ELECTION SEASON came to Grouse County, bringing unusual weather. The leaves hardly changed color and fell abruptly, almost overnight. Miles Hagen, the Republican candidate for sheriff, ran his usual campaign, with no chance of winning, no desire to win, and no particular platform beyond advocating the construction of a new jail on the northern bank of the Rust River in Chesley.
This land was owned by one of his relatives, but Miles was a handsome and venerable figure who had propped up the two-party system for years, and the proposal would never get anywhere, so no one cared.
Dan Norman campaigned sufficiently but with a distance between him and the voter. One Monday morning he went to the Valiant Glass Company in Wylie and shook hands at the factory gate with the men and women of the seven-thirty shift. It was a clear October day, and the workers were reluctant to leave the light so late in the year.
“With winter coming up,” said a fat man in worn overalls, “I guess my biggest concern is my mailbox. I live west of Boris, and every snowfall without fail the county plow comes barreling along and knocks my mailbox down. Yet when I call the county recorder’s office to straighten this out, I invariably reach a curt young woman who gives me the runaround.”
The proper response was obvious. Dan should have taken the man’s name. He didn’t have to do anything with it. He could even throw it away once the man was out of sight. But standing at the plant gate, he should have written down that name. Instead, he said, “Well, see, you’re calling the wrong people. The recorder doesn’t have anything to do with the snowplow. Try Public Works.”
Meanwhile, Johnny White, the Independent candidate, seemed to have a chance. His theme, that Dan had been a do-nothing sheriff, did not sway many voters, who for the most part were not looking for a keyed-up or hyperactive sheriff. But Johnny had a large advertising budget, and the repetition of his name and face made him seem more plausible. He also had an indignant, cheated style that appealed to some.
As the election neared, Johnny wondered how to use what he considered his secret weapon: Margaret Lynn Kane, the mother of the abandoned baby Quinn. According to the file Earl Kellogg had given Johnny, a judge in Family Court had assigned her to a halfway house in the eastern part of the state. She was thirtynine years old and a graduate of Romyla High School. Her parents were dead, she had cousins in San Diego who did not remember her, and her thought processes were faulty and unrealistic.
Now, Johnny had boxed informally in high school: a group of friends would gather and spar behind the school, pretending to enjoy it. One time, Johnny knocked down a better boxer but couldn’t remember how—which hand, what sort of punch. The fall was like a gift from the blue, and so were the facts on Margaret Lynn Kane. He felt that these smudged and typewritten secrets must be useful. But he was not sure how. He did not want to confront the woman at the halfway house. He did not want to talk to her. All he wanted was to announce her existence in some dramatic way.
Tiny and Johnny talked strategy over beers at the Lime Bucket in Grafton. Little could be done without Shannon Key, the reporter who covered health, agriculture, and politics for Channel 4. And she liked Dan Norman, judging from when she interviewed him on TV. Even if there had been a bad accident, she would smile ruefully, as if wishing she could have ended up with him. She had already refused to run some of Johnny’s charges against Dan, saying they were “unsubstantiated.”
“Hey, if I say something, I don’t care what it is, it’s news,” said Johnny.
“That’s right,” said Tiny.
“If I say the moon is made of, you know, fiberglass.”
“Right.”
“Now, if she wants another opinion, I can live with that. But at least report the charge. She’s the media. This is her job. She’s not hired to make fine distinctions.”
Tiny finished his beer and swirled the foam around the bottom of the glass. “Why don’t we go to the halfway house?”
“They wouldn’t let us in,” said Johnny.
“We could have a press conference. We could set up in the street or on the sidewalk with the building in the background.”
“I like that… “
“In a way,” said Tiny, “it would be preferable if they didn’t let us in.”
“I don’t want to go in,” said Johnny. “I had a cousin in one of those places. I remember she bit her wrists. She’d have these bite marks. Spooky girl.”
“Connie Painter.”
“I know Connie.”
“She was fucked up, man,” said Johnny, and he seemed lost in thought. “Anyway, I don’t know if Shannon Key will go for this. She’ll say Quinn is old news. She’ll say anything to keep from helping me.”
“You don’t have to tell her what it’s about,” said Tiny.
The next day they were driving around Morrisville in Johnny’s Bronco when they saw Shannon Key sitting on a bench in Roosevelt Park and eating an apple while a crew set up around her. Johnny pulled over and said he wanted to schedule a press conference out of town.
