by Tom Drury
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.”
“The topic was a dog,” said Louise.
“You leave me stranded among strangers,” said Mary.
“I’m on your side, Mom,” said Louise. “I’m on your side. What did happen with King?”
“This is what I mean,” said Mary. “King, King, King, King, King.”
“Why don’t you make a drink and calm down,” said Louise.
“What happened to the almighty King,” said Mary.
“Why don’t you fix yourself a drink,” said Louise.
Mary sighed. Then she was quiet for so long that Louise began to wonder whether she had put the phone down and walked away.
“That pet shop woman talked for one solid hour,” said Mary. “They had to table my motion and adjourn just to get rid of her.”
THREE
ONE SATURDAY, Sheriff Dan Norman was kneeling on top of his trailer house, trying to patch a rusty spot that was beginning to leak, when a religious woman came by. She had yellow hair pulled into a thick braid. Her Bible was white, and she held it in both hands, like a big white sandwich.
“Does Jesus live in this home?” she said.
“Pardon?” said Dan. He stood up. In his hands were a trowel and a can of orange sealant, called Mendo, that he had got at Big Bear.
“Did you know that Jesus could live in this trailer?” said the woman. “Because he can. You accept him as your personal savior, he’s here tomorrow.”
“I’m comfortable with my beliefs,” said Dan.
“Well—what are they?” said the woman.
“Let’s just say I have some,” said Dan, “leave it there.”
“Fine with me,” said the woman. She tucked the Bible under her arm and climbed the aluminum ladder leaning against the side of the trailer. She stepped onto the roof and held out her hand. “My name is Joan Gower,” she said. “I’m from Chicago originally, but I’ve lived in this area seven years.”
The sky had the blue depth of a lake. Joan Gower took the trowel from Dan Norman’s hand. He thought for a minute that she was going to pitch in, but it was a brief thought, because she hurled the trowel to the ground.
She sighed. “Wouldn’t it be a miracle if we could throw away our sins that easy?” she said. “God, what a miracle that would be.” She stared sadly downward, and it seemed to Dan that she had in mind particular sins, occurring on such and such a day.
“Look at that,” said Dan: the trowel had stuck in the ground, like a sign. He climbed down to retrieve it, but the phone rang and he went inside, leaving Joan Gower standing up on the roof of the trailer.
The man on the telephone told Dan to go look in a shopping cart at the Hy-Vee. He did not say which Hy-Vee. He did not say what was in the cart. He said he was calling Dan at home so the call could not be traced. Dan’s approach to mystery callers was to treat them casually, get them talking, so he said, “You know, we don’t, as a rule, trace calls at the office either. Call tracing is tricky, and the phone company doesn’t like to do it. They will do it, I’m not saying they’ll never do it, but they won’t do it if they don’t have to. Sometimes you can get what is called a pen register, but that takes a warrant, and warrants are hard to get, too. I know in this county they are. It seems like the judges are all afraid of being overturned down the line, know what I mean?”
“Goodbye,” said the man.
“Now just wait a minute,” said Dan. “Which Hy-Vee?” But it was too late.
Dan hung up the phone, put on his sheriff’s jacket, and went back outside. Joan Gower had come down from the roof and was leaning on a sawhorse, smoking a reedlike cigarette. Dan brought the ladder down, returned it to the shed out back, and explained to the woman that he had to go.
“May I share a verse with you?” said Joan Gower.
“O.K., one verse,” said Dan.
She stood, rested her cigarette on the spine of the sawhorse, and opened the Bible to a place marked by a thin red ribbon.
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart,” she read, “as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.”
Joan Gower retrieved her cigarette and took a drag. “Song of Solomon, eight: six and seven,” she said. “What does that say to you?”
“I don’t know,” said Dan. “Love is powerful.”
Joan nodded. “Good,” she said. “Solomon is grappling with the idea of love.”
On the highway Dan turned on the reds, and he got to the Hy-Vee in Chesley pretty fast, but he found nothing unusual in any of the shopping carts. He saw Lenore Wells in the dairy section—she was on antidepressants, as always, and smiled her small, lonely smile. Her father had hanged himself in the vault of the Morrisville bank, and her brother was serving fifteen years in Anamosa for stealing a mail truck. Sad, sad family. Lenore told Dan about two cranes that had flown over her house early that morning, and Dan thought she was going to weep, but instead she shook her head and reached down to get some string cheese.
There were two more Hy-Vee stores in the county, in Morrisville and in Margo. At the Hy-Vee in Morrisville the boys brought the groceries out to your car, and so there was always a line of cars at the curb, but there were no carts in the parking lot.
The store was at one end of a little shopping center, and Dan entered through a wide corridor in which about one hundred 4-H girls were involved in a confusing demonstration of soil erosion. On a long narrow table they had set up a miniature landscape covered with sand and were now attacking the sand with fans, and squirt guns, and even their hands, although their hands corresponded to none of the erosive forces they had studi
ed, and using them was against the rules. The girls wore white jumpsuits with green sashes, and these outfits were splattered with sand and water, and all around the table was chaos, except for one end, where the older girls presided calmly over the area designated Contour Plowing. Dan was glad to get into the Hy-Vee store, but when he looked at the idle grocery carts, he saw nothing in them except broken lettuce leaves. He left the Morrisville Hy-Vee and drove to the one in Margo.
There he found a shopping cart with a cardboard box in it. The cart was in the northwest corner of the parking lot next to a yellow Goodwill bin. Dan looked at the box, which had once held a case of Hamm’s beer. The top was closed, each flap overlapping the next. Dan heard crying. Lifting the flaps, he found a baby wrapped in a blue flannel shirt. A note was taped on: “My name is ‘Quinn.’ Please look out for me.” The baby had dark eyes, much dark hair, and a loud, deep cry. Dan picked up the Hamm’s box and put it in the front seat of the cruiser. He fastened the seat belt and shoulder harness as well as he could around the box. The baby howled powerfully, but once the car was in motion he looked around, burped, and fell asleep.
Dan headed for Mercy Hospital in Stone City, but three miles out of Margo he picked up a radio call from the deputy Ed Aiken. Some kids were on top of the water tower in Pinville, and Ed Aiken could not get them to come down.
“Try the bullhorn,” said Dan.
“Did that,” said Ed.
“Say you’re calling their folks,” said Dan.
“Did that.”
“I guess you’ll have to go up after them.”
“No, sir,” said Ed, who had found it almost impossible to climb since an incident in his teens when he had come very close to falling off the roof of a barn.
