Maggie Boylan

by Michael Henson

  It took only ten minutes for James Carpenter to do what he had to do. But twenty minutes later, thirty minutes, forty minutes: Maggie Boylan was nowhere in sight. He checked briefly in the drugstore and did not see her there. He could have asked, but that would have meant telling the whole town he had been hanging out with Maggie Boylan and he did not want to feed the rumor mill. So he waited and fretted in the shadow of that damned courthouse.

  He should have left her behind. Any normal person would have left her. But there was that purse under his seat. She had trapped him twice now with that purse. The wind shook the courthouse trees and skipped scrap paper across the courthouse lawn. He muttered around the block, talked to a couple of the old men on the benches of the courthouse square, went in for coffee at the Square Deal Grill, came back around, and saw her, leaning against the fender of his truck as if he was the one who was late.

  She must have bummed another light. She held a cigarette close to her lips; tobacco smoke ran away from her in a gust. He was ready to tell her off for leaving him to wait so long, but she stared at the sidewalk and did not raise her eyes. Bright tears streaked her guttered cheeks.

  So he held his peace. She said nothing as he got in the cab and she said nothing as she pulled herself into her seat. He asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right, it’s them courthouse motherfuckers. They think they rule the fucking world. Hell, they ain’t even motherfuckers cause their own whorish mothers wouldn’t have them.”

  He turned the ignition and everything was dead again.

  “Oh fuck,” she said. “Please get me out of this tight-ass town. I can’t stand these bluenose motherfuckers with all their little sheephead smiles. Get me out of here before I kill somebody for sure.”

  James Carpenter looked behind the seat of the truck, but the hammer was not there. He was sure he put it back in its nest among the other tools he kept in the truck, but maybe, in his hurry at the crossroads store, he had mislaid it.

  “If my old man wasn’t in that jail right now, I’d blow that whole place up. I’d drop that motherfucker right around their ears, ever lying sack of shit walking those halls, just to see them buried in the rubble.”

  She continued to curse as he rummaged through his tools. The hammer was nowhere to be seen, so he pulled out a tire tool, which he thought a little awkward for the job. But it worked. Just a little tap, and he was able to start the truck back up.

  “Yeah, I’m all right,” she said. “I just want to shoot me a couple deputies.” She had not stopped cursing the whole time he had tinkered with the battery and she showed no signs of stopping now. “I’d like to blow the balls off them all. If they had them, which I doubt.”

  Carpenter’s own thoughts about the courthouse gang were not so far off from Maggie’s, but he hated to stoke his resentments. “They’re just doing their job, Maggie,” he told her, just to remind himself.

  “No they ain’t. Their job ain’t to keep me from visiting my own husband. Their job ain’t to tell me I can’t see him cause I didn’t have no ID. They know damn well who I am. And if they don’t, I’ll sure enough let them know. They let every skank and crack whore and hustling bitch in the county visit their man, but they won’t let Maggie Boylan see her man who ain’t done no harm to nobody, just too damn broke to get his tags up to date.”

  “Maggie . . .”

  “Which I’m sorry I was late, but they was ready real quick with those pills and I remembered it was visitor’s day and you wasn’t back yet so I thought, hell I won’t be but a minute and it’s right across the street and all. So I’m thinking I’ll just go over there and tell Gary how I been trying to get money for his bail and all, but I got his mom to cook for and to get the pills for and I ain’t had an unemployment check in over a month and I can’t get nobody to explain that to me and that big old lard can that works the front desk at the jailhouse says I can’t visit cause I had that little trip to Marysville.”

  “They got their rules.”

  “No they don’t. They got one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for the likes of you and me. You know they do. They didn’t care about the rules when they searched my old man’s car to look for dope. They didn’t care about the rules when they come out to the house without a scrap of a warrant to look to see was we cooking up meth. They didn’t care about the rules when they sent me off to prison with my kids crying in the gallery. And I know they didn’t care about the rules when they set you up and fired you.”

