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.
“Now, watch,” she said to the dog. “See what this lady’s doing? Look at the TV. She’s taking the real pearls and leaving the fake ones.”
• • •
The next day was Saturday. Louise stood in front of her mother’s deep freeze, down in the basement beside the stairs. Louise had a headache, and wore an ugly, shabby sweater. She kept bumping a coat rack bearing the little coats once worn by herself and her sister June.
“Why me?” said Louise. “Just curious.”
“If I have you do it,” said Mary, who was sitting on the basement steps drinking sherry, “it shows the importance I attach to it. Also, it gives you the chance to make some lasting friends.”
“Can I have some of that sherry?” said Louise.
“It’s all gone, sorry,” said Mary.
“I have lots of friends,” said Louise, who seemed to be drawn by the presence of the little wool coats into the tone of voice of an eight-year-old.
“Take some to Dan Norman,” said Mary. “You like him.”
Louise considered this remark. She and Dan had been brought together by the breakup of Louise’s marriage, and now that it was good and broken up, they had not seen each other in a while. “He’s never home,” said Louise.
Mary nodded. “You think you hold office, when in fact the office holds you,” she said.
Louise loaded her arms with white packages. “How many goddamned deer you got in here?” she said.
Mary stood. “I realize it’s a lot,” she said. “Don’t feel compelled to take it all at once. Get that little Coleman and put some in there with some ice. That’s what I got it out for. And don’t forget to smile. It takes less muscle effort to smile than it does to frown.”
“When my face is completely relaxed, people still think I’m frowning,” said Louise.
“You have a beautiful face,” said Mary. “An angel’s face.”
“Even you must admit my forehead is on the large side,” said Louise.
“I’ve never believed that stuff about your forehead,” said Mary.
• • •
Louise delivered venison to three people before bailing out of the task, and even those people—Nan Jewell, Jack White, and Henry Hamilton—lived more or less on her way home.
Nan Jewell had the southernmost of the Three Sisters, the big blue houses on Park Street in Grafton where the various members of the Jewell family lived. Nan was a rich and restless widow who held people to such a high standard that they usually fell short. When Louise arrived, the old lady was practicing the line of attack she would follow in church the next morning. She always thought people were taking negligent procedural shortcuts.
“They’re not posting the hymns anymore and I would like to hear someone tell me why,” she said. “They’ve always done it and now, lo and behold, they’re not doing it. What about the people with arthritis? What about the people who need a little time to find the right page? Are they not welcome in our church? And another thing while I’m thinking about it. I don’t know who’s slicing the Communion bread lately, but they’ve got a lot to learn about what is meant by a wafer. I don’t think a Jewell would cut Communion bread in this haphazard way. I don’t think a Montrose would. Nor a Robeshaw, a Mason, a Kellson, a Carr.”
“Boy, I know it,” said Louise. But that was just what you said to Nan unless you wanted to be trapped with her all day. The fact was, Louise didn’t know anyone named Kellson.
From Nan’s house it was out in the country to Jack White’s farm on the Margo-Chesley road. Jack White was the father of Johnny White.
Louise found Jack in his horse barn with the veterinarian Roman Baker. Jack had five Belgian horses, named Tony, Mack, Molly, Polly, and Pegasus. They were enormous animals with jaws like anvils. Louise started to tell Jack about the venison, but he said it would be a minute before he could concentrate on whatever it was she had to say. The problem was that some of his horses were walking backward.
“When did this start?” said Roman Baker. His face was narrow, his hair thick, his eyes widely spaced. He’d been working with horses a long time. “Change their diet recently? Might there be something spooking them?”
“Not that I know of,” said Jack White. “But there again, I’ve been gone.” He put his boot up on the rail and crossed his forearms on his knee, like someone in a fertilizer commercial. “Just yesterday got back from Reno. Spent five days in Tahoe and three days in Reno. That Tahoe is some of the prettiest country there is, and I saw Juliet Prowse in Reno. What a pair of legs on that lady. What a radiant complexion. Anyway, my son Johnny was watching the place for me while I was gone, and when I asked him, he said as far as he had noticed, the horses were not walking backward. I said, ‘You mean to stand there and tell me if a horse was walking backward you wouldn’t notice it?’ He said he might not. Well, the boy has personal problems, and that’s no secret. As I always tell him, ‘Johnny, you missed the boat.’ I say, ‘Johnny, see that little speck on the horizon? That right there is the boat.’”
