Pot Shot

by Gerry Boyle

  I ate and finished another pint of ale and then made a pot of tea. Then I took the pot and a mug and went to the computer and sat down and sipped and typed. Everything I could remember of my conversation with Stephen. All of my notes from my conversation with the Mullaneys and Coyote. Notes on our visit to the marijuana patch. All female plants. Buds that don’t go to seed.

  After a couple of hours, I found myself sitting in the blue light of the computer screen and just staring. I thought about the odd places people end up, the random turns lives can take, the fact that so much of what we are is dictated by circumstances beyond our control.

  And I thought of the power that these parents have to mold their kids in whatever shape they choose, how kids like Stephen stay in that shape until they grow strong enough to break free, like something that has come alive and smashed its way out of a tomb.

  I slept well, though not as well as I did when Roxanne was wrapped around me. When I got up, the sun was creeping up, backlighting the trees so that they glowed yellow and orange like stained glass. I eased my way down the loft stairs, put water on the stove, and took a shower. The tea steeped while I got dressed, and then I drank a cup with toast and thought of Roxanne in court, my beautiful, if not virginal, Jeanne d’Arc. I hoped it went well.

  Pouring a second cup of tea, I went to the table and the phone. I got out my list of names and numbers from the restaurant in Madison and started calling.

  I didn’t need a lot, just enough to fill the holes. For three hundred bucks, they weren’t going to be filled to the brim. After all, I may have been a freelancer, but I was a professional. And I had my pride, even if all else failed.

  But it didn’t. In fact, the morning went smoothly. I called Sam with the gold glasses first and he was home, even answered the phone. He told me he grew up in Colorado, had a master’s degree in English literature, and had taught in high school and colleges. Now he stayed home while his wife worked as a nurse in Waterville. She worked and he took care of their son, who was seven and thought his father was a criminal.

  I asked Sam if he could recall exactly what his son had said.

  “I remember every word,” Sam said. “I’d been arrested for trafficking, a few little plants in the woods, and it had been in the paper that morning. He’d heard us talking about it, and he’d been crying, you could tell. He didn’t want to talk at first, but I sat with him, and I remember I had this book on my lap, one of his books. He was leaning over and he started to cry again and a couple of tears ran down his face and landed on the page—it was a library book—and he looked up at me and said, ‘But Dad, I thought you were one of the good guys.’ “

  “Do you consider yourself one of the good guys?” I asked, my voice soft and calm as I scribbled madly off camera.

  “Yeah, I do, Mr. McMorrow,” Sam said. “I’m really trying to right a wrong. I really think that. I think a terrible injustice is being done in the name of fighting this so-called war on drugs. But sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. Fighting back, I mean.”

  “And this was one of those times?”

  “This was one of those times. Yes.”

  It was all I needed, or almost all.

  “Sam,” I said, knowing it would be an awkward transition. “Could you tell me again how you spell your last name?”

  It was good stuff, and it kept on coming. I called Darrin and he went on at great length about how his truck had been confiscated, which left him with no way to get to work at the tannery in Farmington, so he’d had to hitchhike, and even if he got up at four in the morning, he sometimes had trouble getting rides, so he was late.

  “So they canned my ass,” Darrin said. “Now me and the old lady are on welfare and food stamps. All for a stupid little plant.”

  “You mean you only had one?” I asked.

  “Well, no. I had . . . Well, they charged me with, like, seventeen or eighteen. But they weren’t mine.”

  “Whose were they?”

  “No comment,” Darrin said.

  Kathy commented, mostly by reading from the Book of Genesis. She said religious use of marijuana had given her insights into the spiritual world and enhanced her ability to pray to the Lord our God.

  “Marijuana laws in this country are a clear infringement on religious freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution,” she said.

  I thanked Kathy for her time. She said she’d pray for me.

  “And the sinners, too?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. “Just a joke,” I said.

  I was on a roll, reporting in the zone, as they say in sports. Roberta was home and she described her illness in great detail, saying that before she bought a small amount of marijuana to try to ease her pain, she had never broken a law, never had a traffic ticket, never been late on a car payment.

  “When they arrested me, the two policemen said they were very sorry. One of them called me the next day to make sure I was okay.”

  “But they have to enforce the law.”

  “And the law needs to be changed,” Roberta said. “My medication is two hundred eighty-three dollars a month. All I need is a little plant out in the garden.”

  And on it went the rest of the sunny morning. People were home. People were talking. Even when I made calls to get the police side, I scored.

  At the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department, there was a sergeant named Johnston who seemed to pop up in all the drug-bust anecdotes. I called the number in the book, a dispatcher answered, and then Sergeant Johnston was on the phone.

  I made my pitch. He apparently listened.

  “I’d rather talk to you in person,” Johnston said.

  “I live in Prosperity. It’s kind of hard to get over there.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. In the background, a police radio crackled.

  “Okay, Mr. McMorrow,” Johnston began suddenly. “Here’s the short version. Number one, I get paid to enforce the law. Marijuana is illegal. Possessing small amounts is a misdemeanor. Growing it for profit is a felony. That’s the law. I didn’t write it.”

