Nick Reding (23 page)

Despite these developments, in the harsh, fluorescent reflection of Clay Hallberg’s continuing sobriety, his life did not
look the same to him as it had when he’d been drinking. Some aspects were worse than they’d ever been, said Clay. His blood
pressure had gotten so out of control that he began fearing for his well-being. What was becoming clear to him in his sobriety,
too, he said, was that his marriage needed some serious attention. Or rather, it had long ago to him begun needing attention,
and he was just now able to see this. The man who promoted Whorfian linguistics and the fluid communicative harmonies of music
had found he’d lost the ability to speak meaningfully to his wife of twenty years. When they talked, he said, they made no
sense to each other.

One evening after dinner at Las Flores, Clay and I went across the street to Von Tuck’s Bier Haus. More than any other place
in Oelwein, Von Tuck’s captures the town’s desire for upward mobility by taking the drinking tradition of the northern Midwest
and elevating it to a level of finery unseen anywhere else in town. Even a sober doctor can feel at home there. Top-shelf
whiskeys line Von Tuck’s polished bar, it’s not loud, and the bartender is nice even if he doesn’t know you. It was here,
while drinking a Diet Coke and chain-smoking Marlboro Lights, that Clay described his most recent epiphany.

“I’m a bastard, okay?” he said.

I waited a moment, thinking there was more. There wasn’t.

“That’s it. That’s the deal: I’m a shit, and now I can stop.”

This insight wasn’t visited on him in a blinding flash of light, said Clay. There was no collision, the likes of which had
killed his mother three years ago. This leap of understanding did not, like the Clydesdale, bolt unseen from the highway ditch
in the middle of the night, crushing the vehicle of Clay’s intellect, shattering the emotional windshield through which he’d
long viewed himself. It was not a euphoric realization, not like taking all his neurotransmitters and putting them in a shot
glass and swallowing them at once. Biochemistry, hydrology, genealogy, physics, Egyptology—the truth was so much more real
to him than any of that had ever been.

His blood pressure, he said, had gone way down. “I’m like a fucking lizard, it’s so low,” he said. He was focused in the ER,
not worrying about making mistakes, or about trying to save people who hadn’t even walked in off the street yet.

“I drove myself to drink,” he said. “I probably drove everyone around me crazy. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m not anyone
but me. When you’re a shit, you think you’re other people. You think
for
other people. All I have to do is not that. The rest’ll work out.” He lit another cigarette. “The thing is, I could never
believe that. I didn’t know how. But now I do.”

A few more businesses had opened in Oelwein by that December, including Lou Ann’s Quilt Garden over by J & L Sports, across
from the building where Marie Ferell had been bludgeoned to death by Tonie Barrett back in 2005. Lou Ann ran quilting classes
out of a building that she and her husband bought, spurred on by the promise of tax breaks that the city council had passed
the year before. Now Lou Ann not only had her shop but also rented the two apartments above it. Her quilting retreats were
booked three years in advance, mostly by middle-aged women who went with Lou Ann to Minneapolis or Chicago or Kansas City
to quilt, see movies, and eat at good restaurants for a few days at a time. The Quilt Garden made for some nice cross-traffic
with the nearby Morning Perk, which had expanded its coffee and breakfast business with an adjacent knitting and collaging
shop.

Out at the Industrial Park, the Oelwein campus of Northeast Iowa Community College and the accompanying Regional Academy for
Math and Science (RAMS) were nearly complete. Classes were scheduled to start in the fall of 2008. With the call center still
hemming and hawing about whether to set up shop in India or Oelwein, Murphy had begun construction of a Tech Spec Center,
as it was called, just east of the RAMS building. Meantime, the old 160,000-square-foot Donaldson factory, across the street
from the Cop Shop, had two brand-new occupants after being empty for nearly two decades. One was a wind turbine company called
Sector 5; the other was a battery manufacturer called East Penn. Between them, they employed nearly one hundred Oelweinians
at hourly rates of fifteen to twenty-four dollars, which is way above the county average.

