by Tom Drury
The trip from the Klar farm to Boris was all on the gravel, and it had been dry, so Tiny was accompanied by a cloud of rolling dust. His mother’s house was in the dead center of Boris. The house had been painted years ago in a flesh tone that must have been cheap to make, judging from the number of poorly maintained places that you see in that shade. There was a long porch to the left of the front door, and this was laden with junk and sinking into the ground. Colette Sandover’s house was a mess, and no sense could be made of the disorder. There were engineer boots in the sink, an animal trap shedding flakes of rust on the television set, and stacks of Photoplay magazines in the bathtub. Tiny found his mother standing in the backyard weeds, telling a story to some children from the neighborhood.
“And so, the wolf went home hungry,” she said. “He was so hungry that he ran around his cave, and the geode that he had worshiped fell upon him. The wolf howled and howled until the townspeople heard his terrible cries. ‘Help me, I can’t move,’ said the wolf. Then the mayor reported to the people, ‘The wolf is pinned. He has no food. It is only a matter of time.’ ‘Good,’ said everyone. And they waited three months until they were certain that the wolf had perished. Then they went into the cave, carried his bones out, and made a boat that carried them to the new land across the lake.”
“Hello, Mom,” said Tiny.
“Go home, children,” said Colette. She and Tiny went into the house.
“I don’t want to see you,” she said.
“Well, this is a hell of a thing,” said Tiny.
“I can’t give anymore,” she said.
“Name something you ever gave,” said Tiny.
“When you fell, I picked you up. When you were hungry, I handed you food. There are other examples. I’m not the endless well you seem to think I am. I’ll be happy to see you children at Christmas. But that’s it. Possibly Easter. Otherwise, I must ask you to keep your distance.”
Some parents get their children mixed up, calling one sibling by the name of another. But Colette seemed to have confused Tiny with the offspring of some other mother. “I don’t think I’ve been in this house in five years,” said Tiny.
“Christmas or Easter, take your pick,” said Colette. “Tell you what. Why don’t you choose now and Jerry will have to take the other. What could be more fair?”
“I don’t want either one of those.”
She sighed. “Well, what do you want? Everyone’s needs come before Mother’s needs.”
Tiny went to the sink, moved the engineer boots, and got a drink of water. “Are you getting enough nutrition and stuff?” he said. “Do you cook for yourself? What do you do?”
“What I cook or don’t cook is no concern of yours,” she said. “If I were you, I would worry about my own plate. Your father was a fool. Jerry’s father was mean, and Bebe’s father was weak, but yours was the fool of the bunch.”
“A stroll down memory lane,” said Tiny.
“And stay away from my meter,” said Colette. “I know you’ve been turning it forward to make it look like I’m using more power than I am.”
“Oh, yeah. I do that all the time,” said Tiny.
“Christmas or Easter,” said Colette.
Tiny went south to Highway 56 and west to Morrisville. His mother was crazy, and maybe insanity was all that he had to look forward to. The drunk-driving people in Colorado had given him the address of something called the Room. This was a counseling group with an office in a brick building above a jazz-dancing studio by the South Pin River. Tiny watched the jazz dancers in their colored tights for a while and went upstairs, where he found two rooms with the sort of sad, anonymous furniture that can be purchased in bankruptcy auctions from coast to coast. There was a metal desk with a wood-veneer top, a green file cabinet scarred by the removal of unknown stickers, and half a dozen flimsy chairs of orange plastic in a seventies contour. Over in the corner Johnny White was hitting golf balls at a putting machine.
“Johnny?” said Tiny.
“Shh,” said Johnny. “If this goes in, I’ll be a success in life.” He hit the ball past the machine and into the baseboard. “That doesn’t bode well.”
“Johnny?”
“I know you,” said Johnny. He had large red eyes that always made him seem either hung over or very sincere. “We used to have belt-sander races in shop class.”
“Those were the good days,” said Tiny. “Listen, I’m looking for something called the Room.”