“First of all, we don’t travel out of our viewing area,” said Shannon. “Second of all, the rule for political coverage is you gotta make a press release and hand it in. Third, you’re parked on our cable.”
Johnny put the truck in drive and eased it forward. “You don’t want to miss this.”
Shannon bit the apple. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.”
“It will explode what’s left of Dan Norman’s campaign,” said Johnny.
“Oh, likely,” said Shannon.
“Even you can’t save him,” said Tiny.
“Hey, Charles—I’m impartial,” said Shannon.
“The hell if you are,” said Tiny.
Shannon sighed. “When is it?”
“What does your schedule look like?”
“I’m free on Friday. I’m not free on Saturday. Monday is doubtful. Tuesday is out of the question.”
“Friday.”
“Look, I’ll bring it up. I’ll see if we want to do something. You realize that, under the Fairness Doctrine, Dan would get equal chance to respond.”
“Good,” said Johnny.
Johnny campaigned with his kids that night at the Town Hall in Pringmar. He flew them in from Cleveland whenever possible. Sometimes Lisa, their mother, would come along, sometimes not. Her attitude toward Johnny had improved through therapy.
Megan and Stefan bolstered Johnny’s image. Without them he was considered by some to be a lightweight. He knew this and had reconciled himself to it, although he still suspected that a polling firm working for him had inadvertently helped popularize the label. His kids granted him the minimal substance necessary to be a father.
He interviewed them in public, drawing out their concerns about the world. It turned out they had many concerns about the world; Johnny was surprised. These two children, aged twelve and nine, viewed the world as a place verging on disaster. Sometimes he cast them in skits with a law-enforcement theme. In Pringmar that night, on the stage of Town Hall, Megan played deputy sheriff to Stefan’s dope fiend.
“What are you holding, son?” said Megan. “Grass, snow, dust, smack …”
“I’m not holding anything.”
“… speed, reefer, Quaaludes, crack …”
“Are you deaf? I don’t have drugs.”
“Then I guess you have nothing to fear from a drug-sniffing German shepherd.”
“Ha—Grouse County doesn’t have a canine program.”
“It does since Sheriff John White was elected.”
At this point, Jack White’s beagle spilled onto the stage, barking and running circles around Stefan, who had a plastic bag of hamburger in his jacket.
Megan found the bag and held it up to the light. She handcuffed her brother. “Just as I thought—drugs.”
“Everything’s changed since Sheriff John White came in,” complained Stefan.
“Now you’ll go to jail, with access to the counseling you need.”
Megan dragged Stefan offstage, leaving the dog to eat the hamburger. The audience got a kick out of the whole thing, and the serious lesson probably sunk in as well. Then Johnny came out and gave his speech. “Some will tell you my campaign is negative,” he said. “What does negative mean except I’m against it. In this county we have a sheriff who lets three out of four crimes go unsolved. We have a sheriff who lets gamblers and dope dealers run free. Am I negative about these things? Yes …”
Afterward, Johnny took Megan and Stefan out for supper at a club in Stone City, with oak tables and primitive country murals on the wall. Johnny ordered wine and made a show of trying it in the presence of the waiter, although he would not have rejected the bottle unless there was something terribly wrong with it.
He leaned back in his chair and asked the kids to tell him about their lives in Ohio. And they did, for a while, but soon their stories trailed off and they began fighting. Megan accused Stefan of lying to make his life sound better. Stefan said Megan always put their mother in tears. Megan stabbed Stefan in the arm with a fork.
Johnny tried to divert their attention. “Look, here comes our food,” he said, as Stefan punched Megan in the back. Megan gasped for air. Finally Johnny yelled, “All right, that’s enough! I said enough!” For he had found that the kids hated to be embarrassed in public even more than they hated each other.
Friday came. Johnny and Tiny drove across the state, stopping for coffee, stretching their legs like old men. The halfway house was located in a former jail in a pretty town ten miles from the Mississippi. The term “halfway house” had made Johnny expect a small bungalow, an overgrown yard, torn shades. But this was a big brick building with chestnut trees and a leaf-covered yard. Johnny parked on the street in front of the jail, which had been part of the state correctional system until budget cuts. Half a dozen people tended the yard. They moved heavily and with troubled expressions.
“I guess these are the inmates,” said Johnny.
“Slaving away,” said Tiny.
