The End of Vandalism (24 page)

On the second day of her vacation Louise found a pair of hip boots in the closet of her cabin, and on the third day she put them on and walked up the stream. The cold water pressed against the rubber of the hip boots, and the rocky area near the bridge gave way to smooth sand where the stream widened. Clouds moved fast across the sun; the light and the shade swept across her path in alternating bands. A muskrat dived into the water, and a stranded orange traffic cone had washed down from somewhere. She waded awkwardly to the bank and stood there crying for a half hour. Her tears fell into the stream. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and washed her hands in the water.

When she got back, Carol and Mary were waiting to take her fishing. Carol suspected that the bandfish were still in the lake, but grouped together as if preparing for a counterattack from the other fish they had driven out. So the three women went across the lake in a Boston Whaler and dropped anchor
not far from a shady spot under a weeping willow on the far bank. Looking back at the camp, they could see the tiny figure of Kenneth carrying something across the grass.

“Cast at the tree,” said Carol.

“I’m afraid I’ll get tangled in the branches,” said Louise.

“There’s no way,” said Carol. “I’ve put too much lead on the line. You couldn’t reach it if you tried.”

They cast for a long time with no response. There was a light breeze, and swallows dipped over the water.

“How are you, Louise?” said Carol.

“I’m good,” said Louise.

“Mary said you’ve been waking up early.”

Louise squinted and dropped her lure into the dark water beneath the tree. “Yeah.”

“Well, why don’t you come along on my paper route?” said Carol. “I’d be glad for the company.”

“I don’t think that’s very advisable,” said Mary.

“What time do you go?” said Louise.

“Four o’clock,” said Carol. “It’s a pretty time of day.”

“That might be fun,” said Louise.

“Louise, you just cast right over my line,” said Mary. “All right. Don’t move. Hand me your rod and reel.”

“Where?”

“Hand it to me.”

“You’re not tangled,” said Carol.

“And I’m not going to be,” said Mary.

It was not long before Louise was running Carol’s route on her own. There were seventeen papers every day except Sunday, when there were forty-eight. Carrying a pair of snips in her hip pocket, she picked up the newspapers in the parking lot
of a natural-gas substation next to a bean field in the middle of nowhere. She liked the sound when the yellow nylon band that had held the bundle together broke. She would often be there waiting when the guy who brought the papers to the substation arrived. His name was Monroe, and he was a bald man who stood in the back of his truck in a white canvas apron. Sometimes he would ask after Carol. He never seemed to quite understand why Louise was doing the route. That was all right with Louise. “Carol is taking a little vacation,” she would say, smiling up at Monroe, waiting for her papers like someone about to take Communion. Then Monroe would toss the papers out of the truck and they would land with a slap on the pavement.

All the customers lived in the country and had mailboxes, so after picking up the papers and breaking the band, Louise never had to get out of the car. She drove Carol’s old beige Nova, which had a bench seat and an automatic transmission on the column. Carol had demonstrated how to drive and deliver newspapers at the same time. You sat in the center of the seat, left hand on the steering wheel, left foot working the pedals, right hand flipping open the mailboxes and putting the papers in. Louise liked driving this way. She had a much clearer sense of where the car was in relation to the ditch.

For most of the route the sun lit the sky from below the horizon. This light was either white or pale blue, and the trees were black against it. Louise listened to the radio. She had to dial away from the bland and voiceless junk preferred by Carol. She and Carol were destined to fight a war of the frequencies for some time. Louise found a station out of somewhere in Wisconsin that played stark Irish songs about the difficulties of that poor land and its wretched inhabitants.

There was a town to the north of Seldom Lake, and after the papers were delivered Louise drove there for coffee and hash browns. She sometimes went into a consignment shop near the diner to look at the children’s clothing. She found some incredible buys, and she bought a tiny yellow dress, which she hung on a deer hoof back at the cabin. The woman behind the counter was indifferent to what happened in the store and did not seem to notice or care whether Louise bought anything. One day the telephone rang in the shop, and the woman picked it up and listened, then said, “Don’t call me here, Susan. I mean it… I understand that, but not here. Goodbye.” Within seconds the phone rang again. “All right, Susan,” she said. “I’m not joking with you. I am very serious.” Louise edged toward the door, knowing, as anyone would, that the phone would ring again. “This is too much. My God, Susan, it has to stop!”

