by Tom Drury
Dan waited for her to conclude the story, but that seemed to be it, so he said, “Did it ever bother Nora that she gave her baby away?”
Dr. Pickett shook out a handkerchief and blew her nose. “It bothered her a great deal,” she said, “and I believe she tried to get it back. But Jack Price was a judge, so you can imagine how that went over.”
Claude Robeshaw did not give up on the water-tower issue, and the county board of supervisors eventually agreed to a deal in which he would put up four hundred dollars toward the restoration, and his son would pay off the rest by working after school for the sheriff’s office. Dan did not have to go along with this arrangement, but it seemed like the punishment would mean more to young Albert if he had to put in time; also, let’s face it, sheriff was and remains an elected position in Grouse County, and Claude Robeshaw was a faithful Democrat, who once had Hubert and Muriel Humphrey to his house for supper.
The first thing Dan had Albert do was clean up the basement of the sheriff’s substation in Stone City. This was a tiny storefront on Ninth Avenue that once had been a barbershop called Jack’s. The reason the sheriff’s department got no more than a barbershop’s worth of space in the county seat goes back to 1947, when the sheriff was a popular fellow called Darwin Whaley. He was handsome and young and just back from the South Pacific, and the board of supervisors hated him. The supervisors got their own way about everything, and wanted to keep getting their way, and decided that the thing to do with Darwin Whaley was stick him far from the rest of the government, where he would have a hard time finding out what was going on. So they built the sheriff’s building off in Morrisville—where it is to this day—and for years the sheriff had no place whatsoever in Stone City, although the courthouse was there, and appearing in court and consulting court records were common things for the sheriff to do. It was in 1972 that the county made a deal with the dying barber, Jack Henry, to buy his shop and rent it back to him for one dollar a year until his demise. But Jack Henry surprised his doctors by holding on until 1979, at which time the sheriff (this would have been Otto Nicolette) finally got his barbershop.
The basement was still full of everything a careless barber with one foot in the grave might care to throw down there: newspapers, hamburger crusts, magazines, sun-faded comb displays, pop bottles, torn seat cushions, burned-out clippers with tangled cords, radios with cracked faces, moldy calendars featuring bland farm scenes or naked women with scissors and comb. The worst was the hair tonic, which would take Albert several days to find but which he could hear dripping everywhere, like underground springs. He went to work with a shovel and an aluminum basket. On the second day he uncovered two barrels full of mannequin heads—many more heads than one barber would need, you would think, but it turned out that each one was printed with dotted lines suggesting a different cut or style. This would have seemed touching to anyone who had been around when Jack was barbering, because he was known for having exactly one haircut in his repertoire and applying it equally to all customers. Albert carried the heads up the narrow stairs in the aluminum basket. They had the feel of an important archaeological find, and Albert kept three for a use he had not yet determined, but the rest went into a dump truck parked in the alley.
The cleanup took place during a week when Dan was testifying before a grand jury in a drug case involving a restaurant called Rack-O’s on Highway 41. Once, returning to the office, he found Albert dangling his legs over the side of the desk, smoking a cigarette.
“I just used the phone,” said Albert. “I hope that’s all right. I was calling Lu Chiang. She’s the exchange student from Taiwan. They put her out on Kessler’s farm.”
“Long way from home,” said Dan.
“You wouldn’t believe how hard they make her work,” said Albert. “She has to take care of these chickens all by herself. If it wasn’t for her, the chickens would all be dead. Candy Kessler stays in town every night, but Chiang has to go home to feed the chickens. She has to get up at six in the morning to feed the chickens. One of the chickens stayed out in the rain and got sick, and none of the Kesslers would speak to her until it got better.”
“I never knew anyone with chickens where they weren’t always getting sick,” said Dan.
“There’s a foreign-exchange guy named Marty in Kansas City, but he just kisses the host family’s ass,” said Albert. “He says she knew this was a farm area when she left Taiwan, so too bad.”
