The first order of business for any Nazi cold cook is to amass quantities of cold pills. To do this, cooks generally hire people who will work in exchange for a portion of the product. These people stereotypically ride together in vans from one town to the next, piling into gas stations, Wal-Marts, grocery stores, and pharmacies in order to steal or buy as much cold medicine as they can. They might do one county today, and another tomorrow. If they’ve been particularly active lately around Oelwein, they might run up to Caledonia, Minnesota, hit Decorah and Kendallville, Iowa, on the way, then rob their way home via Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Cops across the country, playing on the van element and the fact that the people riding in them are apt to be acting funny, call the process of amassing pills Smurfing.
Depending on how successful the cook is, he might have his own supply of anhydrous ammonia, which is generally to say that he gets it from a farmer who takes a cut of the profit. For small-timers, though, stealing is the order of the day. It’s dangerous work, and a common source of injury. For use as a fertilizer, anhydrous is highly diluted; for use in making crank, it must be gotten in its concentrated form, which is largely done at night and surreptitiously. One common and incredibly hazardous way of getting anhydrous from the heavy, thick-walled steel tanks in which it is stored is to prop the tank legs on bricks and then to drill holes just above the settling line of the anhydrous, easily identified, like studs in drywall, by rapping one’s knuckles along the tank and listening to the pitch. Then, the thieves remove bricks one at a time from two of the legs of the tank, tilting the tank more and more. When the anhydrous pours out of the drilled holes, they attempt to catch it in buckets or small, reinforced kerosene containers. Dr. Clay Hallberg, the chief of staff at Mercy Hospital, tells one story among many of a boy who waited nearly two days to come to the emergency room following an accident while stealing anhydrous in which a small amount of the liquid had spilled on his jeans. He’d have come sooner, but he was still high, and he didn’t want to go to jail. By the time he got to the ER, says Clay, one of the boy’s testicles had melted off.
It’s stories like this, told and retold every day among the farmers at Hub City Bakery or while shopping at VG’s, that had begun to fray the sense of civility in Oelwein by summer 2005. Two years after a consolidated effort to rid the town of meth was begun, patience was waning. The police chief mandated—with Nathan’s and Murph’s full support—that his men pull over cars for almost any reason in hopes of finding meth. He had recently lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance outlawing bikes in town. The hope was that the cooks who brazenly cycled around making meth in their soda bottles would at least do so somewhere out in the country instead of right on Main Street. In reaction, there was talk in Oelwein that Murph and Nathan and the chief were infringing on people’s civil liberties when they ought to be doing something about the meth labs, which regularly caught fire in residential neighborhoods, sending toxic plumes of smoke in whatever direction the wind happened to be blowing. Meantime, an Oelwein officer named David Bloem was being investigated for assaulting a meth addict named Jason Annis. According to the West Branch (IA) Times, the accident began when Bloem arrested Annis with a meth-filled syringe “sticking out of his arm.” Later, a video camera in the police station appeared to show Bloem shoving Annis to the floor, where he suffered a broken orbital bone at one eye and a compound fracture at his left cheek.
The effect was partly desperation, even panic, and partly a reversion to the overly simplistic version of events, which is that meth, and meth alone, was responsible for all that was bad in Oelwein. The addendum to the postulate is that whoever becomes hooked is weak. There’s something wrong with them, and because of them, there’s now something wrong with us. Even Nathan, whose own contradictions made him adept at looking at things evenhandedly, was quick to talk about the “shitbags” and the “scum”: those whose addiction made everyone else pay the price. After three years as assistant county attorney, during which things had gone from bad to worse (in Oelwein), he found it harder and harder to see the nuances of life after meth.
Nathan’s office is in a squat three-story brick building at the corner of Highway 150 and Route 3, across the street from the Oelwein Public Library. On the first floor of the building there is a small bank. The second and third floors, like so many commercial spaces in Oelwein, are empty. The basement is occupied by a two-man law firm, Sauer and Sauer LLC. The younger Sauer, Wayne, is, in addition to being a partner in the firm with his father, the county attorney. Nathan, every day that he’s not in court, goes to his office there, which is ample, if not extravagant. There is a large desk and three chairs, two of them stacked with boxes of depositions and police reports. On the wall hangs the beard of a turkey that Nathan killed last spring, ten inches long and black and coarse, like the tail of a tiny horse. Next to that is a framed certificate of thanks to Nathan for one of the many cleanups he has organized on the nearby Volga River.
It’s lunchtime, during which Nathan, who is proud of his frugality, would normally go home and eat last night’s leftovers while watching TV. A second reason Nathan hardly goes out to eat is that he is constantly running into people he’s prosecuted. Today, though, is Friday, the end of the workweek, and the May sun is finally out following five solid days of rain. Leo’s Italian Restaurant, just three blocks away, has a special every Friday on the fried pork tenderloin sandwich with mayo and tomato and a side of broasted potatoes. It’s still an expensive sandwich, if you ask Nathan: $5.95. But today it sounds too good to pass up. So Nathan reaches for his suit jacket, walks up the stairs, and heads out the glass door of the building into the warm sun.
Leo’s is packed. Fronted by large windows that look onto Main Street and across at the movie house, Leo’s feels as old as the building, built in 1907, that it has occupied for forty years. The tin ceiling is original, as are the wood walls. Business is good every lunch and dinner, twelve months of the year. At the tables sit farmers in their clean jeans, and technicians from the Tyson plant, along with some men in town to discuss the opening of an ethanol plant down the road.
Taking his place in a red Naugahyde booth against the wall, Nathan is feeling a little philosophical, perhaps because the waitress, Brigitte Hendershot, represents for him the difficulties faced by his town. Brigitte works five days a week. She is fifty-four, and what Nathan calls the salt of the earth. Her son-in-law is a sheriff’s deputy; her daughter works for the state’s Department of Human Services. It is people like Brigitte, says Nathan, whom the meth epidemic hurts the most. They work hard all their lives only to see their towns go to hell and to worry that their grandchildren will fall prey to a drug. In a sinking economy, he says, it’s as though the harder they work, the farther behind they fall. It makes Nathan crazy.
“I think about the credos that I admire: Kant’s call to action for the betterment of man; Aquinas’s belief that every man’s job is to help every other man achieve his ends. When I grew up,” says Nathan, “everything in my parents’ house had to be black and white. No interracial marriage, no booze, no sex, no voting for Democrats. I went to law school, and I thought: How does this narrow-minded horseshit aid in the callings of Kant and Aquinas? It can’t, because it’s too marginalizing.