Nick Reding - Methland

Meth’s power, said Major, had never been more clear to him than the last time he was in jail. Major was panic-stricken without the drug. By turns he couldn’t sleep or couldn’t wake up. He couldn’t eat. He had hallucinations. His body hurt as though he’d been in a car accident. And he, by a long stretch, had it pretty easy. According to an undercover narcotics agent in Ottumwa, Iowa, one addict became convinced in his jail cell that the impurities in the meth he’d been cooking and injecting—particularly the lithium battery strip used as a solvent in the drug’s manufacture—were actually inside his body. Thinking that one of the veins in his arm was a strip of lithium, he sat on his bed and spent hours using his long fingernails to dig the vein out. Talking to Major made it clear that meth’s physical withdrawals were only the beginning of his problems with quitting, for what was most striking about him was that he seemed to have no idea who he was now that he no longer used meth.

Buck was ready to cross my lap again in order to complete another turn around the table. “Hi!” he said. He picked up a lighter on the table and held it out to me. “For you,” he said. He was wearing little red shorts that bulged with a fresh diaper. For Major, waiting to see what price his son would pay for his transgressions was a daily reminder of why he had to stay straight. But his anxiety and guilt were also an hourly motivation to get high. Major, when he allowed himself to think of what he might have done to his boy, wanted nothing more than to kill himself with a final, euphoric overdose of crank.

“Not for you,” said Major, grabbing the lighter from Buck’s hand.

Buck began crying. At first Major spoke soothingly to him. When Major picked him up, Buck hit Major in the face. Bonnie came to the doorway again, watching. Major looked at her, his face first registering the need for help, and then anger. Major looked back at Buck, who tried to bite his father’s nose. Major shook him furiously as Buck howled. That’s when Bonnie swooped in and took Buck away. Bonnie and her son stared at each other, Buck between them like a shield. Or like a threat, for Bonnie could at any time banish Major from her home, and Buck would have to stay with her.

“He’s hungry,” said Bonnie finally. “That’s all.”

A few days later, I met Joseph and Bonnie in the bar of a restaurant in Independence that looked like a T.G.I. Friday’s done up with telltale small-town signs of color. Kitty-corner from a print of John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in The Blues Brothers was a walleye mounted on an oak plaque bearing a gold plate engraved with the angler’s name, the lake where the fish was caught, and the weight: seven pounds, three ounces.

It was July 5, and Joseph and Bonnie had come to talk to the owner about their youngest son’s wedding rehearsal dinner, which they wanted to have in October in the restaurant’s small reception room. But before reservations were made and the menu decided, they had a long talk about the owner’s recent trip to a lake in Canada, where the owner had enjoyed the best walleye and northern pike fishing he’d ever imagined. Joseph and Bonnie had been to the same lake many times—they are both avid fishermen—and were clearly sorry they’d missed the action. They hadn’t been fishing in over two years, which is about as long as they’d been taking care of Buck, who for all practical purposes had become Bonnie and Joseph’s fifth child.

Technically, Bonnie, a social worker, and Joseph, a county magistrate, have custody of Buck. That they allow Major to live in their home is a circumstance that exists outside the bounds of custody litigation. It can be, to say the least, an awkward arrangement. Bonnie and Joseph were fifty-three years old when I met them in 2005. They had not planned to raise a two-year-old at this stage of their lives. Just a year earlier, Major and Sarah, still living at Bob’s farm, would break into Bonnie and Joseph’s house to steal what ever they could, then sell it to buy more cold medicine from which to make meth. One night Major stole his mother’s pan ties and bras and hocked them at a bar. During another break-in, Major and Sarah decided to stash a large amount of meth in the air vents of Bonnie and Joseph’s home. When Bonnie and Joseph turned the heat on, the meth-tainted air that blew through the vents made them ill, and they had to spend ten thousand dollars, or a quarter of Joseph’s yearly income, to have the whole system replaced. That there was some resentment beneath the surface of their every interaction with Major was not surprising.

More surprising was how little resentment there was. Joseph, a heavy smoker with an ashen complexion, is an intensely quiet man given to wearing khakis, short-sleeve oxford shirts, and simple ties with no jacket. When he speaks, his words come out with the blunt force of body blows. Bonnie is soothing and kind, a tall, thin, pretty woman of Swedish descent with sharp features and a stately bearing. That day at the restaurant, Bonnie’s articulateness was magnified as she sat next to her brooding husband. Since adopting Buck, Joseph and Bonnie have put their lives on hold. Retirement is no longer an option, never mind a goal. They cannot leave Major at home alone for more than a few hours at a time, so afraid are they that he will relapse, or that Bob will make good on the threat he has leveled in dozens of late-night phone calls: that he will kidnap Buck, murder Major, and burn down Bonnie and Joseph’s home.

Bonnie lit one of Joseph’s cigarettes, took a drag, and handed it to him. Referring to the day I’d spoken with Major on the porch, she said she didn’t believe a lot of the things she’d heard him tell me about his time living with Bob and Sarah. Bonnie called her son by his given name, Thomas. Thomas had told me several stories about his and Bob’s murdering rivals and making millions of dollars. “I think a lot of it is exaggerated,” Bonnie said. “The things about how powerful and smart Bob is. Thomas likes to imagine he was so important and so marvelous. In truth, Bob is a putz.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Joseph, shaking his head. “By the time Thomas moved back in with us, he literally didn’t know his name. He’d gotten so used to lying that he’d stumble over any simple fact.”

“I think between the drugs and the games they played with him, they really got into his mind,” said Bonnie. “That so-called family will stay at a farm for a while, never paying the rent, and then just leave and go to a new place. They’ve done that their whole lives. And if you talk to Bob, there’s nothing at all scary about him. He’s this little guy, and he’s a total brownnose. He’s like a weasel. Nothing Thomas says adds up.”

It was the questions that were killing them, said Bonnie. Not just what had really happened while Major was with the Family but also how to help him recover. Even as a social worker, Bonnie knew comparatively little about how to aid in this process or what kind of outcome could reasonably be expected. In lieu of a blurry future, Bonnie and Joseph constantly replayed the past, looking for clues.

Bonnie said, “I mean, I keep thinking, ‘What did we do wrong?’ I breast-fed Thomas. I didn’t smoke or drink when I was pregnant. After he got out of jail the second time, we rented him an apartment. He was back on meth overnight. So we moved him and Sarah into our house. In response, her father beat her up. Bob beat the absolute hell out of his own daughter for moving in with us and trying to quit meth. Once we got custody of Buck, Sarah tried to get DHS to take him away from us because we smoke . She said we were endangering her child. She told the police that we kidnapped him. She still calls thirty times a night, sometimes, and hangs up.”