Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  “Mr. Albert?” I said.

  “Jack McMorrow?” he said.

  We shook hands. His was wet.

  Albert was fifty, maybe a little older. A big, stoop-shouldered guy, he had a little bit of a paunch but not much. He was wearing a bright green tie with a pale green shirt and dark green slacks, both of which complemented his reddish face. It would have been a nice outfit for St. Patrick’s Day, which was nine months away, but Albert, moving with the unhurried languor that is a sign of long-term, unchallenged authority, didn’t seem to care.

  I followed him to his office, which was a desk like the others but set off in the corner, behind a fake-paneled partition. Behind his chair there was a six-foot map of the state of Maine. As he stood in front of the map waiting for me to sit, Albert looked like a television weatherman who’d forgotten his pointer. “A low-pressure system will move in from the southwest . . .”

  “So, Mr. McMorrow,” Albert said when we’d both sat. “You want to do some court reporting?”

  “I might,” I said.

  “You know it’s only a part-time position?”

  I nodded.

  “Like the ad says. Two days a week,” Albert said. “And I don’t anticipate it growing into a full-time job, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking,” I said.

  “This isn’t a big-budget operation, you know,” he went on. “I don’t have money to throw around.”

  I tried to conceal my surprise.

  “What’s your circulation?” I asked.

  “About nine thousand. Stays pretty steady. Six days a week, except for Christmas.”

  Nine thousand. I could just hear what my former colleagues would say about that. “You shouldn’t deliver those papers. You should number them and sell them as a limited edition.”

  “So you brought some clips?” Albert said.

  “Not exactly. I brought some papers.”

  I put the newspapers on his desk. There were four metro sections from the Times. My byline above the fold. Two copies of the Androscoggin Review. My byline on every story on the front page.

  Albert picked the papers up, unfolded them, and began to read. As he read, he made a hmmph sound. He hmmphed four times, then put the papers down.

  “So you’re that Jack McMorrow,” he said, looking me in the eye.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “The one from the weekly over in Androscoggin. Where those people got killed.”

  I nodded.

  “That was a crazy business,” Albert said.

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “I read about that. The photographer got killed first, didn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He gave me a long look, then picked up a section of the Times. The story was about a night riding with an ambulance in the Bronx. Four overdoses. A shooting. Two stabbings. A pretty teenage girl slashed across the face with a razor. A couple of heart attacks. An infant, the mother of whom spoke only a Hmong dialect. The baby had severe diarrhea and dehydration. She was followed by a drunk homeless man, run over because he was passed out in the middle of the Grand Concourse.

  An average night, the ambulance people had said.

  “Jesus,” Albert said, putting the paper down. “I don’t know how people can live like that. Animals. So, Mr. McMorrow. What brings you to Kennebec, Maine?”

  “Needed a change, I guess,” I said.

  “So you ran the weekly in Androscoggin.”

  “Yup.”

  “And you’ve been freelancing since then, you said.”

  “Some,” I said.

  “And you’re living out in Prosperity?”

  “Right.”

  “Got family up here?”

  “Nope.”

  “Leave a family down in New York?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “Divorced?”

  I hesitated.

  “No, and my underwear size is thirty-four, boxers. Shirt, sixteen and a half. I brush twice a day, but I don’t floss as often as I should.”

  Albert looked at me. I smiled. He didn’t. He picked up one of my papers.

  “Well, you know Kennebec isn’t New York City.”

  “I noticed,” I said.

  “And district court in Kennebec isn’t like something in the Bronx there. I see you covered a murder trial. You won’t get anything that exciting in district court.”

  “A kid got shot in an argument over a thirty-eight-hundred-dollar crack deal. It wasn’t all that exciting.”

  Albert was scanning the story.

  “He end up getting convicted?”

  “Sort of. Manslaughter. He shot the guy in the face with a three-fifty-seven, but I guess he didn’t mean to kill him.”

  “So what happened?” Albert said again.

  “Plea bargain,” I said.

  He put the paper down, shaking his head.

  “You sure you aren’t overqualified for this job, Mr. McMorrow?”

  “Depends on what the job is.”

  “Report on what goes on in court. Who the people are and what they did. What their fines and sentences are. Spell the names right and use middle initials. We have a lot of people around here with similar names. Tom Jones the punk gets convicted of drunk driving and Tom Jones the lawyer calls up and chews my ass out ’cause people think it was him.”

  “So I’ll say Tom Jones the drunk punk, not Tom Jones the drunk lawyer,” I said.

  Albert gave me the long look again. There was the sound of marching in the aisle behind me. I turned. It was Mister Doughnut, carrying an empty coffeepot. He gave me the quick once-over and headed for the bathroom to refill.

  I waited while Albert looked down at my newspapers, then turned toward the window. The view was of a big brick mill, now used as a warehouse. It had nice classical lines, but plywood plugged half the windows. Beside the mill were rows of tenement houses that had been built for the mill workers who’d come down the Kennebec from Quebec, or walked in from their farms. Beyond the houses there were wooded hills, pale spring green against the searing blue sky.

