Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  It was almost ten o’clock and I hadn’t eaten. Even if I had, eating was better than going back to Prosperity and waiting for Jeff. Besides, I didn’t feel like tromping around the perimeter in the rain.

  I drove two blocks up and took a right onto the main drag. There was a store with a lunch counter up ahead. I’d stopped there for coffee once and the milk had been sour. What better way to continue this day.

  The store was right on the sidewalk, with concrete steps and a steel railing that set it apart from the other old frame houses on the street. I parked by the side of the building, on which someone had spray-painted obscenities. Nobody had tried to paint over them.

  I went inside. There was an old man at the counter, and as I sat down, he didn’t look up. I waited and finally there was a rustle from the next room, where the videos were lined up on wooden racks. Through the doorway, a small bald man came through the colored tinsel that separated the video room from an alcove with a sign that said ADULTS ONLY! I’d written the guy off as a pervert when he came over and poured me a cup of coffee.

  “Milk?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  The coffee was very hot and very strong and probably acted as life support for the old guy to my right. I was scanning the plastic menu on the wall in front of me for something I could eat when the old man erupted into speech.

  “Gimme one of those muffins,” he croaked, and the small bald man took an English muffin from a bag and lathered it with melted margarine with a plastic brush. I could see black specks in the margarine. I decided to pass.

  But the first cup of coffee wasn’t bad. The second came unsolicited. I was halfway through it when a blue uniform settled onto the stool to my left.

  “Mr. McMorrow,” a voice said.

  I turned.

  “Officer Lenny,” I said.

  “How’s Donna?”

  “What?”

  “How’s Donna?” Lenny said, turning to me with a half smile. “I saw your truck outside her house.”

  “Keeping an eye on the place?”

  “Trying to. In between the other crap. This morning, I spent twenty minutes getting a bat out of an old lady’s kitchen. For this, I went to the academy.”

  “To protect and to serve,” I said.

  “That’s serve, not servant.”

  “A fine line.”

  “That we keep crossing,” Lenny said. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

  “How’s Donna?”

  “Yeah.”

  The small bald man banged a cup down in front of Lenny and filled it. I waited as Lenny took a sip and grimaced.

  “Good as ever,” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “So?”

  “Donna’s okay,” I said. “Considering they won’t keep that psycho in jail.”

  “That stunk. Off the record, I didn’t think Tate would do that. She’s unpredictable, but the guy is a clear risk.”

  “That’s the idea, I think.”

  “The thing is, he’ll probably come after you first,” Lenny said.

  “That makes me feel better.”

  “Thought it would.”

  He shifted on his stool and his gun belt creaked.

  “You did a pretty good job on his mouth. They had to put a bunch of stitches in his lip.”

  “He would’ve needed more than stitches if he’d taken me down,” I said.

  “So you made the first move?”

  I shrugged.

  “You’ve got my statement.”

  “You’re not like the reporters we get here,” Lenny said between sips.

  “That good or bad?”

  “I don’t know. That was a good article on the plea bargains over there. I’m surprised they printed it in that chickenshit rag.”

  “I caught them napping,” I said.

  “So when do they give you the boot?”

  “I don’t know. They may keep me. I’m a good speller.”

  “So’s a computer with a spell-checker.”

  “Don’t tell them that,” I said.

  Lenny drank his coffee. The small bald man came over and poured me a third cup. Lenny held his cup out and got a refill, too. The old man was putting ketchup on his English muffin. It looked like blood.

  “So you’re not doing anything to hurt Donna, are you?” Lenny asked suddenly.

  I looked at him. He seemed to want an answer.

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “ ’Cause I’d hate to see her hurt anymore.”

  “So shoot her boyfriend.”

  “I’ve come close,” Lenny said. “Let me tell you.”

  “You’ve known her a long time?”

  “Ever since she married old pretty boy Donnie there. The first time I got called to her place—and this is off the record—he’d piled all her clothes on the bed and poured gasoline on them. Said he was gonna put a match to the whole mess.”

  “I thought he was the nonviolent one?”

  “He is. I mean, he isn’t the type to just beat on somebody, not like Jeff there. Jeff’s a raging-bull type, but he’ll come right at you. The first time we came to the place for him beating Donna up, I emptied a can of Mace in his face. Had to whack him a couple of times after that to keep him down. Strong goddamn boy.”

  “I noticed,” I said.

  “But Donnie, he’s a different story. Meaner. Kind who’ll hire somebody to burn your house down. He’d find ways to hurt that girl that you couldn’t see. Like wrecking her clothes. One time he locked her out in the hall, nothin’ on but her underpants. Friggin’ January.”

  “Liked to humiliate her, you mean. She told me he was worse than Jeff in some ways.”

  “In some ways,” Lenny said.

  “And you don’t want me to be number three?”

  He sipped his coffee and looked straight ahead.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt, for one thing. These boys both play rough. And I don’t want her hurt, either.”

  “You’re a little late, aren’t you?” I said.

  “I do my best with the laws we’ve got to work with.”

  “Which don’t amount to squat.”

  “I don’t disagree with you there. If it were up to me, both of those guys would be sitting in prison right now. If she were my daughter, they’d have laid a hand on her just once.”

