The End of Vandalism

by Tom Drury

  “I didn’t know there were places like this,” said Louise.

  The wind blew in their faces and hair, and that night Dan came down with an earache. The next day his temperature was a hundred and one, and they went to see an island doctor, who told him to put mustard in his ear. Louise and Dan took a ferry to the mainland, picked up some antibiotics in Escanaba, and drove home without stopping. It was eleven-fifteen on a blue and brilliant morning when they got back to Grafton. The gamblers had left town, and soybeans were growing in curving rows where Dan’s trailer used to be

  SEVEN

  TINY DARLING settled into Colorado life. He found work at a lumberyard in Lesoka, the town where he had arrived by chance. He rescued his broken-down car from the empty highway. The police had put an orange sticker on the side mirror that said, “Give Generously to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association.” All winter he plowed snow from the blacktop of the lumberyard with a Case tractor. He was thankful for every day that it snowed.

  In the spring he began dating a woman named Kathy Streeter from the Farmers Business Bank. She had crayon drawings on her bedroom wall, done by her nephew, who was four or five. The last night Tiny stayed at her apartment, he got up early, untacked the drawings, and left without waking her.

  Tiny drove across the state to the town of August. This seemed like a proper Western place, whereas Lesoka had seemed merely depressed. The bar was called a saloon, men wore cowboy hats, women wore long leather skirts with fringe down the seams. Tiny found June and Dave Green’s address in the phone book. They lived in a development called Sangria Shores—no water in sight, but maybe that would come later. All the houses in Sangria Shores balanced on gentle hills. The grass was perfect and the sunshine evenly distributed. The Greens had the sort of house that would have been better off had there been fewer construction materials available when it was built. There were red tile roofs, stucco walls, copper downspouts, and intricate wrought-iron railings; and everywhere Tiny looked he saw either a fountain, or an arch, or a combination fountain and arch. A white Mercedes-Benz sat in the driveway. Someone had written “This Is Indian Land” in green along the fenders and driver’s door. The driveway curved broadly, with black asphalt and yellow lines. Just as Tiny angled his car between the lines, the mirror that the orange sticker had been on fell off.

  He stepped from the car and picked up the mirror. At least it was not broken. June opened the front door. She was tall with dark curls, and wore a long black dress. “I’ve been expecting you since fall,” she said.

  “Hi, June.”

  “Louise warned me,” she said.

  “What do you hear from her?” said Tiny.

  “She got married last month, Tiny. She married Dan Norman in Trinity Church.”

  Tiny polished the mirror with his sleeve. “I know it’s pretty serious.”

  “It’s not ‘pretty serious.’ They’re married.”

  “Did you go to the wedding?”

  “We were in Mexico.”

  “How was that, June?”

  “Very different.”

  “I’m not saying I own her.”

  “You got that right,” said June.

  Tiny walked up the steps. “I came all this way—”

  She took the mirror and turned it toward him. “I think I’ve found the problem,” she said.

  Then Dave Green came to the door. He wore jeans, a turquoise sweatshirt, and glasses with round black frames. He was in shape. “You must be Tiny,” he said.

  They went into the house. There was probably five or ten thousand dollars’ worth of stuff in the front hallway alone. Dave led June and Tiny past a grand piano and bright swirling paintings into something called the Florida room, which was full of waxy plants and cane furniture. Dave poured coffee while June leaned reluctantly in the doorway.

  “Honey, sit with us,” said Dave. Orange fish swam in a rich green aquarium behind his head.

  “I’ve got to go downtown,” said June.

  “No, sit,” said Dave. “Help yourself to a cruller, Tiny. You must be hungry from your journey. Come on, June. We’ll get our bearings and then we’ll go from there.”

  “What happened to your car?” said Tiny.

  “The Indians around here are pretty unhappy with me,” said Dave.

  June sat. She pulled pastry apart and stared at it. “I have to go to the pet store, and the clothes store, and the pharmacy, and the bank.”