“You got it,” said Johnny. “Tell you what, though. I’m running behind in my schedule. I’m giving a talk up by Margo in about twenty minutes. You want to come along, see what we’re all about?”
“All right,” said Tiny.
Johnny and Tiny went to Margo in Johnny’s Bronco. It was a new truck with a black interior, and although it was only forty-some degrees outside Johnny kept the air conditioner blasting.
“You hear a lot, Tiny—or I hear a lot, anyway—about the twelve steps,” said Johnny. “At the Room we don’t have twelve steps. We have one step. Step into the Room. Don’t leave until you’re clean. It’s that simple. Once you’re in the Room, the idea is always to be moving toward the Door of the Room. This must be gradual. You can’t just waltz out, because if you do, you’ll fall. By the same token, you do have to step out eventually. Understand?”
“No,” said Tiny.
“The Room is not an actual room,” said Johnny.
“I’m confused,” said Tiny. “If you step in and then step out …”
“Right,” said Johnny.
“That right there is two steps,” said Tiny.
“Let’s not get hung up on the number of steps,” said Johnny.
The Little Church of the Redeemer was dark brown with frayed red carpet on the floor. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and Tiny could see the gray hills and board-and-batten cottages out the window. This was an area on the edge of Grouse County where it was too hilly to farm. Joan Gower met Johnny and Tiny at the back of the church. Tiny did not know her. She was a wide-eyed woman with blond hair, and she wore a long white gown with a rose-colored cross on the front. Johnny introduced Tiny and Joan, who sat together in the front of the church as he gave his talk. Tiny turned around a couple times. Some of the people in the audience were blind, and they aimed their ears at Johnny and consequently seemed to be looking right at Tiny. This made him nervous, even though they could not see him.
Johnny White told his own story—the bankruptcy, the divorce, how he missed his kids. He had told the story many times, but now, instead of being merely sad, it established his credentials as leader of the Room. Johnny had grown his hair long enough in front that he could smooth it back to cover his bald spot. But this long front hair tended to fall forward, and as a result he leaned his elbows on the pulpit and kept both hands free for managing his hair. There was a new part in his story, about drinking. Johnny did not really have an ongoing drinking problem. Judging from this anecdote, he had got drunk once and run into some spectacularly bad luck. Maybe this was a nitpicking distinction. He had ended up getting stitches. It’s also possible that Joan Gower had not heard Johnny’s story before. As Johnny spoke about his children, Megan and Stefan, she took Tiny’s hand and held it tightly, and Tiny saw the tears on her face.
At the end of Johnny’s talk an old man came up the aisle with a whiskey bottle. “I’m a big drinker,” he said. “I fought with George Smith Patton in Sicily but I can’t fight this.”
“Not alone, my veteran friend,” said Johnny. “That’s why the Room exists. Most people can’t fight it alone. Some can. If anyone here can, I would advise them candidly to hit the road, because they don’t need us.”
“I just get so thirsty,” said the man. “During the day I’m right there. But when night comes on, I don’t know, that’s when it’s bad.”
“You’re in the grips of a disease,” said Johnny. “It’s like anything. It’s like breaking your ankle.”
“Something’s broke,” said t
he man.
“We will mend it in the Room,” said Johnny. “Out here is the land of make-believe. You might as well uncork that container and have a cocktail.”
“Really?” said the man.
“That’s how much I believe in what I’m doing,” said Johnny.
The man looked at the bottle. “No, I wouldn’t feel right.”
Afterward, Johnny White stood under a musty tent beside the church and answered questions. There was a great deal of confusion about the Room and why, if it wasn’t an actual place, did Johnny talk about going into and out of it. What did he mean by that? And if it isn’t a place, what is it? And where? Meanwhile, Joan Gower took Tiny for a walk.