“Something came up about Taiwan the other day,” said Dan. “Oh, yeah, that’s where they make our radar guns. One of them went on the blink, and we had to mail it back. Forty-three dollars postage.”
“Chiang says she’s not getting a very favorable impression of America,” said Albert. “I said, ‘Just wait.’”
The rain let up gradually, day by day, and the weather warmed into a wave of Indian summer. Farmers got back to work, and the combines were going around the clock. You could see the headlights through the stalks at night, dust plumes during the day. On the highway, every other vehicle seemed to be a tractor pulling a green wagon full of corn. The sunlight was golden. Lu Chiang’s chores became less burdensome, and she got to go up to Pizza Hut with Albert Robeshaw.
Meanwhile, Quinn had not been forgotten, and various towns and clubs and churches struggled, not in an undignified way, over the right to carry his banner. It was felt that something should be done, no question, and that one large thing would be preferable to a lot of small things. So it was decided that a Big Day would be held for Quinn on Sunday, October 14, in the town of Romyla. A Big Day was what you called it when a town held a street event for any purpose other than to celebrate a conventional holiday. You could have a Big Day for sending a sick child to the Mayo Clinic, for new axes and boots for the fire department, or just for everyone to drink and dance on Main Street. Romyla was chosen because it had never had a Big Day, although it had conducted an Irish Fair for several years in the seventies and was considered capable of holding a well-run event—unlike, say, Boris, which was regarded as something of a joke town, barely able to keep a tavern in business.
They asked Dan to bring out the sheriff’s department cruisers for the parade, and they also asked him to take his turn in the dunking booth. Dan agreed to the cruisers, and bought some hard candy for himself and the deputies to throw to the spectators. Ed Aiken was lukewarm to this idea, and Earl Kellogg said flat-out that it was sissified for anyone in a cruiser to acknowledge the crowd in any way, and that this was doubly true when it came to throwing candy, to which Dan said, “And we wonder why people hate the sheriff’s department. And I don’t mean not like, I mean hate.”
“Well,” said Earl, “if you want to do something people would get a charge out of, they already asked you to sit in that cage where they dump you in the water.”
“Lester Ward broke his collarbone that way,” said Dan. “You want to try it, you be my guest.”
“Lester Ward,” said Ed. “Isn’t he the guy with all the decoys in his yard? Why would anybody want to dunk him?”
“No,” said Dan, “but I know who you’re thinking of. That’s Lyle Ward. Lester Ward’s dead. He ran the hatchery in Pinville. You remember him—he always wore a hat.”
“Oh, Lester Ward,” said Ed.
Dan met Earl Kellogg and Ed Aiken in Romyla at ten-thirty on the Sunday morning of the benefit. They were all in their reflective sunglasses, and they stood in front of the Cotter Pin Tap watching the Methodist women unloading a van full of cakes for the cakewalk. The sun was bright, and it seemed that all the grass in town had just been mowed. Romyla had a hostile kind of pride that you didn’t find anywhere else in the county, Dan thought. Earl Kellogg sneezed eleven times in rapid succession, and Ed pounded him on the back to help him stop.
A new red pickup pulled alongside them, with Claude Robeshaw, Lu Chiang, and Albert inside. Claude said good morning and went into the Cotter Pin, and Albert introduced Lu Chiang to Dan, Ed, and Earl. Lu Chiang had brown eyes and long black hair. She
was one of those foreign students whose fresh clothing and generous expressions make the local kids seem edgy and strange. She, Albert, and Dan walked down the midway, which was in this case Main Street between the old telephone office and the tracks.
“Albert tells me you have a basement with heads in it,” said Chiang.
“That’s right,” said Dan.
“It must be very comical,” said Chiang.
“They’re gone now,” said Albert. “I threw them out.”
“Now, Lu Chiang,” said Dan, “how long does it take a person to get here from Taiwan?”
