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.”
Bonnie paused to light another one of Joseph’s cigarettes. This time she didn’t give it back to him. The whole time she’d spoken, Joseph had silently rubbed his forearm with his blunt fingers, the way you might rub a favorite blanket or a piece of cloth. Bonnie said, “So that’s what we get for trying to help.”
Staying busy amid these circumstances, said Bonnie, was a blessing. What busied them more than anything else was overseeing a kind of in-house rehab for Major while they waited to see what, if any, problems Buck might develop. This was not Los Angeles, or Tampa, or even Poughkeepsie. There were no residential chemical abuse facilities around there. None that Bonnie and Joseph could afford anyway, despite making twice the median income for the area.
By law, Major had to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings each week; meet with his parole officer twice a month; and hold down a job, which meant working construction. Had Buck still been in his custody, a DHS worker would have visited every week to assess the situation and to offer help, for an hour at a time, with the dizzying array of adjustments, however prosaic or monumental, that Major faced in his attempt to live a sober life. “That’s as much as can be done for meth addicts and their children,” said Bonnie in regard to comparatively well-off Independence, Iowa.
When Joseph finally broke his silence to offer his opinion on what should be done with meth addicts, it reflected this lack of available options. Brutally, dispassionately, quietly, he said that all addicts ought to be sterilized. While in jail, they ought to be put to work on behalf of the community they have sullied, milking cows and building roads. Then, echoing his wife, he said, “That’s as good as can be done in In dependence, Iowa.”
Bonnie let him cool down. Then she reminded Joseph that while Major was last in jail, his third time, Joseph went to visit him every night. Furthermore, Joseph leveraged his position as a county magistrate in order to get Major out early. Had Major been sterilized during one of his incarcerations, Bonnie went on, they would never have had the profound pleasure of seeing Buck learn to walk. When she was done talking, she put her hand on his.
Joseph shook his head. Then he nodded in agreement. “Whatever happens,” he said, “we’ve got the boy.”
For a moment, it was unclear which generation of his progeny he meant: his son or his grandson. Then he said, “No matter how badly he screws up from here, Thomas can’t change that.”
CHAPTER 5
THE DO DROP INN
Before my second two-week stay in Oelwein during the summer of 2005, I’d spent ten days driving from town to town in southern Illinois, western Kentucky, and northern Missouri. In Benton, Illinois, a poor black-earth farm town in the sweltering hollows of Franklin County, I’d ridden around for a few days with J. R. Moore, who was not only the Benton police department’s sole narcotics officer, he was also Benton’s interim mayor and the owner of one of the town’s three restaurants. All day, J. R. drove a black Mustang GT with tinted windows and an arsenal of shotguns in the bucket backseats, smoking Marlboro Lights and rolling down his window at stop signs to say hey to people he’d known all his life. In Chillicothe, Missouri, in the cattle-and prairie-rich heart of the state’s northern river breaks, I’d spent the night in a motel and listened while, in the room above me, a man beat the woman he’d married that very evening, at that very motel. Like the hill country around Benton, the area around Chillicothe, 350 miles away, had a monumental meth problem, and the bride yelled loudly that her new husband would not have been doing this to her had he not been high on crank. When I called the police, a female officer talked to the groom outside the window of my ground-floor room. After he convinced the officer that nothing was wrong, she wound up her investigation by wondering what kind of out-of-towner had mistaken a good time for domestic abuse.
By then, it was no longer a question in my mind whether meth was a bigger problem in small-town America than in larger cities. San Francisco undoubtedly has many, many more meth addicts than the Central Valley town of Merced. There are thousands of meth addicts in Des Moines, while in Oelwein there are barely more than six thousand people total. Los Angeles is meth’s ancestral home in the United States. Like New York, San Francisco, and Miami, Los Angeles has a large population of gay meth addicts. In the past five years, HIV and hepatitis C rates have increased among the gay population, and meth is widely blamed. The meth problem in those cities is significant, if not monumental. The difference is that Los Angeles can absorb the associated costs of those problems more easily than Oelwein or Merced or Benton. And the recourse of small towns in confronting meth seemed only to be growing bleaker.