A couple of times, Guthrie had been tempted to try it, but he hadn’t, nor had Melinda asked him or invited him or tempted him. She was a nurse; she worked long shifts, but she was proud of her degree. She would sit with him on the sofa and laugh and hook her long leg over his and kiss him up the side of his neck, all over his cheek, until he was laughing out loud.
So a dealer from Usherton had been busted in March—Juan Castro, his name was. Guthrie had met him—one of the hog-facility guys. Several pounds of crank had been found taped up into the wheel wells of his ten-year-old Chevy Avalanche. Guthrie didn’t think much about it, except to keep his eye on Barry. He was therefore much surprised, toward the end of June, when he was driving up the road toward their house—maybe a half-mile from the driveway—when two cop cars passed him going the other way, and he saw, since there was still plenty of light, that Barry was in the back seat of the first car, and Melinda was in the back seat of the second car. He had the presence of mind to pass the driveway and continue on up the hill, then around the long way past the “lake” and back to his own place. The next day, in the Usherton Torch he read that four people had been taken into custody for dealing meth, including Barry, and including Melinda, who had sold it to an undercover agent posing as a low-level administrator at the hospital. The paper said that the “narcotics ring” that had been “broken up” had been operating for several years and dealt hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of methamphetamine. Guthrie knew what his dad would say: Then why had they never cleaned up the driveway? Why did they furnish the house with junk from JCPenney? Why did Melinda agonize, in her charming way, over a pair of shoes that cost fifty bucks? Maybe Barry was inhaling his profits, but what was Melinda doing? That night, sitting in his own run-down shithole, Guthrie smoked three bongs and still couldn’t get to sleep. The fact was, he loved Melinda, he thought he was going to marry Melinda, he thought she was the only girl he had ever met who was steady, pretty, and fun to talk to, the only girl he knew who put her hand up and shook her head when he offered her a hit off the bong.
Or he did get to sleep—since he suddenly sat up in bed at about four and knew for a fact that the cops were heading his way and he had to do something with the bong and the last of his stash, which was in the freezer. That would be the first place they would look. He staggered out of bed, but was perfectly alert by the time he was reaching for his jeans, and five minutes later he was walking down the alley behind his apartment building, looking for just the right trash container—one that had no relationship to him or his building. When he found what seemed to be the right one, he opened it quietly, reached in, pulled out a bag of some sort, oh, McDonald’s, and stuffed the weed into a leftover Big Mac. He dropped it into the container, closed the lid, went on. There was no one around. He got rid of the bong by smashing it and shoving it under some bushes, then walked back to his place, about a quarter-mile, still no one around.
The two cops showed up at nine-thirty, pounding on the door and demanding entry. He had actually gone back to sleep, so when he staggered over to let them in, he did look ignorant and helpless, which maybe was the best look. They waited while he put on some pants and a T-shirt.
They questioned him at the kitchen table. Where was his crank? How long had he known Melinda Grand, and how much crank did he buy from her on a regular basis? Who was he dealing to? Other Iraq War vets? Was he buying from Barry Heim and Melinda Grand, or from Juan Castro, known as the Barker? How else did he know Juan Castro? They stared at him as he answered, looking skeptical—he had never taken meth in any form; he had never seen Melinda take meth; he did know Barry took meth, but he didn’t know where he got it. They questioned him for an hour, then showed him their search warrant, and he went out into the hall while they went through his things, which took another hour. They did not clean up after themselves. They said they would be over to the hotel later in the day—expect them. And when he showed up at the hotel, he would be watched, so don’t try anything. Guthrie promised not to try anything.
There was something about being hostilely questioned by the cops that had an aversive effect, Guthrie thought as he was cleaning the place up, something that put him off thinking about Melinda, made that whole affair seem distasteful and creepy, when he had meant to be faithful and kind and see her through her troubles, whatever they were. Something about those two hours, the cops with their holstered weapons and the bully sticks hanging from their shiny black belts, that convinced him that Melinda was guilty, that her complaints about the long hours and the low pay had indeed persuaded her to go into business, to parrot what Barry often said: Doctors used to prescribe meth. All the ingredients are legal. If you aren’t batching, you aren’t a danger to anyone. It’s my own business—what’s the big deal?
