by Gerry Boyle
“Then why are they fooling with—”
“It was just a side deal or something. Pocket change. They were up here anyway.”
“You seem to know more about it than I thought you would.”
“Bobby told me that much. And I told him, ‘These guys are too rough. Let’s stay away from them.’ ”
“Which brings us back to the cops.”
“Jack, I don’t know. Who’d take care of Stephen?”
“If what?”
“If something happened to me. If I went to jail. I mean, I can’t leave him here alone. There’s nobody else but me. Oh, Jesus Christ, almighty God, oh, God . . . Oh, here he is.”
In the background, a door banged.
“Stephen, I’ve got to talk to you,” I heard Melanie say.
“Mom, this sucks,” I heard him reply.
I waited. The old couple came out, the man first, giving me a hard look, the woman staying behind him, as if I might grab their Big Macs.
“Sorry,” Melanie said.
“Okay,” I said. “How ’bout this. I’ll make some phone calls down to Valley. See if he’s turned up down there. If I don’t find out anything in a day or two, I think you should go to the cops. Unless you think there’s a chance he just, I don’t know, sort of took off.”
“He wouldn’t do that. He’s got plants to tend up here.”
And promises to keep. No doubt.
The restaurant was across the street from the McDonald’s. The sign outside said there was karaoke on Saturday nights.
This was Wednesday, so they just served beer.
I had my choice of tables so I sat down near the back. The waitress, a solid and energetic young woman in a short black skirt, popped out from behind the bar and offered me a menu but I declined and ordered the beer instead. They were cheap so I ordered two. The waitress hustled off and then hustled right back and put both glasses on the table.
“Hard day at the office?” she said.
“Something like that,” I said, raising my scraped hand to take a swallow of the first beer.
The waitress grimaced.
I switched hands and smiled disarmingly.
“Got hit with a pipe,” I said.
“You a police officer?”
“No, a plumber.”
She looked at me funny and fled to the kitchen. I had the place to myself.
I sipped the beer, which was standard-issue Budweiser served very cold. The bottom of the glass felt good on my knuckles. The beer felt good everywhere else.
In the dim light, I became the observer again. It was easier.
I scribbled in my notebook as fast as I could recall, trying to get every utterance, every monosyllable down on paper. The woman speaking through the door on Poplar Street. Descriptions of the three guys in the backyard. Every word that I could remember Paco saying.
It came in jumbles, out of order.
“Was a guy named Coyote there?”
“Not that I heard. I heard the first guy was by himself.”
“Where did they go? Bobby and the manager?”
“They just left. I heard.”
“Where’s the manager from?”
“I heard he was from out of state.”
“Which state?”
“I remember the song, even. ‘Down in the Valley.’ ”
“I heard this guy came here looking for another guy. The other guy owed him money.
“But the other guy owed him as much money as this before, for a lot longer. And this guy you’re looking for never worried about it.
“This guy’s all wound up about it. Right out of his tree. I heard this. I mean, is he nuts? Doing bad drugs, crack and Jack? He shakes this other guy down too hard.”
“If I’m right about you, you’ll be my witness. If I’m wrong about you, that’s okay. If things went wrong.
“I don’t want nobody’s blood on my hands.”
Was that right? Or was it “anybody’s blood”? Close enough for my purposes, whatever they were.
The reporter Jack McMorrow could write that Bobby Mullaney was last seen in Lewiston, Maine, where he was said to have gotten into a dispute over payment for a load of marijuana. The seller was a young man who gave his name as Paco.
Would I have to slip into first-person? The Globe wouldn’t go for it. I’d have to write it straight.
In an interview in a church in Lewiston last week, Paco said Mullaney demanded to see another drug seller from another state. That drug trafficker happened to be in Lewiston, Paco said, and a meeting was arranged.
Paco said that was his last contact with Bobby Mullaney.
Or maybe I wouldn’t use his name. Change it to something else? Use the real names and burn Melanie and Stephen but have a better story by far. And what about my conversation with Melanie? Was that privileged? Off the record? I mulled it for a moment, then bent to my notebook. It was easier.
“Oh, my God, they’ll kill him. Oh, my God, they’ve probably killed him already by now. Oh, my God.”
“Who?”
“They’re killers. Down there, they’re killers. They’ll just kill him. You don’t know. Oh, my God, oh, my Bobby, oh my baby.”
“What are you writing?”
I looked up and there was a little girl. A round-faced blonde little girl who looked to be about four. Maybe older. She was standing a few feet away to my left, eating some sort of candy. She sidled closer and I could see that there was pink drool at each corner of her mouth, which was smiling. Her teeth were very small.
“You doing your homework?” the girl said, chewing.
I smiled.
“Sort of. I’m writing some stuff down so I don’t forget it.”
“Why don’t you want to forget it?”
I considered her. She was doing a little dance in place, her high-top sneakers crossing in front of her.
“Because I might have to write it in a story later,” I said. “Are you a dancer?”