In reward for his efforts, Larry Murphy had been elected to his fourth mayoral term on November 2, 2007. Murphy’s renewal
efforts were far from done; if anything, his conviction had redoubled, and he was more consumed than ever by his town. Next
on his agenda was to expand what he’d come to call the “downtown streetscape” to twelve blocks from the present seven. This
would include more sewer and water improvements, new plantings and repaired streetlights, and converting more abandoned buildings
into attractive new commercial spaces. Murphy wanted trails in the parks and two city-run indoor swimming pools to help his
“community wellness” agenda. He also wanted the twelve-block area to have more efficient geothermal heating and cooling, in
order to cut energy costs. He wanted to begin several more housing initiatives, which was still a euphemism for razing abandoned
and low-income rental properties. To this end, Murphy was pressuring Nathan to run for city council. Land ordinances had,
under Murphy’s direction, been enforced by the police. If Nathan became councilman, Murphy would have an ally in supporting
his initiatives.

The idea that Nathan would run for city council was obviously another step toward grooming him to “someday run this town,”
as Murphy once told me. Nathan was undecided. For one thing, he insisted that he was an intensely private person and that
politics would never suit him for that reason alone. For another thing, Nathan liked to say that he disliked almost everyone
he met, though to see Nathan smile his way through a crowd is to be certain that quite the opposite is true. In fact, his
insistence on playing the cantankerous outsider is precisely what would give Nathan a chance in the April election and beyond,
if he—as Clay Hallberg posited—ever decided to run for state congress.

It is worth noting that Nathan’s is an inherently rural sensibility, insofar as he cultivates a quiet dissatisfaction with
the outside world from a self-conscious remove. The defensiveness in his insistence that he “doesn’t like people” is as palpable
as the yearning in his habit of saying, “This is just Oelwein; it’s not New York.” Watch Nathan work a meet-and-greet at Von
Tuck’s Bier Haus in the preelection season as he weighs his desire to run for city council, and you’ll know that, far from
not liking anyone, he likes everyone, and wishes not to be made vulnerable for it. It’s his longing for approval and inclusion
that makes him distrustful.

Here Nathan’s behavior is allegorical. A decade ago, Oelwein was the butt of one of Jay Leno’s jokes on
The To night Show
. In the intervening decade, meth came to signify the distillation of poverty and disenfranchisement in America to which Leno
spoke, which is to say it came to signify the rural United States, and ultimately, the fullness of its outsider status. Oelwein
was the standard bearer. In the wake of this, the town’s—like Nathan’s—posture is a careful balance of pride and defensiveness.

Not long after Jay Leno’s joke, Larry Murphy began trying to find a place for Oelwein in a new world. It took Murphy a considerable
amount of time to build consensus for his first, giant step, which was to regain some balance—via large-scale economic reforms—against
the unmovable weight that a drug had come to represent. The town’s fight for balance can be seen everywhere—in the downtown
improvements and the dark streets at night in the Ninth Ward, and in Nathan’s and Clay’s and Jarvis’s and Major’s private
lives. Jarvis had ruined his life for inclusion in the glamour of all that Oelwein wasn’t in the late 1980s and early 1990s:
the Corvettes and the money and the promise of what people like Lori Arnold and Jeffrey William Hayes seemed to offer. Major
had nearly ruined his life a decade later for inclusion in the Family. Clay Hallberg, in reward for having come home, wanted
inclusion in his father’s world, in which a town GP didn’t have to fight the hospital and the insurance companies. In a way,
it seems that, like all these people, the rural United States has been fighting for balance since the early 1980s and for
acceptance in a nation intensely divided between the middle and the coasts. In the last decade, meth has become an apt metaphor
for the division. And those conflicts even exist within Oelwein, where meth once again provides the lexicon: either you are
a shitbag tweaker or you aren’t. And while there is no reason to be unfriendly about it—no reason, that is, not to exchange
pleasantries on the way into court—every time Nathan put a tweaker in jail, it pushed the balance slightly more in the right
direction.

In November 2007, Murphy had organized what he called a Community Burial Ceremony of Gloom and Doom. What was contained in
the coffin carried by a procession of townsfolk were the symbolic remnants of Oelwein’s economic and social helplessness.
What Murphy wanted to make clear, however corny it seemed, was that people should no longer take suffering as a precondition
of their lives. Murphy wanted people to fight, and to be aggressive and prideful about the rebuilding. As far as what the
change in one town might do relative to the direction of the rest of the country, Murphy and Nathan and Clay were all too
aware that what happened in Oelwein was just a drop in the bucket. There was a feeling akin to that of a city-state under
siege. Oelwein was repelling the invaders, but that didn’t mean they were going away. The lack of good jobs was certain to
remain, drug traffickers were likely to keep gaining a foothold, and the population would dwindle, whether or not corn prices
stayed high and the local businesses all switched to geothermal heating.