When he got to work (right on time), there was someone, not in uniform, standing in the lobby, not looking like any of their usual clientele—truck drivers, homeless people who had saved enough to check in for one night and take a shower, weary travelers trying to make it from Chicago to Denver on a hundred bucks, the occasional talkative former Ushertonian returning home for the weekend. He went in the back room to go into his little locker and put on his tie and his name tag. The hotel was better now than it had been: The pipes were fixed, the electrical wiring was almost fixed, and there was Internet. The grungiest carpets and mattresses had been gotten rid of, and the place where the ceiling collapsed in Room 145, down at the end, in a big thunderstorm (not even a famous one) three years ago, was repaired and repainted. The cop (plainclothes, Guthrie guessed) followed him into the back room and watched him, took note of the number of his locker. The same two policemen showed up half an hour later, talked to his guard, and came over to the counter. “Mr. Langdon?”
“Yes?”
“Let’s go have a look.”
After that, they went through his locker, through the drawers in the reception desk, through his car, and left. He had no idea what they found, but, standing there, half smiling as people looked at him, then the cops, then him, then the cops, then shook their heads in disapproval, was punishment in itself. His boss drove up, probably called by Lupe, the head housekeeper. He stopped his Dodge Caravan in the middle of the parking lot, opened the door, and sat there in the heat, one foot on the pavement, his khakis scrunched up above his white socks. He said, “What the fuck is this all about, Langdon?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Dell.”
“You involved with those craphead meth dealers, Langdon?”
“I know them, Mr. Dell.”
“That’s bad enough.” The old man shook his head. “Ah, jeez. I ought to fire you.” Guthrie thought, I ought to quit. But he didn’t. That afternoon, he checked in a busload of kids from Cleveland on a school trip to Yellowstone. They all looked different to him now—the girls dolled up in push-up bras, glittery makeup, shorts that ended at the crotch, flip-flops; the boys pale and uncertain, already done for, Guthrie thought.
—
FELICITY NEVER KEPT her opinions to herself; she understood that in Iowa she was surrounded by people who muddied the waters by never saying what they really thought. So, when Guthrie stopped in Ames (he didn’t come for her birthday, he only stopped on his way back from Des Moines) and took her to Aunt Maude’s for supper (she had the Onion Creek Lamb Sliders with Radish Slaw, Tzatziki Sauce, and House Made Buns, for eleven bucks; he had the Cajun Prime Rib Sandwich), she waited until they were half finished eating, then pointed out that, by the time their dad was Guthrie’s age, Guthrie was a couple of years old, Perky was born, he owned most of the farm, and he was calling the shots about farming it. She admitted that there was some scientific evidence that putting off adult responsibilities was an understandable response to longer average life spans and generally lower economic expectations, but…
She made eye contact.
He did not look either shocked or insulted, but she got nervous anyway, while adding the other part she had practiced the night before—the great-and-famous-al
l-powerful Uncle Frank, whose remains in the form of dusty letters their father kept in a locked box on his desk—and, yes, Felicity had rifled through them and found them mildly interesting for their coyly seductive tone—had been through a war just as Guthrie had, and at about the same age, and, admittedly, all wars were different, but their parents were worried, their mom had talked to Felicity about it for an hour the last time she went home and made Felicity swear on a stack of Bibles that she wouldn’t say a word, but since Felicity was a nonbeliever and the stack had not been a stack of scientific journals, she did not feel bound—
Guthrie grunted, ate another bite of his sandwich; she saw that he was going to humor her once again.
She said, “Okay, I am going to tell you what Mom said to me, and this is not necessarily what I think, but you should know what she thinks, and what Dad thinks, because what Dad thinks is about fifteen to twenty percent more anxious than what Mom thinks.”