  Albert frowned as if he’d seen something he didn’t like, then turned back to me.

  “If you’re willing, I’m willing,” he said. “But I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “I like stories written by my reporters. Not about them.”

  “Likewise.”

  “Like this stuff at the weekly. I don’t need that.”

  “I didn’t either,” I said.

  “Just so we understand each other,” Albert said.

  “In time,” I said.

  He gave me the look again.

  Albert got up from the desk and walked to the corner of the partition. He was a big man, one of those flabby guys who still have residual strength. There was football in his distant past.

  “Charlene,” he called. “I need one of those laptops.”

  I heard heels clack off into the distance.

  Albert walked to his desk and sat on the edge of it. I got up from my chair.

  “So what was it like to work for the New York Times?” he said suddenly.

  “Probably a lot like working here,” I said. “Except bigger. Reporters are reporters, you know?”

  “When I first got out of J school, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. You know any of those guys?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “That must be something,” Albert said.

  “Not that much different,” I said. “The actual reporting, I mean. But then they get the foreign stuff in their blood. Some of them can’t come home. Can’t adjust to it. Get to be nomads.”

  “You ever do any of that?”

  “No,” I said. “I stayed in New York mostly. New York and New Jersey.”

  “You liked the city stuff better than the foreign?”

  “I didn’t say that. It wasn’t always up to
me.”

  Albert picked up the Times again. Flipped it back onto the desk.

  “So why are you here, McMorrow?” he asked again.

  “To get a job covering Fourth District Court in the town of Kennebec. Like it said in the ad. Two days a week. Salary negotiable.”

  “Yeah, we’ll pay you what we can. With your experience, say eighty bucks a day.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “When can you start? Court’s held Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  “I’ll go tomorrow,” I said.

  Charlene walked in and handed him a plastic case. She was one of the women from the doughnut circle—forties, matronly, obviously nosy. She smiled at me, and I grinned back.

  “Going to be joining us?” Charlene said brightly.

  “Beginning to look that way,” I said.

  “Good for you,” she said, and gave me a mischievous look that seemed to imply I didn’t know what I was in for. She probably was right.

  Charlene walked out. Albert slowly pulled the computer out of the case, as though he were unsheathing a very sharp knife. The computer was a Tandy, from RadioShack. An old one.

  “Ever use one of these?” he asked.

  “Once upon a time,” I said.

  “You can write your story here or wherever. Then shoot it into our system. Some of our people come in and use the phone here because it takes a few tries sometimes. Saves calling back and forth. Deadline for the court report is eight p.m.”

  “Fine.”

  “So leave your Social Security number with Charlene. Her desk is up by the door,” Albert said.

  He handed over the computer and my newspapers and we shook hands again. His hand had dried.

  “See you tomorrow,” Albert said.

  I nodded and started for the hallway.

  “Mr. McMorrow,” Albert said.

  I turned.

  “There an arrest warrant waiting for you in New York or what?”

  He smiled. Just barely.

  3

  Roxanne left at six thirty for a meeting before school. A sophomore boy had punched a teacher and, as a result, Roxanne had been assigned as his social worker. He was six one and weighed two hundred pounds. Roxanne’s job was to help him rechannel his anger. I offered to go with her and bring a baseball bat, but she said no.

  “Sometimes the old ways are best,” I said, standing in the driveway in my boxers.

  “So bring back public executions,” Roxanne said from the car.

  “You laugh,” I said.

  “At somebody in the yard in his underwear,” she said.

  I moved to the window and leaned in.

  “You know you were right,” I said.

  “About what?” she said, her hands on the wheel.

  “About me getting back into it.”

  “I hope so. I don’t want you to think I’m some old nag.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “And you know what you are when you’re right?”

  She looked puzzled for a moment. I reached into the car and grabbed her thigh.

  “God, Jack,” Roxanne said, pushing my arm away and grinning. “But I’ll be waiting for you when you get home.”

  “Naked?”

  “With bells on.”

  “I love it when you talk kinky,” I said, and she kissed me and drove away.

  But even as I waved and smiled, something told me that this particular brush fire had been knocked down but not extinguished. Even if it were out, another would flare up. There was something smoldering between me and Roxanne, and for the first time in a long time, it wasn’t strictly passion.

  I thought this in the driveway, and then it came back to me again as I sat in the fourth row from the front at Fourth District Court. It was eleven thirty and my back hurt and my stomach was growling. The judge, a small woman who looked tough as dried sinew, had walked in, sat down, and then a bailiff had handed her a note and she’d walked back out. We, the people, had waited another hour and a half, and I’d thought about Roxanne and then the bailiff had banged through the door again.

  “All rise,” he said, and the thirty or so men and women had hauled themselves up from the hard benches like reluctant churchgoers; then, after the judge had settled into her chair, they’d flopped back down again.

  I flopped too.

