by Gerry Boyle
“You’re nuts,” he said.
Clair wanted me to stay and help shingle his barn. Then he wanted to come with me and bring his Mauser deer rifle. Then he wanted to come without the Mauser. Then he said I was nuts, again.
“You’re just gonna walk up and knock on some crazy druggie’s door?” Clair said, as I came down the loft stairs, changed into jeans and a dark blue chamois shirt but not shaved.
“Right,” I said.
“Just show him your reporter’s card?”
“You’ve been talking to Roxanne.”
“You ought to start listening to one of us.”
“I do listen. And then I ignore what you say.”
“Leave me the address. In case somebody wants to know,” Clair said.
I took the paper out of my wallet, scrawled the address on a page of reporter’s notebook, and handed it to him.
“Amazing how far some people will go to avoid honest work,” Clair said.
“About sixty miles,” I said.
It turned out to be sixty-six, from my house to the Lewiston line, the other side of a town called Greene. After an hour and ten minutes of woods and farms, used-car lots and mini-malls, I slowed as I descended the Androscoggin River Valley and headed into the big city.
Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice said, “You’re nuts.”
I ignored that one, too.
13
Lewiston was a tired mill city, home to forty thousand hardworking, clean-living people who went to work every morning, came home every night, had supper with the family, and a big dinner after Sunday Mass in one of the big stone cathedrals that loomed over the narrow streets like castles.
I wasn’t looking for those people.
The Lewiston street map in my atlas showed Poplar Street as being off Park Street, which ran one block above Lisbon Street, which was off Main just above the canal and the mills. I drove past the quiet neighborhoods east of the center of the city, in the direction of downtown. Suddenly the signs said I was on Main Street, which poured down toward the river like a sluiceway. The plain Victorian houses turned to law offices and medical buildings, and then there was a big brick hospital on my right. As I stared up at it, I almost ran into a meter maid driving a three-wheel scooter.
Meter maids. The big city.
I missed Lisbon Street and swung left at the next street, Canal. I drove slowly, staring across the canal at the sprawling redbrick mills. They had made shoes here. Blankets. Bedspreads and towels. An entire city had grown up around churning machinery driven by the cold current of the Androscoggin River. With ornate clock towers and finely arched windows, the mills were graceful, dignified monuments to the Industrial Revolution.
Soon to be tombstones.
In cities like these across New England, people in government and business struggled to keep the few mills still operating. Others looked, mostly in vain, for uses for massive antique buildings that stretched for miles along riverfronts. This was an uphill battle because the mills had long ago outlived their usefulness. There was no reason to make things in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or Connecticut when you could make them far cheaper in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, or the Republic of China.
Nobody needs a Maine river to make shoes. They just need a hundred hardworking Koreans.
Times changed, turning cities into museums populated by those who could still make a decent life and living, but more and more by people who had given up on the idea or had never had it at all.
And here they were.
As I swung up onto lower Lisbon Street, I was hit by a blast of déjà vu. Men stood in clumps of two or three outside bars with blacked-out windows. A tired hooker clipclopped down the sidewalk in heels, stockings, and a black leather skirt. When she walked by me, I could see that her hair was dyed red with a gray band of roots. She looked like somebody’s grandmother, playing dress-up.
There were pawnshops and porn shops. A sign that advertised peep shows and adult videos, Triple X. A guy wheeled out of a bar with empty beer cases on a dolly and headed for a beer truck to reload. Just up the block, a guy in a fatigue jacket and big basketball shoes stood with his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth. Walked ten feet and stopped and rocked some more, looking up and down the street.
He was a lookout. This was New York, in miniature.
I drove up the street and slid the truck into an open space. Ahead of me, I could see the meter maid chalking tires, leaning out of her scooter with a stick. Did they give parking tickets in Gomorrah? I put a quarter in the meter just in case and headed back down the street.
I peered into the darkened bars, where you could spend an hour just waiting for your eyes to adjust. The porn shop door was open, too, this being a beautiful sunny autumn day, and inside I could see men drifting down aisles of videos, lost in their fantasies. I window-shopped at a pawn shop, which seemed to specialize in biker stuff and guns. There was a great deal on a right-side ankle holster, but I decided to pass. After I got a look at Poplar Street, I might be back.
Poplar was up the hill a block and over three. I stayed on Lisbon and the guys outside the bars gave me the once-over. Did I want coke? Did I want sex? Did I want to put them up against the wall and arrest them? It was so hard to tell these days. They turned away and let me pass.
I turned off two blocks up and started up the hill. The street was steep and lined with four-story apartment blocks, hung with wooden fire escapes. The houses crept up the hill and I did, too, past blank vinyl-sided walls, gravel parking lots clogged with junked Monte Carlos and Mustangs. One sign said unauthorized vehicles would be towed at the owner’s expense.
You couldn’t find an emptier threat.
I continued up the hill to Park Street, but took a left instead of a right, procrastinating but chalking it up to reconnaissance. I passed women smoking on their front porch, cars up on blocks in the yard in front of them. Farther along, scrawny cats were eating from ripped trash bags along the curb. At the next house, an obese young woman in sweatpants and sweatshirt stood in a doorway and screamed at toddlers, who were foraging in the dirt like chickens.
