Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  “It’s been a while,” I said.

  “Of course it has. That’s a museum piece you’re working with. A collector’s item. David. Get over here and help this guy out.”

  From behind me, a face appeared. A kid’s face, round and eager, with a shock of black curly hair and an incongruous stubble of dark beard. His sleeves were rolled up.

  “David Archambault,” he said, holding his hand out.

  “Jack McMorrow. I take it you know how to work this thing?”

  “Surely do,” he said. “Bring it right over here and we’ll fire her up.”

  We went to his desk, ten feet up the row. It was covered with reporter’s notebooks, notes scrawled on legal pads, empty cardboard coffee cups, a bag of potato chips spilled out on a faxed press release from the governor’s office. David shoved the pile aside in one smooth movement. I put the computer in the space he’d cleared.

  “So you used to be with the Times, huh?” David said, pulling the cord from the laptop. “Goddamn, I’d give my right arm. Both arms.”

  “Type with your toes?”

  “I’d type with a pencil in my teeth to work for a paper like that. I’m giving myself eighteen months here, then I’m gonna go for a fifty-thousand-or-up paper.”

  “Why so long?”

  David looked at me.

  “You’re being facetious?”

  “Not really. We used to say that more than a year in one paper was death.”

  “Seriously.”

  “We were young and ambitious.”

  “So who isn’t?” David said.

  “You been here long?”

  “Seven months. And my feet are itching bad.”

  “You don’t like it here?” I asked.

  “It’s okay. It’s a start.”

  “What do you like to write?”

  “I don’t know. Cop stuff,” David said, punching the code into the laptop.

  “Much of that here?”

  “Diddly-shit. We run stories out front here that the Times wouldn’t even report. I remember this one time, I think it was a couple of years ago. The Times did this story on all the murders that happened on New Year’s Eve in New York City. There were, like, fourteen of them. They weren’t even real stories. It was like a murder log.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “New York can be a pretty brutal place.”

  “I’d love it,” David said, his eyes glistening at the thought of all that murder and mayhem. “Christ, we get a murder here and it’s this big deal.”

  I had to smile.

  “Pretty sad, huh,” I said.

  “Goddamn pathetic,” David said. “There. Your story’s in the system.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You really gonna cover the court here? I mean, I don’t mean to butt in, but isn’t that kind of beneath you?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d love to talk to you some more.”

  “Be glad to,” I said, and gathered up the computer and wires, stuck them back in the case. I walked to Catherine Plante’s desk and told her the story was in the system. She started to answer and then the phone rang and she made a gun with her finger and thumb and shot it, then picked up the receiver. David came up and stood beside me.

  “Good to meet you, man,” David said.

  He shook my hand and looked into my eyes earnestly and ambitiously. I looked back and it was like looking into a mirror, back in time.

  It was quarter to eight when I came out onto the sidewalk in front of the Observer. The downtown was deserted, but the newsstand up the block was still open. I walked up and got the second-to-last Boston Globe off the rack. The little guy behind the counter, a wizened old man in a Red Sox T-shirt, took my dollar without speaking.

  “The Times sold out?” I asked him.

  “Went quick,” he said. “Always does.”

  “How many do you get?”

  “Six,” the man said.

  “Pretty popular, huh?”

  “They’re gone by eight thirty,” he said.

  I tucked the Globe under my arm and started for the door, then turned back. The old man was shoving cartons of cigarettes into the rectangular holes on the cigarette shelf behind the register.

  “You know where Peavey Street is?” I asked him.

  “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  The old man hesitated, as if he’d prefer to give directions to Peavey Street to someone who had lived in town for forty years and would, therefore, know exactly where Peavey Street was.

  “Up Main to School Street. Follow School Street up about a mile and take a right. Past the billiard place. Peavey’s on the left. You hit the railroad tracks, you’ve gone too far.”

  I thanked him and went back to the truck, putting the Globe on the passenger seat. The Toyota started with a whir and I drove slowly up the block, past shops that were closed for the night and more that were closed for good. I took a left and then another left and pulled into the one store that was open and busy.

  It sold beer. I went in and bought a six-pack of Ballantine ale. The beer went beside the paper on the passenger seat. I drove back to Main Street and took a right, then followed the old man’s directions to Peavey Street. I didn’t hit the railroad tracks.

  Peavey was a couple blocks long, one tier of houses up from the railroad tracks. The tracks ran along the river. The houses were divided into apartments, with outside stairways that hung like scaffolding on the sides of the buildings. From the top floors of the buildings, there probably was a river view. I doubted that it was ever advertised.

  I drove the length of the street, slowly. There were kids playing Wiffle ball who didn’t want to move. They stood and stared, daring me to run them over, until a guy crouched beside a dismantled motorcycle screamed something. They moved grudgingly. I drove fifty yards to the end of the street and turned around and came back.

  They moved even more slowly.

  I was looking for the blue Chevette with the black door, and it was on the return pass that I found it, parked in a driveway behind a Camaro with a green plastic tarp draped over its front end. The building was gray and nondescript. The first floor was dark, but there were lights showing on the second and third. I pulled over in front of the next house and looked back.