“Yes. I go to Miss Flossie’s. I don’t go today. I go on Fridays. Today me and my mom are here to pick up her check. It’s on Friday we go to Miss Flossie’s.”
“Is that a dancing school?”
“Yes. Miss Flossie’s really nice.”
“You must be a good dancer.”
“I am. I do tap and ballet, but tap’s too loud.”
“All that tapping, huh?”
“Yeah. I like ballet ’cause it’s quieter. You wear ballet shoes. Can you read this writing?”
She fingered the scrawled page of my notebook. Her hand was sticky and left a smudge the same color as the drool at the corner of her mouth. The sticky passage was Melanie saying her husband had been killed.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Do you write books?”
“No, I write stories in the newspaper.”
“Why do you do that?” she said.
She looked up at me. I could see that her eyes were blue. When she smiled, her cheeks dimpled and her eyes smiled, too.
“Because it’s what I do,” I said.
“Why is it what you do?”
She giggled. She was teasing me now.
“Because it’s my job. I write stories. I write them down and they put them in the newspaper.”
“Why don’t you just tell your stories out loud?”
“Because . . . because nobody would hear them.”
The girl chewed and did her little two-step. A woman appeared at the far end of the restaurant.
“Hillary. Come on, babe,” she called.
“See ya later, alligator,” the girl said, and then the sneakers thumped across the fake wood floor and I was, once again, alone.
I looked down at my notes and I knew the complete, unexpurgated answer to her question. I was clinging hard and fast to my reporter’s role. I was the observer, back from the war, the poverty, the starving children and bloated infants. As long as I had this notebook, I was detached, safe from the clinging tentacles of real emotion. File my story and g
o home. At various times during my determined climb to the Times, and the top, it had struck me that I was dodging life, evading something. Well, there was no evading this.
Bobby probably dead. Melanie already grieving. Coyote gone. The Mullaneys’ peculiar misfit of a kid wandering the woods with his rifle. And me, caught in the middle of it all, wrestling a story that didn’t want to stay on the page, that wanted to suck me in, yank me out of my easy chair and pull me through the TV screen and into the show.
I drained my beer and threw money on the table. Maybe now the Globe would go to three-fifty.
16
I was sitting in my truck in the dark when Roxanne’s car swung down the drive and pulled in and parked. The door popped open, the dome light came on, and there she was, turning to me, getting out of the car, coming across the little parking lot, running in that short-stepped way that women run when they’re wearing heels.
As I fumbled with the door, Roxanne pulled it open from the outside. I slid off the seat and into her arms.
“Baby,” she whispered, holding me tightly.
“Hey, hon,” I said.
I could smell her perfume, somebody’s cigarette smoke in her hair. Her face was against my neck and I felt her breathe in and then out in a long sigh that ended with a barely perceptible tremor.
“I . . . I’m just glad to see you,” Roxanne said, leaning back and scanning my face, as if to make sure it was all there. I held her by the waist.
“I’m glad to see you, too. How’d you do today?”
Her face fell.
“Oh, so-so. Not so good, I guess. It was, well, it’s a long story. How ’bout you?”
“I guess I did so-so, too.”
“You didn’t find him?”
“No, but I did find people who had seen him.”
“So they were okay? You look fine.”
Roxanne scanned my face again. I kept my hand on her back.
“They told me what I needed to know, I guess. After a while.”
“You charmed them,” Roxanne said.
“Oh, yeah. They wanted me to stay for dinner, smoke a few bowls, meet the wife and kids, but I said I had a date.”
“You do, huh.”
“With a strikingly beautiful woman.”
“Who’s ready for a glass of wine.”
“And I brought a bottle of the good stuff.”
“My connoisseur.”
“Mais, oui.”
I reached into the truck and pulled out a bottle in a bag.
“And what made you select this particular vintage, Monsieur McMorrow?” Roxanne said, slipping the bottle from the bag to read the label.
“It was five dollars,” I said. “And the four-dollar one had a screw top.”
The heels were catapulted across the living room rug. The briefcase thunked onto the kitchen chair. Roxanne took off her blazer and tossed it over the banister to be brought upstairs. I opened the wine and poured two glasses and brought them to the living room, where Roxanne had flopped on the couch. She sat up, putting her stocking feet together primly, and took the glass and sipped.
“Mmmm,” she said. “Worth every penny. And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what you did to your hand.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I thought you said you charmed them down there.”
“I didn’t say it was instantaneous. There was a feeling-out period.”
“What’d they feel you out with?”
“Nothing much.”
I sat down beside her. Roxanne eyed the scab on my hand disapprovingly.
“It’s healing as we speak. You want to talk about court?”
“Oh, gee, I don’t know. It was just sad.”
“They all are, aren’t they?”
Roxanne sipped her wine. Her earrings swung gently.
“This one was harder because I think the kids were really ready to make the break. After a week in a normal house, they know what they’re missing.”
“Toys?” I said.
“Meals. An adult who answers when they call. They know something’s wrong. Really wrong. At least the older one.”
“Were they there?”
