The End of Vandalism Read Free Page A

Miller beer. He lived in a turquoise and white mobile home outside of Grafton. He looked at the nude slides, but they were too small.
    Louise painted her toenails—Dan had noticed that. She painted her toenails dark red. He imagined her dabbing away in some empty room of that drafty farmhouse.
     
    An unusual series of thefts began in February. There were still waves of snow on the ground. The stolen items were huge—combines, feed trucks, even a yellow road grader from the county shed outside Wylie—and seemed to up and vanish. Soon the rumor started that a gang was involved, a possible gang that people called the Freight Haulers. There was much discussion but no consensus.
    In the midst of this, old Henry Hamilton had a tractor stolen from his machine shed. When Dan arrived to take the report, Louise Darling was there as well. It was Sunday morning. Louise had blue earmuffs on. Henry kept chickens, and Louise nestled a gray egg carton in the crook of her arm.
    They all three went into the machine shed, trailed by Mike, Henry’s part-shepherd. The shed had tin sides and a corrugated ceiling of translucent green plastic. There was a blue Chevy pickup, an ancient silver corn picker, and a place where the tractor had been. It was quiet. Henry brought up the Freight Haulers.
    “They’re supposed to take everything to Texas in secret railroad cars,” he said. “This was an Allis-Chalmers, orange in color, with a radio. I put an umbrella on for shade in the summer. Of course, that’s put away now.”
    “Did you lock the shed?” said Dan.
    “I never have locked,” said Henry. “I have all my keys confused in a drawer.”
    “Might want to rethink that,” said Dan.
    “I wonder if it was these freight guys,” said Louise.
    Dan walked around scuffing the dirt floor with his boot. “The whole idea is three-quarters myth,” he said.
    “What?” said Louise, lifting the blue fur off one ear.
    “My opinion, it’s overblown,” said Dan.
    “Not according to the fellow from the extension office,” said Henry. “He said there are some things you can let go by, but not when they throw it in your face. He wouldn’t go beyond that. Now, what a guy ought to do, is slip over to the railroad yard and do some asking around with them.”
    “I thought they just wanted great big items,” said Dan.
    Henry lit his pipe and fanned out the match. “That was a good-sized tractor,” he said.
    Mike slowly raised his head and barked once at the lime-colored light through the ceiling.
    “Mike’s trying to say it was guys from space,” said Louise.
    “No, Mike sees that swallow poking out his head,” said Henry.
    Louise and Dan left the shed and walked over by the hog pen in front of Henry’s barn. It was cold. Louise’s cheeks were red. She slipped the toe of her boot through the rail, and some pigs came over to chew on it.
    “You’re not missing anything, I hope,” said Dan.
    Louise pulled her earmuffs from her head, the blue pads coiling together. “There were lights going by last night,” she said. “That’s all. I thought it could be Tiny—these lights going up and down the wallpaper. Tiny and I got separated, and it occurred to me he might be mad about that.”
    “You and Tiny?” said Dan. “No kidding.”
    Louise wiped her nose with the back of her glove. “We weren’t getting along,” she said. “We would talk but it wouldn’t be about anything.”
    “What makes you say he might be mad?” said Dan.
    “Who wouldn’t be?” said Louise. “It was seven years, practically. You begin to wonder what you had in mind the whole time.”
    “Did he ever threaten to or actually hit you?” said Dan.
    “No,” said Louise. “He might have taken a swing but it never would hurt.”
    “Because there’s no reason you have to sit around living in fear,” said Dan. “That isn’t written anywhere.”
    “Not mad like that,” said Louise. “Tiny would never hurt the individual person. More frustrated kind of