by Gerry Boyle
It was 7:15 p.m. when I crossed the bridge into South Portland, circled back to the harbor, and pulled up in front of Roxanne’s condo. Her Subaru wagon was there. Her lights were on. I went to the front door and rang the bell, then unlocked the door and went in.
“Honey, I’m home,” I called.
“I’m up here,” Roxanne called back.
I went up the carpeted stairs two at a time, turned left and right and into the bedroom.
“What?” I said. “No negligee?”
“You should hope not. I didn’t know you were coming.”
“You could get gussied up every night. Just in case. You know, those high heels with the little puffy things on them.”
“A cold day in hell . . .” Roxanne said.
“Where’s your sense of romance?”
“Where’s my glass of wine?”
Roxanne was sitting cross-legged on the bed. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt, and there were legal pads and official-looking documents scattered all around her. I went to her and she leaned toward me and we kissed.
“Wine me,” she said.
I went down to the kitchen and opened a bottle of California merlot from a winery I’d never heard of. The label was very pretty. I glanced at it, then filled the biggest wineglass I could find, and took a sip. It wasn’t bad, but the label was better. I took a Shipyard ale out of the refrigerator and headed for the stairs, then stopped and turned around and got another one, just in case.
Me and the Scouts.
Back upstairs. Roxanne hadn’t moved. I handed her the glass and, shoving some papers aside, sat on the edge of the bed.
“What’s all this?”
“Those two kids I was telling you about.”
“The one with the kid who went to get Cheerios for his sister?”
“And the mother who keeps forgetting to come home,” Roxanne said. “I’m getting the petition ready.”
“Petition saying what?”
“That we want to keep the kids. They’re in temporary foster care now.”
“Mom’s memory isn’t improving?”
“She’s burnt.”
“And still burning?”
“Word is she’s discovered crack now.”
“Not exactly on the cutting edge, is she?”
“This is Maine,” Roxanne said.
“The way life should be,” I said.
I picked up the closest paper. It was a psychological evaluation done by an outfit in Portland. At the top it said it was confidential and privileged, to be interpreted by “a competent clinician only.”
“What’d they find out?”
“I can’t tell you,” Roxanne said.
“If you could tell me, what would you tell me?”
“That it says he’s developing a psychotic condition.”
“At nine years old?”
“Yup.”
“From being left alone?”
“He was abused by his father when he was little,” Roxanne said.
“He’s still little.”
“That’s right.”
I read on and shook my head. Impulsiveness. Low frustration tolerance. Angry. Defiant.
“Hypervigilant style. What’s that mean?”
“He doesn’t trust anybody so he doesn’t ever let his guard down,” Roxanne said.
“Nine years old. God. What about the little sister?”
“She’s better, but give her time.”
I put the paper down. Roxanne sipped her wine.
“Sometimes I wonder how you can do this,” I said.
“Sometimes I wonder how people can’t.”
“And you keep coming back for more.”
“Speaking of which,” Roxanne said.
I looked at her.
“More wine?” I asked.
This time, it was her turn to shake her head.
The papers were in a pile on the floor. My boxers were missing in action. Roxanne’s clothes were scattered around the room as if the house belonged to Auntie Em.
We ended up with our feet at the head of the bed. My heart was pounding and my head still spinning with images of Roxanne. Laughing, moving, pushing, devouring, slamming, and then coming to a screeching halt.
Literally.
“You’re gorgeous,” I said, running my hand down her side, from her shoulder to her knee. And back.
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
“Pretty of you to think so.”
“Where’s that come from?” Roxanne asked, her head back, her breasts poised. I looked at her.
“Yike,” I said.
“Yike?”
“Oh. No. That’s Hemingway. The end of The Sun Also Rises.”
“Which comes from the Bible.”
“Ecclesiastes,” I said. “ ‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.’ ”
“I love it when you quote Scripture.”
“I love you all the time.”
“And I love you all the time,” Roxanne said. “Why don’t you move in and be my concubine?”
“My funny concubine. That’s a song, isn’t it?”
“But if you keep that up, I’ll have to gag you.”
“Oh boy,” I said. “Just don’t lose the key to the handcuffs. I’ve got places to go, people to see.”
“Name one.”
“Well, tomorrow I have to go to Lewiston and look up a guy named Paco.”
“What for?”
“Oh, well. It’s sort of a long story.”
Roxanne turned toward me.
“So go ahead,” she said.
“Well, you know those pot guys you liked so much?”
“Yup.”
“They’re missing.”
“What’s the bad news?” Roxanne said.
I started with the phone call from Melanie. From there, I went on to coffee at the restaurant in Madison, my inspection of the Mullaneys’ abode, and sitting in the undercover Blazer while Johnston told me about his son’s drug problem. Roxanne, still naked, had hoisted herself up on one elbow.
“You’re nuts,” she said.
“No, it’ll be a good story. Better than just dueling propagandists from the two sides of this marijuana thing. Write about the nitty-gritty. The trail of the drug trade.”
“Is littered with dead people.”