As Nathan and I talked about this one evening, I asked him if he’d consider running for mayor once Murph was no longer in
office. We were in his garage. The fire in the stove was out, and we were cutting kindling to get it going again.

“Yes,” said Nathan, “I would.”

It was one of the only times in two and a half years at that point that I heard Nathan speak of the future with an utter lack
of equivocation. Larry Murphy had changed things, indeed.

CHAPTER 15

INDEPENDENCE

O
ne night on that last trip to Iowa, I drove down to In dependence to see Major. When I arrived, he was babysitting his son
Buck, who was now four years old. Major was still living with his parents, Joseph and Bonnie. That they trusted Major enough
to go to a party that night was a great improvement since the summer of 2005. Back then, fresh off a horrible three years
during which Major and his girlfriend would break into Steve and Brenda’s home to steal what they could in order to sell it
to buy more meth, Major’s parents were afraid to leave him alone for even fifteen minutes. Now his parents were once again
considering something they thought they’d never again have the chance to do: take one of their beloved fishing trips to Canada
next summer.

When I got to his parents’ house, Major was drinking a beer and chewing tobacco as he prepared Buck’s supper of micro waved
tomato and cheese pizza. Buck, once the child with the highest hair-follicle count of methamphetamine in the history of the
state of Iowa, was watching TV from inside a fort he’d built by anchoring one side of a blanket beneath the couch cushions
and the other side beneath heavy books on top of the coffee table. On both sides, he’d stacked cardboard bricks from the floor
to the blanket-roof to make walls. Buck peered at the television out of a hole he’d left in the bricks. On TV, Bugs Bunny
attempted to outwit Yosemite Sam, who in this version played the part of a French chef hell-bent on fricasseeing rabbit for
dinner. Presently, Buck destroyed the fort he had created and marched into the kitchen.

“What?” said Major.

“Dinnertime,” said Buck.

“Because you’re the boss?”

“Yes,” said Buck. “And boss hungry.”

As Buck sat on the couch and ate, Major updated me on all that had been going on. Words like
sex
and
beer
and
meth
had to be spelled out, since Buck was in the stage where he repeated everything he heard, and was beginning to ask questions
with difficult answers. All in all, said Major, Buck was doing very well. Developmentally, he was still ahead of the game.
What two years before had been a personable habit of making eye contact and smiling shyly had morphed into a practice of holding
one’s gaze while asking a question—“Who you?” he’d asked me when I walked in—and then maintaining eye contact while the answer
came: the habit of a boss, for sure.

What had not changed since I’d last seen him, said Major, was the fear that one day, out of the blue, Buck would develop some
kind of problem that was a direct result of Major’s heavy meth use. The idea of this—and that it might, no matter how many
strides Major made in his life, become a sudden and crushing reality—grew inside Major like a benign tumor that could, at
any moment, metastasize into an inoperable cancer. The very notion that innocent, tiny Buck might be victimized by his father’s
past was still enough to make Major want to go and finish himself off with one last, superlatively freeing crank overdose.

Research regarding the long-term effects of meth exposure in children was, as it had been in 2005, still inconclusive. University
of Toronto pharmacology professor Dr. Sean Wells told me, “It’ll be two decades before there are any firm findings,” since
“long-term effects cannot be studied in the short term.” For Buck and Major, no news was good news. But the same lack of information
also allowed Major’s imagination to reinforce his sense of guilt. It was a cruel fate for someone like Major, who so badly
wanted to be liked that he had easily fallen under the sway of the Sons of Silence, to whom he still referred as the Family.
Major was alone with his self-loathing, which at times extended to Buck, the bearer of his father’s sins, the vessel holding
the despicable remnants of his parents’ all-too-present past.

Major said he still felt far from accepted by people in Independence. With the help of meth and the Family, he said he’d put
himself at a far remove from most of American society, and this at times only further tempted him to return to his old life.
The help Major got from his parents was remarkable, though their relationship continued to be fraught with difficulties. Buck’s
mother was still meth-addicted and still living with the Family. Major knew it would be his undoing to have any contact with
her, but he missed Buck’s mother horribly. Who else, really, could even begin to understand his situation?

