Nick Reding - Methland

Chad said, “Where’s Ella?”

Ella was still four seats away, playing Keno. With her back arrow-straight and her feet dangling below her, she looked like she might actually be taking a computerized grammar test in a virtual high school. She wore no earrings, no jewelry at all, and she didn’t blink as the light from the machine brightened and dimmed in the dark bar. Chad was looking right at her.

“Where’s Ella?” he said again.

I started to say that Ella was sitting right there when I remembered what a woman in Cedar Rapids had told me about her ex-husband—that after he’d been using meth for a couple of years, he’d lie next to her in bed and ask where she was. Other times, he would mistake pillows and couches and dressers for his wife. If she would countermand his claims, she said, he would first panic and cry, sinking to the floor, begging her to reappear. When she did, he would accuse her of infidelity and beat her savagely with anything he could find: a lamp, an ashtray, and one time with a broken table leg.

Chad asked if Ella was with me. Then he scratched the wooden bar with his long fingernails, as though the bar had an itch that Chad could feel.

He asked me, in all seriousness, if I was having sex with Ella.

I said, “Right here?” When he picked up his empty beer bottle by the neck, I said, “She’s playing Keno.”

Chad said, “I can’t believe Ella’d fuck you. I can’t believe you’d do this right in front of me, Ella.”

Ella, hearing her name and looking up from the Keno machine, said, “Coming.” It was like a child’s response when being called for dinner.

“He’s a total fucking stranger!” said Chad. “How can you just fuck him like this?”

At that point, I got up and brought Ella to him. I asked her to hold his hand.

“See?” I said. “Here’s Ella. This is Ella’s hand.”

Chad looked at her for several moments before he actually saw his girlfriend. When she let go of his hand and walked off a few seconds later, Chad looked at me and said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I told him I was just passing through.

“You’re a liar,” he said. He stood up to his full height, a good six feet two. He appeared to weigh two hundred pounds. I looked down the bar at the kitchen, into which Mildred had disappeared ten minutes before. There was no sign of her.

When Chad asked me if I worked for DEA, the window of diplomacy seemed to be closing once again. He said he’d be honest with me: he hated DEA. Nor, he said, would it be any skin off his teeth to make sure I never came back to town again. I was drinking whiskey; I wrapped my fingers around the tumbler so that if need be I could use it to break one of Chad’s eye sockets.

That’s when he sat back down. “Come on,” he said. “Are you a narc or not?” He seemed genuinely interested. It was suddenly posed as a cordial question. He wanted to know, very sincerely, if I worked for DEA, for the reason that he had never actually met an agent, and had always kind of wanted to.

I told him I was sorry, but that he was out of luck. In general, meth dealers and the people trying to catch them often seem to dress in the same manner. Both constituencies are given to hair cut close to the scalp and a few days’ growth of beard. I’d followed suit.

“Boy,” said Chad confidentially, “you sure look like a fed.”

“So much for fitting in,” I told him.

Chad laughed, and so did I. He slapped me on the back. We shook hands. The agony he was in just a few minutes before was gone without a trace, replaced by a sense of euphoria that seemed to lift the heavy air of the bar. Both of us, I think, felt not just relieved, but elated. Chad was back up on the shoulder of his tweak, and he gathered Ella and rode the smooth wave out the back door of the Do Drop Inn into the alley across from the abandoned roundhouse. Right then, as though by magic, Mildred reappeared. She been watching all along through the space of the doorjamb. She said, “Isn’t that terrible, the way people act?”

In some ways, it’s true that, as people say around Oelwein, meth is confined to a few places. But it’s just as important to see the places where meth is not in evidence, at least in its physical form. For even as the difficulties caused by the drug are an everyday part of life in Oelwein, so, too, are the rhythms of life there extant with or without meth. In this capacity, Clay and Tammy Hallberg excel. Much of Oelwein comes through Clay’s office on a weekly basis, or past him in the emergency room. Or, as happens on several holidays a year, into the Hallberg home to celebrate.

Clay and Tammy’s house sits just across a narrow wooded gully from their neighbor’s home, off a long gravel driveway half a mile west of town. Because Clay is not a farmer does not mean he doesn’t grow corn on a couple of acres of his property, or raise a few chickens in the barn alongside his house. In front of the barn is the stable where Tammy keeps her horses, with which she has won riding competitions as far away as Kentucky. They can see most of their fifty-acre spread from the eat-in kitchen of the split-level ranch, with its big north-and south-facing windows.

It’s July 4, 2005, and Clay and Tammy are having their annual hog roast. It’s an occasion to be happy and to remember that life is indeed good, if only people would take the time to eat well and drink a little bit and enjoy one another’s company. Gathered in small groups in the backyard beneath a looming eighty-year-old live oak, city employees from the water company mingle with bartenders and high school teachers, waiting for Tammy to give the word that a 250-pound pig provided by the local UPS driver is, after six hours, finally done roasting. Clay’s twin brother, Charlie, is here, along with his wife. They’ve brought with them another friend, a Chilean expatriate who works as a translator at a windowpane plant down in Cedar Rapids.

While the UPS man stands beside his custom-made hog oven, a submarine-shaped barbecue so large it had to be towed behind a pickup, the Hallberg twins hold forth on their latest gig, which took place last night in a bar in Wadena, Iowa, where the hundred or so listeners twice asked them to reprise Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a crowd favorite for a quarter century. Meanwhile, Tammy advises a group of women on the finer points of her famed beer-can chicken recipe, the gist of which is to insert an open, full Bud Light into the gutted cavity of a homegrown broiler, then to stand the chicken, legs down, on the grate of a charcoal grill. For the best results, says Tammy, use a medium-hot fire. And if your M.D. husband isn’t looking, brush that sucker every fifteen minutes with a warm bath of salt, melted butter, and—as ever—more beer. After an hour of that, she concludes in her thick drawl, you’ll never eat so good.

What unites the partygoers beyond the obvious bond of community is that Clay, all the while with Tammy working as his receptionist, delivered most of the guests’ children. As the children grew (many of them were now adults themselves), he was their pediatrician, even as he treated their parents for problems ranging from skin cancer to gout. During his tenure as assistant county medical examiner, Dr. Clay made official the pronouncements of their parents’ deaths. Oelwein itself is a crossroads in northeast Iowa, and Clay’s and Tammy’s lives together serve as a point of intersection of Oelwein’s socioeconomic and cultural axes, the coordinates of which remain unchanged, even as Oelwein’s demographics have shifted further and further toward a baseline of poverty. Oelwein, with its familiar and often complex social circuitry, is much like a family, and Clay and Tammy are in many ways at the center of it. Regardless of the trends in community health in the last thirty years, and in the corresponding changes in the chief medical complaint (it had once been sore muscles and broken bones; now it is depression and meth), if you have a problem or a reason to celebrate, you go to see the Hallbergs.