  It was the first session, just getting under way. The judge had been tied up all morning for an emergency Human Services custody hearing, which they’d held in the other courtroom. I’d watched as the social workers hustled the kid, a bewildered-looking boy no older than eight, into the courtroom. After almost two hours, they’d hustled him back out like a protected witness, a diminutive rock star. It was a celebrity that no doubt had been hard-earned and was destined to be short-lived.

  So now we waited.

  The lawyers, men and women in an odd assortment of suits and tweed jackets, leaned against the railing up front and chatted, ignoring the huddled masses behind them. In front of me, a young guy stretched his muscled arms out on the back of the bench, showing a crude tattoo on his right forearm that said BORN TO BE BAD.

  An icebreaker in the nursing home someday.

  Next to him was an older man wearing a dark blue uniform. His face was brown and weathered, with fissures like something on the bottom of a dried-up clay riverbed. There was a woman with him, maybe twenty and quite heavy, whom I presumed to be his daughter. She leaned over and whispered to him and he reached in his shirt pocket and took out a cigarette, which he gave her. She got up and eased her way along the row toward the door, hunching low as if the courtroom were a movie theater and she didn’t want to block anyone’s view.

  Not that there was much of one.

  The room was done in blond wood paneling, which was warped and faded. There were two flags, United States and Maine, one at each end of the judge’s bench, and they were faded too. On the wall to the left was a dusty print of George Washington. It was crooked, giving George an impish look. He stared across the room at a long line of framed photographs of past judges, all men, all grim, as if their years on the bench had left them with no hope for humanity. Their photographs were black-and-white, except for the one at the end of the line, which was in garish color. That judge had blue eyes and pink cheeks that made his colleagues look like stiffs.

  Which was what I was, after two hours on the hard pew. I hadn’t taken a single note, but I was ready. Jack McMorrow, veteran reporter, at your service. All I needed was a story.

  The bailiff talked to the judge in courtroom whispers and the judge, in a black polyester robe, sat back in her big leatherette chair. She sat, and we sat, and then she picked up a piece of paper and said she was going to call the docket.

  “I am Judge Marlene Dorsett,” she said, “and I’m going to call the names on the docket. If you hear your name, please stand and tell me.”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you,” the tattooed guy sneered under his breath.

  “Dale Mulcahey,” the judge said.

  “Here, Your Honor,” the tattooed guy called politely.

  I choked back a chuckle. The guy turned around and scowled. I smiled back sweetly.

  The roll call continued, like the first day of school. The defendants stood awkwardly, holding baseball caps in front of them, tough guys temporarily humbled. A young woman was there with her mother and they both stood, as if their case would be won on solidarity alone. An old man in green work clothes stood slowly and painfully and asked if his name had been called.

  “What’s your name?” the judge asked, her list in front of her.

  “What?” the man said.

  “Your name, sir.”

  “What?” he asked again.

  A bailiff marched down.

  “What’d she say?” the man said loudly.

  “What’s your name, sir?” the bailiff barked into the man’s ear.

  “Reny,” the man said, as the audience snickered. “Reginald Reny.”

  The judge glared. The snickering stopped. The jud
ge examined her list.

  “Mr. Reny, your case will be heard shortly,” the judge said.

  “What?” the man said.

  “Sit down,” the bailiff called into the man’s ear.

  “Okay,” the man said. “You don’t have to get all wound up about it.”

  The audience tittered. I opened my notebook to the first blank page and waited.

  At that moment, the lobby door opened with a boom and a woman strode in. She was very big, almost masculine, but very blonde and carefully groomed, like a linebacker in meticulous drag. As she approached, the lawyers watched her deferentially. She dropped a stack of books and papers on the table and turned to the audience, scanning the faces. When she came to mine she paused, as if trying to place me. I stared back, and she turned to the judge.

  “Are you ready, Miss Tate?” the judge said.

  “All set, Your Honor,” Miss Tate said. “Let’s do it.”

  And so they did. One by one, the cases were called. One by one, the defendants came out of the rows and walked to the podium in front of the judge.

  “This is a change of plea, Your Honor,” Miss Tate would say.

  “Is that true?” the judge would ask.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” the lawyer would say. The defendant would stand passive and mute.

  “Sir, you had pleaded not guilty to a charge of operating under the influence of intoxicating liquor. You’ve decided to change your plea?”

  “Yes,” they said, one after another.

  “To what?” they were asked.

  “Guilty,” they said.

  “And you’re giving up your right to a jury trial?”

  A nudge from the lawyer.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve decided to do this on your own? Nobody’s telling you to do this?”

  Another nudge.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  After which the judge would ask Miss Tate to recount the circumstances of the case.

  “On Thursday, April 12, at seven thirty p.m., the defendant was observed driving in an erratic manner on Main Street. He was stopped by the officer and a manual dexterity test was performed. He was believed to be under the influence and was arrested and taken to the Kennebec Police Department, where a breath test was administered.”

  “What was the test result?”

  “Point zero eight, Your Honor. It was borderline, but with the defendant’s inability to perform even the simplest dexterity test, the officer felt there was more than enough evidence to support a charge of operating under the influence.”