“The flight from Taipei to Tokyo was three and a half hours,” said Chiang. “At Narita there was a long delay, and I fell asleep in my chair. Then I awoke and boarded a flight to Chicago, which lasted twelve hours. From Chicago there was a flight in a small, barren aircraft to Stone City, where Ron and Delia Kessler were waiting for me. I believe it was twenty-one hours from the beginning to the end.”
Dan whistled. “Was this the longest you’d ever flown?” he said.
“Yes,” said Chiang. “Seven hours from Tokyo, the flight attendants appeared with facecloths for everyone.”
“I can’t even picture Tokyo,” said Dan.
The parade was late because the Morrisville-Wylie marching band was late, but the band members finally arrived, in a yellow bus, and led the way playing “On Wisconsin,” “Quinn the Eskimo,” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” They were followed by blue-ribbon rider Jocelyn Jewell on Pogo, by a group of Korean War veterans pulling a cannon, and by floats representing the discovery of the infant in the grocery cart, the marriage of Julien Dubuque and Princess Petosa, and the complete line of Arctic Cat snowmobiles sold by Wiegart Implement in Wylie. The sheriff’s cruisers ended the procession, and no candy came from their windows.
After the parade, Albert and Lu Chiang went down the line of musty blue tents, trying to win a prize. They threw baseballs at a row of stuffed cats that seemed to be nailed down, lost eight dollars at blackjack, and had their weights guessed almost to the pound in an unsuccessful attempt to win a plaster cow. Then they examined a red tractor that had been modified to run on LP gas, but it looked to their eyes like any other red tractor, and they wandered by the table of the Little Church of the Redeemer, where Joan Gower and a thin boy named Russ were giving away coin banks in the shape of a church to anyone who could recite a Bible verse from memory. Albert responded with the one about Caesar Augustus’s decree that all the world should be taxed, and Joan said very good and handed him a church bank. Then she turned to Chiang, and when she learned that Chiang was a Buddhist, she picked up a stack of pamphlets, thumbed off five or six, and pressed them into the girl’s hands.
“I want you to have this literature,” said Joan. “I want you to take these home to your family. This part is about the death on the Cross, and this shaded area has to do with the Resurrection. This is a beautiful message for people of all nations. And I’ll bet when you get down to it you will find that Jesus and Buddha have a lot in common.”
“I think the Buddha is much heavier,” said Chiang.
“You just take these home,” said Joan.
Albert and Chiang headed for the Cotter Pin in search of old Claude. Along the way, Chiang let the pamphlets drop into a green barrel, and Albert gave her the church bank he had won.
The Big Day in Romyla raised more than two thousand dollars for Quinn, but it turned out that he did not need it. A rich couple came down from Minneapolis one weekend and made him their foster child. Because of the privacy laws, not even Nancy McLaughlin of the Children’s Farm could give out the identity of the couple, but it was Mark and Linda Miles, who, with some foresight, had made their fortune selling soy-based eye makeup in northern Europe. Quinn was renamed Nigel Bergman Miles and given a bedroom about the size of Dan’s trailer, overlooking one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.
Meanwhile, Dan kept looking for Quinn’s mother. He never got to see the clinic records, and had to make do with rumors, anonymous tips, and crank phone calls. He ended up with a list of thirteen names, and during the month of October he was able to clear eleven of them. One had given birth in St. Louis and put the child up for adoption, five had miscarried without providing adequate explanation to their neighbors, two were men with female-sounding names, and three were elderly nuns at Sacred Heart Academy in Morrisville.
That left two possibilities: a woman who would not discuss the case over the phone, and a woman who had no phone.
Dan ruled out the first woman when, in the middle of their interview, she excused herself to turn up the radio to hear the theme song from Cats. This was at the laundromat where she worked, in Walleye Lake. Also, her story made sense and was verifiable. (It had to do with a troubled young man who once had a crush on her and now waged a relentless telephone campaign against her. Since the establishment of the Crimebusters Hot Line in Brier County, for instance, he had called up to link her name to well-publicized instances of arson, hit-and-run driving, and window-peeking.)
