Way Past Legal

by Norman Green

  “You saw the light and decided to go straight. Nice to know that can still happen.” He lifted one eyebrow a millimeter or two, curled one corner of his mouth up. It was probably his equivalent of a belly laugh.

  “You know, when you’re a teenager, it’s like playing Russian roulette with no bullets in the gun. Nothing can happen, you’re a minor, there ain’t shit anybody can do to you.”

  “Noticed that.”

  “I bet. You turn eighteen, though, they put a bullet in the gun. But you’re still immortal, you’re Superman, right? Five out of six is still pretty good odds, that’s what you think when you’re that age. But the longer you play, the more bullets they put in the gun.”

  “How many in yaws?”

  I shook my head. “Couldn’t tell you. I quit playing years ago.”

  “Glad to heah that,” he said. “I worry about folks like the Averys sometimes. There’s such a thing as being too kindhahted. Did you know it ain’t safe to pick up hitchhikahs any moah?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Louis Avery,” he went on, “used to be an awful rakehell, back befoah he found the baby Jesus.” His expression did not change. “Thought maybe good living might have clouded his thinking. But Eleanor, now, you’ll nevah get much past her. She told me she thought you was probably all right. Said you’da nevah raised that little boy up as good as he is if you didn’t have some finah points.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  “I trust her judgment,” he said, “up to a point. Why don’t you read ovah this statement, see if you agree with what it says.” He handed me a couple of typewritten pages. As I took them from him, he picked up a newspaper that had been lying on his desk. It was a copy of the New York Daily News, a couple of days old. I was pretty sure it was the issue that had had the story about the Russians and the stock scam in it, and the story about Nicky going missing in Bushwick.

  It was hard to concentrate on the statement, but I did the best I could while Bookman paged idly through his paper. After a few minutes I handed the pages back to him. “Says here he punched her in the face, but he didn’t. All he did was whack her head against the car.”

  “A fine distinction,” he said, putting down the paper. “Hold on, this won’t take a second to change.” He came back with a new printout a minute later. He handed the sheets to me, picked up his paper again.

  “I ’magine those tattoos ah kind of a handicap for a guy like you, ain’t they?”

  “I’m a software designer,” I told him. “They don’t handicap me at all, I just get tired of the questions.”

  He was nodding. “That’s right,” he said. “Eleanor Avery told me that, but I forgot.” He rolled the paper up and tossed it into his trash can. “Don’t know how you can live down to Noo Yok,” he said. “People robbin’ each othah all the time. Don’t seem natural.” He was staring at me.

  “You get used to it.”

  “I ’magine,” he said. “None of my business, what you do to each other, down to Noo Yok or Boston. I got enough to do right heah. You know what I mean?” He regarded me calmly, giving me a minute to think about it, then cleared his throat. “Wife told me you was out to the house yesterday.”

  “Out to your house?”

  He turned around one of the framed pictures on his desk so that the image faced me. It was a picture of Bookman and Franklin, the big kid with the broken bicycle. The two of them had their arms around one another, and Bookman squinted into the camera while Franklin looked at the ground. “Ah. He’s your son.”

  He nodded. “My son. Funny thing about him. He don’t talk a lot. He won’t say a word about who it was run him off the road, and I really need to know who done it.”

  “Nobody likes a rat.”

  He stared at me. “Populah misconception,” he said.

  “I didn’t see the accident. I saw a pale green pickup truck, seventy-four or seventy-five GMC, with two kids in it. Mile or so later, I saw Franklin.”

  “All right.” His face betrayed no emotion at all. “I appreciate you coming in like this. I’m gonna tell Hop to stay the hell away from you. He don’t, you let me know.”

  I guessed that he knew who the kids in the pickup were, and would administer justice in his own way and in his own time. “All right.”

  “I had a visit from a private investigatah this mawning. Russian guy, from down to New Jersey. Checked in with me, just like he’s supposed to.”

  Man, this guy was a laugh a fucking minute. “Is that right?”

  “Ayuh. Said he was tracing some guy jumped bail on an ahmedrobbery chahge in Bayonne. Guy name of Mohammed something. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”

  “I never even been to Bayonne.”

  “Figured that,” he said. “I nevah liked private investigatahs myself. Most of ’em ah just bottom feedahs, you ask me. Anyhow, I’m gonna leave that paypah, and all them stories in it, right theyah in the trash bucket.”

