course Silvia Vontrauer would say that! She wears scarves with pianos on them!
The Vo-Ag teacher smiled his big toothy smile. “Dieter also said I could smoke here.”
I continued to treat him like a potential client. I said, “Well, there are only two things you can really count on in this life... ”
He got excited and said, “Oh, I know this one: death and taxes.”
“You seem to know a lot about a lot of things,” I said.
He laughed then, and tapped a cigarette on the big desk and asked me for a light.
I pulled a book of matches from the Powerhaus out of a drawer in the big desk and the big red ceramic ashtray off the bookshelf behind me, where I keep it next to the trophy.
Actually, there are two things aside from the Tax Code that distinguish my office from anyone else’s. One is the big red ceramic ashtray I also bought ten years ago at Huff and Doc’s garage sale. I paid two dollars for it and never got the money back. The other is the trophy. It says: WORLD’S GREATEST ACCOUNTANT. I bought it for my father at Woolworth’s a block down from our office more than twenty years ago, back when I was twelve. It was on clearance because the Woolworth’s was closing due to the Walmart opening in Independence. I paid fifty cents for it.
The trophy pleased my father. He smiled when I gave it to him. He touched my shoulder. But I didn’t know what about it pleased him exactly. I thought it was the price, the good deal I had found. Then I thought perhaps it was the thoughtfulness of the gift. Then I saw him and Doc and Huff bent over and laughing about it. So probably it was the price.
“Can I always count on a light and an ashtray too?” the Vo-Ag teacher asked.
“No. Just death and taxes,” I said.
He laughed and smoked and stared at me. There was silence, and something else—something tingly, something electric.
“How can I help you?” I asked him. I ask this of all the people who sit in that chair. It is my business to help them.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.” And he laughed a little again.
I knew he would be back the next day.
I suppose, in the interest of clarity, it would be important to tell you that I wanted him back the next day.
I wasn’t there, though. Another house blew up, and it was one of Mueller’s—the big white rental with the screened-in porch—and so he asked me to go down and look. It was closer to downtown than the other one, within a few blocks of my office. A family who had come from Waterloo lived there. The father had been laid off from John Deere. He was working night shifts at the meatpacking plant for minimum wage and they were Section 8. There was a hole in the roof and smoke was rolling out of it. Some of the men in this town acting as volunteer firemen moved the children’s bikes to the next yard over. The whole block smelled like cat pee and battery acid. Dave Oppegaard walked by in his heavy fireman boots and pants and suspenders, which formed arches over his big gut. He asked me for a light and I pulled a book of matches from the Powerhaus from my long black coat.
“Roof blew off this one,” he said. “Don’t breathe too deep, there’s anhydrous everywhere.”
Anhydrous ammonia is the main ingredient in homemade meth around here. It may be different where you come from. I don’t know how you make your meth, but I hear there are lots of ways to do it. Here, we have giant tanks of anhydrous scattered all throughout our fields, perfect for siphoning if you’re in need of some meth. Some of these tanks have motion-sensor cameras on them, until those cameras are broken or stolen. Some of these tanks have locks on them and sometimes this can make a difference for a little while.
“It’s kind of ironic that something that increases yield can reduce a person’s life,” I said.
“Yeah,” Oppegaard said. “Maybe Channel 9 will show up.”
At lunchtime, the Vo-Ag teacher appeared beside me. “So we blow up our houses here,” he said.
Oppegaard just stood there nodding and smoking, his ruddy face getting ruddier. And when he went back to the fire truck he struck up talk with the other volunteer firemen, including Bob Munson and Howie Claus, who raised their eyes to me as soon as Oppegaard opened his mouth.
“Jesus, Tandy,” the Vo-Ag teacher whispered into my ear. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
And though it was an inopportune time, standing out there exposed with all those other men I had known my entire life, a switch flipped inside of me. His breath was like a sage lightning bolt. I seemed to rise from the ground, like a current was coursing from a knot in the back of my throat down through my spine and splitting through my legs so that my feet almost lifted off the sidewalk.
Across the street I could see Bob Munson and Howie Claus and Oppegaard all laughing, then Doc and Huff in Huff’s golf cart pull up and all of them jabbering. But right then they could not touch me.
I didn’t have an answer to the Vo-Ag teacher’s question—What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?—so I said the one thing I know for sure: “I am taking care of the tax needs of my community.” But it came out of my mouth small and quiet, like I was speaking from inside a balloon.
The Vo-Ag teacher laughed again, but this time it was a special kind of laugh that gurgled up in his throat and flowed out his mouth. It was like we were sharing some sort of special secret, though I do not know if we were or not. And I can admit to you now that this frightened me.
“I don’t like it when you laugh,” I said.
He sighed. He said, “None of the girls in this town do.” And then he poked me again, right below the belly button, and then, with his arms open wide, he walked backward and away, singing a line from Annie: Bet they collect things, like ashtrays and art!
I watched that butterfly knot on that multicolored beaded belt from Africa get farther and farther away from me.
Later, after Gerald had eaten his Subway and fallen asleep in his chair, I went back to my office. I turned off all the lights and I locked the door and I closed the dusty little curtains in my waiting room. I sat down at my computer and I clicked my way to eBay and I ordered a multicolored beaded belt exactly like the one the Vo-Ag teacher wore.
I ordered it from a person called africannibal. I paid $5.75 plus $12 in shipping, because I chose the overnight mail option.
The next day when the belt came, I laid it atop my computer monitor, and when clients came in, or the Vo-Ag teacher, or Clive, I hid it in the long skinny drawer of my big desk, the one you are supposed to put pens in.
Then I put my big black coat on and I opened the curtains and stood for a while looking at the lights of the Country Kitchen across the street from my waiting room window. At night the letters of the Country Kitchen sign are lit up, but the kids in this town keep throwing rocks at the O, R, Y, and K until the bulbs in those letters go out. At night the sign reads: C UNT ITCHEN.
Of course I had laughed about this before. Mueller and I laugh about it all the time, even now. Doc still thinks it is the greatest thing this town has going for it. He wants to print it on a T-shirt and sell it during our town’s
