The End of Vandalism (8 page)

“I guess stay away from the bat,” said Diane.

At this, Pansy drank off some vodka and began to talk. “My boyfriend used to slap me,” she said. “No reason necessary. He would slap me for good things or bad things, in sickness and in health. He would slap me to improve his luck. Then he slapped me in front of my mother, and she pushed him down the stairs.”

“All right, Pearl!” said Diane.

“So he stopped slapping me,” said Pansy, “and started burning me with the cigarette. I missed the slapping at first, until I got used to the cigarette. Then he stopped smoking. They outlawed smoking at work, and he said if he couldn’t smoke at work, it would be easier all around if he didn’t smoke at home either. He tried a pipe for a while, but it wasn’t like the cigarette. Finally he moved out. I miss him, I miss all the terrible shit he did.”

Diane rocked the weeping Pansy. “I know you do, babe,” she said.

“Why?” said Louise.

Pansy wiped her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “He’s going through changes,” she said. “He’s deeply troubled. Are we ready for a round?”

Louise laid ten dollars on the table and got up to use the bathroom. She washed her hands and looked at herself in the mirror. She felt as if she had strayed far from the people she understood. On the other hand, she lived within twelve miles of where she was born.

Dan Norman was on the ten o’clock news. Shannon Key had interviewed him for Channel 4 out of Morrisville. She was asking about the baby who had turned up at the Hy-Vee in Margo.

“Are you interviewing suspects?” Shannon asked.

“No,” said Dan. “We’re not even sure there was a crime. So suspects, no, that would be overstating it.”

“Are you interviewing anyone?”

Dan gave this consideration. He looked into the camera by mistake and became somewhat rattled. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I mean, of course.”

“Channel 4 has learned that forty yards of green corduroy were stolen from Not Just Fabric in Margo, on or about the same day the baby was found,” said Shannon Key.

“We know all about that,” said Dan. “We don’t think there is any connection.”

“When do you expect results?”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a spider making a web,” said Dan. “But I have, Shannon, and it takes a long time and a lot of going back and forth. And even when this web is done, somebody might come along and destroy it just by their hat brushing against it. Know what I mean?”

Louise picked up the phone and dialed Dan’s number. She did not expect him to be home, and the phone rang in that neutral way it does when no one is going to answer. But he did.

“A spider?” she said. “What the hell is that all about?”

“It’s a metaphor,” said Dan.

“Would you like to come over for a beer?” said Louise.

“I better not right now,” said Dan. “Apparently there’s been an accident up at the Sugar Beet. I’m picking up things on the radio.”

“What kind of things?” said Louise.

“Things about an accident,” said Dan. “Tell you what. How about you coming over here? I shouldn’t have to go out, but I had better stick by the radio awhile.”

“O.K.”

“I don’t have any wine and I don’t have any vodka.”

“I have those.”

It should not have surprised Louise that Dan was gone by the time she got there. A manila envelope was stuck in the doorframe, and in the envelope was a note saying the key was under the rock. The path from the door to the driveway was lined with white-painted rocks, and Louise could not find any key. She checked under several rocks, and with the last one she broke a pane of glass above the doorknob.

Louise let herself in and put on some lights. She swept up the broken glass and dumped it in a wastebasket. Looking for a corkscrew, she found instead a letter from Dan’s Aunt Mona, who was scheduled for exploratory surgery on the eighteenth of November but beyond that had little to say. Louise poured wine and carried a snack tray into the living room.

One of those bankers who had stolen all the depositors’ money was on TV. This one had purchased a boat, a plane, and a cattle ranch in Kenya with a partner. He was speaking to a room crammed with Harvard University students. They were practically hanging from the rafters. It was a seminar on the educational channel.

“I did some things I’m not very proud of,” said the man. “Basically they fall into two categories—financial errors and screwing people over. Whatever I wanted I could easily have by snapping my fingers. Oh, I was a bad character.”

The students asked critical questions but seemed at the
same time to be taking notes so perhaps they could pull the same shit someday. And certain things about the banker reminded Louise of Tiny, such as the way he ran his hand over his face when asked a hard question, and the self-centeredness of him: I did this, I did that, always I. This was Tiny through and through. She changed the channel and watched the Saladmaster man bashing frying pans together.

Louise then went out and got her overnight case from the car. She showered, washed her hair, brushed her teeth, and put on a cotton nightgown. She pulled the blankets off Dan’s bed and went out to sleep on the davenport. Later, when Dan came home, she sat up from a dream and said, “Just put her in a bucket.”

“It’s all right,” said Dan. He was in the kitchen washing his hands.

Louise swept the hair from her eyes. “I was dreaming,” she said.

“What about?”

“I was at the circus. They made me be a clown,” said Louise. “It was awful. What time is it?”

Dan looked at his watch without pausing in the washing of his hands. Louise felt like a scientist, observing his habits. “Two-thirty,” he said.

“I had to break the window,” said Louise.

“Yeah, I was so careful to write a note, I forgot to leave the key,” said Dan. He shut off the faucet and dried his hands slowly on a dishtowel.

“Well, was there an accident?” said Louise.

Dan came into the living room. “A guy hit a tree.”

“How is he?” said Louise.

Dan sat down in a low chair with a bottle of beer. The chair was close. Louise could have touched Dan’s forearm with her
foot, except her foot was under a blanket. “Well, not very good,” he said.

Louise nodded and listened. Grafton can be very quiet in the middle of the night. “What’s it doing outside?” she said.

“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.”