“Not in Lewiston, Maine. This isn’t New York.”
“You think this Paco guy is going to be sitting on the porch saying ‘ayuh’?” Roxanne said.
“No, but—”
“ ‘Sure, Mr. Reporter. Come on in. I’ll tell you what it’s like to be a drug trafficker. It all started when I was three . . .’ ”
“Rox—”
“Jack, I can’t believe you’re going to do this. Looking for guys who didn’t come back from some drug deal?”
“It isn’t a kilo of cocaine.”
“It’s drugs. It’s money. It’s a lot of money. It’s people who go to prison if they get caught. It’s people who carry guns.”
“So I’ll bring Clair.”
“Jack.”
She pulled herself up and knelt, facing me, her face flushed but this time for a different reason. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed.
“Don’t go there,” Roxanne said.
“Roxanne, you do more dangerous stuff every time you go to a house to ask about some kid being beat up.”
“No, I—”
“It’s true. I’m not taking kids away. I’m just asking if they’ve seen Bobby and Coyote. They say, ‘No, never heard of ’em,’ I’m out the door. I don’t even have to go in the door.”
“Do you think they’re going to tell you?” Roxanne asked. “Like, ‘Yeah, they were here, but we didn’t have the money so we killed them. Any other questions?’ ”
“Roxanne,” I said. “I just want to see it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s real. And I need to get back into it once in a while. I don’t cover wars.
I don’t cover gangs. I don’t ride around Manhattan with a photographer and a police radio anymore. I want to write a good story. Make ’em sit up at the Globe. A good, real raw story. I’m sorry, but that’s the way I feel. It’s what I do, and if I can’t keep pushing toward something then . . . then what am I doing?”
She looked at me, her eyes full of worry. Then she got up and went to the closet and took out a bathrobe, whipping the tie around her waist. At the door, Roxanne paused.
“You take care of yourself, because I love you,” she said, without looking at me.
“You do the same,” I said. “For the same reason.”
So we had cheese and crackers and carrots and celery in front of the big window in the dining room, and watched the traffic on the ship channel. The Scotia Prince ferry was lit up like Disney World, and cars were loading into the bow for the overnight run to Halifax.
“We should do that sometime,” I said.
“Yeah,” Roxanne said, dressed now, her feet up on the coffee table.
“We could have dinner and a drink and then retire to our cabin.”
“To read,” she said. “Twin beds.”
“Of course.”
“Do you think we’d rock the boat?”
“I doubt it,” Roxanne said. “Our rocking would be countered by somebody else rocking the other way on the other side of the ship.”
“If the ship is rocking, don’t come knocking. Remember the last time? When we had Skip’s sailboat?”
“Yeah.”
She smiled softly.
“I think they picked us up on Loran,” I said.
“Was that the white thing that spun around, way up high?”
“No, I think the white thing was radar. But I’m not sure.”
“Good thing we never left the dock,” Roxanne said.
“Good thing.”
I put my left arm around her shoulder. With my thumb, I could feel a pulse near her heart. I counted the beats, watched the cars roll up the ramp and onto the ferry like hippos onto Noah’s Ark.
“They have slot machines on there,” I said.
“What a waste of time and money.”
“I know. But some people just love to gamble.”
“I don’t,” Roxanne said.
I looked at her. Her face was in resigned repose.
“No more than I have to,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“You know why? Because I couldn’t stand to lose. I wish you weren’t going down there.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t seem worth it.”
“Three hundred bucks? Maybe if I had one of those cushy state jobs . . .”
“You know what I mean. Those people just don’t seem worth it. Thirty years old and all they care about is sitting around and getting stoned. Why don’t they just grow up?”
“I don’t know. I kind of admire them in a way. The woman with MS. They’re willing to fight for what they believe in. There’s something sort of naive about them. It’s like they think the government is corrupt and out to get them, but they haven’t given up. They’re not totally cynical. They believe they can change something they think is wrong.”
Roxanne’s eyebrows flickered skeptically.
“They should channel all that energy into something real instead of just getting high. Volunteer in a hospice. Work with kids. Cook in a shelter. I mean, get a life.”
“I take it you still don’t want to sign a petition.”
“Just one to keep you here with me,” Roxanne said, turning to me.
“I’ll be back tomorrow night. What do you want to bet? I’ll give you odds.”
Roxanne just shook her head and looked out at the ferry and the lights and the red-and-white running lights of a sailboat, motoring toward the slips.
“There are some things you don’t joke about,” she said. “Losing you is one.”
Roxanne was up at five to go over her documents one more time. I lay in bed and watched her for a while and then rolled out of bed. When I came out of the shower, I pulled on my jeans and sat on the edge of the bed again.
“I hope it goes well for you,” I said.
“Thanks. I hope it goes well for them.”
“They couldn’t be in better hands.”
“We’ll see.”
“Maybe I’ll come back and help you celebrate.”
Roxanne, still in her robe, smiled. A rueful smirk.