“Waiting in a conference room. Mom showed. She even looked sort of straight. Put her hair up in barrettes and everything. She brought a counselor who said she’d come to her for help.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Won’t last. She’ll be back at it, partying all night. I give it a day or two. She’s an addict. You can see it in her eyes. The distraction. It’d take months for her to really clean up.”
“So what happened to the kids?”
“They went home with her,” Roxanne said.
“Were they crying?”
“No, but I was.”
“Really?”
“Close as I get. It just got to me. The little girl turned and gave me this little wave. Oh boy . . .”
“What do you do now?” I asked.
“Follow up on her. Wait for the cops to call again.”
“Stinks.”
“Yup,” Roxanne said. “I’m going to go over there tomorrow and follow up. And tomorrow night. Don’t worry. I’ll bring a cop.”
“The cop can bust her for crack and you can grab the kids.”
“If this were a perfect world . . .,” Roxanne said.
I took a sip of wine. It wasn’t perfect, either.
“This must be one of those where you wish you could just grab them.”
“But I can’t. I have to play by the rules.”
“And stay in there swinging.”
“On to the next windmill, Sancho,” Roxanne said.
She smiled.
“So, dear,” Roxanne said. “Tell me about your day. What did you do in Lewiston?”
“I went to church.”
“How was the sermon?”
“The Gospel according to Paco. That’s where I met him. It was pretty interesting. And the church is beautiful. But after that I had to call Melanie.”
“And tell her what?”
“That her husband might be dead.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“What did she say?”
“She cried. Sobbed and cried.”
Roxanne looked somber and concerned.
“What did you tell her then?”
“I said I’d make some calls and see if he’s turned up in Massachusetts.”
“Massachusetts?”
“That’s where Paco said the guy Bobby was with may have brought him.”
“His body, you mean?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Roxanne grimaced, then fixed her narrowing gaze on me.
I sipped my wine.
“I hope you don’t get any ideas about going down there,” she said, her legs tucked under her.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Why do you do anything, Jack?”
“Can we make this a take-home test?” I said.
“No.”
I sipped, then shrugged.
“It’s going to be a pretty good story. From the hippies at the fair in Maine to the mean streets of Massachusetts.”
“But it’s just a story. It isn’t worth it.”
“If I thought that, I’d never write another word,” I said.
“Can’t you write about something else? These people are drug dealers,” Roxanne said.
“I know, but it isn’t so black and white. Melanie isn’t a bad person, and even Bobby, he’s sort of engaging, in a way. Anyway, there’s a lot of hypocrisy out there. Booze is a multibillion-dollar industry, but these people get called drug dealers. I don’t know. One man’s drug is another man’s cocktail.”
“God, Jack,” Roxanne said, swinging her legs down and getting up from the couch. “There’s hypocrisy everywhere.”
“But don’t you think it should be unmasked?”
“Sure. Politicians who talk about helping kids and
then give the money to their pals. These bozos in Congress who go around saying they have no money for your program but then turn around and give millions to these filthy dictators. I don’t know. It just seems you have to pick your battles, Jack.”
Sitting there gripping the stem of the wineglass, I could feel myself hardening.
“I have, Rox,” I said. “You pick your windmills and I’ll pick mine.”
Dinner was stir-fried vegetables, prepared and eaten in silence. Roxanne picked and then got up and left. I put the dishes in the dishwasher and wiped the wok and half watched the news on the little television on the kitchen counter. It was mostly reports of problems without solutions, the decline of societies and economies, currencies and cultures. Pick one of those battles, why don’t you?
I sat for a while and then put water on for tea and went upstairs to find Roxanne. I found her laid out on the bed in her blouse and skirt, a magazine on her chest, her breath making a faint rustle as she slept. For a minute or so I looked at her. She was such a strong woman, but something about her was still childlike. Skin like snow. Dark hair gathered at the back of her graceful neck. Lips and eyelashes and feet in stockings snuggled together.
Smiling grudgingly, I took a goose-down comforter off of the blanket chest and put it over her. Roxanne was reason to be careful.
So I went downstairs and made tea and put on my jacket and went down to the dock behind the condo complex. The few sailboats left were jostling in their slips, their rigging ringing like wind chimes in the breeze. I sat on a bench in the dark and watched the clouds race past the stars, a tugboat huff out of the harbor, and blinking jets bank and take aim for the Portland airport. As I watched, I thought about Roxanne and her kids and Melanie and her son and Bobby and his wacky confidence and where it had gotten him. And I thought that it was all such chaos, everything, all around us, that the only recourse was to try to make a small part of it good, or to chronicle the chaos so at least there was a record to provide a scant semblance of order.
If Roxanne had been there, she would have asked me which I thought I was doing. And I would have said I was doing a little of both. I hoped.
When I came in, Roxanne had awakened enough to get out of her clothes and into a flannel nightgown. She was asleep again and I got undressed and climbed in beside her and then the alarm was cheeping on her side and she was lurching toward the shower. I fell back into a thick tar pit of sleep and then felt her lips on my cheek, smelled her smell.