  “See, I work with land,” said Dave. “It was my dad’s business and now I have it. June and I met in Germany. I was studying overseas.”

  “The problem is Wild Village,” said June.

  Tiny looked from June to Dave and back. Probably they were unhappy with each other, and probably this unhappiness could be worked with. “Where?”

  “It’s an amusement park based on various conceptions of the Old West,” said Dave. “It may or may not happen. Wild Village is a long way from becoming reality. A long way.”

  “Frankly, I wish we had never heard of it,” said June.

  “So they painted your car,” said Tiny.

  “Look, I don’t blame the Bearpaw Nation,” said Dave. “The white man did steal their land. Not me, but my kind. Today we would go to the police. I don’t know where to put their resentment. The irony is, Wild Village would pay a lot of Bearpaws a good wage.”

  June gathered crumbs on the tip of a finger. “I can see where they wouldn’t want to wear those uniforms.”

  “Hey, I didn’t like those sketches any more than the next person,” said Dave. “But the fact is they were preliminary sketches.”

  “What’s wrong with the uniforms?” said Tiny.

  “Look, they were cut too high in the thigh,” said Dave. “No one’s denying that.”

  “I’m going,” said June.

  “Did you know that the gods sometimes appear in disguise to test our characters?” said Dave.

  “You always say that,” said June.

  “I’m just a man,” said Tiny.

  “What do you want, Tiny?” said Dave.

  “I’d like to find work,” said Tiny.

  Dave Green drove Tiny to a construction site in the mountains. There were pilings, concrete forms, cranes, and trailers. A bridge stood half built across a stream. To the right was a dark green wall of mountain, and to the left a lighter valley. The Mercedes rolled to a stop; Dave and Tiny got out. A thin construction worker pointed with a shovel and laughed at the graffiti on the car. His boots were yellow and big as loaves of bread. Dave beckoned to him, asked his name.

  “Milt,” he said.

  “Milt, I want you to meet Tiny,” said Dave. “He’ll be taking your job. That’s right, you’re done. Leave your tools and get on home.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Milt.

  “You believe it, Milton,” said Dave. “It happened to the Indians. See how you like it.”

  “I have a family,” said Milt.

  The foreman came over. “What’s the trouble, Dave?” he said.

  “Hi, Cliff,” said Dave. “I’ve fired Milt here. Tiny will be taking his place. Any problem with that?”

  “What did Milt do?” said the foreman.

  “He made fun of Indians,” said Dave.

  “I thought that was directed at your car,” said the foreman.

  “Either way, that makes him a smartass,” said Dave.

  “I have a family to feed,” said Milt.

  It was not clear who had the upper hand, Dave Green or the construction foreman. A swivel hook and some wire ties happened to be on a stack of rerod nearby, and Tiny picked them up and showed that he could use them. Both Milt and Tiny ended up staying on the job. The foreman, Cliff, seemed all right. Some construction bosses have a sadistic streak, and the whole site then gets that way. Cliff was a fair man, with a big stomach and gray hair. Later that first day, Tiny got to see how he handled a problem. The bridge had wood pilings that had been driven deep into the ground by a pile driver attached to the boom
of a crane. Because of rocks and roots it was rare for a piling to go in straight, and by the time you had six of them driven in a row, they looked crooked as teeth. Then they had to be pulled one at a time into a more or less straight line, also by the crane, and secured that way long enough to set up concrete forms and pour a pier on top of them. This securing was done with a come-along run from the straightened piling to another piling across the creek. A come-along is a length of cable with hooks on either end and a ratchet-and-handle in the middle for taking up slack. When you crank up a come-along enough to hold a strained sixty-foot piling, the tension becomes considerable. So a cable broke and the ratchet, weighing perhaps twenty pounds, ripped across the stream with a ghostly sigh and buried itself in sand. This was a case of death finding no one home, and everyone looked at the sky, as if expecting a fusillade of come-alongs. Cliff came out of the trailer. He pulled the ratchet from the creek bank and examined the piling, which had snapped back to its wayward position.

