The End of Vandalism (27 page)

She scrubbed the arm of the chair with steel wool. “You can’t see the future.”

“I mean, you
are
in a cult.”

“Why are we tax exempt? If we’re a cult, as you say we are. Hmm? Answer me that.”

“I’m not an accountant. I don’t know why you’re tax exempt. I don’t know that you are tax exempt. I don’t have the training to know such things.”

“This chair is going to look excellent.”

“Oh, yeah, Joan,” said Tiny. “They’re going to love that chair so much they’ll put a little kid right in it.”

Joan looked under the sink until she found her white Bible. “Behold ye among the heathen,” she read, “and regard, and wonder marvelously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you.”

Tiny took the Bible from Joan.

“Hey,” she said. “That’s Habakkuk.”

“You use this thing as a crutch,” he said. “Any point of view can be found in here somewhere. Listen: ‘The range of the
mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after every green thing.’”

“That’s beautiful,” said Joan.

“But what does it prove?” said Tiny.

“It doesn’t have anything to prove. It’s the word of God.”

“And you are drunk on paint stripper.”

“Oh no, it’s beautiful, Tiny. Please read it again.”

Tiny took Jack White’s remarks about training to heart. He went to the community college outside Stone City to sign up for a night course on drugs and how they work. The campus had been built in the sixties, under the egalitarian architectural theory that no building should be any better than any other building. Tiny had to wait in line behind two young women—a tall one in embroidered denim and another one with straight black hair—who were looking at the course catalogue.

“I’m thinking about Rock Poets,” said the taller one.

“Who are they doing this semester?”

“Tom Petty and Wallace Stevens.”

“What else?” said the girl with black hair.

“Well, there’s psychology.”

“You’re good with people. You’d smoke that puppy.”

“And there’s Luddites.”

“What’s Luddites?”

“The Luddites were people in England who went around destroying textile looms.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. But it sounds interesting, doesn’t it?”

“Very interesting.”

Eventually it was Tiny’s turn. “You’re sure this is the course you want?” said the registrar.

“Yep.”

“This isn’t the course to get you off drugs. That’s a different course, held in another building. This course has science in it.”

“What are you trying to say?” said Tiny.

“I’ll also tell you that if you’re taking this course to meet women, you can forget it,” said the registrar. “People have ideas about night courses, but we don’t run that kind of college.”

The class met on Tuesday nights. The teacher was a doctor named Duncan. He came into the class pushing a slide projector. Two dozen people sat at small desks.

He introduced himself and began, writing on the chalkboard as he spoke. “Amphetamines belong to the chemical class of alkylamines. They have the formula C
₉
H
₁₃
N and a molecular weight of 135.20 in the basic form. Most amphetamines are isomers of the fundamental structure. Another group created by rearranging this basic amphetamine is called amphetamine derivatives, and comprises a long list of chemical names beneficial to really no one but the pharmacologist. These drugs are primarily different from their predecessor in that the NH2 is turned back and bonded with the alpha carbon group, like so. It’s kind of a neat trick …”

The doctor talked like this for a long time and Tiny found himself staring at the back of the young woman ahead of him. She had a very short haircut and there was something alluring and even moving about her bare neck. He wanted to touch the brushy dark hair behind her ears, and so he did.

She looked at him. “Stop it,” she whispered.

Dr. Duncan turned off the lights and began a slide show. Tiny wondered what had made him touch the woman’s hair.
He seemed to be getting more emotional. The other day, hearing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on the radio, he had found himself anxious, as if he had relatives aboard the doomed ship.

Dr. Duncan clicked the slide carousel. A photograph of a hamster running inside a wheel came on the screen. “We also find increased arousal, increased motor activity, decreased appetite, and mood amelioration or happiness,” said the doctor. “This happiness, however, is fragile. Heavy users can experience paranoia or even amphetamine psychosis.” The picture changed to one of the Statue of Liberty. “How did that get in there?”

When the class had reached the halfway point Tiny began to seriously wonder what he was doing there. He knew the Whites would never hire him again. It was rumored, in fact, that Jack was breaking all ties with the Room. With no reasonable hope of employment Tiny had enrolled in the class more as a way of changing his luck. He was over forty now. Something had to give if he was going to make the mark he felt capable of making.

The lights came up. There was a break and everyone had coffee. Tiny tried to speak to the short-haired woman but she only smiled and slipped away. Then the class resumed.

“How do amphetamines work?” said Dr. Duncan. “Imagine a mighty kingdom that communicates by means of a special group of messengers. What if all those messengers lost their way at the same time? The kingdom would fall into disarray, wouldn’t it. The messengers would wander from house to house, delivering the same news over and over like a zombie.”

An elderly woman raised her hand. “I’m sorry—I don’t follow that at all.”

