by Gerry Boyle
“I love it when you talk dirty grammar,” I said. “But your parts aren’t like any grammar I’ve ever seen.”
“I certainly hope not,” Roxanne said, getting up and taking her coffee with her and, as she walked away, pulling the back of her shirt up, just for a teasing moment.
Clair was up at the store getting the paper and talking. I told Mary, his wife, that I couldn’t cut wood that day, but I’d see him when I got back. Mary said that was just as well, and maybe she could keep him out of the barn, too, on a Sunday morning.
“Day of rest, you know, Jack,” she said, standing at her back door, still in her church dress.
“I rest all the other days, Mary,” I said, and I was back in the Toyota and on my way.
But I didn’t really rest. That summer I’d built the house, with Clair along to supply advice, instruction, tools, and nearly all of the expertise. The house replaced one that had burned, thanks to a couple of fellows now confined to smallish rooms in the state prison at Thomaston. My house was small, too, and it was heavily insulated. Most of the windows faced south, where the fields and woods were. The fields and woods were full of birds, and there was ale in the refrigerator, and Roxanne most weekends.
Life was good.
But Roxanne was right. I was happiest, almost, when I was working. It was a strange state of affairs for someone who had stepped off the pinnacle of the kind of work I did, as a metro reporter at the New York Times. I’d stepped off when the even hotter hotshots had started blowing by me. I hadn’t realized that a reporter walking out that door was like an astronaut cutting the tether on a space walk. You spin out of that orbit and into another, and there really is no easy way of going back. But then, at that time, I’d had no intention of returning.
But I could still go about my business, which on this gray September morning meant driving west, down the long slope of the Kennebec Valley. After fifteen miles of woods and pasture and corner stores, I crossed the river into Waterville, a brick mill city stubbornly fixed to the shore of the Kennebec River. I cut through the little city, past the shopping malls, and out the other side, still headed west. The road climbed the valley, passing meager used-car lots and tired farms, with barns and sheds sinking slowly into the ground. There were houses plunked where rectangular chunks had been hewn out of the woods, and many of the houses had stuff piled on tables in the front yards, FOR SALE signs on the cars and trucks and old aluminum rowboats.
The signs, like the cars and trucks and boats, were old and weathered and faded.
I continued northwest, deeper into Somerset County, and the houses were fewer and farther between. Some were small and temporary-looking, like something put up for migrant workers. In fact, everything had a temporal feel to it, except the woods that lined the road like the wall of a steep russet-colored canyon. Maples and alders and oaks, they were like an army that couldn’t be defeated, as if you could knock them down and they’d keep coming, keep growing. People could live out their little lives up here, farm their farms, build their houses, and the relentless woods would be waiting somewhere out back for the barns and houses to fall vacant and the fields to grow back.
It was like the woods were laughing.
After a half-hour or so, I passed through a couple of small yard-sale towns, then a bigger one with a woodturning mill at its center along the river, three pizza shops, and a gas station owned by an out-of-state chain. The gas station marked the end of civilization, as most people know it.
Across the green metal bridge over the river, there was a sign that said the town of Farmington was to the west. I turned and the truck whined its way up a grade and past the last of the houses and down a long roller-coaster hill, past a cemetery encircled with wire fence like a sheep pasture. I wondered if the fence was electrified to keep the dead from roaming.
The road vaulted up and then down, twisting and turning past a couple of abandoned barns and a stubbled field where cows stood behind barbed wire like prisoners of war. For miles, everything was green and orange, with slashes of tan, where someone had cut into an esker and hauled off the gravel. There were signs jabbed into the ground and nailed to trees saying the land was for sale, which seemed like trying to sell sand at the beach. And then there were more miles of woods and the Mount Blue range hunched darkly against the horizon to the northwest and then an intersection with a state sign, leaning crazily, that said Florence was to the right, eight miles north. I drove the eight miles and another sign, this one homemade, told me I had just crossed the Florence town limits.
I felt like I had reached the end of the earth.
In Florence, even the limits were limited. About five hundred yards from the first sign, I came over the crest of a hill and plunged down into the downtown area, which was really a cluster of about eight houses and a store.
I coasted through and looked. The houses were gathered around the remains of some sort of an old wooden mill building. The mill was falling down onto the banks of a stream and the houses were falling down in place. The one across from the store had plywood on the windows, which appeared to be some indication of disuse. Then again, the store had plywood on its windows, too, but the flashing beer sign in the one window in which glass remained said the place was open.
I pulled the truck into the dirt patch that was the store’s parking lot. There were two other trucks parked there, including another old four-wheel-drive Toyota like mine. Its bumper stickers said JUST SAY NO TO PESTICIDES and SOLAR POWER.
Bobby Mullaney’s kind of people?
I shut off the motor and sat. A grim-faced man appeared in the doorway, stared me and the truck up and down, and went back inside. A moment later another man, older and shorter, came to the door and did the same thing. The Welcome Wagon was on its way, no doubt. I sat there with newfound respect for any undercover drug cop who could come within five miles of this place undetected, much less make an arrest.