Major was still on probation, still attending mandatory Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and still working a construction job
to which he was always having to find a ride; his license would remain suspended for another six months. The good news, he
said, was that he
had
a job, and that each day he stayed clean, he was a step closer to being free of meth forever (he hoped) and to getting off
probation. Once he could drive again he hoped to find a house for himself and Buck and maybe to pick up his studies at the
community college where he’d left them for dead six years ago. One day, he said, he still hoped to become a machinist.

The bad news, said Major, was that he lacked anything in which to believe. He was working hard—at staying clean, at raising
Buck, at making money. But without meth, Major found it impossible to feel, as he put it, “happy.” It was precisely the dilemma
that Clay Hallberg had seen so many times in patients like Roland Jarvis. Even when Major did the right thing, he couldn’t
quite believe in its rightness, for that thing didn’t satisfy him—meth did. The first time I spoke to Clay on the phone, he’d
said that an entire generation of people was suffering from this, and that meth was less the culprit than the perfect metaphor.
To get back to normal—that is, to begin once again to derive meaning from the humdrum facts of life—might take years. Clay’s
own recent epiphany was essentially that intellect cannot substitute for instinct—knowing is not feeling. In the same way,
Major’s self-admonishment that he ought to be grateful is no substitute for the neurotransmitters—and the feeling of well-being
they create—that he can no longer produce. In the meantime, the gravitational pull of meth, with its pyrotechnic promise of
biochemical ecstasy, could be overwhelming. Major, standing in his kitchen on a Saturday night, seemed to be searching aggressively,
almost violently, for order, even as he was resolved to the fact that he would not find it. I asked him if he was ready to
revert to his given name, Thomas, or if he still preferred his nickname.

“It’s not a nickname,” he said. “It’s who I am.”

The first time I’d met Major we’d gone on a glorious July day to an isolated park a few miles outside town, at Major’s request,
to play Frisbee golf. The course was laid out in the woods, and each “hole” was a large metal basket set at certain distances,
from a hundred yards to several hundred, from each “tee,” which was nothing more than a mowed patch of grass amid the trees.
After playing, Major instructed me to take a shortcut on the way home. As one gravel section road led to the next, with green,
chest-high corn obscuring the horizon in every direction, it was obvious we weren’t headed back to town but, rather, farther
into the country. Major asked me several times if I knew where I was, knowing well that I did not. He clearly enjoyed the
control. Eventually, he told me to pull in the driveway of an isolated farmhouse, which turned out to be the current residence
of the Family. There, the Sons of Silence leader, Bob, was living with his daughter—Buck’s mother—and presumably batching
meth in the barn, just as he’d been doing when Major was sent to jail.

Only a few days before, Bob had called Bonnie and Joseph in the middle of the night to say that he was coming to kill them
and Major, to burn their house down, and to kidnap Buck. And yet, at the first chance Major had, he’d concocted an elaborate
plan to play a game of Frisbee golf in an isolated park in order to be driven back to the life he both loathed and longed
once again to live. When I pulled out of the driveway, Major pleaded for me to take him back, then refused to tell me how
to get back to town. He berated me, threatened to have me killed, and pounded the dashboard as I drove. Major pulled out a
cell phone, called a girl he used to know, and promised me that if I’d take him back to the Family, he’d get the girl high
and she’d do anything I wanted. It took an hour of driving around aimlessly before I finally got him back home.

By that stretch, Major had come a long, long way. He still prayed for Buck’s mother to come back to him, but only if she were
clean. He still dreamed of the Family when he slept at night, and had to fight the occasional urge to rejoin them, but it
was no longer a daily battle he waged with himself. In order to see more clearly still how far he’d come, one has only to
think of Roland Jarvis, for example, or even Lori Arnold, who was due out of federal prison for the second time in June 2008.

The last time I’d visited Jarvis, oddly, was the only time I’d ever seen him outside his mother’s house. He was sitting in
his mother’s front yard in a lawn chair, wearing his customary flannel shirt and heavy warm-up pants despite the heat, idly
chatting with neighbors walking by on the sidewalk. That, though, seems to have been a high point. I’d tried to contact Jarvis,
but to no avail, which I took to be a bad sign, given how welcoming he’d been during two years’ worth of my trips to Oelwein.
No one seemed to know where he was or what had happened to him. Clay Hallberg, his doctor, hadn’t seen him in months. It was
as though Roland Jarvis had been suddenly swallowed up by the musty living room floor of his mother’s house.