When Louise got back to the camp, Carol was waiting outside her cabin with a bundle of overalls tied with string. “These are my old ones,” she said. “They haven’t fit me for years, but they should be about right for you. They’ll keep the ink off your clothes now that you’re doing it every day.”

After the two weeks that Mary always stayed, they decided to stay another two weeks. This was what Louise wanted, and Mary said that whatever Louise wanted was fine. Louise knew on some level that her staying away would bother Dan, but she avoided that level by making her letters to him kind of impersonal. They were reports of her days. He called sometimes to find out when she was coming home, but she never gave a definite answer.

Being an older newspaper carrier, Carol also was responsible for supervising the paperboys and papergirls
in the towns around Seldom Lake. So one night she asked Louise to come up to the house and help put together the packets for a subscription drive. Each carrier was to receive a manila envelope full of information. They had just started when the telephone rang and Carol went to answer it. Then Mary came in to make a drink, and Louise was working alone in the living room.

“Now what does she have you doing?” said Mary.

Louise explained.

“Well, Jesus Christ,” said Mary.

“What’s wrong with that?” said Louise. She licked an envelope.

“You are here to rest,” said Mary.

“I am putting sheets of paper in envelopes,” said Louise. “What is your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem,” said Mary.

“You sure act like it,” said Louise.

“Well, I guess I am mistaken once again.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“What do you think?” said Mary.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think you’re the only one who’s sad?”

“No, I don’t think that.”

“That baby should be here.”

“I cannot believe you.”

“She should be, Louise.”

“She is mine. Don’t you bring her into this.”

“I think she’s already in this,” said Mary. “I wanted you here because you were sick—not to run a paper route and pretend everything is fine.”

“Oh, I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” said Louise.

Right about this time Carol came back into the room. “Come on,” she said. “That was Kenneth. He’s down at the boathouse. The fish have come back.”

“What fish?” said Mary.

“Hurry,” said Carol. And Louise and Mary were so embarrassed to have been surprised in the middle of their fight that they went along.

The dock system was complicated, and although they could see Kenneth standing out there against the dark water, getting to him was like going through a maze.

Hundreds of fish were swimming just beneath the surface of the water, forming a river of silver in the moonlight.

“What kind of fish are they?” said Louise.

“Northern pike,” said Kenneth.

“I am going home in the morning,” said Mary. “Good night, everyone.”

Louise and her mother had fought before, of course, but they had never really had the ready option of putting hundreds of miles between them. Louise stayed on at Seldom Lake. Her cabin had a gas heater that she began using in September, with the red and yellow leaves batting against the windows. She kept doing the paper route, and ran the subscription drive herself. She handed out all the packets and sat with the carriers in Carol’s car as they looked over the prizes they might try for.

“Let me ask you something,” said one boy with owlish glasses. “Me and this girl were pen pals all summer. So she always signed her letters by saying ‘Love you always,’ and I did the same. But now that we’re back in school she won’t even look my way. Not only do I not think she will love me always, I don’t even think she loves me right now. So I was
going to get her a present, and I see that if I get three new subscriptions I win a stuffed dog with an AM/FM radio inside.”

Louise looked at the picture of the dog. “Yes, but can you get three subscriptions by the contest deadline?” she said. “This is a pretty small town, and right in the instructions they say don’t shoot for the moon.”

“I think I can,” said the boy. “But what about that idea? Would you like a dog radio if you were a girl? I mean, you
are
a girl. Would that sort of thing appeal to you if you were my age?”

“Let’s see,” said Louise. Her opinion was that the item shown would probably not be a very good dog or a very good radio. She looked at the paperboy and said, “If I was your age, I would really want this.”

With Louise handling the paper route, Carol had hoped to write more poetry. She had a lot of ideas about autumn. But once the northerns had returned to the lake, so did the customers, and Carol and Kenneth found themselves working from dawn until nine or ten at night to keep the place running. And Louise, being Louise, did what she could to help out.