“This is our duck pond,” she said. “As you can see, it’s almost time to skim for algae. Continuing up the hill, we get a good view of the repairs being done gradually to our church roof. And here are the cottages. Aren’t they the greatest? These were manufactured in Sioux City in the nineteenth century for farmers who would come to town on Saturday and wish to stay overnight for church in the morning. In that sense they are the first prefabricated houses, and here they are in Margo. Our campers or residents come from the cities primarily—Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Louis—and they study with me and Father Alphonse Christiansen. Stepping in, we see the nice detailing and bead-board that tell us these cottages are from a different time. The setup is pretty spartan. We provide a hot plate, a desk, a chair, a dresser, and a plain but sturdy bed. This particular cottage has a nice view of the duck pond that we were just at. Look, some mallards are coming down for a water landing. Oh, hold me. Please hold me.”
Margo began as an outpost and has remained one. The houses are far apart and small. Whereas other towns thrived and then dwindled, Margo never thrived and so dwindling was not an issue. Even Boris has more handsome pages in its history than Margo. Margo has the lake, too, just south of town, which you would consider a benefit until you actually stood on its shores. Lake Margo is fed by the same aquifer as Walleye Lake, but as is the case with some siblings, they could hardly be less alike. Walleye is clean and broad and, when viewed from above, is shaped like a big healthy muskrat. Most years it is full of northern and walleyed pike—hence the name—and many a young camper has been sent off to bed with the promise that “we’ll get up and fish Walleye in the morning.”
Lake Margo, by contrast, has the outline of an elemental protozoan, and though it is deep, it is full of weeds that seem to have evolved specifically to foul the blades of outboard motors. There is a large gasoline distributorship to the east, and after a rain the water sparkles with fragile pastel oil rings. No connection has been proved, and the matter has been tied up in court so long that the county judges are all tired of it and tend to recess defensively whenever it comes up. But the lake often smells of gasoline, which helps explain why Walleye Lake has a thriving tourist business featuring a water slide while Margo has the Little Church of the Redeemer with its falling-in roof and ragbag revivalists.
Tiny and Joan Gower kissed passionately for several minutes, with the gray light coming through the window of the homely cottage. Then Joan straightened her gown and its pale cross and walked down the hill to the church. Johnny and Tiny drove to Morrisville, where Tiny picked up his car and a box of L’Oréal No. 3 Soft Black hair color before returning through the dark countryside. Joan was in the basement of the church playing “This World Is Not My Home” on the piano when Tiny came down the stairs. He stopped and listened to her sing.
This world is not my home
I’m just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up
Somewhere beyond the blue
They made love on the piano bench, on the steps, and in the bell tower, where there has not actually been a bell since the big lightning storm of 1977. Finally they sat in the kitchen, worn out if not exactly satisfied, smoking Father Christiansen’s Canaria d’Oros and languidly reading the intimidating instructions that came with the hair dye.
“You don’t want to do your eyebrows, do you?” said Joan. “It could cause blindness.”
“In that case, no,” said Tiny.
“I like when the eyebrows are different,” said Joan, and she smiled. Then she read: “Some people are allergic to haircoloring products. Allergies can develop suddenly even though you have been coloring your hair for some time. The simplest and most effective way to find out if you are allergic is to do the following Patch Test.”
“Nah, forget that,” said Tiny.
He poured the coloring into the developer and shook the mixture while Joan pulled on the transparent gloves provided.