“These effing kids,” she called to a guy hanging out a window across the street. “I’m about to give ’em away.”
Go right ahead, I thought.
I looked over and one of the toddlers, a little girl with dark curls and filthy pants, said, “Hi.” It was a high-pitched cheep, like a bird, and I smiled and said hello. The mother looked at me and then at the girl.
“I told ya,” she snarled. “Ya don’t talk to strangers.”
I shook my head.
Where was Roxanne when ya needed her?
The streets were named after the usual trees—Spruce, Maple, Oak—which were, in this neighborhood, endangered species. I made my way up the hill and the houses began to lose their raggedness. Trash gave way to neat tenements with white sheer curtains and bare square yards, tended like cemetery plots. The people walking were old, women with shopping bags and men wearing caps. The first two women who passed me were speaking French and the two after that. Then a white-haired man, small and stooped, wearing a tweed sport coat.
“Bonjour,” I said.
He smiled.
“Et, comment ça va?” he said. “You have a good day, uh?”
This was the old way, salvation after life on dirt-poor Quebec farms. A steady job in the mill and a paycheck every week. An apartment with heat and running water. Food on the table and a future for all the little ones gathered around it. Walk to church. Walk to work. Walk to the corner market. Stop on the sidewalk and gossip. Get home and read the paper. Make sure the kids do their homework.
Fifty years ago, that was the good life on these streets. Now it was going, if not fast, then steadily, as modern times, modern values crept up the hill like encroaching vines. Gang graffiti. Kids who had fathers but no dads. People who didn’t need cars—not because they walked to work in the mill down the hill, but because they didn’t work
at all and didn’t need to go anywhere.
Except to buy beer.
It was sad, this passing of an era. I thought this as I made my way down the next block, past the towering cathedral of Saints Pierre et Paul. I stopped and looked up at the rose window above the door, the twin towers topped by four spires, reaching up to heaven. The church was quiet, but one of the massive front doors was propped open for some reason. I considered going in, at least to sit and look, if not to pray. But then I knew that I was doing everything but what I had come to do.
I kept walking, back into the tattered part of the neighborhood, two blocks down and one block over and back down Lisbon Street to my truck. I circled the block again, drove past the mill and up the hill to where Poplar Street was supposed to be.
And there it was.
It was a short street, on the right, lined with dingy apartment houses that overlooked a drab vacant lot. Number 17 was on the left, three houses in. It was mostly yellow with the word SATAN spray-painted near the front door. Other than that, there had been no attempt to gussy up the place. There were three floors, with wooden stairs running up the side. The staircase was roofed with green corrugated plastic. There were mailboxes on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, and I got out of the truck and walked over to them. Of the six boxes, three had names scrawled on them. None of them was Paco.
I looked up the stairs and took a deep breath. Then began the climb.
At the second-floor landing there was a windowless steel door. It was a good heavy door, because someone had tried to kick it in and had given up. Probably the wicked wolf. Looking to do a story on three little pigs. Who sold cocaine.
At the landing, I paused to admire the view of the house across the way and then kept going. Six steps to the landing, where there was a broken Budweiser bottle. Six more steps to the door, which was gray steel and dented. And unlocked.
“Damn,” I said.
I eased it open slowly, not knowing whether it opened into a hallway or a living room.
It was dark. It was a hallway.
I went in, leaving the door open a crack behind me. The hallway was lit by a single bare bulb. There was stuff strewn on the floor: beer cans, fast food cartons, an empty bottle of cheap vodka. The carpeting was dirty gray, and where there was no trash, it was gritty, like a floor mat in a dirty car. This drug business was all glamour.
There were two doors on my end and presumably two on the other. I stopped in front of the first two and listened.
Nothing.
I started down the hall and immediately I could smell it.
Pot.
And then I could hear voices. A woman laughing.
I kept walking and the smell was stronger. The woman was talking. I heard a guy’s voice, then the woman again, then a second guy’s voice, lower than the first. I got to the door and stopped.
The door on the right. Cheap unpainted wood. No name. No number. It could have passed for the broom closet, if the place had ever had a broom. I stood outside it for a minute and listened, simply because listening was easier than knocking. I heard the voices, the woman give a little shriek that sounded almost coquettish, the guys laughing now.
They were in a good mood. I knocked.
The apartment went dead. There was no sound at all, then footsteps that came toward the door and stopped.
“Hello,” I called.
I heard a chair scrape and a door slam but I didn’t hear a shotgun being racked. I wouldn’t have heard a knife coming out of a sheath, but I tried not to think about that.
There were more footsteps. I waited and was about to call again when a voice, the woman’s voice, said, “Yeah?”
“I’m looking for Paco,” I said through the door.
I heard her whisper, “Somebody’s looking for Paco.”
“Who is it?” she said.
I hesitated. Crunch time.
“My name’s Jack McMorrow.”
