by Paul Doiron
She could feel her forearms growing warm around him from the wood-fired stove. “I just don’t understand it, Charley.”
“Don’t understand what, Boss?”
“How you went through hell on earth and came out a good man. So many others came back ruined.”
Charley took a long time answering, as if the question had never even occurred to him. “I guess I was just lucky is all.”
“Lucky? You were tortured. You spent years in a jail cell.”
“I’m lucky I am the man that I am.”
Blessing her own good fortune, she hugged him harder.
* * *
Two months later, Charley, Ora, and the girls were traveling home from Bangor on the old Airline Road. It was their monthly trip to the big city for a movie and Chinese food. The back of their Jeep Wagoneer was overstuffed with bags of new clothing from the Jordan Marsh department store. Each of the girls had a stuffed animal to play with: Ann, a duckling; Stacey, a saber-tooth tiger.
The twisting and turning road was clear of ice—which was unusual for March—and they were making good time when Charley saw flashing blue lights ahead. A state trooper, whose license plate he recognized, had pulled over an eastbound tractor unit just past the gate of the Call of the Wild Game Ranch. The truck was a red cabover Peterbilt. The trooper had hauled the driver out on the salted shoulder for questioning. The headlights of the cruiser shined upon the two men as upon actors on a theatrical stage.
Charley said: “That trooper is Alvin Bishop. And I believe that’s the Hussey fellow I told you about.”
“We should stop,” said Ora from the passenger seat. The Airline was a long desolate road and police back-up was almost always too far away to be of any good.
Charley slowed to a stop, then climbed out of the Wagoneer.
He called out before approaching the cruiser, not wanting to spook the patrolman. “Need any help here, Alvin?”
Trooper Bishop turned without taking his eyes off the driver. He kept his hand on his holstered revolver. He was one of the older highway patrolmen in the state: long-nosed, wide-shouldered, and bald as a vulture’s egg under his campaign hat. “Charley Stevens! Is that you?”
“In the flesh,” said the warden. “And is that gentleman with you Mr. John Hussey of Fire Road Three in Whitney?”
“He won’t submit to a field sobriety test, Charley.”
“Because I’m not drunk!” Hussey had grown out his pale hair and started a beard since the warden had visited his house. But there were conspicuous scratches across one of his cheeks: deep gouges that looked as if they’d been made by fingernails. “Smell my breath!” the truck driver insisted.
“You were swerving all over the road, sir,” said Trooper Bishop.
“I told you—a deer ran out in front of me.”
“Then how come I didn’t see it?” said the trooper. “I wasn’t more than a hundred yards behind you.”
The flashing blue lights didn’t flatter either man’s complexion, but Charley thought Hussey looked like he belonged in an open casket.
“Can I talk with you a moment, Alvin?” Charley said.
“Keep your hands out of your pockets,” Bishop commanded the trucker.
Hussey spread his fingers in the air.
The two law enforcement officers stepped back against the trooper’s idling Crown Victoria.
Charley asked, “You were in Korea, weren’t you, Alvin?”
“Sure was. I was an MP.”
“Did the docs over there hand out pep pills like they did in the Vietnam?”
“You think he’s on amphetamines?”
“I’m pretty sure he was hopped-up on something the last time I saw him. His pupils were big as bullets.”
“Well, hell,” Bishop said. “I can’t haul him back to Bangor and make him take a piss test. I’ve got no probable cause. It’s not like he actually ran into a telephone pole.”
“Do you mind if I talk to him alone?”
Bishop exhaled a cloud of coffee-scented breath. “If you think it’ll calm him down, be my guest.”
Charley ambled back into the lighted space between the cruiser and the back of the tractor where Hussey stood waiting.
“Wicked cold night, isn’t it?” the warden said.
“What’s that—small talk?”
Even with his head turned toward the lights, Hussey’s pupils were enormous. As cold as it was, there was a film of sweat visible along his brow. And the cut on his face where the bat had bit him still hadn’t healed. It looked, in fact, as if the man had been picking at the mottled scab.
“How is Giang?” Charley asked.
“None of your business.”
“Mr. Hussey, it wouldn’t hurt you to be polite once a month. You might find it good practice.”
“She’s fine.”
“How about your little girl? She and I didn’t meet that night I visited you.”
“Lisa’s fine, too. OK? Are we done making nice?” Hussey leaned over the much shorter warden. Can you just tell that asshole to let me go? I’ve been on the road for a week and need to get back to my family. Who knows what that crazy woman has done now?”
It wasn’t the first time Hussey had referred to his wife as being unhinged. But Giang hadn’t seemed unstable to Charley, not even remotely. If anything, the truck driver’s insistence seemed to raise doubts about his own sanity.
“The trooper and I are concerned about you,” the warden said. “We want you to make it home safe.”
“I told you I’m not drunk!”
“You seem agitated. Have you been using stimulants to stay awake?”
The trucker seemed unable to relax a single muscle. “So it’s against the law to drink coffee. Is caffeine a controlled substance now?”
Charley knew he’d reached a roadblock. “I don’t suppose you ever got that rabies shot.”