“O.K.,” said the doctor. He held up a chart of the brain and tried again. A thick black line outlined the brain; the chart looked like the map of a prison. People took notes, rubbed their chins thoughtfully, and Tiny felt utterly alone. The woman with short hair had moved to another desk. He imagined her going home. She would drive a Trans Am to an apartment in a nice old building in Stone City. There would be a cat, a robe and slippers, record albums on a shelf. She might as well have lived on Mars.

There was a big fire that night. Tiny could see red light in the sky from Highway 8 between Chesley and Margo. He turned at Jack White’s corner and followed the light south. It turned out that Delia and Ron Kessler’s place was burning. Coming down the hill he could see the yellow flames with the North Pin River in the background. A number of spectators had already parked by the corncrib across the road from the Kesslers’. There were trucks and firefighters from Grafton, Wylie, and Pringmar, but fire showed in all the windows of the house, upstairs and down. Two sheds were also burning, and the family stood hypnotized between the swing set and the fire trucks. A cage full of chickens rested on the ground. The chickens were quiet, and reflections of fire danced in their eyes. Three windows shattered as Tiny walked behind the Kesslers, and then Tiny heard a faint and strange melody. Ron Kessler was singing: “If that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring. And if that diamond ring gets broke, Papa’s going to buy you a billy goat …”

Dan Norman and Fire Chief Howard LaMott of Grafton stood together in black rubber coats with yellow bands on the sleeves, looking into the fire, faces dirty with smoke.

“What happened?” said Tiny.

“We don’t know,” said Howard LaMott.

“Did they all get out?”

“We think so.”

“Good evening, Sheriff,” said Tiny.

“Howard, what about spraying water on the machine shed?” said Dan. “The house is a loss. Let’s save what we can. Don’t you think?”

“I agree,” said Howard LaMott.

“I’m sorry, Tiny,” said Dan. “What did you say?”

“Just good evening.”

“Oh. Good evening.”

“How is Louise?”

“She’s all right.”

“I was sorry to hear about her troubles. Joan and I sent some flowers.”

“I know.”

“Can I help in some way?” said Tiny.

“No,” said Dan.

Tiny walked away from the burning house. It seemed that something in his mind was also burning. When he got home, Joan was lying on her side in the bed with her face turned from the light. She was crying.

“What’s wrong?” said Tiny.

“The adoption guy came.”

“What’d he say?”

“He didn’t even come in. He gave me some papers to fill out but he wouldn’t come into the apartment, and he said that even if it worked out, it would be nine years before I could get a baby.”

“That’s what he said? Nine years?”

“If it worked out.”

“In nine years you might change your mind.”

“I worked so hard and he wouldn’t come inside.”

“Maybe he said five years.”

“I said please come in. I said have a cup of coffee. He said it didn’t matter at this point.”

“Did he say anything at all about the church?”

“He said it was an odd place to live.”

“Fuck him, what does he know.”

Joan turned onto her back and reached for Tiny’s hand. “They don’t make it easy on people who live in odd places, do they, Charles?”

“No, Joanie, not really, they don’t,” said Tiny.

Then Tiny left the bedroom. He went out to the kitchen to sit in the chair that Joan had stripped to plain wood. He sat there and drank until he fell asleep, and while he slept he dreamed of the fire in the windows of the Kesslers’ house. When he woke up it was nearly morning, and the light was on the windows of the church.

IN MINNESOTA that winter Louise slept with a pair of knee socks under her pillow, and when she woke she pulled the socks on and got out of bed. She sat at an oak trestle table drinking coffee and listening to the wind that roared around the cabin.

She set her clock radio to begin playing at four in the morning. “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” would come on, or “Knock on Wood,” or “The Long and Winding Road.”

Getting dressed took a while. There were many layers, and with each one her motions became more cumbersome. She had always loved winter clothes. She loved boot socks, quilted underwear, cracked-leather mittens with fleece cuffs. They were dear to her, lifesavers.

She downed the last of her coffee with mittens on and went outside. The season lay like an ocean over everything. Branches snapped and cabins groaned. The Nova, kept in a quonset hut, always started—sometimes she had to open the hood first, take off the air filter, and spray ether into the carburetor.

She did Carol’s motor route and then went into town to deliver the papers of the girl who had mononucleosis. The windows were dark, the streets icy and hard. The north wind gusted over pools of street light. She might have been
delivering newspapers to houses that had stood empty for a hundred years.

The rural people mailed their subscription fees to the newspaper, but in town you had to collect. Louise went door to door with a green zippered bag for the money. Some people would ask, “When is Alice coming back?” as if Louise had done something to her. Or they would get out the ticket she had given them the previous week, to make sure they weren’t being cheated. It occurred to Louise that people in your own area generally seem friendly, and people in other regions of the country do too; but that people in neighboring states seem cold and cruel.

