One early evening in particular brought home the complexity of the divisions in Oelwein, as expressed in its most notorious bar. It was a Sunday, and Mildred and I were the only two in the place. We were watching the news, which at the time was concentrated on the case of a young Mormon girl who’d been kidnapped from her Salt Lake City bedroom while her sister slept next to her; police suspected the handyman. Into the Do Drop Inn walked a man and a girl. The girl looked sixteen or seventeen, and the man over thirty. He was wearing denim Carhartts and a matching work jacket, each dirty enough to have been through a long day of building road in a dust storm. He had long, dirty, sharp fingernails, and he smelled like sour milk. The girl’s hair was bobbed and greasy, and her body was lost inside an enormous gray sweatshirt that read “Duluth Is a Cool City” across the front, in homage to the brutality of Minnesota winters. It was immediately obvious to me from their dilated pupils and the man’s aura of violently aggressive confidence that they were high on meth.
“You can’t be twenty-one, honey,” Mildred said to the girl as she studied her driver’s license. Mildred then looked at the girl sternly with one appliquéd eyebrow raised, waiting for her to admit her true age. When the girl didn’t respond, Mildred said brightly, “But if the state says you are, then you are.” She looked at the man. “I know you’re over,” she said to him coldly. She gave them the drinks they’d ordered. Then, even though no one ordered any food, Mildred hurried into the kitchen, leaving the three of us alone in the empty bar.
The man was named Chad and the girl Ella. There was a computerized Keno machine at one end of the bar, and Ella went with her drink, sat down, and started tapping at the screen. She was four stools away from me, and seven away from Chad; I was between them. Chad and I talked about one thing and another, looking for some common ground. For instance, when I said I was born in Missouri, he allowed how he’d been in jail there once. His pupils completely obscured the blue of his irises.
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.