Yet here was Major, twenty-seven years old (Jarvis would turn forty in December 2007), staying clean, holding a job, seeming
to enjoy the sight of his son, who, so far, needed no transplants and no special education. Gone were the days when Major
was so high that he mistook a nickel for baby food. (Buck nearly choked to death on the nickel, while Major, fearful he’d
be put in jail if he took the child to the hospital, drove Buck to his parents’ house and had them take Buck to the ER. Once
there, Buck had emergency surgery to remove the nickel from his trachea.) No longer did Major seem to have the energy for
the monologues describing how enemies of the Family were duct-taped to chairs and given lethal amounts of intravenous methamphetamine,
their bodies thrown to the hogs. By December 2007, Major had lost his enthusiasm for the Sons’ white supremacist espousals,
which, ironically, he’d always spewed to an inaudible beat—as though, even as he raged against blacks, one of his beloved
Wu-Tang Clan riffs played in his mind. Compared with Roland Jarvis, Major had triumphantly entered an entirely new realm.

Major’s hope was nonetheless tentative. For one thing, he was attempting to stay clean of meth while refusing to stop drinking.
(When I asked him about this, he asked if drinking was illegal. I shook my head. To which Major added angrily, “Then I rest
my case.”) Just how close Major was to losing the ground he’d gained was made clear in a story he told me while Buck, drowsy
with his belly full of pizza, climbed inside his newly rebuilt fort, ostensibly to watch more Looney Tunes, and fell quietly
asleep.

The previous night, Major said, he had put Buck to bed and walked in the agonizing cold to a favorite bar eight blocks away.
Between the time he’d spent with the Family, the time he’d spent in jail, and the time he’d spent essentially hiding in his
parents’ home, afraid that any social contact would lead to a relapse, most of Major’s friends had moved on in one form or
another. Many had left town looking for work, or had married and taken jobs that kept them out of the bars at night. The rest,
not unreasonably, were afraid to get involved with a former neo-Nazi meth dealer. But that night, Major had run into a girl
with whom he’d gone to high school, and on whom he’d had a long-buried crush. As they talked and drank, Major became aware
that not only were his adolescent feelings still fresh, but that she, too, had long had feelings for him.

The sudden awareness that his mind was at ease was almost dizzying, since he’d been constantly preoccupied for so long. Life,
Buck, his parents, his past—for a sweet, short time, thoughts of all these things dissolved away with the pitchers of beer
and the warm, dark room. He was drunk and happy, reconnecting with a part of his life that was free of the burden of his recent
entanglements. He and the girl laughed about how, back in high school, Major, who’d never done drugs of any kind until after
he’d graduated, had actually given a speech to the student body on the evils of methamphetamine.

Then, ecstatically, Major and the girl took advantage of the low light in the corner booth to engage in the kiss that had
been nearly a decade in coming. As he kissed her, though, Major snuck glances at the big windows at the front of the bar.
He knew he had to leave, even though the warmth of her body held him fast. It was going on midnight on a Friday, and the police
would be out cruising. They all knew exactly who Major was. None of them, he felt sure, truly believed a man like him could
ever get clean, and they would be gunning for him. He had eight blocks to walk—a loner on quiet, frigid streets, standing
out like a criminal. Which, legally, he would be: being drunk in public (and Major was most certainly drunk by now) would
constitute a violation of his probation. Should he be caught, he would get three years in jail, no questions asked. He’d completely
run out of strikes.

Finally, Major told the girl he had to go, pushing his way out of the booth. He’d thought about getting the girl to drive
him home, but he knew that would be foolish. She was drunk, too, and if the police pulled her over—which was likely—he would
go to jail just the same. He thought briefly about driving her car himself. Eight blocks wasn’t that far, after all, and Major
was nothing if not an expert at driving drunk. But he decided against this, too, knowing that public drunkenness would get
him jail time but that another driving violation would mean he’d lose his license for good. So Major kissed the girl good-bye,
went out the door alone, and started walking.