Five minutes later we were all in Savannah’s safari-model Land Rover, an odd car for a librarian, an odd car for anyone in Iowa in 1972. It was John Deere green, with enormous tires that rose to my hips. She told me that her father had given it to her a few years earlier. She called him Slim, like everybody else did. “He won it gambling,” she said, yelling over the engine. “The same way he gets everything he has. Apparently he thought it was funny that I have this car. You know: because you’d usually drive this across the savanna.” She raised her eyebrows. “I look like an idiot in it. But it’s what I have.”
The roof of the thing had been removed, as if to make it easier to spot tree leopards or olive baboons, and then it had been reattached poorly; as we drove, the car seemed likely to separate in half if we hit a big enough bump. We went out on Route 112, back toward Ebbington, away from Hove, the grain elevators whiter and grimier in the daylight. Lauren sat up front, sullen, occasionally weeping into her duffel.
“I hate you,” she said to Savannah, more than once.
“You put me in a compromising situation,” Savannah said.
“Spare me the lecture.”
“I can’t help you with this. You’ve got to get through this on your own.”
I thought Savannah was joking when she said this, and so I laughed.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, turning to me. “Could you be any less helpful?”
“At least he listened. Clearly you just don’t want to help,” Lauren said. “It’s not that you can’t. It’s that you don’t want to.” She tried to suck air into her lungs between her crying fits. “I can’t believe you’d send me back to that house! You have no idea how awful it is to live in such a terrible place.”
But of course, Savannah did. And after what I’d told Lauren last night, she should have known better than to say that aloud. To her credit, though, I saw through the side-view that Lauren’s face became an instant wreck of regret. If there was anyone who knew, it was Savannah: that hut, shack, shed, hovel, at the Emerson Oaks; those buckets; the roof, lying in pieces in the brush beside the house.
“It’s awful, honey,” Savannah said, sweet now. “I know. You’ve told me.”
“I haven’t told you everything,” she said.
“What else is there?”
“He’s terrible. He’s just awful. He’s a bigot.”
Savannah shrugged.
“He is,” Lauren insisted. “You should hear his mouth. I can’t even be there. He’s hideous.”
Savannah did it again, gave a small shrug, as if Lauren’s father’s being a bigot wasn’t anything she didn’t already know about. “Look, nobody’s perfect. Nine months. That’s all you need.”
“Then what? College? You think he’s gonna pay for college?”
“No,” Savannah said. “But my father didn’t pay for college either. I took out loans. Like most people.” She turned to me. “Not Hilly here. Hilly didn’t need loans. But most people just go to the bank, sweetie. It’s actually pretty easy.”
“Loans.” Lauren said this oddly, as if she hated the concept of debt, but also as if she hadn’t ever considered that she could finance her own future. For her, the word was clearly an epiphany. She wore the realization transparently, relief settling over her, replaced just as quickly by the embarrassment of not having known this earlier. Then: a perfectly pitched adolescent scoff. “I know it’s easy. Jeez.”
We got to her house soon after we crossed the town limits of Ebbington. Hers was a neighborhood of intersections, a grid dropped as if by helicopter down onto what must have been a family farm once, sold off to developers, parceled, surveyed, flattened. A wooden billboard announced the neighborhood as the Peterson Estates. “Estates” was something of a misnomer. The homes here were flat, shorter than ranches, about as tall as Savannah’s Land Rover, as if some big twister had cleaved in half any structure that dared to commit a second story. The predominant building material here was a type of fake brick that was in reality simply cheap concrete shaped into rectangles and painted red. When the weather shifted from cold to hot, these tended to shatter, and as a result the houses here looked as if they had seen the wrong end of some harrowing battle, the chipped bricks welted as if by machine-gun fire. Lauren sank into her seat as we passed that wooden billboard to her neighborhood, the P in Peterson done up, for whatever reason, in a calligraphic typeface that didn’t match the rest of the name, graffiti smeared onto the wood, a bright yellow suck it conjoined to a pink peace sign. Her crying became hysterical now. I hadn’t noticed that she was wearing any makeup until it was wetly smeared and streaked on her face.
Again, she spoke in short artillery bursts: “Fuck. You. Both.”
I tried to give her some reassurance by way of the side-view mirror, but she was lost, already working the door handle as Savannah slowed to her house.
“I’m never talking to you again,” Lauren said to Savannah.
“That’s fine.”
“You can live with that?” Lauren asked.
“You’ll thank me for this.”
“You’re arrogant,” Lauren said. “People say that about you. People all over say that. You think you’re so smart.”
“Good to know. I’ll keep that in mind the next time I see some people. I’ll try to act nice and stupid for them so that everybody feels good about themselves.”
Lauren sneered at this, wounded. Then, shaking her head, she got out of the car. I watched her get halfway up her walkway before Savannah turned to me.
“Get out there,” she said. “Make sure her father doesn’t think we took her. I don’t feel like getting arrested today.”