“I saw him up at Walleye Lake last spring,” said Louise. “We had a talk. He seemed very friendly.”
Jack White dusted off the sleeve of his shirt. “He always liked you,” he said. “And it’s too bad he didn’t marry somebody of your caliber, instead of that nut he did marry. Although it’s certainly hard to put more than a tiny fraction of the blame on her.”
Roman Baker took a silver penlight and examined Tony’s ears. “You got anything unusual growing in the field?” he said.
Jack stood, adjusted his belt. “Boy, I sure don’t think so,” he said.
“Have you checked the fencerows?” said Roman.
“Sure,” said Jack. “Well, no. Not really.”
“It could be in the fencerows,” said Roman.
“Let’s do it right now,” said Jack.
They took a pickup out in the bumpy pasture. Jack drove, following the fences, Roman Baker occupied the passenger seat, and Louise sat on the tailgate, weeds sweeping against her ankles. The southwest corner of the field was thick with dark green growth. The truck came to a stop. Roman got out and walked to the fence, where he crushed some spade-shaped leaves between his palms and raised his hands to his face.
“This has to go,” he shouted. He filled his arms with weeds and pulled them from the ground. “All this,” he said. “Everything from here on down.”
Jack stepped out of the cab. “What’s he saying?”
“He says it all has to go,” said Louise.
Henry Hamilton’s farm was just up the road from Louise’s place. The milkweed that had once been properly confined to the ditches along the road had come up the driveway into the yard, and at this time of year the air was thick with flying seeds. The fences needed work, and pigs seemed to come and go as they pleased. Driving in, Louise saw one come out from behind a propane tank and tear through the long grass to the grove.
Henry’s house was dimly lit and warm and smelled of boiled cabbage or boiled greens of some kind. But it wasn’t as if he had just boiled the greens—it was as if they had been boiling for years. On the kitchen table he had spread the comics from the Sunday paper and was carving a jack-o’-lantern. Mossy seeds spilled over the newspaper.
“These kids from The Family Circus don’t have any sense,” he said.
“I agree,” said Louise. “There is a pig out.”
“I’ve been after that guy for two days,” said Henry. He turned the pumpkin toward Louise. “Do you think this looks like Tiny?”
“Kind of,” said Louise. “The mouth does.”
“I haven’t seen him in the longest time,” said Henry.
“Well, you know we’re divorced,” said Louise.
Henry put down his knife. “I didn’t know that,” he said.
“Henry,” said Louise. “You remember. You notarized my statement.”
Henry thought for a moment. “O.K. That’s right. So I did.”
He resumed work on the pumpkin. “I try to get one of these out every year. Sometimes I see a fair amount of children. Other times, the night goes by and I don’t see anyone. One year I made divinity and I’ll be goddamned if one person showed up.”
“It doesn’t look like Tiny anymore,” said Louise.
She was right. There had been something subtle that was now gone.
Henry shrugged. An old Moorman’s Feed clock ticked like time itself. “How does divorce suit you?” he said.
“It’s all right,” said Louise. “I don’t have to cook anything I don’t want to eat. That’s a plus.”
“Hey, my new tractor came in,” said Henry.
“Good for you,” said Louise.
They went out to see it. It was a large red tractor, and the wheels were already caked with dried mud. Henry let Louise climb up and drive it around the yard.
“She’s a beauty,” said Louise. “You’re going to love this cab.”
“I had to sell my oil well to get it, but I think it’s going to be worth it,” said Henry.
“I didn’t know you had an oil well,” said Louise.
“I had an oil well in Oklahoma,” said Henry.
Louise went out with the girls that night. This had been planned weeks ago. Perry Kleeborg had suggested it. He had accused her of moping around to the point where it was affecting her performance. He received a business magazine called Means of Production free in the mail, and evidently he’d been reading it.
“Oh, my performance,” said Louise. “You must excuse my performance.”
“You ought to go out with the girls,” said Kleeborg. “Do something to relax your mind a little bit.”
Louise pressed wet contact sheets to the wall. “I don’t know any girls,” she said.
“I have Five Hundred Club every Thursday,” said Kleeborg. “I know it’s helped me. Do you play five hundred?”
“I’ve never understood the concept of trump,” said Louise. “I like slapjack.”
“Not really a club-type game,” said Kleeborg.
“No,” said Louise.
“Do you bowl?” said Kleeborg.
“I have bowled,” said Louise.
“Well, you ought to do something,” said Kleeborg.
