Nick Reding Read Free Page B

all the while living down the street
     from his parents and his two brothers. Really, I went to Oelwein for the reason that Clay and his hometown seemed inseparable
     to me, in the same way that hometown America was becoming inseparable with meth. I thought Clay could explain to me how that
     had happened.
    By May 2005, Oelwein was on the brink of disaster. As I stood on First Street in front of the post office, the signs of entropy
     were everywhere, and hardly less subtle than those in East New York, Brooklyn, or in Compton or Watts, in Los Angeles. The
     sidewalks were cracked, half the buildings on Main Street stood vacant, and foot traffic was practically nonexistent. Seven
     in ten children in Oelwein under the age of twelve lived below the poverty line. Up at the four-hundred-student high school,
     on Eighth Avenue SE, 80 percent of the students were eligible for the federal school lunch program. The principal, meantime,
     was quietly arranging with the local police to patrol the halls with a drug-sniffing dog—essentially, to treat the high school
     as a perpetual crime scene. The burned-out homes of former meth labs dotted the residential streets and avenues like open
     sores. At the same time, the Iowa Department of Human Services, whose in-home therapists serve as one of the only realistic
     options for dealing with a mélange of psychiatric ailments, drug addiction, and all manner of abuse in Oelwein, was cutting
     90 percent of its funding to the town. The meatpacking plant was on the verge of closing its doors. The industrial park sat
     unoccupied. Unemployment was pegged at twice the national level. For Larry Murphy, Oelwein’s embattled second-term mayor,
     the question was this: How would he keep his town from literally vanishing into the prairie?
    The afternoon that I arrived in Oelwein, Clay Hallberg’s friend Nathan Lein met me at the Super 8 motel. For forty years,
     Nathan’s parents have farmed and raised livestock on 480 acres north of town. Following law school in Indiana, Nathan returned
     home to take the job of assistant Fayette County prosecutor. On our way to the police station, Nathan drove by what he described
     as several working meth labs on the pretty, oak-lined streets that fill out Oelwein’s residential neighborhoods, where the
     hand-laid stone houses date back in some cases 120 years. We passed Amishmen coming to town in their buggies, the Rent-a-Reel
     movie rental store, and the farm co-op. Two blocks farther on, Nathan pointed out his favorite restaurant, a drive-in burger
     joint called EI-EI-O’s, which had recently closed. On the boarded-up windows, the owner had scrawled in red spray paint, “Make
     Offer—Please!”
    The Oelwein Cop Shop, as the police station is known, is a nondescript 1960s-era brick building by the railroad tracks, one
     block north of the Chicago Great Western round house. Inside, past the blue-lit dispatch station, Nathan introduced me to
     the new chief of police, Jeremy Logan. Logan had recently been promoted from sergeant by Mayor Murphy with mandates to clean
     up a force with a reputation for impropriety and to spearhead a desperate effort to get Oelwein’s small-time meth manufacture
     under control. Sitting in his windowless office wearing a bulletproof vest, Logan scrolled through mug shots of Oelwein’s
     best-known crank dealers and most notorious addicts, one of whom had recently been taken from his home along with fifteen
     assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition—all while his fifteen-year-old daughter watched. Many of Oelwein’s addicts
     and dealers, said Logan, hung out at the Do Drop Inn. The idea was that I would go there and, with the blessing of Logan and
     Nathan Lein, have free range to meet whomever I could. The further hope was that I would get the stories of several addicts
     and dealers and, with luck, be allowed to follow their lives for the next two years.
    It didn’t take long. Two days later, I was in