  “Maggie, they suspended me.”

  “Well, we know they fired you. Don’t lie.”

  “Maggie . . .”

  “Everybody knows they set you up and they fired you. They knew you was on their case about county workers at the golf course and they knew you had their number about old Lard Bucket getting blow jobs from the girls in the jailhouse. They knew you was on their case about all the little hush-up deals that go on in the county, so they set you up.”

  “Maggie . . .”

  “They did. Everybody knows they did.”

  “Maggie . . .”

  “Don’t lie. Everybody knows you never give that boy no fifty dollars just so you could ball that little cracked-out bitch of a girlfriend he’s got. He’s just a lying, snake-eyed, drug-running ex-con that’ll say anything to keep from going back to Chillicothe. He’d lie on his own mother for a nickel rock. It’s true. Don’t lie.”

  “I can’t say anything.”

  “I know. Because you got a court case and the lawyer’s done told you don’t talk to nobody about it. But I know. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

  “I can’t say anything.”

  “You don’t have to. I know exactly what happened. You went down to that trailer to see that little lying cunt because you thought she could tell you something about the low-life deals going down with that courthouse gang and she set you up. Didn’t she?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “I could understand it if you did want to get a little off her. Old Lard Can gets his right at work. But everybody knows that’s not why you was there.”

  “Maggie, I can’t say.”

  “You don’t need to say nothing. I know all about it.”

  * * *

  YELLOW FIELDS, black fields, gray hills in the distance. Maggie talked on. “I know what you’re thinking. How does a crazy bitch like Maggie Boylan know so much about what goes on?”

  Which was not exactly what he was thinking, but it was close.

  “I got my ways, you see. I watch. I listen. I think for myself. I don’t just take what everybody says is gospel. All them good people that look down their noses at you, all they do is think what somebody tells them to think. Ain’t a one of them thinks for themselves. But anyway . . .”

  The crossroads store was by now a half mile down the highway, but the road to Maggie’s sixty acres was just ahead on the left. He turned on the blinkers to make ready.

  “No,” she said. “Just take me back to Gleason’s. I got to get me some baloney.”

  He hoped his grimace didn’t show.

  “Anyway, what I was saying, don’t ever go around a little lying whore like that without you got a witness. If you can’t get no one else, I’ll go with you. Cause they’ll fry your ass ever time. You think you know these people, but you don’t know them like I do. They’ll sell you out for a six pack and a carton of cigarettes.”

  He pulled to the edge of the lot. His first inclination was to let Maggie off there, on the highway shoulder, on the off chance no one would see her climb out of his truck. But a wave of defiance rose up in him. All his life, those old men had watched him. And all his life, he had worried over what they thought of him. Let them watch, he thought. They can think whatever they want. He pulled up bold as life by the gas pumps in front of the big restaurant window and the eight watchful eyes of the four old men who did not disguise their staring this time as Maggie stepped bold as life out of the truck.

  Maggie stood a mom
ent in the open door with her old man’s coat pulled up around her ears. The wind skipped a plastic bottle across the pavement and she shivered the coat higher on her shoulders. “They’ll leave you to hang,” she said. “And won’t a soul stand behind you when they do.”

  She reached under the seat for her purse and pulled something else out with it. “Here’s your hammer you was missing.” She smiled, sweet and sly. She laid the prodigal hammer on the seat and started to pull her purse onto her shoulders.

  Later, back home, after the wind died down, he would go out to clean up his battery’s corroded posts and to put the hammer back in its place. He would find, on the floor of the passenger side, the empty bag from the pharmacy. Stapled to the bag, he would see the slip of paper that told what was in it. It would be none of his business to look, but he would look anyway and he would see nothing for high blood pressure and he would know then that Maggie Boylan had gotten stoned on her dead mother-in-law’s Oxys right there in his truck and he, Maggie’s fool, had not noticed a thing.