Hussey’s mouth opened wide. He shook his head in disbelief. “You sound like my wife.”
“She’s worried about you and wants a doctor to check you out.”
“That witch! She hopes I’m dying. She’ll dance over my grave, that woman will.”
Trooper Bishop returned. “How’s it going here?”
Charley had a brainstorm. “Mr. Hussey just proposed a compromise. I told him it would put our minds at ease if he agreed to a police escort. He said he’d be happy to have you follow him home.”
“You son of a bitch,” the truck driver snarled.
“Well, Mr. Hussey?” asked Alvin Bishop.
“Just as long as I can get on the road.”
Charley slid back inside his warm vehicle. Both of the girls were animated from the excitement of the flashing lights, so he waited until they’d fallen asleep before he recounted the conversation to his always curious wife. Charley relied on Ora to help him get what he called a “round view” of a problem. The Husseys were the most problematic people he’d encountered in a long time.
“That man scares me,” Ora said. “There’s something not right about him.”
“There’s a poison in him, that’s for sure.”
It was the nature of the toxin that was a mystery.
* * *
Ora was working her usual evening shift at the library in Machias. Most nights, she had help, but the other librarian, Terri Sewall, had gone home early to attend to her sick daughter. That odd child was always ill. Besides, it wasn’t as if crowds of people were venturing out into the torrential rain.
The only patron in the drafty old building was a widower whose last name was Spinney and was only ever called Spinney. Even his library card omitted his first name. He was a retired lobsterman, as leathery as a shoe, who enjoyed romance novels. He would read them sometimes in the library with his back to the room so that no one coming through the door could see the half-naked men and women on the covers.
It was because he missed his wife so, Ora believed. The old lobsterman yearned so hard for love and the only place he could find it now was in
the pages of Harlequins.
She had re-shelved the last of the returned books, emptied all of the trash cans into a green bag that she would bring the next morning to the town dump, changed out the pail that was catching the water leaking through the ceiling in the periodical section; had done everything but tell Spinney it was closing time, turn off the lights, and lock the door, when the Vietnamese woman and her little girl came in out of the night.
The first thing Ora noticed about Giang Hussey was how tiny she was, scarcely taller than her young daughter; the next thing she noticed was how absolutely soaked both of them were. As they paused, unsure, in the entry, water flowed outward from their boots as if they themselves were melting into puddles. Beneath their hoods, their hair was dripping and their faces were as white as Ora’s got after swimming in the ice water of Machias Bay.
“Let me help you off with those wet things,” Ora found herself saying, forgetting that the library was supposed to be closed.
“Thank you,” said Giang. The rain had caused her makeup to run, and she seemed self-conscious about it, the way she hung her head. She had artificial lashes that were longer than any Ora had seen outside a fashion magazine.
“Let me bring you some paper towels,” Ora said. “You can use as many as you want.”
It turned into a fifteen-minute job, trying to dry them off, but their clothes were simply too soaked. Spinney watched the whole show from his chair in the corner with an expression that seemed to alternate between amusement and suspicion. After a while, he returned to his bodice ripper.
“Did you have a breakdown?” Ora asked.
Giang seemed confused by the question. The mother looked at the daughter, who translated the question into Vietnamese.
“We have no car,” Giang said. “We walk.”
“You walked here from Whitney?” The township was more than twenty miles from downtown Machias.
Giang turned again to her daughter and said something quickly in her native tongue. The tone of her voice sounded panicked.
“My mom wants to know how you know we live in Whitney,” the girl said with a perfect American accent. She looked to be somewhere between eight and ten years old. The daughter had dark, almond-shaped eyes, but lacked her mother’s ethereal beauty, as well as her birdlike bones.
“My husband is the game warden who came to your house when your husband was bitten by the bat. My name is Ora Stevens.”
Afterward, Ora would doubt what she’d seen: a sudden and momentary intensity in the Vietnamese woman’s gaze that seemed almost calculating in its intelligence, as if perhaps she was merely feigning not to understand English. Then it was gone, and she was back to being a wet and confused creature.
“I am Giang,” said the woman. “This my daughter, Lisa.”
“Hi,” said the girl.
“Do you need any help over there?” Spinney asked. The nature of the assistance he was offering made Ora blush with embarrassment, although neither the mother and daughter seemed offended.
“Shouldn’t you be getting home, Spinney?”
Ora waited for the old man to place the novel he had been reading on the counter (face down, of course) and to button himself up in his orange Grunden raincoat. Only after he had stepped through the door, letting in a burst of windswept rain, did she turn back to the mother.
“You don’t have to leave. You’re not even dry yet. Take all the time you want. Is there something I can help you find?”
“You have book on rabies?”
The request took Ora aback. She thought they were there to find books for the daughter. “Let me check for you.”
While she went searching in the card catalog, Giang excused herself to use the bathroom. Back then the Machias library hadn’t yet been computerized or connected to any database of titles—those years were long off in the poorest county in the northeastern United States. Ora couldn’t find any books devoted to the subject of rabies, but there were medical texts in the reference section she thought might be of help.