ELECTION SEASON came to Grouse County, bringing unusual weather. The leaves hardly changed color and fell abruptly, almost overnight. Miles Hagen, the Republican candidate for sheriff, ran his usual campaign, with no chance of winning, no desire to win, and no particular platform beyond advocating the construction of a new jail on the northern bank of the Rust River in Chesley.

This land was owned by one of his relatives, but Miles was a handsome and venerable figure who had propped up the two-party system for years, and the proposal would never get anywhere, so no one cared.

Dan Norman campaigned sufficiently but with a distance between him and the voter. One Monday morning he went to the Valiant Glass Company in Wylie and shook hands at the factory gate with the men and women of the seven-thirty shift. It was a clear October day, and the workers were reluctant to leave the light so late in the year.

“With winter coming up,” said a fat man in worn overalls, “I guess my biggest concern is my mailbox. I live west of Boris, and every snowfall without fail the county plow comes barreling along and knocks my mailbox down. Yet when I call
the county recorder’s office to straighten this out, I invariably reach a curt young woman who gives me the runaround.”

The proper response was obvious. Dan should have taken the man’s name. He didn’t have to do anything with it. He could even throw it away once the man was out of sight. But standing at the plant gate, he should have written down that name. Instead, he said, “Well, see, you’re calling the wrong people. The recorder doesn’t have anything to do with the snowplow. Try Public Works.”

Meanwhile, Johnny White, the Independent candidate, seemed to have a chance. His theme, that Dan had been a do-nothing sheriff, did not sway many voters, who for the most part were not looking for a keyed-up or hyperactive sheriff. But Johnny had a large advertising budget, and the repetition of his name and face made him seem more plausible. He also had an indignant, cheated style that appealed to some.

As the election neared, Johnny wondered how to use what he considered his secret weapon: Margaret Lynn Kane, the mother of the abandoned baby Quinn. According to the file Earl Kellogg had given Johnny, a judge in Family Court had assigned her to a halfway house in the eastern part of the state. She was thirtynine years old and a graduate of Romyla High School. Her parents were dead, she had cousins in San Diego who did not remember her, and her thought processes were faulty and unrealistic.

Now, Johnny had boxed informally in high school: a group of friends would gather and spar behind the school, pretending to enjoy it. One time, Johnny knocked down a better boxer but couldn’t remember how—which hand, what sort of punch. The fall was like a gift from the blue, and so were the facts on Margaret Lynn Kane. He felt that these smudged and typewritten secrets must be useful. But he was
not sure how. He did not want to confront the woman at the halfway house. He did not want to talk to her. All he wanted was to announce her existence in some dramatic way.

Tiny and Johnny talked strategy over beers at the Lime Bucket in Grafton. Little could be done without Shannon Key, the reporter who covered health, agriculture, and politics for Channel 4. And she liked Dan Norman, judging from when she interviewed him on TV. Even if there had been a bad accident, she would smile ruefully, as if wishing she could have ended up with him. She had already refused to run some of Johnny’s charges against Dan, saying they were “unsubstantiated.”

“Hey, if I say something, I don’t care what it is, it’s news,” said Johnny.

“That’s right,” said Tiny.

“If I say the moon is made of, you know, fiberglass.”

“Right.”

“Now, if she wants another opinion, I can live with that. But at least report the charge. She’s the media. This is her job. She’s not hired to make fine distinctions.”

Tiny finished his beer and swirled the foam around the bottom of the glass. “Why don’t we go to the halfway house?”

“They wouldn’t let us in,” said Johnny.

“We could have a press conference. We could set up in the street or on the sidewalk with the building in the background.”

“I like that… “

“In a way,” said Tiny, “it would be preferable if they didn’t let us in.”

“I don’t want to go in,” said Johnny. “I had a cousin in one of those places. I remember she bit her wrists. She’d have these bite marks. Spooky girl.”

“Who’s that?”

“Connie Painter.”

“I know Connie.”

“She was fucked up, man,” said Johnny, and he seemed lost in thought. “Anyway, I don’t know if Shannon Key will go for this. She’ll say Quinn is old news. She’ll say anything to keep from helping me.”

“You don’t have to tell her what it’s about,” said Tiny.