“I know what it is to profoundly change,” said Joan. “I wasn’t always in the ministry. I was an actress for many years in Chicago. I tried to be, anyway. It’s a very hard business to be in. I come from Terre Haute, and when I left there they all warned me. ‘Joan,’ they said, ‘the only way people get ahead in that business is by sleeping around.’ So I went to Chicago and I took an acting workshop and I did sleep around to a certain extent but apparently not enough, because it took me two years to get a part in a play. It was called Au Contraire, Pierre, a French comedy, and I played a pregnant woman. I had a thing to wear on my stomach and, you know, I really studied for that part, because I wanted to make it special. Wow, this is black. I mean, it’s really black.” She lathered the coloring into his hair. “Well, for instance, some pregnant women have to lie on their backs for months, and I knew this, so I suggested that it might be comical for me to lie in a bed onstage during the whole play and never move. But they said no, they didn’t want that. Don’t you think that could have been funny? If it was done right? And I knew that some women have to sit down all the time and put their legs up to keep from getting varicose veins, but they didn’t want me to do that either. The last thing that I thought might be interesting was the fact that pregnancy can cause forgetfulness. But instead of asking anyone, because of course they would say no, I just started acting forgetful—you know, as if I couldn’t quite remember my lines. I admit it was tricky, what I was trying to achieve. Then one day when I came to the set they told me I had been replaced by another woman, and I should clean out my locker and go.”
“You got screwed,” said Tiny.
“I agree,” said Joan. “Wait a minute. I got some on you. Hold still.”
She ran a towel carefully over his forehead.
“Anyway, that night I happened to be in a bar, and I managed to let it slip that I was an actress. Well, this man started talking about a well-known star—or starlet, I guess you’d say—who you always see on TV. He said some terrible things about her and what she supposedly did in order to become famous. I mean, unless he was a bug on the ceiling there is no way he could have known what he was talking about. And the more he talked the louder he got, and the more bitter he got, and it was ‘Fuck this’ and ‘Fuck that,’ and the more he reminded me of the people back in Terre Haute and the warning they gave me when I left home. So finally I hauled off and hit him just as hard as I could across the face. But you understand, this is when I knew I had to change. Now we let it sit for twenty-five minutes. Then, let’s see… we rinse your hair and apply the Accent de Beauté shampoo and conditioner.”
“My scalp feels strange,” said Tiny.
Joan Gower pulled the blackened gloves off, one finger at a time. “That means it’s working,” she said.
Tiny went to see Johnny White. They could hear the music from the dance studio, the bass like a heartbeat. Johnny said there was a possibility that Tiny could get four hundred and twenty-five dollars a month to work for the Room. It all depended on whether he was any good at talking in front of a group. Johnny said it was not that hard, and from what Tiny had seen at Joan’s church, this had the ring of truth. Johnny said he would coach Tiny. Tiny would start off talking to kids and gradually work up to the adults. Tiny would be required to wear a tie and to look everyone in the eye at all times. He would be expected to emphasize drugs rather than a
lcohol, because people were more afraid of drugs. Johnny said there was fair demand right now for speakers in the high schools.
So one Saturday night Tiny found himself sitting at a basketball game between Pringmar and Romyla in his new black hair and a clip-on necktie, waiting for halftime when he would speak. Like many of the smaller gymnasiums in Grouse County, this one was cramped and outmoded, with a rounded ceiling that was so low on the sides that corner shots with too much arc would hit the rafters. Seeing this, Tiny felt less nervous. His efforts might not amount to much, but they could not be sillier than the spectacle of these children in badly fitting jerseys bouncing basketballs off the ceiling. Then the first half ended, a boy and girl swept the yellow floor with push brooms, and Tiny climbed onto the stage and with both hands took hold of a microphone that had been set up in front of the pep band.
“Hello, folks,” he said. “My name is Charles Darling and they call me Tiny. You might wonder how I got that nickname. Well, if you think that’s strange, you should meet my brother Fats. If you’re not home, I’ll just slip him under the door. But I jest. What I’m here to talk about today is no laughing matter, which I’m sure you’ll agree with, and that’s drugs …” Tiny spoke for fifteen minutes and showed a short film. The reaction was about what he had hoped for, which is to say that most of the students ignored him completely, and then the program was over, and the Romyla pep band played “Cocaine,” and Tiny walked off the stage and sat down. The Room distributed questionnaires the following Monday in health classes at the Romyla and Pringmar high schools. After getting the responses back and reading them, Johnny White said they were basically what you would expect, although a handful of students had seemed to get a favorable rather than an unfavorable impression of amphetamines, which is something Tiny would have to work on.