Her old man was out on the step before Lauren got to the door, his obvious concern not eclipsed by the withering disgust he directed my way. Lauren saw her father and stopped midway up the walk. I had the urge to hug her when I saw this. She took a small step backward. If I hadn’t before, I now believed everything she’d just said about him.
“You the one who took my daughter?” the man called out to me. “Or the colored lady take her?”
Whatever Savannah thought of my job, whether in fact it was the worst job ever, as she had put it, years of traveling had provided me with an ability to deal with men like Lauren’s father. He seemed, at first glance, harmless: corn-husk skinny, with tawny, smoke-blanched skin, teeth like gravestones toppled by vandals. Men like him lacked any pretense of self-consciousness; everything about him worked on instinct. He was in his socks. They were, I found it necessary to notice, Green Bay Packers socks, green and yellow, the logo on the toe. Tacked atop his upper lip, a big furry cat’s tail of a mustache gave accent to everything he said.
“Turns out Lauren got sick last night at the library. Really messy, actually. Some sort of food poisoning. Isn’t that what they said?” I tried to find Lauren’s expression so that we could corroborate this instantly. “Anyway. That’s what the emergency room doctors told us.”
At this, her father froze. “Doctors?”
“They wanted to call,” I said, finally catching a glint in Lauren’s eye. “But she couldn’t really get it together to give anybody your number.”
Her father turned. “Is this true, Lauren?”
Lauren managed, thankfully, to nod. “It was gross.”
“And who are you?” her father asked me.
“Hilton Wise,” I said, my hand out to shake his. “Friend of Savannah’s. She’s the one who took her over to the hospital.”
“Wise?”
“I’m a reporter. Boston Spectator.” Another business card, the same officious exactitude in the way I whipped it out of my jacket pocket. I was getting good at this. Lauren disappeared inside the house. I saw, as the door opened, a swatch of high-pile orange carpet, a fat tabby lolling about on a love seat, more Packers gear (a woolly throw, ratty slippers, a soggy-looking green pennant). Also: the wooden cabinet to a television set, rabbit ears splayed east and west. On the set he’d put a frosted mug, losing its icy coat now, the bee
r just poured, the fizz still popping. It wasn’t yet nine and he was drinking.
“I’m Larry Becker,” he said, nodding at me. Then he peered out again at the Land Rover. “You with her?”
“She’s a friend of mine,” I said. “Like I said.”
He was still squinting out at Savannah. “She bring my money?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did the colored bitch bring my money? She should have brought me my money.”
I stiffened. “What’d you just say?”
He grinned falsely. “Sorry. The colored woman bring me my money?”
I stepped aside so that both Larry and I could look over at the Land Rover together. I wanted to see what he saw, which apparently was her color first and her lack of his money second. When she saw that we were looking, she revved the engine, a huge noise, the whole neighborhood awash suddenly in the churning of this beast of a car, designed to tackle a safari, to outrun a gazelle, to withstand the horn of a rhino. Instantly, birds were jolted out from the bushes of the neighboring houses.
“How much money does she owe you, exactly?” I asked.
“It’s her daddy that owe me.”
“Charles?”
“Who’s Charles?”
“Slim,” I said, correcting myself. “How much does Slim owe you?”
Larry took a tiny spiral notebook out from his back pocket, the cover of which was green, with a yellow stripe running the y-axis. Everything about this man seemed designed to silence the fool who dared to challenge his devotion to the Packers. Flipping back a few pages, he landed on a sheet filled with a horizontal slew of numbers, each line crossed out in pencil and then replaced below it with another, bigger number. “As of today, with interest, Slim owes me eighteen K. But it’s about to go up. ’Bout to go up real soon.”
“K. You mean thousand?”
“Yes. K as in thousand.”
Now Savannah was waving me home to the car. Another growling bit of thunder from the Land Rover. When I turned back to Larry, he was studying my business card.
“Wise. Any relation—”
“He’s my father,” I said.
“You look like him, so I was thinking that.” Larry chuckled, his eyebrows rising. His whole disposition changed, the toughness melting out of him. Now he was my friend. “I’m a big admirer of his. I won’t get in an airplane ’cause of that guy.”
“He has that effect.”
Larry motioned to me with my card, asking wordlessly if he could keep it.
“Say, how’s it that Slim owes you so much money?” I asked. “Eighteen thousand is a lot of cash.”
“Well, he doesn’t owe me, per se. I run a casino downtown. Under the phone building. Sort of low stakes, usually. Unless things get out of hand.”
“Casino? You’re kidding me.”
“It’s a sports book, mainly.”
He was smiling now, bragging. Rather than come across as a gangster, which I think was what he wanted, knowing now that I was Arthur Wise’s son, and probably believing some of the various rumors that floated around my father’s success like a flock of bees—that in order to pressure the airlines, he needed to exert influence on the unions that supplied the pilots and the baggage folks and the mechanics, and to do that he needed to muscle the various crime syndicates that people assumed ran those unions—Larry came off to me a preening teenager, harmlessly pleased with himself.
“So did he get out of hand, or did he just run up a tab?” I asked.