The next day they were driving around Morrisville in Johnny’s Bronco when they saw Shannon Key sitting on a bench in Roosevelt Park and eating an apple while a crew set up around her. Johnny pulled over and said he wanted to schedule a press conference out of town.

“First of all, we don’t travel out of our viewing area,” said Shannon. “Second of all, the rule for political coverage is you gotta make a press release and hand it in. Third, you’re parked on our cable.”

Johnny put the truck in drive and eased it forward. “You don’t want to miss this.”

Shannon bit the apple. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.”

“It will explode what’s left of Dan Norman’s campaign,” said Johnny.

“Oh, likely,” said Shannon.

“Even you can’t save him,” said Tiny.

“Hey, Charles—I’m impartial,” said Shannon.

“The hell if you are,” said Tiny.

Shannon sighed. “When is it?”

“What does your schedule look like?”

“I’m free on Friday. I’m not free on Saturday. Monday is doubtful. Tuesday is out of the question.”

“Friday.”

“Look, I’ll bring it up. I’ll see if we want to do something. You realize that, under the Fairness Doctrine, Dan would get equal chance to respond.”

“Good,” said Johnny.

Johnny campaigned with his kids that night at the Town Hall in Pringmar. He flew them in from Cleveland whenever possible. Sometimes Lisa, their mother, would come along, sometimes not. Her attitude toward Johnny had improved through therapy.

Megan and Stefan bolstered Johnny’s image. Without them he was considered by some to be a lightweight. He knew this and had reconciled himself to it, although he still suspected that a polling firm working for him had inadvertently helped popularize the label. His kids granted him the minimal substance necessary to be a father.

He interviewed them in public, drawing out their concerns about the world. It turned out they had many concerns about the world; Johnny was surprised. These two children, aged twelve and nine, viewed the world as a place verging on disaster. Sometimes he cast them in skits with a law-enforcement theme. In Pringmar that night, on the stage of Town Hall, Megan played deputy sheriff to Stefan’s dope fiend.

“What are you holding, son?” said Megan. “Grass, snow, dust, smack …”

“I’m not holding anything.”

“… speed, reefer, Quaaludes, crack …”

“Are you deaf? I don’t have drugs.”

“Then I guess you have nothing to fear from a drug-sniffing German shepherd.”

“Ha—Grouse County doesn’t have a canine program.”

“It does since Sheriff John White was elected.”

At this point, Jack White’s beagle spilled onto the stage, barking and running circles around Stefan, who had a plastic bag of hamburger in his jacket.

Megan found the bag and held it up to the light. She handcuffed her brother. “Just as I thought—drugs.”

“Everything’s changed since Sheriff John White came in,” complained Stefan.

“Now you’ll go to jail, with access to the counseling you need.”

Megan dragged Stefan offstage, leaving the dog to eat the hamburger. The audience got a kick out of the whole thing, and the serious lesson probably sunk in as well. Then Johnny came out and gave his speech. “Some will tell you my campaign is negative,” he said. “What does negative mean except I’m against it. In this county we have a sheriff who lets three out of four crimes go unsolved. We have a sheriff who lets gamblers and dope dealers run free. Am I negative about these things? Yes …”

Afterward, Johnny took Megan and Stefan out for supper at a club in Stone City, with oak tables and primitive country murals on the wall. Johnny ordered wine and made a show of trying it in the presence of the waiter, although he would not have rejected the bottle unless there was something terribly wrong with it.

He leaned back in his chair and asked the kids to tell him about their lives in Ohio. And they did, for a while, but soon their stories trailed off and they began fighting. Megan accused Stefan of lying to make his life sound better. Stefan said Megan always put their mother in tears. Megan stabbed Stefan in the arm with a fork.

Johnny tried to divert their attention. “Look, here comes our food,” he said, as Stefan punched Megan in the back. Megan gasped for air. Finally Johnny yelled, “All right, that’s enough! I said enough!” For he had found that the kids hated to be embarrassed in public even more than they hated each other.