“Maybe it’s work therapy.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You should try to be more positive.”
They were early. Johnny turned on the radio and listened blankly to the hog reports. “I saw a funny show on television last night,” he said.
Tiny bit his thumbnail. “Yeah?”
“This guy was telling some great jokes.”
“Like what?”
“Well, they weren’t really jokes. They were just, like, remarks. I can’t really remember them.”
“I see,” said Tiny.
They sat in silence for ten minutes. Tiny read a newspaper. Johnny took a folder from above the visor and looked through it.
“Wait a minute,” said Johnny. “Look at this.” He handed Tiny a photocopy of a picture of Margaret Lynn Kane. The contrast was very high. “Now look at the woman over by the yard cart,” said Johnny. “My God, I can’t believe it.”
The woman wore a red sweater, baggy tan pants rolled at the cuffs, and dirty white sneakers. She glanced up with dark and unguarded eyes, raking.
“It could be,” said Tiny.
“She’s the right age,” said Johnny. “I mean, look at her face. You can just tell. You don’t get a face like that for nothing.”
“You could be right.”
“I know I am,” said Johnny, pressing a blue bandanna to his forehead. “But we don’t want to talk to the media with her standing there. I mean, Jesus, she’d hear what we were saying. She might freak out.”
“I’d hate to think what she would do.”
Johnny put the folder back above the visor. “I can’t believe we found her.”
“She’s looking right at us,” said Tiny. “She’s coming over.”
“What could she want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey,” said the woman. Tiny rolled down his window. “Hey, listen to me. You have to move your vehicle. There’s a truck coming for the leaves. This is where the truck comes. You can’t park here.”
“Who do you work for?” said Tiny.
“Rudy Meyers,” said the woman. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. In about two minutes he’s going to be pulling in here to load his truck. That’s why you have to move.”
“You don’t live in there?” said Johnny.
“God no, I don’t live in there,” said the woman. “That’s the nut house. What do I look like, a nut?”
“Not at all,” said Johnny.
“Do they have a Margaret Kane?” said Tiny.
“We don’t know,” said the woman. “We keep the yard nice. That’s all we do. These are dangerous people, mister. If you want their names you have to go inside.”
Johnny turned the truck around and parked across the street from the halfway house. The rakers began combining their leaf piles. Johnny stared at them. “You know, the more I think about this, the more I don’t want to do it.”
“I was just going to say the same thing,” said Tiny.
“The woman has trouble enough.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“It’s Dan Norman’s fault. It’s time to pull the plug.”
“Channel 4 will be here any time.”
“We did come all this way,” said Johnny. “But we learned something. We learned that this was a bad idea. Dad is not going to be happy. That’s inevitable. So be it.”
Johnny jammed the gearshift down, backed up, and sped away. Leaving town, he and Tiny saw the television van in time to turn down a side street where they would not be found. They laughed, imagining Shannon Key’s bewilderment, and got back on the highway. But the Bronco didn’t have much gas, and Johnny had to stop after several miles and fill up. The tank was large, and there was a reserve tank, and by the time both were full the bill was forty-four dollars. This figure seemed to underscore the folly of their efforts and, discouraged, they rode twenty miles in silence and then stopped at a tavern. They drank Tuborgs and played bumper pool until they felt all right again. There were other ways of defeating Dan Norman. They forgot all about Quinn’s mother.
She had, in fact, been at the halfway house. She watched the yard workers at about the same time Tiny and Johnny did. Standing at the window of her room, on the second floor, she looked down through the glass and bars, then went to her desk, opened a journal bound in blue paper, and began to write. The journal had been given to her by her doctors, along with a mirror and a doll. They wanted her to look at the doll and remember the baby. They felt that memory and tranquilizers were the way to health. But she did not want to remember, and she had no interest in dolls. She had put the one they gave her under her bed, in the center of the space beneath.
“I am always hungry these days,” she wrote. “Promised food, we do not get enough. The yard people have been here since morning. They miss so many leaves it seems to make things worse instead of better. They sit on the sidewalk eating their lunch and I want their chips. I would like to go out and rake with them. They probably never took care of a place alone. They probably never had a house to themselves. Raking would be a way for me to make some money and buy a clock radio. I know I have mentioned this before but I really want one. There is something about me that waking up I want to see a clock and hear a radio. Without them it is hard to come out of a dream.”