Two weeks before meeting Rudy, I’d been in Georgia and Alabama in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I’d gone there because, according to Tony Loya, record amounts of meth had been flowing into the area from the East Texas border during the past few months. There had been an increase in drug cartel violence around the sibling towns of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo that had made every major American newspaper’s front page off and on for weeks. The Mexican government, in reaction, had sent in the army. The drug lords, in counter-suit, had redoubled their attacks on one another. To that end, they had begun employing a gang known as the Zetas, former American-trained members of the Mexican special forces.
One morning, I’d spoken with Sherri Strange, then the DEA special agent in charge of the Atlanta office. According to her, the meth market in her seven-state area was so good that many of the Zetas had gone into business for themselves, armed with their expertise in surveillance, weaponry, and counterintelligence.
“The DTOs hold Atlanta,” said Strange. “And they’re here in a way that, to me, after twenty-five years being on the street and in charge in various locations, is frightening. We used to have Mexicans—and excuse the term, I’m only talking about a few but, I’m sorry, all the big players are Mexican—that were pretty minor league. They were just guys trying to make enough money in a year to go back home and retire. Now, in the last eight months, there’s a sea change. We’re getting traffickers who are as highly trained as we are in intelligence gathering, evasion techniques, weapons. They’re scary. I can literally walk down the street—and this happened here a while back—and just know what’s going on. You see them, if you know what to look for, and you just think, ‘Oh my God.’”
Later in 2005, I went to meet Alex Gonzalez, an officer with the Hoover Police Department, in Alabama’s poultry-rich northern tier. An interdiction specialist, meaning that he pulls cars and trucks over and searches them, Gonzalez and his partner are also part of the vast web of people who keep Tony Loya apprised of what’s happening on the fringes of the narcotics world. Describing the relationship he has with the traffickers, Gonzalez said, “We’ll get a load one day, a big one, maybe a hundred pounds of crystal headed to Atlanta. Or maybe $1.2 million in cash headed back to Mexico. And that night the traffickers call you on your cell phone and say, ‘Nice job, man! That was a big bust!’ It’s like we’re friendly, almost—joking with each other. Then they ask about your wife, and it gets very creepy; they want you to know how much they’ve got on you. They say, ‘Too bad while you were taking the five hours to deal with that hundred pounds, we got another thousand pounds past you.’ The hundred pounds were just a decoy.”
He went on: “They watch us watching them. Their ‘counterintelligence’ is so superior to our ‘intelligence’—and I can’t stress enough what a bullshit word that is—that it’s just no contest. You taunt each other, like it’s a game, but it’s a game they always win.
“What’s not a game is that, if drug organizations can not only get major shipments past us every day, but can know how much they got past and can laugh at it—if they’re watching that close—what’re the terrorists doing? I’ll tell you what they’re not doing is advertising. It’s not a game to them, I wouldn’t think. And what if they go into business together? They’ve done it before. Then what?”
CHAPTER 14
KANT’S REDEMPTION
My last trip to Oelwein was in mid-December 2007. As the plane flew west from New York, an ice storm worked its way east. I met the weather at O’Hare Airport, which closed for most of a day; that was where I spent the night. By late the following afternoon, the glare off the frozen fields along Highway 150 was dizzying, and the sleet turned to snow and back to sleet again. It snowed the whole week I was in Oelwein; the high temperature was eighteen degrees. This was only the beginning of a long winter. By April, Fayette County would get nearly eight feet of snow. Drifts at the Leins’ farm would be forty feet high where the wind, with nothing to stop it for what seemed like a thousand featureless miles, had piled it up to the roof of the house.
On the first morning of that last trip, Nathan and I got in his white diesel Jetta (it now had 222,000 miles on it, 45,000 more than when I’d first met him) and headed to court in West Union. Nathan was dressed in his customary gray suit and white shirt. His hair was carefully gelled, and he had on his class ring from Luther College. Jamie had once again gotten a job contracting with DHS, and was no longer bartending in Strawberry Point. Things around the house were much better for it. Better still, most of Jamie’s cases were down in In dependence. This meant she didn’t run into clients’ families, or even the clients themselves, while out and about in Oelwein. And she and Nathan didn’t have to worry about influencing each other’s views of people whom, for instance, Nathan might be prosecuting, even as Jamie was attempting to persuade the court not to take their children away.
It’s a thirty-minute drive from Oelwein to West Union. When it’s three degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of twenty-seven below, it takes half that time for the Jetta’s heat to kick in. As we drove, Nathan and I looked for pheasants along the side of the road, coming out of the draws and creek bottoms to peck at waste grain fallen off the farm trucks. When we saw them—in pairs and threes, their green and red heads iridescent in the harsh, slanting light—Nathan made a note of whose field they were on. That way, we could come back in the afternoon and ask the farmer for permission to hunt on his property. At one fence crossing, we saw an entire covey of birds, prompting me to whistle and slap the dashboard with excitement.
“Uh-uh,” said Nathan. “Amish.”
The Amish didn’t let non-Amish hunt on their land, and vice versa. Not that there was any real antipathy between the two groups in and around Oelwein. Rather, there were rules of engagement, which served to highlight the differences between the Mennonites and the rest of the community. Even when the Amish came to town and participated in the wider world, they invariably managed to set themselves completely apart. The night before, I was at the Kum and Go gas station when an enormous blue van pulled in. No fewer than fifteen Amishmen, none of whom were technically allowed to operate gas or electric machinery, poured out of the van, which had five rows of seats. The first day of deer season had—in accordance with the semi-religious aspect of the sport in northern Iowa—ended at sundown. The Amishmen had hired the van and driver to take them to a piece of state land called the Volga River Wildlife Management Area to hunt that day; attached to the back fender of the van was a heavy, grated cage that could be used for hauling equipment, but in this case was stacked with four gutted whitetail bucks. All fifteen Amishmen, including elderly men and boys in their teens, each with a beard and no mustache—or in the case of the boys, a dusting of peach fuzz along their jaw—walked single file into the Kum and Go to eat microwaved burritos and drink steaming black coffee from Styrofoam cups. Despite the violent cold, they wore collared white shirts, navy blue suits of thick wool, and rubber knee-high boots. In order to comply with state hunting regulations they each had pulled a hunter-orange stocking cap over the crown of their straw hat and fastened it with safety pins. When the Amish left the gas station, everyone in line watched them. Then someone said they were Yoders.
“No they ain’t, either,” said the cashier. “Them are Bontragers, no question.”
Covey of pheasants or not, asking the Amish for permission to hunt wasn’t going to happen. Not that it was of any consequence, for the principal motivation behind going hunting was less to hunt and more to spend time with Nathan, whom, as had happened with Clay Hallberg, I’d long before come to think of as a friend. On the drive to West Union that morning, Nathan and I, prompted by the fact that I’d gotten married two months before, talked about his relationship with Jamie. Nathan said it was hard to imagine himself getting married. Thinking about it was a little bit like imagining death, or eternity: when he closed his eyes and looked into it, the darkness closed in all around. It was better to keep his eyes open.