  The third-floor windows showed bare walls, a Budweiser sign that lit up. In the windows on the second floor there were hanging pots, curtains with some sort of gauzy shades. As I watched, a child flitted past one window, then the other. Then a taller figure, a woman. I turned in the truck seat to look. The child flashed by the windows going the other way, the woman running after her. For a moment the windows were empty, and then the woman stopped in front of the nearest one, her hands on her hips.

  It was Donna.

  I watched her curiously and then, ten feet from the truck, a light came on in a window. The shade pulled back and a face stared out. Like an interrupted voyeur, I brought myself back to reality, started the truck, and drove away.

  What was it about her? Certainly not her looks. Donna was thin and almost boyish, with narrow hips and shoulders. I didn’t know much about her, except that she had hooked up with at least two dirtballs and didn’t seem to deserve that fate. And I knew she had a bite mark on her belly.

  It was a strange sort of intimacy, one that reporters experience every day, especially if they’re good. A woman would tell me her life story. A week later, I would have forgotten her name.

  But I hadn’t forgotten Donna. There was something appealing about her, something naive and vulnerable and blindly optimistic. As I drove through the redbrick funnel that was downtown Kennebec, then over the bridge and east along the winding, tree-lined river, I thought of a guy I’d known who had been a Times correspondent in Bangkok.

  His name was Harrison, his first name, and he’d told me that he’d had to resist the urge to save the Thai women he saw in brothels, on the streets. He said they brought out this pri
mitive instinct in him.

  “I didn’t want to have sex with them,” he’d said over beers one night. “I wanted to bring them to Long Island and show them dishwashers and garage-door openers. It just seemed so unfair.”

  Maybe it was like that with Donna. I just wanted to swoop in and save her, show her that she could live with a man who didn’t hit her and call her names. She seemed like a good person. Why should she have to live like that? What did she do, apart from being born, to deserve this idiot who’d left bruises on her chest, teeth marks on her belly?

  I shook my head. I was in the town of Albion, driving east, the glow of the setting sun lighting the rearview mirror. The road twisted between rocky pastures trimmed with lupine, past long dairy barns crammed with black-and-white Holsteins. I reached for a beer and twisted it loose, then put it between my legs and popped it open. It was pretty, forgotten country out here, thirty miles from Maine’s gold coast, ten miles east of the interstate. I sipped the ale and flicked the radio on. The public radio announcer said the Pittsburgh Symphony was about to begin Mozart’s Requiem. Roxanne was waiting for me at home.

  For me, if not for Donna, life was good.

  When I pulled onto the dump road in Prosperity twenty minutes later, I’d finished the ale. I slid the back window open and dropped the can into the truck bed, where it clinked and rolled. Coming over a rise, under the big oaks that lined the road, I spotted Roxanne’s Subaru. I wondered how she’d done with the young and the violent. I hoped the glow she’d left with that morning had not subsided.

  It hadn’t.

  She was sitting in the big chair by the back window. There was a bottle of chardonnay open on the counter, one glass poured. I put the beer and the paper on the counter and went in to see her. She was wearing a khaki skirt and her legs were up over the side of the chair.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said. “I missed you.”

  “How’d it go with your young serial killer?”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “It didn’t go well?”

  “It went fine. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What do you want to talk about?” I said, leaning over to kiss her.

  “Who said anything about talking?” Roxanne said, and her mouth opened and drew me in.

  6

  We moved to the bed silently, as if in a trance. Roxanne slipped out of her clothes, shedding several articles of clothing in a single swift movement. Women are able to do that. Men yank off their pants and socks clumsily, like city people shucking corn.

  But then we were in the bed and there was only the sound of breathing and the squeak of the springs as we pulled each other closer. It was almost dark, but not quite, and I could see Roxanne’s body in a filmy dusk. We kissed but didn’t speak, and then for a few minutes lay still, running our hands over each other so that you could almost hear each caress. And then we were not so still and fell into a rhythm that was like a little chop slapping at the shore, and then it slowed and there was just Roxanne beside me, my hands on her hips, her breasts, her neck, her chin.

  And the phone rang.

  Neither of us made a move to answer it and it kept ringing, ten rings or more, so that we began to take on the rhythm of the rings, which made us laugh.

  “We should have turned the answering machine on,” Roxanne murmured. “ ‘We can’t come to the phone right now. We’re making love.’ ”

  “I could answer it and turn it on.”

  “You turn me on,” Roxanne said, smiling and kissing me.

  And then we were gasping, and when the phone stopped ringing we bent into each other like rowers to their oars. Roxanne’s legs were splayed over me, pressing.

  And the phone rang again.

  “Jesus,” Roxanne said, backing off but still moving.

  “I’m sure it’s important,” I said. “Maybe we won a weekend at a timeshare. Or a set of steak knives.”

  Roxanne kissed me on the temple, ran her lips over my hair. The phone kept ringing.

  “You want to throw it out the window or should I?” she asked.

  “You’ve got a better arm. Among other things.”

