The End of Vandalism (30 page)

THE SPRING was rainy and farmers could not get their crops planted on time. They complained bitterly, projecting a loss of yield. It was always too wet or too dry for farmers, said Mary Montrose. You would never hear a farmer say, “Yes, everything is perfect.” She was working on a Grafton comprehensive leash law, which she hoped would become a model for other towns. Instead of “choke chain” she used the term “training collar.”

Perry Kleeborg drove out to the farm one day in a straightforward attempt to get Louise to come back to the job. The little man wore his big sunglasses behind the wheel of a lavender Chrysler New Yorker. It was hard to see how he kept getting his driver’s license year after year, and in fact he did not. He walked up to the house with a box of prints for Louise to examine. Business was not great at the old studio. Most of what he showed Louise looked out of focus, and she said so.

“Maren is in over her head,” said Kleeborg. “She has not yet mastered the rudiments of photography, and now she wants to reorganize the back shop. She wants to move the enlargers where the dryer is. She wants to put the light table where the enlargers are. I don’t know why she wants these things. I
ask but she cannot tell me. She just thinks it will be handier somehow, as if by magic. I tell her there isn’t any magic, only hard work every day of the week. She is a young person with a lot of new ideas. Some good and some bad. I suspected the pictures might be soft, but with my eyes acting the way they do, it is an easy thing to overlook.”

“Don’t let her move things around,” said Louise. “She may not realize it, but that is a pretty efficient layout.”

“That’s what I told her,” said Kleeborg. “The problem is that her job has not been well defined. We were operating under the assumption that you would be coming back any moment. When you didn’t, I found myself giving her more and more responsibility, until now she wants to put her personal stamp on the operation.”

“Let me ask you about these prints from the horse show,” said Louise.

“I thought you might.”

“The horses are stepping out of the frame,” said Louise.

“Well, yes,” said Kleeborg. “Yes, I spoke to her about these. And we gave the horse people a special discount. But this is what I say. Maren is not ready. She’s a year or two away. And that’s if she stays. She talks constantly of California. California is the place to be. California is the ideal. Louise, you must come back. I meant what I said about you inheriting the business, but if you don’t come back soon, there won’t be any business left. I can’t tell you how many times we wanted to call you up in Minnesota but decided against it because it would be a toll call.”

They had been sitting on the steps of the house, and now they got up and walked along the bluestones that Dan had arranged into a path. Red, yellow, and violet flowers grew
under the kitchen window. A red-winged blackbird flew into the bushes on the edge of the yard.

“I’ll come back,” said Louise.

So she went back to work. And one sunny day she and Maren were loading the van for a photo session at the elementary school when Louise said, “Hey, just from curiosity, why did you want to move the enlargers?”

“What enlargers?” said Maren. “I don’t want to move any enlargers.”

“You know,” said Louise, and she repeated what Kleeborg had said Maren wanted to do.

Maren closed a tripod and slid it into the back of the van. “I never said any such thing. As if I would want to move the enlargers. They’re fine with me right where they are. As if I would want to move the light table. I don’t care where the light table is. Perry’s a nut.”

They drove over to the elementary school in Walleye Lake and spent the morning taking pictures of kids. Maren got them laughing and Louise snapped the shutter. In the van on the way back to Stone City they rolled down the windows and dangled their arms in the sunlight. Maren closed her eyes, smiled, and said, “This is what California is like every day of the year.”

As Mary Montrose had once predicted, Jean Klar came back to the farm. She did not want to reclaim the Klar homestead but to sell it. The farmhouse and two acres went to Louise and Dan, and the rest to Les Larsen.

There had been for some years a problem with water getting in the basement, and once they owned the house, Louise and Dan got Hans Cook to come with a backhoe to
lay a line of tile around the foundation. They had called the Tile Doctor, Tim Leventhaler, but he put them off until Dan realized that Tim was not going to mess around with a job this small.

So Hans and Dan were working on it. “Hey,” said Hans, “remember when we moved your trailer?”

“Oh no,” said Dan. “I had no part in that.”

Hans laughed. “You know, I saw that old trailer the other day,” he said.

“It’s at the landfill, right?” said Dan.