  But at that moment, as she stood in the open door, with the big wind pulling at the wings of her coat, he felt ready to tell Maggie Boylan he would wait. He was ready to give her a ride to the house. He was ready to defy the stares and the talk. He was ready to make the big mistake.

  Instead, he told her, “You take care, Maggie.”

  “If you ever need me for anything,” she said, “you know where I am.” Then she turned and walked away. The wind gusted across the lot and blew up a great column of dust and paper scrap. Maggie staggered a moment in the wind and turned to say something more. But the wind tore the words away. She staggered again and maybe it was the wind or maybe it was the Oxys. James Carpenter knew that Maggie Boylan, Oxy-addled, thieving Maggie Boylan, was wasted down to the near side of nothing. But in her oversized coat she looked slim as a girl.

  Black Friday

  IT WAS the day after Thanksgiving at the Once Removed secondhand store and Maggie Boylan burst through the door, already talking. Sarah Hunter was on the phone with her mother, her poor sick mother in Columbus, but you could not shush Maggie Boylan.

  “Sarah, I got to get some money,” Maggie said. She was dressed in a big, loose, oversized denim coat with the sleeves rolled back, jeans all out at the knees, and a pair of men’s work boots. But she held out a pair of shoes—flawlessly white walkers like nurses wear and a pair of jeans, crisp and new and embroidered with flowers and spangles, hung over the shoulder of that big loose coat.

  Sarah Hunter had hoped for more customers today. She had put up her Christmas decorations and she had discounted some of the better items. But there had been hardly anybody in all day. Now, at midafternoon, two women stood over by the children’s bin, rummaging for school clothes. They eyed Maggie carefully. They were in their own big coats. They continued to turn over jumpers and T-shirts but their eyes worked back and forth from Maggie to Sarah to the bin.

  Maggie set the shoes and the jeans on the counter where Sarah could not miss them.

  “Hold on,” Sarah said into the phone. “I’m getting interrupted.”

  “I need you to help me,” Maggie said, “Christmas is coming up. I got to get my babies’ presents out of layaway.”

  “Let me call you back,” Sarah told her mother. “I got to deal with something here.”

  “You know I’m sober now,” Maggie said. “Can you tell? I’m getting fat.”

  Maggie was not getting fat. She raised her shirt to show her belly and she was not fat at all. Her ribs were like a line of coat hangers; her belly was gaunt. In fact, Maggie Boylan was all elbows and knees; she flopped about in her open coat like a horsefly inside a tent. Sarah Hunter had known Maggie since they both were girls. They had grown up friends and she could not bear to look at the hollow of her belly. She could not bear to look at the bones of her face.

  “See? No more of that crack. No more Oxys. I can’t live without my Vicodin on account of my back, but I don’t do no more of that crack.”

  Sarah looked at the shoes and the jeans. Brand new; neither had ever been worn. But there was no tag on either one. “Where’d you get these, Maggie?”

  “I got them for myself,” Maggie said. “But my babies come first. How about ten dollars for each. Those are fifty-dollar jeans.”

  “Maggie, where’d you get them?”

  “I got them at Target.”

  Sarah shot her a skeptical eye.

  “I swear,” Maggie said. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  Dennis Hunter limped out from the back office with a stomp and a shuffle. He was in his coveralls and he had a wrench in his hand. The truck was up on ramps out back and muffler parts were strewn across the yard. He had been stomping and shuffling in and out for tools and warmth all day.

  “There’s your old man,” Maggie said. “He’s the one I want to talk to.” She grabbed up the shoes and the jeans. “Hey, Dennis,” she called. “Dennis,” she said. “I got to talk to you.” She pushed him back into the office and slammed shut the door.

  “Well damn,” said one of the women at the children’s bin. The women looked at one another, raised brows, looked down for a moment, then back to the office door. The first woman asked, “You gonna leave her alone with your man like that?”