“The first time I did this, I had to go take the child. Me and another guy and a deputy. The little guy had been beaten and locked in a closet and all this horrible stuff, but still, there he was, hanging on to his mother’s leg, sobbing. I got home, I just lost it. I cried all night.”
Her eyes misted at the thought.
“But it’s for the best.”
“I need you to keep telling me that. I need you to be here to keep telling me that.”
She reached out and took my hand.
“Be careful.”
“You, too,” I said. “Fight the good fight.”
“Don’t you.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll call you. Or I’ll just show up.”
“I’d like that,” Roxanne said, and she kissed me and then her face jelled, from soft to hard. As she got up and headed for the shower, she already had her armor on and was ready for battle.
She was a tough act to follow.
We drove out together, past the now-empty ferry terminal, over the crest of downtown Portland and down the other side. I swung onto the interstate ramp and beeped once. Roxanne kept going up Forest Avenue. She beeped twice. I caught a last glimpse of her hand as it waved.
I drove north with Mozart on the radio, cranked up to be heard over the whir of the knobby tires. After ten minutes, the din became unbearable and I turned Mozart off. That left me with my thoughts of Roxanne—how lucky I was to have found her, how lucky I was to know her. I wondered where she got her resolve. From her father, a workaholic surgeon who died of a massive coronary while she was in college at Dartmouth? From her mother, who six years later still hadn’t forgiven the God who took her husband away? What kept Roxanne on the front lines of this war to save children? The same need that was sending me to Lewiston?
I’d asked her, more than once, and the only answer I’d gotten had something to do with her father dying.
“Since Dad, I decided I had to make every minute count,” Roxanne had said.
So she had been out there fighting for four years. Her colleagues had fallen away, burned out and worn out. But Roxanne didn’t allow herself even that much self-pity. She didn’t allow herself any at all.
Roxanne was a rush of focused, directed energy. When it was aimed at her job, it made her relentless. When it was aimed at me, as it had been the night before, it did the same.
I smiled, remembering. And a blast from the truck coming up beside me sent me back into my own lane.
So for the next hour, I tried to keep my mind off of Roxanne and on the road and the task at hand. It wasn’t easy, but that was why they paid me the big money. Three hundred bucks to drive around the far reaches of Somerset County, to trek to Lewiston in search of Bobby and Coyote. But they weren’t paying me for that one. That one, I’d throw in for free.
And I was excited about it, Roxanne’s concerns notwithstanding. I didn’t dismiss these people as easily as she did, but then I didn’t spend my days the way she did. They were likable, except for Coyote, of course, and even he was intriguing. I liked sitting in the Blazer with the cop. I even liked being patted down, as long as they didn’t take my Swiss Army knife.
I didn’t know that I’d learn anything knocking on doors in Lewiston, but I’d be out there. I’d be in the midst of the tumult, the whirling, twirling, wheeling, dealing that was life on this particular edge. I would be in the thick of it. Again.
I drove north to Augusta, over the black ribbon of the Kennebec River and up Route 3 toward Belfast. On Route 3, I followed the slow-moving foliage fans from
New York and Pennsylvania until the turnoff in Palermo, where I swung west through the forgotten Waldo County hills toward the hollow that was home. When I turned onto the dump road in Prosperity, I almost hit Clair’s big green Ford head-on.
He swerved, stopped and backed up. I did the same.
“Goddamn flatlander,” Clair said.
“Sorry. I can’t drive and listen to opera on public radio at the same time.”
“Should’ve blown up the bridge at Kittery a long time ago. This state’s going straight to hell.”
“We’d sneak around and come in from the north at Jackman,” I said. “What’re you up to?”
“A run to the store in Albion. Ran out of shingle nails.”
“I’ve got some.”
“Ran out of shingles, too. Doing the back of the barn.”
He pushed his John Deere cap back and smoothed his silver hair. The motor in the big Ford thumped dependably, like a dog’s wagging tail.
“Where you been?”
“Roxanne’s.”
“I figured. What a fine girl like that sees in you is beyond me. One of life’s eternal mysteries.”
“You’ve said that.”
“Have I?” Clair said.
“Once or twice.”
“Must be getting senile.”
Clair smiled and put both of his big hands on the steering wheel and stretched, his muscles like taut cords below the rolled sleeves of his flannel shirt.
“Gonna be around?” he said. “I’d let you hammer a few shingles, just so you don’t forget what working is altogether.”
“What do you mean? I’m working hard right now.”
“You hide it well.”
“Thank you.”
“So you’re not going to be around?”
“I just stopped to pick up clothes and a notebook and stuff. I’ve got to go to Lewiston.”
“What’s in Lewiston?” Clair asked.
“It’s kind of a long story,” I said, once again.
Clair reached over and put his truck in gear.
“I got time,” he said, and pulled the Ford over to the side of the road. I backed up behind him and we shut our motors off and got out. We stood there under a two-hundred-year-old maple, with pale yellow leaves falling occasionally like flurries from the flat blue sky, and I told him my story.
Hat pushed back, hands in the pockets of his jeans, Clair listened until I was finished. And then he studied me for a moment.