  He paused. Writing on a legal pad, I caught up.

  “Number two, and this is my personal opinion, you start legalizing drugs like this, where does it stop? All this stuff about it being a natural herb and all that, well, mushrooms are natural and they can put a fourteen-year-old kid on another planet. Cocaine comes from a plant. Grows all over South America. Coca plant. LSD comes from mold spores. Natural as hell. You have kids, McMorrow?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, when you do, it changes the way you feel about this stuff. Hey, my kid smokes marijuana, it’s not the end of the world. He drives into a tree while he’s stoned and drunk, it could be. Hey, I know what alcohol can do. I’ve seen it in my own family. But bottom line is this: I can’t arrest you for buying a case of Bud. I have to arrest you for buying marijuana.”

  “Or growing it.”

  “Or growing it,” Johnston said.

  “I’ve been up to Florence, around the area. Must be a tough place to infiltrate. At least in New York or someplace, there are people.”

  “We have our ways. You from New York or someplace?”

  “I’ve worked there.”

  “What brings you up here?”

  “Needed a change.”

  There was a pause, as if Johnston had processed that answer and filed it under “Crap.”

  “Thanks for your help,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  “No problem. Hey, so you’ve been around Florence. Let me guess. Bobby Mullaney and his wife, and his sidekick, there.”

  “Coyote.”

  “Yeah. I knew it was something like that.”

  “What’s his real name?” I said.

  “We don’t know,” Johnston said.

  “But you’ve inquired?”

  “No comment. Hey, I got a call, Mr. McMorrow. But if you’re around Florence, we’ll meet.”

  He didn’t say maybe.

  I hung up the phone and
wrote. Next to Johnston’s name I put “tough and smart.” The Mullaneys had picked a formidable foe.

  Next I tried the Drug Enforcement Agency in Augusta. An answering machine hissed. I left a message, and five minutes later the phone rang. The guy on the line identified himself as Martin Jones. He had a radio voice and was pretty slick, for a cop. But he gave me only a couple of things worth using.

  The Florence area had been targeted for special attention after informants said marijuana grown there was making its way to cities in southern Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, Jones said.

  “These aren’t all hippies drying a couple of ounces for sitting around the woodstove in the winter,” he said, in a practiced tone that made me think he’d said the same thing many times before. “Money attracts serious criminals. And there’s a lot of money to be made in marijuana.” And there was, at least by my increasingly modest standards. Three hundred bucks, to be exact. If I kept my nose to the grindstone, I could knock this story off by two o’clock, zap it into the Globe’s computer, and spend the rest of the beautiful autumn afternoon tromping around the woods with my binoculars, finishing with cocktails at the Varneys’, or at least a beer with Clair in the barn.

  All rewards weren’t monetary.

  So that’s what I did, typing away at my little keyboard, eyeing my notes, underlining the best quotes, puzzling over different leads.

  FLORENCE, MAINE—Accused marijuana trafficker Sam Sheedy says he can accept the fact that Maine drug agents think he’s a criminal. What shook him, Sheedy says, was his seven-year-old son coming to the same conclusion.

  “He was leaning over and he started to cry again and a couple of tears ran down his face and landed on the page,” Sheedy said, at his home here recently. “It was a library book. And he looked up at me and he said, ‘But Dad, I thought you were one of the good guys.’ ”

  Not bad.

  FLORENCE, MAINE—Some people might say that when Bobby and Melanie Mullaney fled Valley, Mass., for the woods of this tiny hamlet in northern Somerset County, they were simply trading one drug scene for another.

  The Mullaneys wouldn’t agree. They say there’s no comparison between the cocaine-fueled crime they left behind and the marijuana legalization movement they’ve joined in rural Maine.

  A little flat, but it had a good Massachusetts hook.

  FLORENCE, MAINE—Roberta Florio was arrested recently when she attempted to buy an ounce of marijuana from an undercover police officer outside a Waterville bar. The officer came to her car because Florio, 48, suffers from multiple sclerosis and finds walking difficult.

  “I wasn’t trying to buy drugs,” said Florio, a fervent supporter of the growing marijuana movement in this corner of western Maine. “I was trying to buy medicine.”

  The quote was good, but Florio wasn’t really typical of the movement.

  And then there was another lead, one that had been skulking in the back of my mind all morning.

  FLORENCE, MAINE—When 15-year-old Stephen was sent home from school because he smelled of marijuana, his mother and stepfather??? went right over to talk to the principal.

  And threatened to picket the school.

  Welcome to the world of the marijuana legalization movement, a growing presence in this corner of western Maine. . . .

  That one would require some more work. I didn’t know Stephen’s last name, for one thing. I’d have to corroborate the incident with the school people. And last but not least, I’d have to clear it with Stephen.

  But only if I wanted to sleep at night.

  I leaned back in my chair, and eyed the screen. It had been the same at the Times, at the Providence Journal, the Hartford Courant. Some of my best work had been lost to the red pen of my nagging conscience.

  So I went with the Sheedy lead, deciding against putting Roberta up there, because the medicinal-use angle was important but not really representative, and the drug-buy anecdote wasn’t all that compelling. But you’d have to be illiterate not to be hooked by the recounting of the moment a father realized he had lost the respect of his son.