When the first guy had come to the door for a second look, I decided it was time to go in and make friends. I got out and walked to the door. There was no sign to say push or pull. I guessed wrong and pushed, then pulled the door open and went inside.
The store was one room with a low ceiling and very understated lighting. When my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I made out a few shelves of dusty groceries, a beer locker, and the two guys from the hostess committee leaning against a low, white cooler. The sign on the cooler said CRAWLERS. The two guys said nothing.
“How you doing?” I said, and the more gregarious of the two almost nodded.
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “I’m wondering if you could tell me how I could find a guy named Bobby Mullaney.”
The two guys, done up in matching green work clothes, looked at me as if I were talking on the wrong frequency and nothing was coming out of my mouth.
“Parlez anglais?” I said. “Cómo está? Nein?”
They stared. I smiled.
Something rustled out back and a door slammed and a woman appeared behind a counter to a right. I switched back to English and said hello.
“Hi,” the woman said.
It wasn’t much but it was a start.
She was in her fifties, with a smoke-weathered face and long yellowish hair parted in the middle and tied in the back. She and Coyote used the same stylist.
“I’m looking for a guy named Bobby Mullaney,” I said. “He told me he lives in town, but I never asked him where.”
The woman started to say something, then hesitated.
“Whatcha looking for Bobby for?” she said, folding her arms across her chest.
“I’m a reporter. My name’s Jack McMorrow. I met Bobby and a guy named Coyote yesterday at the Country Life Fair. We talked about doing a story on their group and I decided to take a ride up and talk to them some more.”
She looked at me. Reached behind the counter for a pack of generic cigarettes and took one out and lit it with a purple butane lighter. She puffed.
“They wanted the story, if that’s
what you’re worried about,” I said.
The woman puffed again. One of the guys cleared his throat and looked like he was about to spit on the floor but remembered he wasn’t at home. All three of them looked at me some more.
“I’m not a cop, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said.
I pulled my jacket open and the shorter guy flinched.
“See. No wire. No nine-millimeter in a shoulder holster.
I’d let you search me but we’re in mixed company.”
I grinned. They didn’t. The woman considered me some more.
“You see this road out here,” she said suddenly, smoke billowing from her mouth as she spoke.
“Yup.”
“You go up here and you take a left. And you drive out past Harrison’s place, keep going till you come to a log house. There’s a road after that, gravel, and you take that road about four miles down until you get to a fork. Take the left side of the fork and you’ll see a cemetery, and just a stone’s throw up on the right you come to another dirt road. That’s theirs.”
“Their road?”
“Their driveway.”
“How far in is their house?”
“About a mile,” the woman said. “And you best be ready to put that truck in four-wheel.”
“Mud?” I said.
“Rocks,” the short guy said, almost startling me. “Size of a basketball. Discontinued road. Ain’t plowed.”
“All washed out,” the woman said.
“How do they get in and out?”
“Slow,” the bigger guy said.
The shorter guy snorted. I grinned. The big guy stared and the woman blew smoke. I felt like family.
“Well, thanks,” I said.
I felt a sudden obligation to buy something but then I looked around. It was too early for beer, and I didn’t need any worms. I moved toward the door, then stopped.
“Oh, yeah. What about Coyote? Where can I find him?”
“Right there,” the woman said.
“He has a house on that road, too?”
“He has the same house,” she said. “They live together.”
“All three of them?”
“Four, with the kid,” the woman said.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”
She looked doubtful, and then she looked away at the two guys and when her gaze came back to me, the doubt was gone, replaced by an impassive screen that said nothing at all.
4
The boys in the store had exaggerated. The rocks in the road weren’t the size of basketballs. Most were the size of softballs, so that the road was no rougher than your average rocky streambed. As I lurched along in first gear, it occurred to me that I’d hate to be in a hurry to get in there.
I’d hate even more to be in a hurry to get out.
I followed the road, reassured by the phone line strung fifteen feet up on the trees to my right. Beyond the big roadside trees, the woods were mostly second-growth poplar and birch and maple, with occasional slash piles still showing in the brambles. The Mullaneys’ acreage had been cheap for a reason. It was cut over, and up here, where woods meant timber and pulp, and timber and pulp meant cash money, cut-over land wasn’t worth much.
But there were things other than trees that you could grow as a cash crop, and I wondered whether the Mullaneys and their live-in buddy had adopted marijuana as more than a cause.
High-grade pot, all resin-filled buds, went for more than two hundred dollars an ounce, two to three thousand dollars a pound. A single, well-tended plant could yield ten ounces or more. A slash in the woods could support a family for months. A bigger operation, with plants scattered in patches over miles of remote woods, could make somebody rich, or put them in prison. It was a gamble, but up in these forgotten faraway hills, any occupation beyond welfare and food stamps was a gamble. And of all the ways you could gamble in a place like Florence, Maine, growing marijuana had the best odds and the biggest payoffs.
So what did Bobby Mullaney do? And Coyote? Whatever it was, I thought, bumping up a rise, it was a hell of a commute.