Not long after this, as it happened, the chairman of the county board of supervisors had his picture taken at the Kleeborg studio. His name was Russell Ford, and his skin was bad, and he seemed to think that if he got just the right pictures, it would somehow make his skin better. Removing scars and bumps from a photograph is not hard, but Russell was after something elusive, and Louise eventually had to take the photographs to Big Chief Printing in Morrisville to have them touched up. The airbrushers there were two women named Pansy Gansevoort and Diane Scheviss. They roomed together in an A-frame on the south shore of Walleye Lake, and were somewhere in the lost years between twenty-seven and thirty-two. The three women had some laughs over Russell’s homely features, and decided to get together one Saturday night.
Louise found Pansy and Diane in the Hi-Hat Lounge on Route 29 in Morrisville. It seemed they had already been drinking hard among the Halloween decorations. Pansy’s face was a high red, and Diane had broken a glass. If alcohol, for Louise, was like a slow train through hills and scenic lowlands, for Pansy and Diane it seemed more like an elevator after the cable had snapped.
Louise tried to impose some order. The table at which they sat was a video game pitting a giant bat against a humorous figure representing the player. Louise suggested they try this, and they did, but without success. The stream of quarters required was more or less continuous, and no sooner would they get the little person moving than the bat would sweep in, ending the game. Louise said, “I don’t even get the object.”
“I guess stay away from the bat,” said Diane.
At this, Pansy drank off some vodka and began to talk. “My boyfriend used to slap me,” she said. “No reason necessary. He would slap me for good things or bad things, in sickness and in health. He would slap me to improve his luck. Then he slapped me in front of my mother, and she pushed him down the stairs.”
“All right, Pearl!” said Diane.
“So he stopped slapping me,” said Pansy, “and started burning me with the cigarette. I missed the slapping at first, until I got used to the cigarette. Then he stopped smoking. They outlawed smoking at work, and he said if he couldn’t smoke at work, it would be easier all around if he didn’t smoke at home either. He tried a pipe for a while, but it wasn’t like the cigarette. Finally he moved out. I miss him, I miss all the terrible shit he did.”
Diane rocked the weeping Pansy. “I know you do, babe,” she said.
“Why?” said Louise.
Pansy wiped her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “He’s going through changes,” she said. “He’s deeply troubled. Are we ready for a round?”
Louise laid ten dollars on the table and got up to use the bathroom. She washed her hands and looked at herself in the mirror. She felt as if she had strayed far from the people she understood. On the other hand, she lived within twelve miles of where she was born.
Dan Norman was on the ten o’clock news. Shannon Key had interviewed him for Channel 4 out of Morrisville. She was asking about the baby who had turned up at the Hy-Vee in Margo.
“Are you interviewing suspects?” Shannon asked.
“No,” said Dan. “We’re not even sure there was a crime. So suspects, no, that would be overstating it.”
“Are you interviewing anyone?”
Dan gave this consideration. He looked into the camera by mistake and became somewhat rattled. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I mean, of course.”
“Channel 4 has learned that forty yards of green corduroy were stolen from Not Just Fabric in Margo, on or about the same day the baby was found,” said Shannon Key.
“We know all about that,” said Dan. “We don’t think there is any connection.”
“When do you expect results?”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a spider making a web,” said Dan. “But I have, Shannon, and it takes a long time and a lot of going back and forth. And even when this web is done, somebody might come along and destroy it just by their hat brushing against it. Know what I mean?”
Louise picked up the phone and dialed Dan’s number. She did not expect him to be home, and the phone rang in that neutral way it does when no one is going to answer. But he did.
“A spider?” she said. “What the hell is that all about?”
“It’s a metaphor,” said Dan.
“Would you like to come over for a beer?” said Louise.
“I better not right now,” said Dan. “Apparently there’s been an accident up at the Sugar Beet. I’m picking up things on the radio.”
“What kind of things?” said Louise.
“Things about an accident,” said Dan. “Tell you what. How about you coming over here? I shouldn’t have to go out, but I had better stick by the radio awhile.”
“O.K.”
“I don’t have any wine and I don’t have any vodka.”
“I have those.”
It should not have surprised Louise that Dan was gone by the time she got there. A manila envelope was stuck in the doorframe, and in the envelope was a note saying the key was under the rock. The path from the door to the driveway was lined with white-painted rocks, and Louise could not find any key. She checked under several rocks, and with the last one she broke a pane of glass above the doorknob.