  “Let’s try that again,” he said.

  Tiny got a room in a big house in the Mount Astor neighborhood east of August. Tall, bleached grass grew all around. Many members of the crew lived there. It was one example of the overbuilding that had been sponsored by the failed Bank of August. One night Tiny drove over to Dave and June’s for supper, and afterward they turned down the lights and prepared for a séance. The founder of August had been murdered in 1894, leaving a fortune in silver that had never been found.

  The three Green children were at the movies, and June went around the house putting masking-tape crosses on the doors of their rooms. She wore a denim skirt and a big purple T-shirt. She explained how you could never expose children to the influence of the underworld and asked Tiny if he had any pictures of children or any children’s belongings. He told her about the crayon drawings by Kathy Streeter’s nephew.

  “Drive by a church tonight before going home,” she said. “Go out to the stop sign and make a left. Go through two sets of lights and take the first right past the Cantonese restaurant. That’s Highland Episcopal.”

  “I thought you had to go in the church,” said Dave.

  “I heard driving by is sufficient,” said June. “I remember, because I thought, That’s odd.”

  June brought out the Ouija board. Dave put on some spooky music, and they sat around a glass coffee table. Tiny upended the pointer when he put his fingers on it. He adopted a lighter touch. Asking a piece of heart-shaped plastic to tell you where a dead man had left his treasure seemed as foolish as anything Tiny had ever heard of. But staying close to the Greens seemed important. Eventually something would fall into his hands. The pointer had begun to move. Tiny thought June was pushing it, or Dave, or both of them. He stared at June’s legs in a way that might pass for mystical concentration. He thought about the first time they made love, on a blanket beside a corncrib at night.

  The Ouija session was kind of a disappointment. What was spelled out was “hajir.” June and Dave decided that the j could be disregarded. What they based this on, other than pure convenience, Tiny did not know. He was pleasantly surprised at the silliness of rich people, or these rich people anyway, in their spare time.

  “Hair,” said Dave. “Cut hair. Who cuts hair?”

  “A barber,” said Tiny.

  “A barber cuts hair,” said Dave.

  “Stop the presses,” said June.

  “Maybe the guy needed a haircut when he died,” said Tiny.

  “Maybe the silver was in a barbershop,” said Dave.

  “This is just speculation,” said June.

  “I think we’re going to have to spend some time with the plat maps,” said Dave.

  Then Dave led Tiny into the billiard room for some nine ball. The table spread before them like a brilliant green field. Dave seemed unaware of the rack of polished cues, the powder dispenser, the gleaming abacus on the wall for keeping score. Absently he hummed and poured out the Johnnie Walker.

  “You’re a drinking machine,” said Tiny. He had too much talcum on his hands and left ghostly prints on the felt as they played.

  Tiny had velocity but not accuracy. Dave patiently won three games of nine ball. June was waiting for Tiny in the front hall, and she walked him to his car. They heard a song begin on the piano. It sounded like things drifting down stairs.

  “They say you don’t know Dave until you’ve heard him play,” said June. They stood sheltered by the open door of the Parisienne. Tiny kissed her until she pushed him away.

  “I think not,” she said dreamily.

  The church June had directed him to was bunkerlike and modern, with a giant cross that seemed to challenge rather than court the stars. The door was locked but not securely. Tiny stood at the back pew and let his eyes absorb the darkness. The moon shone through tall, narrow windows and reflected from something on the floor at the head of the aisle. It was a vacuum cleaner, which Tiny approached and turned on with his foot. He vacuumed the carpet and thought about Louise. He had been dispirited and blasé when she engineered the divorce. But now the years they had been married seemed like the central age of his life. He finished vacuuming and stole a silver pitcher from a wooden rail.