The phone wire kept going and so did I. Just when I was beginning to wonder if the pounding would ever end, the road went uphill steeply and turned to the left, and there was a hand-painted sign that said NO TRESPASSING. I trespassed anyway, and a truck came into view, an old black four-wheel-drive Ford, backed into a clearing fringed by wild blackberries. Then there was another truck, a red Chevy four-wheel-drive with a wood body and coppercolored doors. Beside the Chevy was a Subaru station wagon. It was white and spattered with rust. Fifty yards farther was home sweet home.
It was a funky sort of house, all unpainted wood and odd-size windows, built around a blue-and-white travel trailer that showed at the core of the building like a suitcase from which the rest of the place had been unfolded. There was a big vegetable garden to the right, fenced with chicken wire, and beyond that, dome-shaped stacks of firewood, neatly piled. I heard a rustle behind me and a dark red chicken scurried along the garden fence. Behind the garden was a weathered-wood chicken coop sort of thing, and another chicken showed in the door. Next to the chicken house there was a black table-like contraption that looked like some sort of photoelectric equipment. Green-and-white wires ran from the black thing to the back door, which eased open as I sat and watched.
A woman looked out.
She was short and slight, dressed in jeans and a black sweater and boots. She was halfway out the door and I gave her a little wave from the truck seat, then popped the door open. When I did, she stepped the rest of the way out of the door, showing that she was holding a gun, the long barrel pointed down.
Maybe I should have called first.
I stepped out of the truck but stood behind the open door. The gun appeared to be a shotgun, and if it was loaded with bird shot, the door would protect my vital organs. One of the things they don’t teach in Journalism 101.
“Hi,” I called, forcing a smile. “I’m Jack McMorrow. Looking for Bobby Mullaney. Is this the right house?”
“What are you looking for him for?” the woman called.
“I’m a reporter. The guy he met yesterday at the fair. I told him I’d come see him about a story.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jack McMorrow. I met Coyote, too.”
She eyed me for a long moment.
“Come on in,” she said, and she and her gun went back inside. I grabbed a notebook off of the seat of the truck, and holding it in front of me like a white flag, followed.
I stepped into the room and felt the warmth of a woodstove and the smell of some sort of herbs. There were bunches of them hanging from the rafters, and squash and potatoes spread on newspapers in the corner of the room. The wall art was posters of photographs of wilderness places. The shotgun, an over-and-under model, leaned against the wall beside the door. A place for everything and everything in its place.
The woman wasn’t in sight, and I stood there awkwardly for a moment. Maybe she’d gone to slip on something more comfortable, like a nice .357. I waited, and suddenly she came from behind a big cinder-block chimney and walked toward me. Unarmed.
“I’m Melanie,” she said, her hand held out.
“Jack McMorrow.”
She shook my hand firmly and glanced toward the shotgun.
“Sorry about that, but you never know out here. And the cops might as well be in Boston, if you try to call ’em. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Sure,” I said. “Tea would be great.”
No shots fired. No hard feelings.
Melanie turned and went back behind the chimney. She was fair-skinned, with red curly hair pulled back, and looked more like a Mullaney than her husband did. She was nice-looking enough, in a handsome sort of way, but with the telltale sign of an unprivileged upbringing: slightly crooked teeth.
Dishes rattled and Melanie came back holding a mug, a small earthenware pitcher, a wicker strainer, and a jar that matched the pitcher. She set
the stuff on the overturned packing crate that served as a table, and then she pulled up an old metal folding chair. I sat down on the chair, with my knees sticking out, and felt like a dad at a little girl’s tea party. Melanie went and got her mug from behind the chimney and came back and sat down on an old brown couch, against the wall, next to the door—and the gun.
“He’s not here,” she said brightly. “They’re working in the woods. You want me to do that for you?”
I was fumbling with the wicker thing and the spoon.
“Sure,” I said.
Melanie got up and leaned over the table. She was very close to me, but very matter-of-fact about it, like she could have been cleaning my teeth. She scooped green tea into the strainer, then poured hot water through it and into the mug. She waited while the water ran through, then poured some more.
“It’s green tea. Japanese,” she said.
“Oh. Do you have some sort of specialty store where you can get it?”
“The health food store in Farmington. That’s the only place I shop. The rest of the stuff we grow or barter for. I just traded twenty pumpkins for some steaks. I’m a vegetarian, but the boys still like their red meat.”
“I’m sure,” I said. I couldn’t picture Coyote biting into a patty of soy substitute.
Melanie sat back down and I sipped the tea. It was hot but tasted like mown grass. She sipped hers.
“Mmmm, that’s good,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hits the spot. Do you expect Bobby back soon?”
“I’m not sure. They didn’t say.”
“I guess I should have called first. Their crew works on Sunday?”
Melanie crossed her legs. Her boots were worn. The knees of her pants were faded.
“Oh, they’re not working on a crew. They’re working themselves. With the army truck. It’s not an army truck now. It used to be. Now it’s a wood-hauler thing.”
“They cut on your land?”
“Firewood. There’s a shitload of dead stuff out there. That’s how we heat this place.”
I looked around.