Louise let herself in and put on some lights. She swept up the broken glass and dumped it in a wastebasket. Looking for a corkscrew, she found instead a letter from Dan’s Aunt Mona, who was scheduled for exploratory surgery on the eighteenth of November but beyond that had little to say. Louise poured wine and carried a snack tray into the living room.
One of those bankers who had stolen all the depositors’ money was on TV. This one had purchased a boat, a plane, and a cattle ranch in Kenya with a partner. He was speaking to a room crammed with Harvard University students. They were practically hanging from the rafters. It was a seminar on the educational channel.
“I did some things I’m not very proud of,” said the man. “Basically they fall into two categories—financial errors and screwing people over. Whatever I wanted I could easily have by snapping my fingers. Oh, I was a bad character.”
The students asked critical questions but seemed at the same time to be taking notes so perhaps they could pull the same shit someday. And certain things about the banker reminded Louise of Tiny, such as the way he ran his hand over his face when asked a hard question, and the self-centeredness of him: I did this, I did that, always I. This was Tiny through and through. She changed the channel and watched the Saladmaster man bashing frying pans together.
Louise then went out and got her overnight case from the car. She showered, washed her hair, brushed her teeth, and put on a cotton nightgown. She pulled the blankets off Dan’s bed and went out to sleep on the davenport. Later, when Dan came home, she sat up from a dream and said, “Just put her in a bucket.”
“It’s all right,” said Dan. He was in the kitchen washing his hands.
Louise swept the hair from her eyes. “I was dreaming,” she said.
“What about?”
“I was at the circus. They made me be a clown,” said Louise. “It was awful. What time is it?”
Dan looked at his watch without pausing in the washing of his hands. Louise felt like a scientist, observing his habits. “Two-thirty,” he said.
“I had to break the window,” said Louise.
“Yeah, I was so careful to write a note, I forgot to leave the key,” said Dan. He shut off the faucet and dried his hands slowly on a dishtowel.
“Well, was there an accident?” said Louise.
Dan came into the living room. “A guy hit a tree.”
“How is he?” said Louise.
Dan sat down in a low chair with a bottle of beer. The chair was close. Louise could have touched Dan’s forearm with her foot, except her foot was under a blanket. “Well, not very good,” he said.
Louise nodded and listened. Grafton can be very quiet in the middle of the night. “What’s it doing outside?” she said.
“Raining,” said Dan.
“They were predicting rain.”
“They were right,” said Dan.
“Here we are,” said Louise.
“I’m glad to see you,” said Dan.
“Come closer,” said Louise. “What are you thinking about?”
“Your eyebrows.”
“Yeah? What about them?”
“What they would be like to kiss,” said Dan.
“You can find out,” said Louise.
So he kissed her eyebrows, holding her face in his hands. They had kissed before, but not to this degree. Dan unbuttoned Louise’s nightgown. Louise put her arm out and knocked over the beer bottle.
“You’re wrecking the place,” said Dan.
“It’s my way,” said Louise.
Later, they watched the streetlight shining on the trailer window. Louise asked Dan whether he had found the mother of the grocery store baby.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s not all there.”
Louise had the house, but for those first times they mostly ended up at Dan’s trailer. Part of the reason was Louise’s farm-style bed. It came with the house and had contained generations of Klars. It was a tasteful bed, and Louise felt thrilled at not having to sleep in it anymore.
Dan had made his bed out of a mattress, three-quarter-inch plywood, and cement blocks. It provided a good, sturdy platform for ranging around and trying to anticipate the other person’s desires. Dan surprised Louise with his sexual side, and she felt like a retired skier from the movies who learns everything over again and wins the big jump against the East Germans in a blur of sun on snow. There was a spell on the mobile home, and when they had to leave, they wanted only to come back. Three, four, five nights. She cried once, shook with tears, and there was nothing that could be done to make her stop. He tried to console her (“Don’t cry. Don’t, Louise. It’s all right. Don’t cry …”), but what could be done? It just had to come out.
Halloween fell on a Wednesday that year, and in the morning Louise sat up in Dan’s bed, put on her socks, and looked out the little window just in time to see Hans Cook towing away her car.
She pulled jeans on under her nightgown and ran outside calling “Hans! Hans!” But the tow truck and the Vega chained to it were well down the road and moving at a fair clip. She could hear him shifting, up on the blacktop.