The woman with no phone was Quinn’s mother, although she never admitted it. She lived in a house on a woody hill across from the county shed on the outskirts of Wylie. It was a house that had been moved to the site years ago, but it still looked out of kilter and always would. The doors would not close; winter wind would sweep through the cracks in the foundation. The house needed paint, and for some reason there was a rusted barbecue grill on the roof of the porch. There was no sign of children, no sign of animals, no sign of anyone except this woman, who was a little older than Dan had expected, wore a cotton dress, and had her hair tied up with a frayed green ribbon. She and Dan sat on the steps of the porch.
“I went to the doctor the one time,” she said. “It wasn’t for the baby. There was no pregnancy. That’s where the confusion lies. It turned out to be a false alarm. I wrote it on my calendar.”
“Who’s your doctor?” said Dan.
“He’s on my calendar,” she said.
She got up, went inside, and came back with a wall calendar from the cooperative elevator in Wylie. It did have writing on it, lots of it, but it was unreadable, and had been scrawled across the days without regard for when one ended and the next began. Dan got up. The woman’s eyes were still—she was watching the orange county trucks across the road. “Let’s go for a ride,” said Dan, and she said, “Where to?”
FOUR
IT WAS NOT long after this that Louise broke into Dan’s trailer. She had broken into one other place in her life—the Grafton School, in 1972. Louise and her friend Cheryl Jewell had climbed a drainpipe, raised a window, and spray-painted thirty-one football helmets hanging on the wall of the gym.
Louise and Cheryl were sophomores, and they felt—and they were not alone—that too much importance was being placed on football at a time when the rest of the school was without money. Meanwhile, there were those helmets, like dinosaur eggs pegged up in a row, and the two girls took their spray paint and wrote the following, one letter per helmet: SEE THE LONELY BOYS OUT ON THE WEEKEND.
The words came from a Neil Young song, and were actually not about football but about buying a pickup and driving down to L.A. All Louise and Cheryl had to do was make it “boys,” plural. Some football players protested in the school paper. “With the many activities available to us, such as pep rallies, snake dances, etc., we are far from lonely,” they wrote.
No one ever found out who painted the helmets. The equipment managers were able to scrub the letters off using steel brushes dipped in turpentine, but there were those who felt the team played lightheaded all year due to the fumes. Louise was sixteen at the time. Now she was thirty-four, and the school was closed, and frost coated the windows of Louise’s house. Also, the big white dog was in the living room. He sat on the couch, looking luminous and pleasantly surprised. Halloween was coming, and that seemed to be the extent of his message. Louise had a set of blue drinking glasses, and she was enjoying her third blue glass of red wine.
/> “You’re supposed to be outside in the cold shed,” said Louise to the dog, “but instead you’re in the warm house. What are you doing on the warm davenport in the comfy house? You’re not going to answer me, are you? I’ll bet I could talk for a long time before I got an answer. Couldn’t I talk a long time before getting an answer?”
Louise’s mother then called her on the telephone. Hans Cook had acquired some venison, and it had ended up in Mary’s deep freeze, and Mary wanted Louise to distribute it. Louise and Mary had been arguing recently, and this was clearly Mary’s way of patching things up.
“The dog’s in the house,” said Louise. “He’s sitting here watching TV.”
“I don’t think Les Larsen would like that,” said Mary. Les Larsen rented the fields and outbuildings of the Klar place. “Isn’t that dog supposed to be guarding the farm?”
“The farm is quiet as a mouse,” said Louise. “How did Hans get this venison, anyway? Does he hunt?”
“I don’t know,” said Mary. “It was some trade he made. They were playing cards. I didn’t get it all.”
They talked a little more and said goodbye. Louise sipped wine and turned the television up.