Guthrie said, “Dad thinks I should give up and move back to the farm, live in the old place, raise some goats or heritage chickens, and be content to talk about whether the river at the bridge there on Adams Road is a foot below flood stage or six inches below flood stage, and do I remember when the creek that runs past the southeast field actually had water in it, and the biggest question in life is ethanol. We had that discussion in May. And then we turned to the new interactive tornado map on the Weather Underground site, including the ‘historically significant’ tornado map, none of which had ever touched down anywhere near Denby.”
“No,” said Felicity, “Dad—”
“Dad is a saint,” said Guthrie. “Mom is a saint.”
“Mom knows that Melinda is likely headed for Mitchellville.”
“She likely is. I haven’t talked to her. I let Mom follow the case.”
“Did you love her?”
“I loved the her that I saw. Obviously, there was a lot more to her than I realized.”
“Mom says her parents can’t believe it.”
“She talked to them?”
“Mrs. Grand called her to find out how you were.”
“I didn’t realize Mrs. Grand knew anything about me.”
“Mom said that she always wondered why you never brought Melinda for supper, and then, when the arrests happened, she put two and two together.”
Guthrie said, “I saw her at the most three nights a week, depending on her shifts, and I didn’t believe it, either. But why would I bring her home when the whole conversation would be about how it’s never snowed on the first of May before, and last year we were broiling in the heat and now we are drowning in the rain, and the crop-insurance rates are skyrocketing, and the government used to pay if the yield was below a certain point but now it’s privatized and therefore all a gamble? Anyway, the only thing I wonder about her anymore is, where’s the money?”
“What about the girl before her?”
“Lisa? Chef Lisa? She has a job in Chicago, making pasta. It was that or sausage.”
Felicity imagined the sausage making, the knives, the grinder, the pig intestine casings. Likely Lisa, who would be about Guthrie’s age, was making ten bucks an hour if she was lucky. Felicity pondered her possible replies, then said, “At least she got out. At least she got to Chicago.”
“Where her apartment was flooded out in the spring, and she had to move in with a friend, then get rid of all her stuff,” said Guthrie. He ate the rest of his sandwich and wiped his mouth with his napkin.
Felicity said, “Can I be frank?”
“Isn’t that your trademark?”
“Yes, but I’m not always tactless. I want to be tactless.”
Guthrie made a funny face and said, “You can be tactless for as long as it takes me to eat my Chocolate Toffee Bread Pudding.” He gestured to the waitress.
Felicity stayed mum until the dessert was set before her brother. This very morning, at 9:03 Central Standard Time, she had turned twenty-five, the age she had always longed to be. At exactly her birth time, she had stripped off the T-shirt and briefs she slept in and stood in front of her full-length mirror. Eight pounds, four ounces, twenty-one inches long had become five feet, ten inches, 139 pounds, size 9B shoe, thick, dark Guthrie hair, and horn-rimmed glasses. She had an alto voice, a strong jaw, a triangular Langdon nose, blue Langdon eyes, 36C breasts with nice cleavage, and a good waist. She was not beautiful or blond—an advantage. The random act of human breeding had worked in her case, and she was realistic about it, not vain. If success was to be her fate, then every study indicated she had to be built for it, and the metrics were trickier for females than they were for males. Tall, attractive, strong-looking, clearly feminine but reminiscent of the masculine. However, although she had matured on schedule, environmental factors seemed to have interfered with the same process in Guthrie, if not in Perky, who was still in Afghanistan, apparently all set to make the military his career.
Guthrie picked up his fork.
Felicity said, “Almost two hundred fifty thousand Iraq vets have PTSD. I’m surprised it isn’t more, frankly, and of the one-point-six million vets, almost seven hundred fifty thousand have filed for disability benefits.” Then, nerdily, because she couldn’t help herself, she said, “That’s forty-six percent.”
Guthrie said nothing.
“Have you been to the VA hospital?”
“What symptoms do I have?” He took a bite of the bread pudding.