  “You have a daughter?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Lenny said. “Same age. She’s got a good job. She teaches special ed in Portland. Decent husband. Nice little baby.”

  “Donna had to settle for one out of three.”

  Lenny finished his coffee. The small bald man had vanished, and Lenny left a dollar bill by his mug. He looked at me and I decided I liked him, this grandfather and protector of the law-abiding public.

  “But you know what I like about her?” Lenny said, easing himself and his equipment off the stool. “She keeps trying. She keeps that little girl dressed nice. She hasn’t given up. So I don’t mean to harass you or anything. I just want to ask you not to do anything that’ll hurt her. I’d appreciate it.”

  He gave me a long, knowing look.

  “She deserves a break, you know?”

  “I know,” I said. “She deserves more than that.”

  So I gave Donna the best break I could think of. I got my groceries and a case of Ballantine and loaded them into the front of the truck. And then I went home.

  There was no one on the road near the house, no one under the beds. I hit the answering machine and it told me that David Archambault had called and wanted to buy me a beer. Networking. A woman whose name I didn’t catch had called to offer me a credit card through a bank in Delaware.

  Roxanne hadn’t called at all.

  I made a tuna salad sandwich, with Colman’s mustard and a chunk of cheese. As I ate I considered having a Ballantine, but then the sun broke out and the day seemed more pure and I decided to take the high ground, which was ice water.

  When I’d finished my lunch
, I put the dishes in the sink and lathered some Avon Skin So Soft on my hands and arms and face. Then I grabbed my binoculars and headed for the one place that seemed safe.

  The woods.

  There was a tote road out back that I had used with Clair. I followed it through the second-growth scrub that bordered the yard and then up into the bigger stuff: birch and maples, oaks and beech. The blackflies were thick and hungry, and the Avon Skin So Soft seemed to infuriate them, so that instead of biting, they swarmed around my eyes and mouth. I flicked them away and kept walking.

  The tote road ended on top of a long ridge that ran east and west a half mile behind the house. I moved along the ridge for a few hundred yards, picking my way between ash and arborvitae. When I could see the tops of dead trees in the distance to the north, I turned off the ridge and started down.

  After fifteen minutes or so, the hardwood thickened with spruce and pine and then the softwood took over. I slipped between the stands, crossed a small stream by walking on a fallen yellow birch. In the silt by the bank, there were raccoon tracks and the single-file tracks of a fox. I kept going, continuing to head downhill, veering only when the blackberry brambles became impassable.

  A half mile from the ridge, the softwoods thinned too, and I broke through their last line and looked out on an expanse of swamp. There were marsh grass and cattails, and thick brambles where marsh wrens broke cover and then disappeared. But what brought me here were the trees that stood in the brackish water, acres of them, all tall and silvery and dead.

  This had been lowland forest, but at some point the highway had been raised and improved and the stream that flowed through here had been blocked. The water backed up and rose, the trees died, and here I was, Jack McMorrow, famous journalist, in search of the rare pileated woodpecker.

  Well, they weren’t all that rare. Just elusive, and I’d only had glimpses of the big black-and-white birds. Both times that I’d seen them, they’d been flying into the woods from this end of the swamp. I figured the dead trees were prime nesting sites and this was peak nesting season. The plan was to sit on the edge of the swamp at a point where I could see up and down the open area along the shore. If they came through here, I’d get a quick look. If I was very quiet, maybe a long one.

  So I sat on a spruce blowdown and waited, binoculars on my lap. The blackflies converged like crows on a carcass, and remaining reasonably still took all the willpower I could muster. Through the cloud of flies, I saw several marsh wrens and what I took to be several swamp sparrows. Tree and barn swallows swooped by and red-winged blackbirds chirred from the marsh grass. A cedar waxwing swung from the brambles behind me. A flicker called out in the swamp, and for a second I thought it was a pileated.

  Close but no cigar.

  I waited an hour, sitting on the trunk until my buttocks screamed. There were clubs in New York where people paid a lot of money to have their backsides made to feel like this. To think that in the wilds of Maine I got it for nothing.

  So with this bargain in mind, I sat some more. All around me was a sultry murmur. I looked out on the marsh, the flies and birds and bugs. Suddenly the trees reminded me of the masts behind Roxanne’s place, which reminded me of Roxanne, whom I’d been thinking about all day but didn’t want to admit it.

  Why did I throw away the thing that was most precious to me? Why did I hold at arm’s length what I wanted more than anything to embrace? Why did I risk doing something that would hurt Roxanne more than anything when hurting her was the last thing I wanted to do? Why did I more and more ride so close to the edge?

  Donna didn’t deserve to live her life with these domineering pigs. Did Roxanne deserve to live her life with me?

  Warning shots in the middle of the night. Maybe they were a warning to her, too.

  I sat for a while and came up with no answers. I thought about Donna and her appeal and couldn’t find an answer to that one, either. I was still searching when there was a kuk-kuk-kuk from the woods to my left. I sat still and waited and there was another kuk-kuk-kuk and then a flash of black and white, undulating out of the line of spruces onto the swamp. It was a pileated, a male, and it landed on a trunk fifty feet in front of me and corkscrewed its way down.

