by Tom Drury
“Raining,” said Dan.
“They were predicting rain.”
“They were right,” said Dan.
“Here we are,” said Louise.
“I’m glad to see you,” said Dan.
“Come closer,” said Louise. “What are you thinking about?”
“Your eyebrows.”
“Yeah? What about them?”
“What they would be like to kiss,” said Dan.
“You can find out,” said Louise.
So he kissed her eyebrows, holding her face in his hands. They had kissed before, but not to this degree. Dan unbuttoned Louise’s nightgown. Louise put her arm out and knocked over the beer bottle.
“You’re wrecking the place,” said Dan.
“It’s my way,” said Louise.
Later, they watched the streetlight shining on the trailer window. Louise asked Dan whether he had found the mother of the grocery store baby.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s not all there.”
Louise had the house, but for those first times they mostly ended up at Dan’s trailer. Part of the reason was Louise’s farm-style bed. It came with the house and had contained generations of Klars. It was a tasteful bed, and Louise felt thrilled at not having to sleep in it anymore.
Dan had made his bed out of a mattress, three-quarter-inch plywood, and cement blocks. It provided a good, sturdy platform for ranging around and trying to anticipate the other person’s desires. Dan surprised Louise with his sexual side, and she felt like a retired skier from the movies who learns everything over again and wins the big jump against the East Germans in a blur of sun on snow. There was a spell on the mobile home, and when they had to leave, they wanted only to come back. Three, four, five nights. She cried once, shook with tears, and there was nothing that could be done to make her stop. He tried to console her (“Don’t cry. Don’t, Louise. It’s all right. Don’t cry …”), but what could be done? It just had to come out.
Halloween fell on a Wednesday that year, and in the morning Louise sat up in Dan’s bed, put on her socks, and looked out the little window just in time to see Hans Cook towing away her car.
She pulled jeans on under her nightgown and ran outside calling “Hans! Hans!” But the tow truck and the Vega chained to it were well down the road and moving at a fair clip. She could hear him shifting, up on the blacktop.
Louise turned in the grass; her feet were freezing. Dan’s car was on ramps beside the trailer—it wasn’t going anywhere—and the cruiser had some ungodly theft-foiling device that no one could get around except Dan. (This went back to 1982, when one of the sheriff’s cars was stolen from the Lime Bucket, driven to the sand pits, and rolled down the bank into a hundred and ninety feet of water.) Back inside, Dan slept in orange light, and Louise called her mother.
“I wish I could help,” said Mary, “but I don’t know anything about it. Are you sure it was Hans? It doesn’t sound like Hans.”
“Where’s he going, that’s what I don’t understand,” said Louise. “Does he still work with Ronnie Lapoint at the station? Because if I remember right, sometimes that wrecker is at the station and sometimes it’s at Hans’s. They more or less divide it. Or do they? Maybe Ronnie Lapoint would know what’s going on.”
“Oh, no, Ronnie and Hans split up,” said Mary. “They split up, oh, it’s been a good two months anyway. See, Hans felt that Ronnie was giving work to Del Hetzler that should have rightfully gone to Hans. So Hans told him, you know, ‘If I hear another word about Del Hetzler, I’m taking my truck, I’m taking my phone number, and I’m setting up on my own.’ So Ronnie says, ‘Well, go ahead, you so-and-so. I never liked you anyway.’ Now, I had to laugh when I heard this, because you didn’t know Doc Lapoint, Ronnie’s dad, but this is word for word what Doc Lapoint was like.”
“Fine, Ma, how do I get to work?” said Louise.
“Won’t Dan give you a ride?” said Mary.
“I don’t want to ask him,” said Louise. “He was working late last night. And tonight is Halloween, another long shift.”
“That’s right,” said Mary. “They’ve already got six or eight hog feeders overturned on Main Street. I can see them from my window. They take them from the hardware store. You know, you wonder why they don’t chain them up or something. Maybe we need an ordinance to make people chain up their hog feeders around Halloween time.”
“Can you give me a ride to work?” said Louise.
“Where are you?” said Mary.
“At Dan’s,” said Louise.
“Well, I don’t want to come over there.”
“Why not?”
“Why do you think not?” said Mary.
“I’ll walk to your house,” said Louise.
“Yeah, why don’t you,” said Mary.
Louise showered, and dried her hair. She put coffee on. A shower tended to fog Dan’s bathroom mirror for the rest of the day, and Louise sat at the kitchen table in her underwear while putting on her makeup. There was a little round mirror on the table. She could see only part of her face at a time. The furnace came on, and Dan’s coffeemaker made a sound that was just like a human sigh.
Louise dressed and went out. The sun was partly hidden by the grain elevator, but blinding anyway. She blinked. “Thanks a lot, Hans,” she said to herself.
Mary was pouring her orange juice and listening to the radio by the kitchen window when Louise arrived. Bev Leventhaler, the county extension woman, was on the radio explaining how to put away a pumpkin bed for the season. “I got some new guidelines from the folks at Iowa State last week, and I want to pass them along to you,” said Bev Leventhaler. “They are unusual, and I’m not going to pretend they’re not. But I’m told that these methods have produced some very high yields when tried in an experimental situation. First, go down to your local hardware store and tell them you want a dowel rod two inches thick by eighteen inches long. Perhaps you may have a similar dowel rod at home. Look in your closet or garage or workshop. I know we have a lot of extra dowel rod at our house. Seems like every time I turn around I’m tripping over dowel rod.”
Louise went to the radio to find some music, but Mary said, “Wait, I want to hear this.”
“Next,” Bev Leventhaler continued, “you will need a twelve-by-twelve sheet of black polypropylene, a handful of common twist ties, and six gallons of solution of calcium and lime. This is sold commercially as Calgro or Zing, and you should be able to find it in your town, but if not, Big Bear in Morrisville I know does carry Zing in powdered form. Just remember, if you do get the powder, you need enough powder to make six gallons, not six gallons of powder …”
Mary drove Louise to work, leaving her on the shaded street beside Kleeborg’s Portraits. “Call Hans,” said Mary. “He has an answering service. The girl’s name is Barb.”
“I will,” said Louise.
“And I meant to ask you,” said Mary. “How’s that venison going?”
“It’s in my freezer,” said Louise.
Louise called Hans, but he did not get back to her until the middle of the afternoon. She was taking prints from the fixer, and she looked at the prints (a stern girl on a horse) and cradled the phone with her shoulder.
“Well, I’m sorry, Louise,” said Hans. “I don’t really know what to tell you. About six o’clock this morning the phone rang and it was Nan Jewell. Actually, it would’ve been earlier than that, because Se Habla Español was on. So I said, ‘Buenos días,’ and Nan said, ‘Hi, Hans. Louise Darling’s car is broken down by the side of the road, and I want you to come get it and take it up to McLaughlin Chevy.’ Now, in retrospect, it did sound kind of funny. I mean, it was your car, why weren’t you doing the calling? So I said to Nan, I said, ‘Well, who told you it wouldn’t start?’ And she said that you told her it wouldn’t start, but that you didn’t have the money to fix it. So she was going to have it towed and repaired, and this would be as a favor to you. So at that point I wasn’t going to argue with her. But I’m sure sorry. I
don’t know what she was thinking of.”
“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.
FIVE
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 J
erry.
“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.