  I read it and reread it, and then plunged in. The inches flew by, the way they did when a news story had some meat to it. Describing the town, the unsettling remoteness of that corner of Maine. The Mullaneys and their petitions, their contention that marijuana users were being persecuted on behalf of the big corporations that sell beer and cigarettes.

  The eclectic band of supporters, from Darrin to Roberta to Kathy. Johnston’s counterpoint to their legalization arguments. The DEA guy’s admonition that people should not be lulled into thinking marijuana growers were all harmless hippies.

  It was 2:25. I was behind schedule.

  I reread the story and there still were holes. I needed to know the year the Mullaneys came to Maine. How long they’d lived in Valley. Stephen’s last name, maybe. How many acres they owned. Their ages and past occupations.

  The phone rang. I picked it up.

  “Jack McMorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Melanie. Melanie Mullaney.”

  “Oh, hi. I was just about to call you. This very minute. I had a couple more questions, little things. Like how long you’ve lived in Florence, that kind of stuff.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  She faltered.

  “Okay, but the reason I’m calling, I mean, I’m calling because, it’s about Bobby.”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, umm, I’m not sure how . . . Well, he’s gone.”

  10

  I sat there, a little confused.

  “Gone where?” I said.

  “Just gone. Gone to, uh, oh God, gone to Lewiston. I mean, oh my God.”

  Melanie’s voice broke. She breathed heavily, holding off a sob.

  “Well, I don’t really understand. What does that—”

  “He went last night. Right after you left. Coyote went, too. In Bobby’s Subaru.”

  “And he didn’t come back?”

  “No, and he hasn’t called, and he said he’d call and he’d be back late. I mean, late last night. Now it’s almost three and he hasn’t called or anything.”

  “What was he going to do in Lewiston?”

  Melanie hesitated.

  “He had business,” she said.

  “So, I guess I’m not sure . . . Have you called the police? I mean, if you’re that worried, they could spot that Subaru down there, I’m sure. You know where he was going? You think he had an accident on the way home or something? I don’t mean to be rude, Melanie, but I don’t get what you’re—”

  “I can’t call the police. Mr. McMorrow, Jack, I think we need to talk. Something’s wrong here.”

  “You don’t want to talk on the phone? Is that it?”

  “I can’t. I mean, oh God, you must think I’m crazy. I don’t know what to do. I’m all alone here, and—”

  “Well, I’d be glad to talk to you.”

  “How ’bout the restaurant in Madison? I can be there in an hour. I know this sounds nuts, but you’ll understand when I explain it more.”

  “It’ll take me an hour to get there. I’ve got to file this story. Umm, does this change the story, do you think?”

  “The story,” Melanie said. “Oh, yeah. I don’t know. It, uh, I don’t know. I’ll see you there in an hour. Okay? An hour?”

  I looked at my watch. I said okay. I hung up the phone and looked at the computer screen, humming away as if everything were just fine, the deluded contraption.

  Something told me I’d been right to keep the Mullaneys out of the lead.

  Melanie was sitting at the counter by the cash register when I came through the door, but she swung off the stool with her mug in her hand and, without speaking, walked to a table on the far wall. The table was halfway between the front window and the kitchen door, underneath a painting of a deer vaulting a fallen tree.

  She pulled out a chair and sat down without saying hello. I sat down across from her. We both k
ept our jackets on. Melanie looked over toward the counter so that I saw her in profile. Her hair looked like it had been pulled back hurriedly and her skin was taut. She looked haggard.

  Finally she looked at me.

  “You must think I’m nuts,” Melanie said.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  I smiled. She didn’t. A young woman in jeans and a University of Maine sweatshirt banged out of the swinging metal doors, coffeepot in hand, and swooped down on the table. She asked how we were doing that day. I said we were doing all right. Melanie said nothing.

  The coffee was strong and Melanie took a swallow from her refilled cup. She drank it black. No green tea this time.

  I sipped my coffee and waited.

  “This has to be off the record,” Melanie began, both hands wrapped around her mug.

  “Okay,” I said. I was easy.

  “Bobby didn’t come home last night. And I know you’ve probably heard this before, but he doesn’t do that. I mean, ever.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “He went to Lewiston.”

  I must have looked unimpressed.

  “It isn’t what it sounds like,” Melanie said.

  “It doesn’t sound like anything yet.”

  “Yeah, well, what is it in these things most of the time? The guy goes to some bar and gets drunk and goes off with some barfly.”

  “And then doesn’t dare to come home,” I said.

  “He wasn’t going to a bar. Not to drink, I mean.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was going on—I guess you’d call it business.”

  “Selling life insurance on the side?”

  Melanie blanched.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She swallowed coffee. I noticed her fingernails were cracked and a little dirty.

  “Well, Bobby was going down there on business. We have this, well, sort of business enterprise thing, I guess you’d call it.”

  “You sell pot,” I said.

  “You figured that out?”

  “I can’t picture Bobby and Coyote selling Amway. Is he gone, too?”