  “But you’re closer.”

  “But if I get it, I’ll have to leave you,” I said.

  “Enough said,” Roxanne said, and reached to the bedside table, where she snatched the receiver in mid-ring.

  “Hello,” Roxanne said, trying to sound as if she’d just put down a dish towel.

  “Yeah. May I ask who’s calling?”

  She held out the phone. Her hips went still.

  “Somebody named Donna?” Roxanne said.

  I frowned. Grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Uh, hi,” the voice on the phone said. “Mr. McMorrow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, well, this is Donna Marchant. We talked today. Outside the courthouse?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m sorry to call you . . . at home, I mean. But I’ve got kind of a problem.”

  I sighed inwardly.

  “And what’s that?” I said.

  Roxanne kissed my chest. Lapped at my phoneless ear.

  “Well, you know that story you’re going to write? The one about me in the court and everything.”

  Oh, that one, I thought.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, my ex-boyfriend, Jeff, the guy I was telling you about? He found out about it and he was, like, really ripped at me for talking to you.”

  Roxanne stopped kissing me and let her head fall back on the pillow.

  “How did he know about it?” I said.

  “I guess I told him.”

  “I thought he wasn’t supposed to have any contact with you?”

  “Yeah, but he called up and he was, like, really drunk, and he started screaming at me and I told him about the story, I guess.”

  “So? I thought you didn’t care what he thought about it.”

  “Well, I don’t. I mean, I don’t care, but he was really ripped, screaming and stuff, and I told him it didn’t matter what he said, it was going to be in the paper anyway, and he said he’d kill me, and I said, ‘Keep talking—you’re digging a bigger hole for yourself,’ and he said he’d kill you too.”

  “What?” I said.

  Roxanne’s hips slid away.

  “Yeah, well, he talks like that when he’s drinking a lot, and I’d just had it with him and I said, ‘Yeah, right. The guy doesn’t even live in town, he lives out in Prosperity or someplace,’ and he said some really disgusting stuff, you filthy slut and stuff like that, and then he said he’d find you.”

  “Does he even know my name?”

  “I told him,” Donna said as Roxanne got up from the bed and picked her underpants up from the floor. “I mean, he didn’t believe me when I said I went to court and I told him I got a protection order and he was like, right, you lying bitch. So I sort of mentioned your name as proof. I guess I shouldn’t have.”

  “He would have seen it tomorrow, anyway.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “That’s when the story’s running.”

  “God. I mean, I just didn’t think it would be so quick.”

  “So what about Jeff?”

  “He, I don’t know, he was crazy drunk, the way he gets sometimes. When he’s drinking hard stuff, he’s, like, right out there, you know?”

  Roxanne had her skirt back on and was hooking her bra. She had a beautiful back.

  I sighed, aloud this time.

  “So he said he could find you,” Donna said. “I mean, he said he was gonna find you. He was saying you were—we were together, you know?”

  “Together?”

  “You’ve got to know Jeff. He’s got this crazy streak. Paranoid or something. Some guy would talk to me in a store or something. I mean, he had to talk to me. I was buying something and he worked there. And Jeff would say the guy was hitting on me. I’m like, ‘I said ten words to
the guy.’ Four of them were ‘How much is this?’ But he’s, like, nuts when he’s like that.”

  “So what’s the story?”

  “He said he was gonna come and beat the shit out of you.”

  “Where? Out here?”

  “He said he could find you.”

  “In Prosperity?”

  “His uncle lives in Palermo. He’s spent a lot of time out that way. Knows quite a few people. Half of ’em are in jail most of the time.”

  “So what’s he gonna do?” I asked as Roxanne rattled dishes downstairs. “Drive around until he sees somebody he thinks is me?”

  “He said he’d ask around and he’d find you.”

  “When?”

  “He said he could find you tonight. He might’ve just gone and passed out, but I wouldn’t count on it. When he goes on one of these, he does a lot of coke, too. Sometimes he’s up three or four days. Him and his buddies call it going on a twister.”

  “That’s nice. I’m glad he has buddies.”

  “Yeah, well they’re all like him. Won’t grow up. Four-wheel-drives and motorcycles. Like little boys with their toys.”

  I was on the edge of the bed, pulling on my boxers.

  “So when did you talk to him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe an hour ago. He was at Mac’s. That’s a bar.”

  “So he could have gotten in his truck and right now he could be knocking on doors out here, asking for Jack McMorrow.”

  “I don’t know,” Donna said sheepishly. “Maybe. He gets an idea and he’s like, crazed. Won’t get off it. I think it’s the coke.”

  “Yeah, or maybe he’s just plain nuts.”

  “That, too.”

  Downstairs, the television came on. From the loft, I could see Roxanne sit down on the couch. She crossed her beautiful legs. Damn, I thought.

  “Does Jeff carry a gun?” I said.

  “Not usually. But he does have a knife. The kind that goes on your belt? He doesn’t go anywhere without it.”

  “American Express.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Listen, you’ve got my number, Donna. If he calls up and says he’s decided to join the priesthood or something, give me a ring.”