Louise turned in the grass; her feet were freezing. Dan’s car was on ramps beside the trailer—it wasn’t going anywhere—and the cruiser had some ungodly theft-foiling device that no one could get around except Dan. (This went back to 1982, when one of the sheriff’s cars was stolen from the Lime Bucket, driven to the sand pits, and rolled down the bank into a hundred and ninety feet of water.) Back inside, Dan slept in orange light, and Louise called her mother.
“I wish I could help,” said Mary, “but I don’t know anything about it. Are you sure it was Hans? It doesn’t sound like Hans.”
“Where’s he going, that’s what I don’t understand,” said Louise. “Does he still work with Ronnie Lapoint at the station? Because if I remember right, sometimes that wrecker is at the station and sometimes it’s at Hans’s. They more or less divide it. Or do they? Maybe Ronnie Lapoint would know what’s going on.”
“Oh, no, Ronnie and Hans split up,” said Mary. “They split up, oh, it’s been a good two months anyway. See, Hans felt that Ronnie was giving work to Del Hetzler that should have rightfully gone to Hans. So Hans told him, you know, ‘If I hear another word about Del Hetzler, I’m taking my truck, I’m taking my phone number, and I’m setting up on my own.’ So Ronnie says, ‘Well, go ahead, you so-and-so. I never liked you anyway.’ Now, I had to laugh when I heard this, because you didn’t know Doc Lapoint, Ronnie’s dad, but this is word for word what Doc Lapoint was like.”
“Fine, Ma, how do I get to work?” said Louise.
“Won’t Dan give you a ride?” said Mary.
“I don’t want to ask him,” said Louise. “He was working late last night. And tonight is Halloween, another long shift.”
“That’s right,” said Mary. “They’ve already got six or eight hog feeders overturned on Main Street. I can see them from my window. They take them from the hardware store. You know, you wonder why they don’t chain them up or something. Maybe we need an ordinance to make people chain up their hog feeders around Halloween time.”
“Can you give me a ride to work?” said Louise.
“Where are you?” said Mary.
“At Dan’s,” said Louise.
“Well, I don’t want to come over there.”
“Why not?”
“Why do you think not?” said Mary.
“I’ll walk to your house,” said Louise.
“Yeah, why don’t you,” said Mary.
Louise showered, and dried her hair. She put coffee on. A shower tended to fog Dan’s bathroom mirror for the rest of the day, and Louise sat at the kitchen table in her underwear while putting on her makeup. There was a little round mirror on the table. She could see only part of her face at a time. The furnace came on, and Dan’s coffeemaker made a sound that was just like a human sigh.
Louise dressed and went out. The sun was partly hidden by the grain elevator, but blinding anyway. She blinked. “Thanks a lot, Hans,” she said to herself.
Mary was pouring her orange juice and listening to the radio by the kitchen window when Louise arrived. Bev Leventhaler, the county extension woman, was on the radio explaining how to put away a pumpkin bed for the season. “I got some new guidelines from the folks at Iowa State last week, and I want to pass them along to you,” said Bev Leventhaler. “They are unusual, and I’m not going to pretend they’re not. But I’m told that these methods have produced some very high yields when tried in an experimental situation. First, go down to your local hardware store and tell them you want a dowel rod two inches thick by eighteen inches long. Perhaps you may have a similar dowel rod at home. Look in your closet or garage or workshop. I know we have a lot of extra dowel rod at our house. Seems like every time I turn around I’m tripping over dowel rod.”
Louise went to the radio to find some music, but Mary said, “Wait, I want to hear this.”
“Next,” Bev Leventhaler continued, “you will need a twelve-by-twelve sheet of black polypropylene, a handful of common twist ties, and six gallons of solution of calcium and lime. This is sold commercially as Calgro or Zing, and you should be able to find it in your town, but if not, Big Bear in Morrisville I know does carry Zing in powdered form. Just remember, if you do get the powder, you need enough powder to make six gallons, not six gallons of powder …”
Mary drove Louise to work, leaving her on the shaded street beside Kleeborg’s Portraits. “Call Hans,” said Mary. “He has an answering service. The girl’s name is Barb.”
“I will,” said Louise.
“And I meant to ask you,” said Mary. “How’s that venison going?”
“It’s in my freezer,” said Louise.
Louise called Hans, but he did not get back to her until the middle of the afternoon. She was taking prints from the fixer, and she looked at the prints (a stern girl on a horse) and cradled the phone with her shoulder.
