Golden Age

2013

EMILY WAS STILL in the ring, teaching a six-year-old boy who could sit on his pony but couldn’t get him to turn left or right. Fiona stood leaning against the gate, watching Emily do her best imitation of Mrs. Herman — talk a lot, be encouraging, demonstrate a few things, let the child find his way, but keep your eye out for pony misbehavior. Champ, who was a small pony, only twelve hands, was not as agreeable as Pesky had been, but he was good enough if the instructor carried a whip. The first thing Fiona said when the boy was finished was “What is your cousin Chance doing these days?”

“Ranch work, I guess.”

“Get him to come down here. I want to learn something new.”

Fiona never said “please” or “thank you”—too many years of giving lessons.

So Emily texted the last number anyone had for Chance, and two days later, he e-mailed her. The first time he came down, he rode four of Fiona’s young horses each day for three days; he rode six the second time. Fiona paid him a hundred dollars a horse, offered more, and said the safety factor was worth it. It was interesting to Emily just to watch. One horse, Dulcet, was talented but spooky. She rarely ran, but she often flinched. When Emily exercised her, the flinching was startling and distracting. Emily would worry that something worse might happen. It never did, but Dulcet was not progressing quickly — she was seven now, had never been to a show. Fiona had decided that, at sixty-five, she was too old to fall off, but Dulcet was beautiful and talented. When Chance worked her, he did nothing wild or cowboylike — he just gently solicited her attention over and over, reminded her to trot a circle, or square a corner, or whatever the exercise was. Fiona got on and did the same, and within a day or two, Dulcet was much more relaxed. Just before Chance got into his truck to leave, Fiona hugged him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She said, “I am going to pretend that you look like Tim”; then she hugged him again and said, “Charlie, too.”

The second time he came, Chance worked with one of Fiona’s very bad horses, one she’d gotten as payment for lots of missed board bills, who would buck hard and keep bucking. With Chance on his back, every buck led to the horse’s quietly spiraling, his back legs stepping over and over, until he sighed and gave it up. At dinner, where Emily talked about it to Chance, where he used words like “mindful” and “redirect,” Emily had to admit that she had sort of fallen in love with him, or maybe she was abandoning years of disdain. She could not help comparing him, just a little, with the lawyer she was idly dating, two years older than she was, who shopped only at Whole Foods, always took his shoes off when he entered his house, and chopped vegetables wearing latex gloves. His name was Corey, and Emily had really wanted to find him compelling for six or seven months, but when he rolled his socks together before they had sex, somehow the thrill was gone. She and Chance started idly e-mailing.

Fiona told her that, once upon a time, all the best riding horses came off the track — they were fit and mostly sound and ready to try something new. Those days were gone; Fiona’s stable was full of Holsteiners and Hanoverians, most of them bred in Europe, but all old horsemen had a lingering fondness for Thoroughbreds they had known, rangy with lots of bone, nice ones related to Hyperion, Prince John, and Eight Thirty, or tough ones related to Nearco. It was early April. Fiona sent them to the Santa Anita Derby, but she didn’t go with them.

Chance knew all about the racing drug scandals and the footing controversy. Both of them had been riding horses too long to be surprised by much, but Emily did say, “That’s why I’ve never been here.”

“Why do you expect people to be honest?”

She almost said, “Because Fiona is,” but she didn’t. Chance might have said, “How do you know?” There was a lot about every aspect of their lives that Emily knew it was wiser not to delve into. Instead, she said, “If you don’t expect them to be honest, does that make you honest?”

He said, “So far, never had to be otherwise.”

Emily believed him.

They found their seats before the fillies’ race, the Oaks, only six horses in the race, and not exciting, because the filly who broke first and went from the outside to the rail just kept running, and the others, no matter how hard they tried, could not get close to her. She had a steady, long stride and a determined attitude that Emily admired. She said, “That was a good race. No drama.”

“She’s not even three, really,” said Chance. “Nicely built.”

He acted restless, shifting in his chair as if the chair didn’t fit him. Emily said, “Let’s walk down by the rail. It looks more fun down there.”

When they went through the betting hall, Emily was most impressed by the guys at tables, pencils behind their ears, intently staring at screens, their Racing Forms and programs spread out around them. Chance asked if she wanted to place a bet. She looked at her program and said, “Why am I drawn to Dirty Swagg?”

“Who isn’t?” said Chance. “But let’s have a look at the animals, just to pretend that we know something.”

They walked out into the sunny paddock area, Emily behind Chance. She saw people look at him and smile — he did look graceful and horsey, but tall, not of the racetrack. He was not wearing his cowboy hat, just a baseball cap, but he was wearing his boots. A couple of girls scanned him up and down, then looked at Emily and turned away. Emily was amused.

At the rail of the walking ring, her eye went straight to the gray — pale head, beautiful dapples, tall and muscular — Flashback, said the program, the favorite, 6/5 odds. Dirty Swagg was 30/1, but he was handsome. Emily would happily take him when he was retired, and keep his name, which was a good name for a jumper.

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.

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-all-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.