Lisa followed her about the stacks like a kitten waiting to be fed. She seemed awestruck by the old building and fascinated by the shelves and shelves of books, as if she’d never been in a library before.
“I can’t believe you walked all the way here on a night like this,” Ora said, arms full of books.
“My dad won’t let my mom drive.”
Ora couldn’t help herself from asking. “Couldn’t he have driven her here?”
“He’s on the road. He takes the car keys with him while he’s hauling logs. He doesn’t even like her to leave the house, especially while he’s away.”
“Why not?”
Lisa chewed on her lower lip. When she answered, it was softly. “He’s afraid she’ll run off on him.”
“Does he hit her?”
The girl glanced at the floor.
“Does he hit you?”
Lisa didn’t respond or raise her eyes.
“You can tell me the truth, Lisa.”
“My mom says he’s sick.”
Giang appeared before them, transformed. In the bathroom she had wrung out her hair, used a comb to secure it, and reapplied her makeup. She looked not just younger but like an entirely different person. Ora’s first response was to smile. Then she saw the darkness in the other woman’s eyes and heard the angry tone she used with her daughter as she said something in Vietnamese.
Ora didn’t understand Lisa’s response, but she recognized it as an apology.
The line from Tolstoy about all unhappy families being unhappy in their own ways came into Ora’s head. She set the books on one of the long wooden tables, explained to the daughter (who seemed more conversant with indexes and tables of contents) how to find the information they wanted, then left them alone.
Ora couldn’t have eavesdropped if she’d tried, not being able to understand Vietnamese. But the daughter was clearly translating passages from the books, causing the mother to become more and more animated.
After a respectful interval, Ora returned to them. She had located a book about rabies in the state catalog and had written the title on a slip of paper which she handed to Giang. “If you’d like, I can get it for you on interlibrary loan. You wouldn’t even need to come back into town. I could have it mailed to your house.”
“No!” Giang’s face blanched again. “No mail.”
“Or I could drop it off.”
“Thank you, no.” Giang rose from the table, and her daughter did the same. They exchanged words again in their shared language.
“My mom says you’re very kind,” said Lisa. “She says she found the information she was looking for. She thanks you for your help.”
They began to put on their wet jackets again.
“Can’t I at least offer you a ride home?” said Ora. “I wouldn’t mind at all.”
“No, thank you, Ora.”
Giang pulled her hood over her head. She helped her daughter get zippered up. Ora watched the two of them step out into the storm. She watched them as they hurried beneath the rain-swirled streetlamp. She kept watching long after they’d disappeared into the darkness.
* * *
“I don’t know, Boss.” Charley said, when she arrived home.
The girls were asleep upstairs, and he had been reading in his leather armchair with their springer spaniel, Baskerville, at his feet. He’d been working his way through Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War. You wouldn’t know it to look at Charley Stevens, but the man was a constant reader.
She unwound the wet scarf from her neck. “What don’t you know?” she asked.
“I don’t know if you should be getting in the middle of this.”
“Charley Stevens, I am ashamed of you. The encyclopedia says that one to three people die of rabies in the US each year. And tens of thousands die around the world. What if he really does have it. The symptoms it describes—”
“Like what?”
“Insomnia, agitation, sweating, hallucinations.�
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“I’ve met plenty of vets like him before who were still dealing with shell shock years after they came home—”
“It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder now, Charley.”
“That man has problems with drugs and alcohol, Ora. It doesn’t mean he’s about to start chomping on people or foaming at the mouth.”
“That isn’t funny!”
“The rabid critters I’ve dealt with have been clearly deranged, not just aggressive but berserk-seeming. And some do get white around the mouth.”
“The encyclopedia said it’s always fatal when symptoms begin to show.”
“But if he won’t agree to see a doctor, and if he hasn’t hit her or the child, I’m not sure what—”
“Of course he’s hit them,” Ora said. “He’s hit them both for years.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to.”
“Ora.”
“That man is obviously sick and whatever’s wrong with him, he’s getting sicker, and how many times have you seen this play out in your career? Rabid or not—”
She let the sentence hang unfinished between them as she left the room.
Charley remained alone in the parlor for a while.
Ora had said that Hussey was off on the road again and away from home. He considered paying the wife and daughter a visit to interrogate them himself, but he knew there were risks to his doing so. If the husband, upon his return, were to hear that the law had made inquiries, who knows what new violence it might conjure?
The next morning, however, Charley began asking around about John Hussey and his Vietnamese wife. And what he discovered was that no one—or next to no one—seemed to know anything about them.
The woman in the deeds office said that Hussey had inherited the land a year or so before from an uncle who had spent the past two decades wasting away in a nursing home: long enough for most people to have forgotten he had ever existed. Hussey had built the home himself (Charley had suspected as much). He had even drilled his own well. Hence there were no builders or electricians or plumbers with stories to tell about the new residents.
At Helen’s Diner, Charley struck up a conversation with the superintendent of schools and verified that the family had obtained a waiver to homeschool their daughter.