  I smiled, and just one thought flashed through my mind: If only Roxanne could be with me to see this.

  I raised my binoculars to my eyes and watched the big crow-size bird as it worked its way across the swamp. When it disappeared, I got up and made my way through the woods and back home, where the message light was flashing on the machine telepathically.

  “I was outside today and this big heron thing flew over and I wanted you with me,” Roxanne said. “I’ll be at Paul’s in Camden at six. I don’t want to eat alone.”

  Camden was forty-five minutes and several light-years from Prosperity. I took a shower and had a Ballantine and was out of the house by four. There was a chance that Roxanne, for the first time in her life, would be early.

  But she wasn’t. I sat at the bar and had another ale, a Sam Smith’s. The bartender who served it looked as if she’d just stepped off Skipper’s forty-footer. She was wearing a khaki skirt and a white polo shirt that accentuated her cocoa tan. She was very pretty, but she was not anywhere near as pretty as Roxanne.

  “Sail in?” she said, flashing a nice smile and teeth from a catalog.

  “No, I drove,” I said, smiling back.

  “From where?” she said.

  “Prosperity.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “About twenty-five miles from here.”

  “Up the coast?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Inland.”

  “Oh. You mean twenty-five miles away from the coast?”

  She looked mildly horrified.

  “The heart of darkness,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “The name’s Kurtz. Nice to meet you.”

  She smiled again, but only at half power this time. A couple came in and sat at the other end of the bar, and the bartender fled in their direction.

  The sad state, I thought, of American education.

  At five thirty I had my second ale, a Shipyard, delivered promptly but with trepidation. I sipped it and listened to two silver-haired guys talk about the engineering of the new Jaguar versus the engineering of the old. Then they complained about the summer tourist traffic, which made it difficult to get up and down Route 1 no matter which Jaguar you drove.

  “So how long are you up?” one fellow asked the other.

  “I’m flying back to Philly for a meeting on Friday,” the second guy said.

  “Duty calls?”

  “Have to go kick a little butt.”

  The second silver-haired guy chuckled to himself. Corporate macho. He noticed me and turned and nodded, and I nodded back but didn’t say anything. I wasn’t there for them. I was there for one reason, and at five minutes before six, she walked in.

  Their silver-haired heads turned.

  Roxanne kissed me once on the lips, very quickly, and sat beside me at the bar and held my hand. Very tightly.

  I looked at her and squeezed her hand back and beamed. She was wearing a white sleeveless cotton dress with a pale coral sweater over her shoulders. Her shining dark hair was in a French braid, which she knew I liked. She leaned over and kissed me again.

  She knew I liked that too.

  “We’re not very good at this,” I said.

  “No,” Roxanne said. “I needed you. I needed to see you.”

  “We’ll end up meeting at rest areas.”

  “Where we won’t rest.”

  “And we’ll get arrested on morals charges,” I said.

  “And lose our jobs,” she said.

  “But I barely have one.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Roxanne said. “Well, then, you’ll have to take the fall.”

  “Only if you fall on top of me.”

  “That can be arranged,” she said.

  Roxanne had the house Chablis beca
use it was quicker, and the sooner it was served, the sooner the bartender would go away. I had another ale, and when the maître d’ called, “Masterson?,” we took our glasses to the table. The table looked out on the harbor; I looked out on Roxanne.

  We sat for a minute and beamed at each other some more, but then the waiter came, which forced us to speak. I ordered shrimp cocktail and Roxanne said that would be fine for her too. The waiter went away and we held hands under the table.

  “I really had to see you,” Roxanne said. “I had no choice. I hope you don’t feel like I’m jerking you around.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew it,” I said. “You can’t fool an old fooler.”

  “I wouldn’t try.”

  “So are you coming back?”

  Roxanne paused.

  “No,” she said. “Did you think I would?”

  “No,” I said. “I just thought I’d ask. This is fine.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it? It’s like a date.”

  “But how do I drive you home?” I said.

  “You don’t,” Roxanne said. “We go parking.”

  “Your car or mine?”

  “Is there a gun in yours?”

  “Yeah, but it isn’t loaded.”

  “And you call yourself a man,” Roxanne said.

  The shrimp came and I ate my three and one of Roxanne’s. The sauce was good, but it really didn’t matter. I would have dipped them in ketchup to be with her. When I was done, I took Roxanne’s hand again.

  “So what did you do today?” I asked.

  “I unpacked. Got settled in. Went to the supermarket and bought some food. When the sun came out in the afternoon, I went out on the deck and read the newspaper. And I fell asleep in the lounge chair.”

  “Be careful with the sun.”

  “The newspaper was over my face. How ’bout you?”

  “I didn’t read the paper.”

  “What did you do?”

  I thought for a moment. Thought some more.

  “Well, this afternoon I went out in the woods. Way back to that swamp that I told you about. I wanted to see a pileated woodpecker and I saw lots of birds and then, finally, after an hour, zoom, this male comes out of the woods and lands right in front of me. They’re huge. I mean, for woodpeckers. It was great. I wished you were there.”