“Well, I’m sorry, Louise,” said Hans. “I don’t really know what to tell you. About six o’clock this morning the phone rang and it was Nan Jewell. Actually, it would’ve been earlier than that, because Se Habla Español was on. So I said, ‘Buenos días,’ and Nan said, ‘Hi, Hans. Louise Darling’s car is broken down by the side of the road, and I want you to come get it and take it up to McLaughlin Chevy.’ Now, in retrospect, it did sound kind of funny. I mean, it was your car, why weren’t you doing the calling? So I said to Nan, I said, ‘Well, who told you it wouldn’t start?’ And she said that you told her it wouldn’t start, but that you didn’t have the money to fix it. So she was going to have it towed and repaired, and this would be as a favor to you. So at that point I wasn’t going to argue with her. But I’m sure sorry. I don’t know what she was thinking of.”
“I’ll tell you what, though,” said Hans. “I’m going to bill her for that tow.”
“Well, O.K., but I’m not paying for it,” said Louise.
“Well, I don’t think you should,” said Hans. “You didn’t call me, she called me.”
“That’s right.”
“I know it is.”
Louise called the Chevy place. The mechanics had worked up a long list of repairs they said were needed.
“The car runs O.K.,” said Louise.
“I wouldn’t say that,” said the mechanic.
“Just don’t touch it,” said Louise.
Dan waited for Louise at the Strongheart at four-thirty that afternoon. This was a diner on Hague Street in Stone City, within walking distance of Kleeborg’s. The restaurant was small and not clean but featured excellent tenderloin sandwiches.
“Hello, Daniel,” said Louise.
They ordered food from an old man named Carl Peitz, who had been at the Strongheart forever. He smiled constantly, as if there were something wrong with him.
“Now, I had a key made for you,” said Dan. He emptied his pockets on the table. There was a red comb, an Allen wrench, a ball of string, a tape measure, a dog biscuit, fingernail clippers, and a skeleton key. “Don’t tell me I lost it already,” he said.
“How did you get to be sheriff?” said Louise.
“I don’t remember,” said Dan.
“Man, I’m about hungry enough to eat this biscuit,” said Louise.
“Don’t,” said Dan. “It’s a knockout biscuit.” He got up and went to look in the cruiser.
Smoke rose from the grill. Carl Peitz removed his apron, fanned the smoke.
“Is that ours?” said Louise.
She went home that night to the farm. It occurred to her that sometimes you need to stop and catch your breath. She went to Hy-Vee first, to get groceries and some candy for the trick-or-treaters who might or might not show up.
Some did. There were vampires, dinosaurs, a ballerina, a hobo with a sawdust beard. Louise stood in the doorway shoveling Red Hots into plastic pumpkins with black straps, giving while the giving was good. The parents stayed back, by pickups and station wagons, out of the light. The white dog knocked down a little girl dressed as Paula Abdul and, taking advantage of the confusion, sprinted into the house.
By nine o’clock or so, no one else seemed to be coming, and Louise poured some Canadian Club and turned on a movie featuring the Wolf Man and his wife. The wife was a prosecutor in Michigan, and she was looking into a string of murders, for which her husband was responsible. But the wife didn’t even know the guy was a werewolf. He himself took his time facing the truth, and there were long, uninteresting scenes with him in a research library at Ann Arbor, looking at the ancient and horrific picture books that are always found in such movies. Then he tried to figure out some way to tell his wife, because she wanted to have children, and he had to keep putting her off, while his wolf side was all for killing her and getting it over with.
The prosecutor was crashing through the trees along Lake Huron, her husband at her heels, when a commercial came on. Louise stood and stretched, rubbed her stomach. The movie was falling apart, and she could sense thousands of people across the Midwest rising to rid themselves of it. She turned down the sound, heard a noise, and went to the window.
She cupped her hands around her eyes. Four or five people were coming up the driveway. At first she thought they were trick-or-treaters, because she could see the bobbing yellow features of a jack-o’-lantern. But the people were too tall to be children, and no one turned toward her door. Up the driveway they went, a group of shadows, traipsing into the farmyard. It was something to see. They had come to drag out a hayrack, or push over a shed, or let something loose from where it was supposed to be. A car would be up the road, waiting. Louise snapped her fingers, and the white dog trotted from the kitchen with a red plastic flower in his mouth. “Give Louise the flower,” said Louise, and she took it from him. Then she opened the door and pushed the dog onto the steps. “Make us proud,” she said.