The girl with mononucleosis was named Alice Mattie. After collecting, Louise took the money to her house. The Matties lived in a small house near a river, and their yard was like an ice-skating rink. Alice’s father worked for the highway department and her mother had a bad back, a very bad back. She usually lay in a lawn chair in the middle of the kitchen. She had a small face and would crane her neck to see what was going on. Alice was a thirteenyear-old with shimmering red hair. She was always playing Nintendo, and tried to get Louise to play, but Louise could not get to the higher levels.

One day, not long before Christmas, Alice gave her a present. Louise unwrapped the package and found an Advent calendar.

“You open a different door every day,” explained Mrs. Mattie from her lawn chair.

“I can’t wait to try it,” said Louise.

That night after supper Louise and Kenneth played backgammon in the kitchen of the main house. Kenneth talked to the dice. “Come on, six and three,” he would say. Louise did not know whether to hang back or hightail it out
of Kenneth’s inner table. As she played, she ate Cheetos and absently wiped her fingers on the shoulders of her sweatshirt. Before she knew it, all the Cheetos were gone and Kenneth had only had a handful. She said good night to Kenneth and Carol and trudged up the hill to her own cabin. After taking her coat off and building a fire she went into the bathroom, and in the mirror saw the streaks of orange dust on her sweatshirt.

“What has become of me?” she said.

She turned the water on in the bathtub and sat on the toilet lid while steam climbed to the ceiling. She smoked a cigarette delicately, flicking ash into the sink. When the tub had filled, she undressed and got in. “Ahhh,” she said. She had slipped on the ice at the Matties’ and bruised her hip. After her bath she sat staring into the fire and drying her hair. Then she lay on the bed and looked at the Advent calendar. It was a manger scene. Mary had a ball of light behind her head, and the Wise Men looked impatient, as if they had somewhere else to go. She held the calendar in her right hand and slowly flexed her wrist several times. Then she threw the calendar across the room and into the fire, where it gave off a green light as it burned. She screened the fire and went to bed.

Ice fishing and hunting kept the camp going in the winter months. Louise would go up to the top of the hill and see the huts that dotted the lake. She could not understand why anyone who was not seriously hungry would ice fish. The men went into their freezing little booths at dawn and came out in midafternoon. Some of them drank a lot; Louise cleaned their cabins and had to carry the bottles out. The ice fishermen were not as sociable as the hunters, who had parties and laughed loudly deep into the night. When Louise
lay awake listening to the faint sound of laughter through the frozen trees, she knew a hunter was out there.

She had developed a strange habit that often disturbed her sleep. She would wind up with her wrists crossed beneath her chest, sleeping like Dracula, only on her stomach. This position cut off her circulation so effectively that she would wake with a start, certain that some kind of stroke had rendered her hands forever useless. It took a good five minutes for feeling to return to the point where she could turn on a light or push herself up in bed, so she would lie on her back, panting and staring at her hands.

Johnny White showed up just before Christmas for a week of ice fishing. He seemed totally surprised to see her. Carol and Kenneth said that Johnny had been coming up here for years, first as a child with Jack and then on his own. He had an elaborate ice-fishing shack with a generator, a refrigerator, and a kerosene heater. Louise and Carol and Kenneth helped him drag the shack across the ice on a blustery crystalline morning when the temperature was about eleven degrees. One day Johnny showed Louise the ropes of ice fishing. It still seemed boring. They had some brandy, and Louise laughed at his campaign stories, and then Johnny asked her, “What are you doing up here?”

“People think Grafton is all there is,” said Louise. “It’s not. You can leave Grafton for a few months without the world ending.”

“You ought to go home,” said Johnny.

Louise had made small mistakes in her pregnancy, but she did not believe that these mistakes had killed the baby, or that because of them she deserved to lose the baby. It was surprising the number of people who seemed to think it would be a comfort to Louise to hear that if she had taken some simple step they had read in a magazine, she would
have a living child today. People did not want to think that anything was precarious. Birth was supposed to be a given. Advertisements for baby toys and food and clothes kept coming in the mail after Iris died. The companies must have known that some of the promotions would reach people who had lost children. Tough, must have been their attitude.

There was a house on Alice’s route Louise could rest in. It was a big house with an enclosed porch where Louise would sit reading the front page of the newspaper. The paper seemed to specialize in explosions around the globe and odd stories about animals. So one day Louise was reading about a hawk in Florida who had flown off with a man’s portable telephone and figured out how to push the automatic redial button. The man’s mother was getting a lot of hangups in the middle of the night. “It’s a unique situation and we’re not happy,” said a spokesman. While Louise read this, the front door came slightly open. She stood and, feeling the heat from inside, entered the kitchen. She removed her wool hat and mittens and pushed back her hair. There was a stairway leading from the kitchen, and she went up. She opened one door and then another until she found a man and a woman asleep in their bed. The air was humid. Someone was snoring. A humidifier bubbled and steamed. Louise rested her hand on a dresser beside the door and found it slick with water. The woman rolled over and flopped her arm around the man. Louise decided the humidifier must be broken to put out this much water.

