, metal-flake green, with mag wheels and lake pipes. The fan did not work, but at highway speeds air rushed in at the car’s every seam. The windshield wipers worked, and sometimes they worked on their own, as if detecting a fine mist beyond Tiny’s perception. A crack had climbed the left side of the windshield like a leafless tree.

It was cold in the speeding car, and Tiny thought back to the night, coming up on a year ago, when Louise had asked him to leave the old farmhouse. Her car had broken down, and she had walked home a mile and a half in eight-degree weather. When she came in, Tiny was trying to assemble a shiny kerosene heater he had stolen from the Stone City Cashway. It is beyond doubt that he failed to notice how cold her hands and feet were. She turned on the broiler of the stove and flopped down on the floor. She peeled off her boots and socks, opened the broiler door, rubbed her toes in the heat. She was crying softly. It turned out she had suffered the first phase of frostbite and this was the pain of reawakening tissue.

“Do you want some Kleenex?” said Tiny.

“I want a separation,” she said.

Now on the radio Tiny picked up a preacher with his own translation of the Bible. Father Zene Hebert was his name, and he had a deep voice that issued great rolls of static when he pronounced the sounds
sss
or
ch.
Father Hebert thought we were witnessing the final minutes of our pleasant day on
earth. Tiny sat forward, kneading the wheel. This kind of stuff always excited him. Father Hebert said the Roman Empire represented suppertime, and the eternal clock was now poised on midnight.

Tiny watched a televised hockey game in a dark tavern in Plain Park, Nebraska. He sat at the bar drinking shots and beers. The hockey was live from somewhere and, with last call looming, seemed like a miracle of light and motion. There were three other people in the bar: a bartender, a waitress, and a small man reading a paperback book by Robert Heinlein. The waitress had completed her chores and sat at an empty table eating spaghetti. She had brown hair. If you saw her across a wide street or highway, you might mistake her for Louise.

Tiny went over and sat down. “Would you like to ride around with me and listen to some cassette tapes?” he said. “I have Bad Company, Paul Simon, Ten Years After, and a lot more under the seat.”

She displayed the back of her hand. “See this?” she said. “It’s a pearl. It means engaged to be engaged. It’s funny you should mention Paul Simon. My boyfriend is Ron Schultz, of the band Vodka River. I am pearled to Ron Schultz. Vodka River plays all around here, and one of their songs is ‘The Boxer.’”

“I should know that,” said Tiny.

“It’s the one that goes ‘lie-la-lie,’” said the woman.

“Oh, yeah,” said Tiny, with no idea what she was talking about. He took out a small black comb and ran it through his hair. His free hand followed, smoothing. “I like a woman of your size,” he said.

“That’s too bad, because, as I say, I’m pearled,” said the waitress. “But it is flattering, and one thing I can do is give you free passes to see Vodka River tomorrow night at the Club Car.”

“I am here tonight,” said Tiny. He took her hand.

She pulled her hand away. “That’s too bad, because Vodka River was named one of the top ten bar bands in Eastern Nebraska. You could go to the Club Car now, but I’m afraid their set is probably winding down. Ron is the drummer. He sings lead on ‘Please Come to Boston’ and ‘I Shot the Sheriff.’ Now I’m sorry, but I have to go back to work. Being pearled is not the same as being engaged, but I’m not going to threaten what I have with Ron.” She brushed her lips with a napkin and stood. “You can have my garlic bread if you want.”

“Thanks,” said Tiny.

The lights came up. The waitress took her dishes to the kitchen, and the man with the Heinlein book came over and sat down. He was pale and straw-haired, and wore a sweatshirt from Storybook Gardens in Wisconsin. His name was Mike, and he claimed to be the distributor in this area for a self-help program called Lunarhythm. Tiny wondered if Mike approached every stranger or just those who seemed to need self-help.

“I’ll start a sentence and you finish it,” said Mike. “‘I don’t mean to complain, but—’”

“I get headaches sometimes.”

“Good. ‘If there was one thing I could change about myself—’”

“I would go ahead and do it.”

“‘I wish I were an eagle, with—’—

“‘With’? What do you mean?”

“There is no right or wrong answer. ‘I wish I were an eagle, with—’”

“Deadly claws.”

“Sure. ‘Deadly claws’ is fine. Why not… ‘I don’t consider myself a loser, and yet—’”

“I have lost things.”

“There, that was pretty easy,” said Mike. “Your answers suggest that you would in fact benefit from the Lunarhythm Plan. I mean, everyone does, but you would especially. You’re what we call ‘predisposed.’ This is a program of self-hypnosis administered according to the thirteen-month calendar of the ancient Sumerians. Why thirteen months? Isn’t that a needless complication? Well, not really, and I’ll tell you why—”

“Give it up, Mike,” said the waitress, while zipping a black and red Plain Park Trojans letter-jacket. “Did you tell him it costs six hundred dollars? It does, it costs six hundred dollars for these pathetic index cards.”

“That’s your opinion, Brenda,” said Mike.

“I don’t have six hundred dollars,” said Tiny.

Mike’s forehead dropped into his palms. “Oh, there’s a payment plan,” he said wearily. “But thank you, Brenda. Thank you for wrecking everything. I don’t know what I did to deserve you for a sister. It must have been really bad.”

“Well, the whole thing is
stupid
,” said Brenda. She lit a cigarette and gave Mike one. “Come on, Michael. Those Lunarhythm people don’t care about you. You’re simply a pawn in their game. You’ve got to get a job. I told you that, Mama told you that, Daddy told you that. We’ve all told you until we’re sick of talking.”

Tiny called Louise on a phone in the corridor by the bathrooms. There was no answer, so he tried the sheriff’s
place. Dan Norman accepted the charges, which surprised him.