  “If it was me,” the second one said. “I’d bust that up real quick.”

  Sarah Hunter would have joked about it if she had been in a joking mood. But she did not trust these two and her mother was sick and she was in no mood.

  “You got to watch Maggie Boylan like a hawk,” the first woman said.

  “I won’t let her in my house no more.”

  “The jeans, she might have got legal, but those shoes is definitely hot.”

  “They probably come straight out of Walmart.”

  “Or Payless.”

  “Or Pay-Nothing.”

  “She comes in your house, you got to watch her ever minute. If she ain’t stealing now, it’s cause she’s casing the joint for later.”

  “Ever time she comes in my house I end up with something missing.”

  “Like your CD player.”

  “She got that for sure. I can’t prove it . . .”

  “But you know.”

  “That’s why I don’t let her in my house no more.”

  “And hell if she ain’t doing crack. She had to stand up twice to make a shadow.”

  “She must of lost fifty pounds.”

  Sarah interrupted. “Well,” she said, then trailed off. She did not know what to say, exactly, but she wanted to hear what was going on in that office.

  “You sure you want to leave Maggie back there with your old man?”

  Sarah tapped a cigarette out of her pack. She could hear Maggie Boylan from behind the door. Her husband’s quieter, gravel-yard voice was in there too, but not so often as Maggie’s. Sarah tapped her cigarette on the counter.

  “She kind of give you the brush-off, didn’t she?”

  “She knows I won’t put up with none of her bull.”

  “And she thinks he will?”

  Sarah shrugged. “I reckon he can handle Maggie Boylan.” She was not at all sure he could handle Maggie Boylan, but she was not about to tell these two. She was of half a mind to go to the office and bust them up, but she lit her cigarette, put her elbows on the counter, and waited. She kept an eye on the women at the children’s bin, too. They might talk about Maggie, but the two of them were not above slipping a little something into the oversize pockets of their coats—a little dress if they liked it, or a pair of shoes. They would be happy to have Sarah turn her back.

  The first woman held up a child-size blouse with a frilled collar. “What do you want for this one?”

  “What’s it say?”

  “It don’t have a tag.”

  “Look again.”

  “It don’t have a tag.”

  “Two dollars.”

  The woman raised a brow.

  “Buck-fifty, then.”

  The wome
n shuffled and bargained over a few more items before Maggie banged open the back-office door.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

  She continued to thank her way up the aisle. “Thank you,” she said again. “You don’t know what this means. My babies can have a merry Christmas.”

  “Bless you both,” she said to Sarah, then banged her way out the door and into the street.

  Dennis limped behind her with the shoes and the jeans. “You reckon these’ll sell?”

  Sarah Hunter tried to keep it to a whisper, but it was hard to do. “If you want to sell them,” she said, “get yourself a store and sell them yourself. Personally, I don’t want nothing to do with them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause they’re hotter than a two-dollar pistol.”

  “She said she bought them herself.”

  “And didn’t show no receipt to prove it. And the tags is off but they never been worn. And here’s Maggie Boylan, the biggest thief in five counties telling you some bonehead story. And you think they ain’t stolen.”

  The two women at the children’s bin decided it was time to settle up. Sarah rang them up and bagged them up and helped them out the door, all with one critical eye on her husband.

  She waited until the women had started gossiping down the street before she lit into him for real.

  “What,” she wanted to know, “did you think you were doing?”

  “I bought some clothes. We’re in the business of selling clothes.”

  “Think a minute.”

  “Think what?”

  “Where’s Maggie Boylan gonna get the money for clothes like that?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Her old man’s been in jail all these months because he took the hit for her and all’s she can do for him is to sit out in that little house in the country and stay high on OxyContin. She ain’t got one dime to rub against another and she’s gonna come in here with some new kicks and a pair of britches look like they come off of Shania Twain’s ass and it don’t occur to you there might be something fishy about the whole damn deal?”