“The guys use it for a shed,” said Hans. “And they love it. Because, you know, those harmless bastards were sitting out in the rain.”

“Did they replace the windows?” said Dan.

“They took the broken glass out.”

“How long has it been since that thing rolled?” said Dan.

“Well, what,” said Hans. “Two years anyway.”

“More than that,” said Dan.

“That’s right, because it was snowing,” said Hans.

Louise came out with sandwiches and coffee, and they took a break and sat around the backhoe. “The coffee is really weak because we’re out of coffee,” said Louise.

“I’ve been meaning to invite you guys over for supper,” said Hans. “I don’t know if Mary has told you, but I’m making my own cheese these days. You wouldn’t believe what all goes into the making of cheese.”

“Milk,” said Louise. “What else?”

“I got a compact-disc player, too,” said Hans.

“Let me ask you something,” said Dan. “How much of a difference is there really?”

“I tell you, it’s like night and day.”

The tiling took them late into the afternoon. It was dirty work, but the dull terracotta tiles made a satisfying noise when they clinked together in the trench, ready to carry the water wherever Dan and Louise wanted it to go. Hans drove the backhoe home, fed his cat, and took a bath. He eased himself into the tub. It was difficult, sometimes, being such a big person. He got dressed, took a small tab of LSD, and drove over to Mary’s house, where they grilled hamburgers behind the house with the spring light fading over the fields.

“Put some tile down with Dan and Louise today,” he said.

“Well, that’s what Louise said,” said Mary.

Hans turned the hamburgers and extinguished some flames with the squirt bottle he kept handy for that purpose.

“How did it go?” said Mary.

Hans looked across the yard. “Wonderful,” he said. Darkness was settling. The trunk of a white birch glowed softly against the grass. “One of these days I’m going to make a birch-bark canoe.”

“Why?” said Mary.

“Oh, dream of mine,” said Hans. “When I was young—now this is going way back—I thought it would be a good trick to retrace the journeys of the French fur traders. Come down the Mississippi to Cloquet, La Crosse, Prairie du Chien—all those places.”

“That sounds like something you would do,” said Mary.

“It might be overly ambitious,” said Hans. “What I’d like to do now is make the canoe and go from there.”

After supper they drove up and around Walleye Lake. Hans leaned back in the driver’s seat and drove slowly, with his big hands cradling the bottom of the steering wheel. From the parking lot of the restaurant at the western end of the lake,
they could see the lights of houses on the north shore. The lights shone twice, once in the air and once in the water.

“Pretty night,” said Mary.

The restaurant was called the Sea Breeze, although it was a thousand miles from any ocean.

That was also the week that Tiny Darling fell and skinned his knuckles in the grocery store. He was walking along pushing a shopping cart and wearing the blue and gold corduroy jacket of the Future Farmers of America. For reasons unknown even to him he got the sudden notion to throw all his weight on the cart and give it a shove. Instead of carrying him along scooter-fashion, the cart flipped, dragging him down the aisle. People hurried to help him to his feet, as if he had been the victim of something other than his own crazy idea.

After getting the groceries, Tiny had to pick Joan Gower up and bring her home. They were still living in the basement of the church in Margo, and Joan served three nights a week as a volunteer at the Saint Francis House animal shelter in Wylie. It was a bit of a jaunt from Margo to Wylie, and Tiny wished that she had found an animal shelter or some other volunteer outlet closer to home. On the other hand, if his car had not broken down, he would not be driving her car, and therefore would not have to pick her up no matter where she went. So it was his fault, and yet he was angry with her. It was with an oppressive sense of his own unfairness that he drove down to Wylie. The dogs barked and pressed against the bars when he came in. “Down, Spotty,” said Tiny. “Down, Spike.”

Joan got to wear a white coat as a volunteer for Saint Francis House, and with the large glasses she had taken to wearing, she looked professional. Tiny thought but had not
proved that the glasses had regular glass in them. Her hair was pinned on top of her head, and she carried an empty clipboard under her arm.

“This is Tuffy,” she told Tiny. “This is Rebel. This is Eleanor Rigby.”