Friday came. Johnny and Tiny drove across the state, stopping for coffee, stretching their legs like old men. The halfway house was located in a former jail in a pretty town ten miles from the Mississippi. The term “halfway house” had made Johnny expect a small bungalow, an overgrown yard, torn shades. But this was a big brick building with chestnut trees and a leaf-covered yard. Johnny parked on the street in front of the jail, which had been part of the state correctional system until budget cuts. Half a dozen people tended the yard. They moved heavily and with troubled expressions.

“I guess these are the inmates,” said Johnny.

“Slaving away,” said Tiny.

“Maybe it’s work therapy.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You should try to be more positive.”

They were early. Johnny turned on the radio and listened blankly to the hog reports. “I saw a funny show on television last night,” he said.

Tiny bit his thumbnail. “Yeah?”

“This guy was telling some great jokes.”

“Like what?”

“Well, they weren’t really jokes. They were just, like, remarks. I can’t really remember them.”

“I see,” said Tiny.

They sat in silence for ten minutes. Tiny read a newspaper. Johnny took a folder from above the visor and looked through it.

“Wait a minute,” said Johnny. “Look at this.” He handed Tiny a photocopy of a picture of Margaret Lynn Kane. The contrast was very high. “Now look at the woman over by the yard cart,” said Johnny. “My God, I can’t believe it.”

The woman wore a red sweater, baggy tan pants rolled at the cuffs, and dirty white sneakers. She glanced up with dark and unguarded eyes, raking.

“It could be,” said Tiny.

“She’s the right age,” said Johnny. “I mean, look at her face. You can just tell. You don’t get a face like that for nothing.”

“You could be right.”

“I know I am,” said Johnny, pressing a blue bandanna to his forehead. “But we don’t want to talk to the media with her standing there. I mean, Jesus, she’d hear what we were saying. She might freak out.”

“I’d hate to think what she would do.”

Johnny put the folder back above the visor. “I can’t believe we found her.”

“She’s looking right at us,” said Tiny. “She’s coming over.”

“What could she want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hey,” said the woman. Tiny rolled down his window. “Hey, listen to me. You have to move your vehicle. There’s a truck coming for the leaves. This is where the truck comes. You can’t park here.”

“Who do you work for?” said Tiny.

“Rudy Meyers,” said the woman. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. In about two minutes he’s going to be pulling in here to load his truck. That’s why you have to move.”

“You don’t live in there?” said Johnny.

“God no, I don’t live in there,” said the woman. “That’s the nut house. What do I look like, a nut?”

“Not at all,” said Johnny.

“Do they have a Margaret Kane?” said Tiny.

“We don’t know,” said the woman. “We keep the yard nice. That’s all we do. These are dangerous people, mister. If you want their names you have to go inside.”

Johnny turned the truck around and parked across the street from the halfway house. The rakers began combining their leaf piles. Johnny stared at them. “You know, the more I think about this, the more I don’t want to do it.”

“I was just going to say the same thing,” said Tiny.

“The woman has trouble enough.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“It’s Dan Norman’s fault. It’s time to pull the plug.”

“Channel 4 will be here any time.”

“We did come all this way,” said Johnny. “But we learned something. We learned that this was a bad idea. Dad is not going to be happy. That’s inevitable. So be it.”

Johnny jammed the gearshift down, backed up, and sped away. Leaving town, he and Tiny saw the television van in time to turn down a side street where they would not be found. They laughed, imagining Shannon Key’s bewilderment, and got back on the highway. But the Bronco didn’t have much gas, and Johnny had to stop after several miles and fill up. The tank was large, and there was a reserve tank, and by the time both were full the bill was forty-four dollars. This figure seemed to underscore the folly of their efforts and, discouraged, they rode twenty miles in silence and then stopped at a tavern. They drank Tuborgs and played bumper
pool until they felt all right again. There were other ways of defeating Dan Norman. They forgot all about Quinn’s mother.

She had, in fact, been at the halfway house. She watched the yard workers at about the same time Tiny and Johnny did. Standing at the window of her room, on the second floor, she looked down through the glass and bars, then went to her desk, opened a journal bound in blue paper, and began to write. The journal had been given to her by her doctors, along with a mirror and a doll. They wanted her to look at the doll and remember the baby. They felt that memory and tranquilizers were the way to health. But she did not want to remember, and she had no interest in dolls. She had put the one they gave her under her bed, in the center of the space beneath.