Felicity opened her mouth to speak, but could not. Guthrie spoke instead. “Am I pissed off all the time? Do I re-experience standing in that square in Sadr City, staring at the women sitting on the curb nursing their babies, while we were peeping around the corners of buildings, deciding if we had to shoot anyone? Do I suspect that my buddy Harper killed himself, since he stopped e-mailing me, and his last three e-mails were about his weapons collection, but I haven’t dared to find out? Do I stare out the window of the hotel into the parking lot and imagine a car driving in and blowing up? Was I driving down the street in Usherton a week after they got Melinda, and I had to pull over and put my hands over my mouth to stop myself screaming, because, even though I couldn’t see any helicopters, maybe I could hear them? Are those the symptoms you are referring to? Does having these symptoms indicate that I should move to Chicago and try something more productive than a seven-dollar-an-hour job assistant-managing a bedbug hangout on the edge of town?”
“I was thinking about the avoidant symptoms, since you mainly avoid us, and so we don’t know about the other stuff.”
“Would I feel better if I just got on that tractor and focused on the horizon and drove west, then turned the tractor twenty minutes later and drove east? Maybe I would, even though sitting in the middle of all that noise makes me want to leap out of my skin. If there’s noise, you see, then how can you be aware of who might be coming up behind you, just out of your peripheral vision, and you might be so startled that you fall right out of the cab.”
He was tense—he stabbed at the last piece of bread pudding, and it jumped off the plate, went down between his legs, and landed on the floor. He said, “Tactless time is up.”
Felicity said what came into her mind, which was “Am I the first person you’ve told about this?”
“Maybe. I can’t remember. That is a symptom, too.”
He set down his fork, took some deep breaths.
Felicity felt that most therapies she had read about did not actually work: drugs had side effects, Freudian therapy grooved memories even more deeply into your neurons. Since she was basically cerebral, she thought that she might respond best to cognitive therapy—her whole life, in some sense, had been about investigating, understanding, educating. But, as a guy, Felicity thought, Guthrie might do better with exposure therapy. There was no exposure therapist in Usherton, but there was one in Iowa City. She said, “The real question is, why are you stuck in Usherton when you could move here to Ames, or to Iowa City? You don’t know what it’s like to walk across a campus, or go to the library,
or meet thousands of members of your very own age cohort.”
“Cohort?”
“So Melinda was the best of the local herd. You’re good-looking! You have no signs of a receding hairline! You have deltoids and pecs! You have Daddy’s smile! I was supposed to be the pretty one, but you are. Use it!”
He pursed his lips and sat back against his chair, but after they paid the bill, on the way to his car, she knew she had stumbled on the right advice, because he said, “You know anyone in Iowa City?”
She said, “Sure, I do. You do, too.”
He didn’t say anything more, but he would. She had two months to get him there before the beginning of the spring semester—she thought she could do it. As soon as he dropped her off at her place and drove away, she ran in and called her mom.
2014
LEO’S SECRET WAS that he was unusually lucky. Over the years, and more than once, he had had the thought, “I need money for the subway, and I left my wallet at home,” only to look down and see a dollar bill or a five blowing past him on the sidewalk—never a twenty or a hundred, but just enough. Or he would have a lonely thought—a party he hadn’t heard about until too late, or a table of interesting-looking people across the room at a restaurant—and then some friend would text him from the party and tell him he had to come, they were waiting, or someone at the table would recognize him and wave him over; it would turn out to be a guy he knew from freshman year. But the item of luck that he valued the most was that, at the last minute, his boss at the museum, Tanya, had decided last September that she could not go to Venice for the Biennale by herself, and so she would fund Leo to go along and help her see to the return of “The Encyclopedic Palace,” which was seven feet by seven feet and eleven feet tall. It had not been his job to dismantle or pack it; Leo didn’t know what his job had been, except to stay at the Locanda Antico Fiori for a week, explore Venice as he wished, and keep quiet about the recurring visits of a French sculptor named André to Tanya’s breakfasts. The acqua-alta flooding had not been as bad as the year before, which was also a piece of luck, because if the weather had been wonderful he would now, in January, be distracted by fantasies ofm moving to Venice rather than focusing on his present job, which was to help five-year-olds pat together clay figures in the crafts room after their very brief tour of the folk museum.