“Little bit of both. He actually owes the money to some friends of mine. I don’t bet anymore myself. Cases like this, where the sum gets high, when people get angry—I usually have to step in and be the bad guy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m in charge,” he said, with another jolt of arrogance.
“Eighteen thousand isn’t a little bit.”
“You don’t need to tell me. I was against letting him wager with us. Just kind of figured this might happen. Guy’s got a problem. It’s a miracle he even still has that diner. It’s the one thing he refuses to put up.”
“How’s he gonna pay you back?” I asked.
“That’s not my problem,” Larry said. “But he’s gotta. He knows. I know he knows. We all know. Even your colored girl over there knows. Besides. Yesterday was the due date.”
Because he thought we were friends, he leaned in to me now. “You be sure to tell your friend out there in the car to be careful at the library, all right?”
“Is that a threat?” I asked.
He sighed. “Not from me, it isn’t,” he said. “But these people I know that he owes money to, they’re mad. That’s all I gotta say.”
Back in the car, I turned to Savannah. “I need to see that library where you work.”
Seven
The library was small, a compact building made from fieldstone. The only building of any substance for a mile—maybe more, maybe two or three miles—the library served at various times as a de facto town hall, a meeting place on July Fourth for paraders and floats and a color-guard squad, the unofficial headquarters for the Hove Little League, the Hove Rotary Club, the Hove Future Farmers of America, and also the only real, serious tornado shelter in the whole county. And in November, the Democrats were scheduled to have the first Iowa caucus here. This was what Savannah told me when we parked. I got out first, fearing already what I expected we’d find: another rock, some spray-painted warning, a lynched effigy of Charles Ewing dangling from the second story. Larry Becker had all put promised this was coming. If not now, soon; if not soon, then eventually. That none of this came as a surprise to me or frightened me very much attested to what had become part of life by then, a side effect of my having seen so many towns like Hove and Ebbington devolve into rock throwing, brick hurling, lynchings and firebombings, into tombstone toppling, grave robbing, and church burning. I’d seen burned churches in seven different states, held burned Bibles in my hands, photographed them, written about them. Every bit of hostility now was colored by this expectation of mine, politics bleeding all over everything.
But Savannah was unconcerned. “That guy’s not dangerous. Neither are his degenerate friends.” The library was calm, the only noise a shingle loose on the roof, flapping against the wood beams. Even in October there were gardens: an oval of red-dyed mulch spread out and ornamented by cabbage the color of the Arctic. Behind the building, rather than a play set or a ball field, there was a sculpture garden, everything made from leftover farm parts and rendered into representations of animals. (Sample piece: the John Deere Deer—disemboweled tractor parts, gesso, copper wiring, Firestone tires flattened and hung like drapery.) According to a small signpost ramrodded into the near tundra, the sculptures were made by local high school students. The garden stretched an acre, into the mouth of a cornfield, the crop gone by now, the tassels detasseled but the stalks still high. I let out a small, impressed whistle, which made Savannah grin.
“I like it, too,” she said.
“It’s nice,” I said.
Considering the last hour, this tiny conversation was a small victory. Finally she’d said something to me that wasn’t an accusation or something meant to hurt me. On the way over to the library, she was so quiet and so tense that I knew I’d made the right decision to tell Jenny I was coming home. I’d check the library and get on a plane that afternoon.
We went in through the front door, Savannah grabbing a huge key ring out of her purse and expertly finding the one that opened the building. She went in first. “My beautiful office is downstairs,” she said, passing by a series of closed doors that she said led to a staircase. “We’ve got the children’s books down there. And the microfiche. Those are new, those machines. We just got them. We had to scrimp for years to afford them.” She still had on her bracelets, and when she pointed, they clanked together, making me think again of Jenny, home alone now. My ticket was out of Cedar Rapids. I’d be back home by dinner, and all of this—these years of obsessing, of s
earching—it’d all be over. With her key ring, Savannah unlocked the glass doors that led to the lobby and the circulation desks. She stopped periodically to unlock various cabinets and stacks and files, every lock requiring a different key, every key color coded on her chain. I followed her everywhere she went. The main reading room was dark, and I could see the fields out beyond the windows better than I could anything around me. The shelves were columns of shadow, and the study tables, the carrels, the check-in desk, were somehow darker, formless, shadows of shadows. She left me then, breezing off somewhere. A big building like this without its light can bring you back to your boyhood so easily; there is something about the unfamiliar that is located in childhood, when so much is still new, when the catalogue of experience is cheerfully short. Then: light. Fluorescents buzzing. From somewhere, the smell of a blackboard eraser. I was in Wren’s Bridge High School, sitting at my flip-top desk. It was just a moment—oh!—and then the spell was broken.
Savannah stepped out in front of me, a huge atlas in her hand. “Listen,” she said, lifting the book. “I’ve got stuff to do. Everything’s fine here. I promise. Those guys didn’t do anything. He’s just bluffing. Maybe you should go.”
“So this is goodbye,” I said.
“Let’s not get all sentimental, you and me.”
“I’ll go call a cab,” I said. “I’ll come get you before I leave.”
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