The End of Vandalism (5 page)

“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.”

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 studied, 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.

“Jesus, Ed,” said Dan, “get over it.

“I’m not going up that ladder,” said Ed.

“O.K., but I have a baby with me,” said Dan. “I found a baby at the grocery store in Margo.”

“Maybe it belongs to somebody,” said Ed.

“Well, I suppose it does,” said Dan.

The water tower was by the tracks in Pinville. It was the old silver kind with a red bonnet, a ladder, and an encircling walkway that provided a good platform to stand on while writing graffiti. A small crowd had gathered in the grass around the base. Someone had come by with a box of tomatoes, and many of the people were chewing on tomatoes and staring up at the water tower. Ed Aiken came over to the passenger side of the cruiser when Dan pulled up. Ed was a thin man, and the one thing you would say about him day to day was that he rarely seemed to get a decent shave. Right now, for instance, he had a little flag of toilet paper flying under his chin as he opened the cruiser door. The baby started to cry again.

“Aw,” said Ed, “let me hold the little darling.”

He lifted the baby from its box, the blue shirt trailing like a blanket. “Do you like your Uncle Ed?” he said. “Say, sure you do.”

Dan took a turn at the bullhorn without any luck, and then he climbed the water tower. A cage made of hoops protected the ladder, but it seemed that if you slipped and fell the main function of the hoops would be to shear off your head on the way down, and Dan felt a vacuum in his lower parts as he climbed. He watched the people eating tomatoes, and when he could no longer make out the individual tomatoes, he stopped looking down. The culprits were three boys in sleeveless black T-shirts and jeans with the knees torn out. Their setup was professional, with hats, rags, a bucket of red paint, a tray, some turpentine, and a roller screwed onto a stick. In jagged, running letters they had written “Armageddon” and “Tina Rules.”

“Who’s Tina?” said Dan.

“Tina of Talking Heads,” said Errol Thomas.

“What are you thinking of, coming up here in daylight on a Saturday afternoon?” said Dan. “Did you imagine for a second that you wouldn’t get caught?”

“We want people to know,” said Albert Robeshaw.

“We want people to wake up,” said Dane Marquardt. He cupped his hands and yelled “Wake up!” at the people on the ground. “Look at them, they’re so insignificant.”

“We’re in a band,” said Errol Thomas.

“I would’ve guessed that,” said Dan.

The boys packed all their stuff into a gunnysack, and they and Dan headed down the ladder. On the ground, Ed Aiken was holding Quinn over his shoulder, patting him, pivoting slowly.

“How is he?” said Dan.

Ed raised his eyebrows and whispered, “Just dropping off.”

It rained most of the time for the next two weeks. This was the long, gray rain known to every fall, when the people of Grouse County begin to wonder whether their lives will acquire any meaning in time for winter. Water filled ditches, flooded basements, and kept farmers from their fields, but it did not stop anyone from visiting the sheriff’s office in Morrisville with supplies for the baby left at the Hy-Vee. Of course, the baby had never been to the sheriff’s office, but the sheriff had found him, and so the people turned up, craning their necks and looking into the hall behind the desk as if expecting to spy the abandoned Quinn in one of the cells or maybe lying on the floor. The visitors were farm women, for the most part, and they came shaking the water out of their scarves, and carrying bundles of diapers, cases of formula, and bales of bleached-out clothing that in at least one case had not been worn since World War II. Helene Plum even brought a beef-macaroni casserole in Corning Ware, although it was not clear who was supposed to eat it. But then, Helene Plum reacted to almost any kind of stressful news by making casseroles, and had once, in Faribault, Minnesota, attended the scene of a burned-out eighteen-wheeler with a pan of scalloped potatoes and ham. True story, told by her daughter-in-law.

At first Dan and the deputies tried a policy of accepting nothing at the station and directing all supplies over to the Children’s Farm in Stone City. That was where Quinn was. But it seemed you couldn’t tell people they had come to the wrong place—they wouldn’t hear it. This was partly out of dignity and partly because Stone City was a good half hour
from Morrisville. So when Dan would say, “The baby is out of our hands,” or Earl Kellogg, Jr., would say, “They got the baby over in Stone City,” the women would leave their offerings on the bench against the wall, or on the floor, and say, “Well, hope he can use this busy box,” or “Well, see that he gets these sleepers worn by our Ted,” and then they would turn and go back out to their El Caminos in the rain. The sheriff and his deputies must have made six or eight trips to the Children’s Farm. There was stuff enough for ten babies, and sometimes the sheriff’s department looked more like a Similac warehouse than an agency of the law.

Claude Robeshaw and his son Albert came in on the ninth or tenth day of rain, but they didn’t have anything for Quinn. Claude’s concern was his son’s share—about seven hundred and fifty dollars—of what it would cost to restore the paint job on the Pinville water tower. Claude Robeshaw was tall, with plowlike features. He was seventy-one years old to Albert’s fifteen. When Dan himself was a teenager he had baled straw for Claude Robeshaw, and he remembered one August Sunday when Claude was driving the tractor and Dan, Willard Schlurholtz, and the Reverend Walt Carr were working the hayrack. The temperature was ninety-seven degrees, and Claude decided that after every round they’d better have a beer so nobody would get dehydrated, and after five rounds young Dan fell off the rack.

“I’ll climb that tower and paint it myself,” said Claude. “That kind of money, I’ll silver-plate the bastard. I’m serious. I’m dead serious. Why, Jesus Christ, some outfit comes down from out of state and they are playing this county like a piano.”

“Claude,” said Dan, “your quarrel really is with the board of supervisors. But as it was told to me, they’ve got to have
somebody who is bonded. Now, what is bonded? Well, you go to the state and the state bonds you, and to find out any more about it, I guess you’d have to go to the state. But this is what it costs, apparently, to get somebody who is bonded.”

Claude turned grimly to his son, who was almost as tall, with short brown hair, jean jacket, eyeglasses. “Do you understand what the sheriff is saying?” he said.

“No,” said Albert.

“It’s bullshit, that’s why,” said Claude.

“They went out and got three bids,” said Dan. “I’ll grant you this was not the lowest. There was one bid that was lower, but that was by a company, their crew got drunk over in De Witt and ran their truck into the river, and it was a big production to get it out. Yes, it’s a lot of money. But those words went up, and they have to come down. People are mad in Pinville, Claude. They had a fine water tower, and now you drive into town, you think the place is called Armageddon.”

Albert laughed, and this angered Claude. “So help me God,” he said, “I will knock you through the wall of this station.”

“Then I’d be dead,” said Albert. “That’s like saying, ‘So help me God, I’ll cut your throat.’ Or, ‘So help me God, I’ll poison your food.’“

Claude made room on the bench by moving aside a yellow quilt that had come in that day for Quinn. He sat down, removed a cigar from its glass tube, pared the end away with a jackknife, and lit up. “I believe I had you too late in life,” said Claude. “I already had two daughters and three sons, and maybe I should have stopped right there. I know it’s been one sorry situation after another. Maybe I should tell the sheriff about when you decided to run away and live in a tree.”