Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Chance put his hands in his pockets and tipped back on his heels, gazing at one horse, then another, in a systematic way. Finally, he said, “I like that chestnut there. He’s got a lot of muscle, taller behind than in front, limber stride.”

Emily looked at the program — Goldencents, his name was. She said, “Let’s bet. I know you have two dollars, because Fiona paid you.”

And they did bet, a little nervous about saying the right thing. And their picks, Flashback and Goldencents, dueled it out in the homestretch, neither wanting to give up (Emily thought that, overall, Flashback showed more determination). Chance won eighteen bucks and Emily won three, so she made him buy her a hot dog.

In a year, she hadn’t asked him what was going on at the ranch, in his family, with his dad, or his mom. She knew he and Delie had split, but not whether he saw his son, Chandler, who would be almost eight at this point. It was all horses, horses, horses, just as it was with her other horsey pals. Possibly, that was the only space where she and Chance could be friends.

After the hot dog, they wandered through the parking lot to his truck, watching the other patrons scurry here and there. Clearly, some had scored — they gave the valets big tips, and in general seemed to have money falling out of their pockets. Others hunched their shoulders and slinked to their cars — bad day at the races. Emily thought she might come back, if only to keep her eye on Dirty Swagg.

At the very last moment, she said, “What’s up at the ranch?”

Chance put his hand on the roof of the truck and looked at her. He said, “Dry. I told my grandmother we had to cull the beef herd — they are scouring the pastures, and the price of hay is sky-high. It’s not like over around the foothills of the Sierras — disaster area over there. But we have to cut back. She’s not pleased. All the cattle have names.”

“They do?”

“Well, not really. But it always surprises me how she remembers their markings, and what that steer was doing last year up there in the north pasture. Anyway. Well.” He shrugged. From this, Emily understood that a hundred-thousand-acre ranch was more of a burden than a blessing.

When he dropped her at her apartment, he gave her a tight hug. Corey called her before bedtime to see if he might come over; she told him about going to the races. He was appalled. Every statistic he cited about drugs, about broken-down horses, about gambling addiction was one she herself would have cited the day before, but tonight she only said, “Oh, I know. It’s shocking. Okay, well, thanks for calling,” and hung up.

—

THE FIRST TWEAKER Guthrie remembered seeing had been Stephanie Crest’s father. Stephanie was in his class at school — what were they, twelve or thirteen? Eighth grade. A slight, hunched man would walk back and forth, back and forth, just off school grounds. No one ever stopped him, even when he grabbed the chain-link fencing and shouted Stephanie’s name and that someone was going to kill her and she had better watch out! The other kids liked Stephanie, but there was plenty of gossip that Guthrie overheard and was impressed by: the windows of their house on Kirkman Street in Usherton (a nice street, everyone agreed) were blacked out, her father kept guns in every room, her mother was long gone. Over that summer, Rod Crest went to jail and Stephanie disappeared, maybe into foster care, maybe sent away to her mother. Guthrie never mentioned it at home, and no one gossiped about it — his dad and mom weren’t interested in much that went on in town. Five years later, just before his first deployment, Guthrie had seen Rod Crest, out of jail, walking past Hy-Vee, and he had thought, wondered, just for a moment, if the old man was heading into the Hy-Vee drugstore to buy Sudafed, and then he had forgotten about it — tweakers were a different breed, they had nothing to do with him. Even after he got out of the service for good, and started having that one dream about the kid sitting on the hood of the car — Perky’s old Jeep Wagoneer — passing through the checkpoint and blowing up just as he lifted his hand to wave to Guthrie, it never occurred to him to touch meth, though he smoked a lot of weed; everyone did. Tweakers were self-evidently stupid; they stole anhydrous ammonia from fertilizer tanks and carried it away in gas cans, they didn’t smell the odors emanating from their houses, their houses blew up. If there was one thing Guthrie had learned on the farm, it was that you don’t play around with anhydrous. Tweakers never stopped tweaking no matter what, whereas marijuana smokers had interesting discussions about good and evil, then fell asleep.

That was all he needed to know until he ran into Melinda Grand at a Greg Brown concert in Cedar Rapids. Melinda had graduated a year ahead of him from North Usherton High, and had been active in 4-H, though she didn’t live on a farm (her cousins had the farm). She had raised pumpkins, brought pumpkins to school for the other kids to carve into jack-o’-lanterns. She was tall and pretty and looked you in the eye. Back then, she had dated Reiner Ohlmann.

Yes, Melinda lived with Barry Heim, but they were just roommates — Melinda loved that house, and when it came up for rent, she went straight to the listing agent and asked to rent it. Barry had already claimed it, and the rent was too high for her anyway, so when she ran into Barry in the Cueball, which was right across the street from the crappy apartment complex she was then living in, she offered to move in and help, not only with the rent, but with keeping the lights on and the refrigerator from molding over while he was on the road. He said yes, and for sure he was thinking of getting into her pants, but that fell by the wayside: she was much more useful as a roommate than as a girlfriend. Barry had never dated anyone for more than a month. All this was what she told Guthrie, anyway. It was Barry who was the tweaker, though you couldn’t tell — he drove that rig back and forth to Omaha six days a week, and he used the meth to keep himself going.

They both told him that it wasn’t like the old days, when tweakers batched their own in the kitchen sink. It all came from Mexico now. Six guys at the pork-processing plant worked butchering hogs five days a week and transported crank a few times a month. If you were making six bucks an hour, you had to have a second job, everyone knew that. Melinda was a nurse — she knew the bad stuff. Part of the relationship, for Guthrie and maybe Melinda, was watching Barry: would he pull it off? He said he knew a guy up by Algona who tweaked for thirty years, had a family and a job; tweaking was his golf or deer-hunting; you could manage it if you had the guts.

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.