“What do you want?”
“Just to talk to Paco. That’s all.”
“What for?”
“ ’Cause I’m looking for a guy named Bobby Mullaney. Another guy named Coyote.”
“You a cop?”
“Nope.”
I heard more whispers.
“What are you?”
“A reporter,” I said, continuing my dialogue with the door. “I’m writing about Bobby and Coyote. About marijuana. I need to find them, and somebody told me they were coming here. Bobby’s wife sent me. She’s looking for him, too.”
More whispers. Then the woman again.
“Paco ain’t here.”
“Where can I find him?”
“He ain’t here.”
“I got that part. Can I give him a message or something?”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“How ’bout Bobby and Coyote?”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“You sure about that?”
No answer.
“Hey, I just need to talk to Paco. If he doesn’t know where they are, that’s fine. I’m outta here.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Who’s on first?” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Listen. Can I slide my ID under the door or something?”
They conferred.
“Go outside. Out back. Look up at the third floor. Take off your shirt so we can see if you’re wired.”
“Take off my shirt?”
“Or hit the road,” the woman said.
I looked down at my hunting coat. It was warm outside, but it wasn’t that warm. What if I just signed an affidavit?
“Okay,” I said.
I went back down the hall slowly, then just as slowly down the outside stairs. When I got to the bottom, I walked toward the back of the building and looked around the corner. There was a small overgrown yard, with a mound of demolition debris in the center. The debris backed up to some brush. There was nobody around. I walked out into the yard and turned and looked up. The windows of the apartment in question were covered with blankets. As I watched, one of the blankets moved.
I pulled my chamois shirt and T-shirt out of my pants. Eased my jacket off and then unbuttoned the chamois shirt and slid it off my shoulders. I lifted my T-shirt up to my neck. The air was cool on my chest. I dropped the T-shirt back down.
“Turn around,” the woman called, her voice muffled behind the window.
I did, lifting the T-shirt again. And as I bent to pick up my jacket, they came around the corner.
14
I whirled. They came at a trot. One taller. One bearded. The tall guy had a piece of pipe.
“Hey,” I said, but I was already backing up, and the guy with the pipe had it back and he was swinging and my jacket went out in front of me and the pipe grazed my hands and hurt but then the other guy, the one with the beard and the clenched jaw, had me by the upper arm, the left arm, and he was holding me while the pipe went back again. I spun and moved the bearded guy in front of me and he was grunting and the guy with the pipe stopped and looked for another opening.
The bearded guy let go with one hand and started to cock it back and I ran right at him, my left forearm up in his face, and he wasn’t strong enough to hold me so he fell backward and I drove into him until he went down. I went right across him, low, feeling his face under my boot and his grunt as I started to run. But the pipe slammed into my back and I pitched forward, scratching on all fours to keep moving, my jacket in my left hand, my shirttails out, and the taller guy was trying to grab them. I pulled and kept running and then a third guy came around the corner of the building and he wasn’t a cop.
He had a piece of wood and he held it in both hands, turning his body like it was a cricket bat. I dodged left, hacked at the guy’s hand on my shirt, and broke loose and ran for the truck, but then realized the keys were in my jacket someplace and I couldn’t stop so I kept going, down Poplar on the edge of the street, across the next road, and I could still hear footsteps.
I glanced back, at a full run, and the taller guy was in front, the pipe held close to his chest like a baton. He was twenty yards back and the other two were twenty yards behind him as I sprinted down the street, looking for somebody, anybody, but there was no one. I kept running and there was a car but it turned ahead of me and drove away, so slow I thought I could almost catch it, but then it was gaining on me and was gone.
Still running, the taller guy staying with me, I stayed in the street and then there was the church, the towers and steps, and I sprinted up them and went through the door, which, miraculously, still was propped open.
It was cool inside and vast and empty and I started up the center aisle, my boots pounding on the marble floor. The sound echoed through the hollowness of the big empty place and then something the nuns had drummed into me in first grade must have kicked in, and I stopped running and just walked quickly toward the front of the church, where I looked behind me.
They weren’t there.
I got to the front of the aisle, and it must have been the nuns again because, for the life of me, I genuflected as I crossed in front of the altar. I went to the right, where there was another door and a stairway, but when I hit that door, which was a slab of oak, it was locked. I walked to the corner, beside the red-curtained confessional, and pressed my back against the wall.
And waited.
For ten minutes, I stood still. I looked at my hand, which was scraped from the wrist to the first knuckles, but not deeply. I flexed it gently and it started to bleed.
That done, I started cataloging the sounds, all of which were outside. Horns beeping. A siren that got my hopes up because it seemed to be coming closer, but then it grew fainter and disappeared altogether. Motors revving and gears grinding and children calling back and forth and a dog barking. And, of course, the heavy, stultifying sound of silence.
I listened. Shifted on my feet. The movement of my boots made a scritching sound that wafted into the air, hanging under the vaulted ceiling like smoke. Clear your throat in this place and they’d hear it in Portland. To sneak up on me, the guys from Poplar Street would have to be ghosts.