Joan opened Tuffy’s cage and knelt at the door. “Tuffy is six weeks old. She’s half Lab and half Belgian Tuveren, and the last of her littermates just found a home. So if she is acting kind of downhearted today—and I think she is—that is why. Here, Tuffy. Are you feeling lost this evening? Say ‘I’m kind of lost.’ Say ‘I’m kind of lost and wondering where everybody went.’”

“Let me pet it,” said Tiny.

A few minutes later, Joan locked the building and they walked across the dark driveway. The stars were out in the cold black sky. Tiny backed Joan’s Torino out while Joan folded her white coat neatly in her lap.

“Remind me to wash this when we get home,” she said.

“You put a lot of effort into Saint Francis for something that’s volunteer,” said Tiny.

“Yeah,” said Joan. “But think about this. When payday rolls around, those dogs have no idea who’s getting a check and who isn’t. I mean, they don’t even know what a check is. And that’s the way you have to look at it.”

“I suppose,” said Tiny.

They went back to Margo via Grafton, and as they passed through town they saw Louise’s car parked at Hans Cook’s place on the main drag. Hans lived in an old cement house opposite the grain elevator. Many years ago the house had been a gas station, and there were still cylindrical red and green pumps with cracked faces and weeds growing around them.

Tiny slowed down. “Guess whose car that is,” he said.

Joan touched the frame of her glasses. “I don’t know.”

“Louise,” said Tiny.

“I thought she was gone.”

“I thought so too, but I saw her the other day at the bank, so evidently she’s back.”

“Did you go up to her and say hi?” said Joan.

“I’m sure.”

“You should,” said Joan. “Show her you’re over that time. The divorced couples I admire are the ones who still talk on the phone. Who exchange birthday cards.”

Tiny snorted mildly and eased the car onto the highway. The farmland rolled away from them, vast and dark and empty. “Whoever told you that is lying,” he said.

“You can’t speak for all couples everywhere,” said Joan.

“Ninety-nine percent,” said Tiny.

The right back tire blew out on the highway to Margo, and the car whumped to a stop. Tiny opened the trunk, in which there were three plastic lambs. “Those are mine,” said Joan. They were the standard lambs, in a resting position, suitable for religious purposes or yard decoration. Tiny took the lambs from the trunk and put them on the shoulder. He dug out the jack and the spare tire. Joan brought him the manual—and her having the manual twenty years after the car was built and a good ten years after it had begun falling apart seemed as much a demonstration of faith as anything she had ever done during a church service. Tiny went about changing the tire, and Joan rummaged in the trunk.

“I don’t want you doing that while I’m jacking the car up,” warned Tiny. In his voice was the righteousness of having caught her doing something procedurally wrong and possibly dangerous.

“I’m not,” said Joan.

“Yes you are.”

“You’re not even touching the jack.”

“I’m about to.”

“When you start, I’ll stop.”

“Just cut it out, Joan,” said Tiny.

“I’m getting the flares out.”

“Don’t.”

“Yes.” She gathered the flares like sticks of dynamite in her hands and went around pushing their metal anchors one by one into the sandy shoulder. Then she removed the caps and scraped the elements to life. The flares hissed and burned with a hollow red light. Joan rested on her knees. Tiny knelt by the car, the lambs around him, and the hollow light touched them all. Joan knew that no matter how long she lived or how soon she and Tiny went separate ways, she would remember this.

Meanwhile, Hans brought the food to the table. He had roasted a chicken with dressing and potatoes and onions and carrots. Mary and Dan and Louise sat around a card table in the living room. Candles burned as the four friends ate the delicious food.

Dan told about a program adopted by the county to promote calmness and civility among public employees.

Mary had read in
Reader’s Digest
about an Indian man who could slow his heart to a standstill by thinking about it.

Louise said she sometimes wondered if she or Dan didn’t have powers of mind over matter, because so much of their silverware was bent.

Hans said he had dreamed recently that he was standing in
the parking lot at the Burger King in Morrisville and all of a sudden he just took off flying.

After supper Hans insisted that they all take turns lying on the davenport with eyes closed and listening to his compact-disc player through earphones. He said this was the only way you could fully appreciate the quality of the sound. When it was Dan’s turn, he lay down and Hans fitted the earphones into his ears. The music was that of a single flute whose notes broke and reverberated in open space.