The following Saturday, while collecting, Louise found the couple home and sitting in their kitchen. She laughed out loud when she thought of asking if they’d got their humidifier fixed.

“What’s funny?” said the man.

“Nothing.”

“When is Alice coming back?”

“Soon, I hope.”

Later that day Louise dropped the collection at the Matties’, and Alice asked her to watch television. They sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of Alice’s room with cream sodas. The show that Alice wanted to see was not on. Instead an announcer said, “We interrupt our regularly scheduled program in order to bring you a holiday concert of the Applefield High School Chorus, under the direction of Warren Monson.”

The students came on right away, clearing their throats and straightening full-length robes of red and white. Louise and Alice could hear the baton of Warren Monson tapping a music stand.

“Do you know these kids?” said Louise.

“They’re older than me,” said Alice.

The girls’ voices were clear and strong, and the boys carried the bass and baritone parts earnestly, like lumber that had to be stacked. Together the voices seemed unbearably beautiful to Louise, and during “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” she began to cry. She leaned forward until her forehead and arms touched the carpet. God knows what Alice thought. But she said, “It’s all right, Louise. Don’t be upset. Oh, dear.”

Alice resumed her paper route on New Year’s Eve. Mrs. Mattie drove her around, wearing a back brace. Louise went along to see how they did.

Carol and Kenneth were going to a party that night, and Louise would be heading south in the Nova. She was going to catch a bus in Hollister and leave the car at the depot for the Kennedys to pick up on New Year’s Day.

She sat in a wicker chair in Carol’s bedroom while Carol tried on dresses for the party. Louise told her which ones she liked and didn’t like.

“I want to thank you for all your help around here these past months,” said Carol. “We are going to miss you so much.”

“I’ll be lost without my newspapers,” said Louise.

“I can’t believe it’s New Year’s.”

“Me neither.”

“Where does the time go?”

“Away.”

“Did you call Dan?”

“No.”

“You should.”

“I got him a shirt with horses on it.”

“Those are nice.”

“He won’t like it.”

“Don’t be surprised if things seem strange at first.”

“Probably.”

“Come July it will have been twenty-seven years we’ve run the camp,” said Carol. “And right after it opened I had a guy come up to me. ‘Carol,’ he said, ‘you know the trail from the cabins down to the water?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know it,’ and he said, ‘Why didn’t you cut it straighter? It meanders, Carol.’ See, he was an engineer, and everywhere he looked, he saw the straight lines that people could have made but failed to. And I said, ‘I thought that was straight,’ and he said, ‘Well, it isn’t.’ And I said, ‘You get your own camp and you can make the trails any way you want.’ “

Louise laughed. “You didn’t really think that trail was straight.”

“It used to be straighter than it is now,” said Carol.

Louise went back to the cabin for a last look around. The Nova was packed and running. She got in and drove to
Hollister. It took about forty-five minutes. She parked the car and carried her things into the bus depot, where an old man was sweeping up. She sat expectantly on a wooden bench, but the place was empty except for the custodian.

“Where you going, Miss?” he said.

“Stone City,” she said. “There is a bus at six-twenty.”

“Not on New Year’s Eve, Miss,” said the man with the broom. “There are no buses on New Year’s Eve except the Prairieliner to Manitoba, which left at four-thirty.”

“Oh, fuck, you’ve got to be kidding,” said Louise. “They said there was a bus.”

“There was—the Prairieliner.”

Louise kicked her bag in despair. “When does one leave for Stone City?”

“Tomorrow morning at nine thirty-three,” said the man. “And I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here overnight. I’m sweeping up, and when I’m done I’m going to lock the doors.”

Louise picked up her shoulder bag and the box with Dan’s shirt in it and went out the door. The town square in Hollister was empty in the dying light except for some kids who were climbing a statue of a Greek goddess with wings and large breasts. As Louise watched, they put a party hat on her head and a cigarette in her mouth. Then the boys dropped expertly to the ground and scattered as a police car roared into the square with blue lights glinting off the darkened windows of the town. It took a moment before it registered with Louise that the side of the police car said “Grouse County.” And then she had the crazy misfiring thought that this was a coincidence—that Dan or one of the deputies had come all this way chasing a criminal or tracking a clue. And by that time Dan was out of the car. He hugged her, lifted her off her feet. “Let me take you home,” he said.