  The next day, in late afternoon, Tiny went walking on Mount Astor. Many trails branched from the big house. As he walked, a red-winged blackbird flew from tree to tree. This was a breed he knew from home. All else was different. The trees were taller and darker, the land was jagged and in most places could not be farmed. Tiny followed the blackbird along the side of the mountain, and eventually the trees opened, revealing a valley with a cluster of unpainted houses linked by gravel roads. The hillside had been timbered, and Tiny rested on a fallen tree. It was suppertime, with mist in the air over roofs of tin and shingle. An eighteen-wheeler rolled in, crowding the rutted road, and stopped beside one of the plywood houses. The driver climbed down, went around to the other side of the cab, opened the door, and took a small, sleeping child in his arms. He carried the child into the house. Everything was quiet except for the occasional bang of a garbage pail. Dogs roamed the village, searching for something they did not seem able to hold in their memory. Tiny sat for another twenty minutes or so, held by the peacefulness of nightfall, and then headed back to the big house. The trees rose up again, over his head.

  Milt the construction worker put a water spider in Tiny’s hard hat. This was a hard-shelled spider found on the banks of the creek. The water spider did not bite but would eventually crawl down your forehead or neck, scaring the hell out of you. Everyone laughed when Tiny discovered the joke. He charged the nearest person, who said, “It was Milt!” Tiny put his hands on Milt’s shoulders and shoved him down. Milt jumped up and delivered a wild punch. Tiny looked at Milt with deep appreciation. Fighting gave Tiny a feeling like being in his own yard. He knocked Milt’s knees out from under him and hit him two times. That pretty much ended the fight. Cliff the foreman took Tiny into the trailer. Cliff had a desk on a raised platform. He rested his elbows on blueprints and looked at Tiny a long time.

  “I don’t see the enjoyment in your kind of life,” he finally said.

  “Milt put a spider in my hat,” said Tiny.

  “Jesus Christ, will you listen to yourself?” said Cliff. “You ain’t a man, the way you talk—you’re a little goddamned kid. Even your name. Tiny is no name for a human being. What is your given name?”

  “Charles,” said Tiny.

  “Then call yourself Charles. Or Chuck, Charlie, I don’t know. Tiny is a mouse’s name.”

  “Why don’t you let me worry about that,” said Tiny.

  “Well, take your time,” said Cliff. “Because I’m letting you go. It’s not just this. It’s a lot else. You’ve been stealing tools. This we know.”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Tiny.

  “Charles, accord me the simple dignity of not lying to my face,” said Cliff. “If you return them, I won’t have you arrested. You can start by handing over that nail apron.”

  “
Don’t fire me,” said Tiny.

  Cliff removed his own hard hat, touched his silver hair, and put the hat back on. “Go home,” he said. “Come back tomorrow morning with all the tools. And I mean I had better see every tool.”

  • • •

  On Saturday night, Tiny and Dave Green went digging for the silver. Dave had learned that a barbershop once occupied a vacant lot next to a nursing home in August. Shovels clattered as they dragged them up the basement stairs. It was almost midnight. June was in the kitchen stirring up an Instant Breakfast.

  “You’re both too soused to find anything,” she said.

  “The nursing home will want our silver if we don’t keep it a secret,” said Dave.

  “You’re soused,” said June.

  “Who,” said Dave.

  He and Tiny stepped onto the porch with the shovels and a goatskin flask. “Is there any chance of finding this silver?” said Tiny.

  “I just felt like getting out of the house,” said Dave.

  They drove to the lot, which was surrounded by a shabby wooden fence. Tiny and Dave went through a gate, and Dave took a certain number of paces from the northwest corner. They went to work. Moonlight made everything look like an old negative and seemed to link them to the pioneers.

  Dave rested his shovel, pressed the sides of the flask, and drank. The night air had sobered him. He breathed deeply and passed the flask to Tiny, whose drunkenness had continued without pause.

  “Why are you really here?” said Dave.

  “I want Louise back.”

  “You’re in the wrong state.”

  “Granted.”

  “She’s not your wife,” said Dave. “The court has split you asunder. She is married to an influential man.”

  “I have goals.”