  I think my heart had stopped beating. “What is it that you want from me, Mr. Bookman?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing at all,” he said. “I want you to have a good time while yaw with us. Gevier ought to have yaw cah fixed tomorrow or the day aftah. See if you can stay out of trouble in the meantime.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Good,” he said. “Thanks for coming in.”

  I stood up to go.

  “Manny?”

  “Yeah?”

  He turned the picture of him and Franklin back around to face him. “You notice how nice and quiet it is up heah? We like it like that.”

  I thought about protesting my innocence, but I didn’t. I just walked out.

  I wanted to run away.

  I hesitate to admit it now, but I did, I wanted to run, I wanted to take off. Looking out Bookman’s window, I could see Canada right across the water, for Chrissake, I knew I’d have to drive about thirty miles up the U.S. side of the St. Croix and cross at Calais, Jesus, I can’t tell you how bad I wanted to do it. Bookman was letting me slide, maybe because he decided Nicky was better off with me than in some foster home, maybe because I had picked up Franklin and given him a ride home, or maybe it was just because he didn’t feel like filling out the paperwork. I didn’t want to push my luck with the guy, though, I wanted to be gone, I wanted to go grab Nicky and run.

  I drove Hobart’s Subaru over the causeway that links Eastport to the mainland, past the Passamaquoddy Reservation, the fucking Subaru barely broke ninety but I was in full flight mode, I promise you. Then I had this thought: All I need is one small thing to go wrong on this relic, this rusted collection of steel, paint, iron oxide, and rubber, and they’ll be scraping me up off this fucking road with a shovel. Where would Nicky be then? It’s like when you hear someone say, “I would have killed myself but I was too much of a coward.” I got to the end of that road, the end point, where it butts up against U.S. 1, and I wrestled with that. I sat there at the stop sign, there was no reason not to, there was no one behind me and no one coming. Easy enough to get away, if that was what I wanted. I could call Gevier and tell him to chop the van and sell the parts, leave some money with Louis, tell him to pay Hobart for the Subaru, grab my kid and take off. I wouldn’t be fooling anybody. I might buy myself enough time to cross the border and get lost, but Bookman would find out in a day or two that I’d run away, and Louis and Eleanor would know it, too.

  I found that I cared what these people thought of me. And worse than that, I didn’t want my kid living with some guy whose coping skills consisted of running away every time the shit got a little funky. Still, part of me thought I was losing my edge, going soft. How did this make any sense? Nicky’s too young, he won’t remember anything. . . .

  I couldn’t do it.

  I turned left, headed back to Louis’s house.

  There was a big yellow Mercedes parked up next to the Averys’ yellow house. I stopped as soon as I noticed it, maybe a quarter of a mile away, and pulled the Subaru over to the s
ide of the road. I fished my birdwatching glasses out from behind the seat, thinking, From now on, everywhere I go, they go. I got out and glassed the place. All I could tell was that the car had Maine plates and there was nobody in it. S 500, maybe four years old. I have never understood Mercedeses’ popularity, they’re too heavy and too slow for my taste. They do what they’re made to do, though. You might as well wear a sign. “Hey, I’m a rich old guy.” It struck me then, I was rich, but I wasn’t old yet. The Mercedes still looked like an old Checker Marathon to me.

  I waited for about half an hour but nobody came out of the Averys’ house to get into the car. I couldn’t see through the windows, either, not at that distance, and there wasn’t much cover between me and the house. I got back into the Subaru and fired it up, drove on past.

  After you go past the Averys’ horse pasture the road curves, and between that and the trees in his woodlot I was very shortly out of sight. Before you get to the Gevier estate there’s a little path on the right leading up into the woods, another narrow, overgrown wagon track where the trees come right down next to the road. I slowed down there. I couldn’t see either the Geviers’ or Averys’ house from that spot, and they couldn’t see me. I turned the Subaru into that wagon track and drove up in between the trees.

  It was smoother going than I had expected. The Subaru was made for this sort of thing, I guess, with its low-torque engine and four-wheel drive. I was almost starting to like it in spite of myself. I mean, it wasn’t like I’d ever wanted one. If I got a sport-ute, I wouldn’t go for an old crock like the Subaru, I would pick something that had AC, a CD player, two sunroofs, three-hundred horsepower, and a ten-grand custom paint job. Of course, then I’d be afraid to take it up into the woods, where it would get all scratched.

  The track ran uphill into the trees about a hundred feet and kind of petered out. You couldn’t see anything from in there, not the main road and neither one of the houses. I parked the Subaru in what seemed the logical place and got out. I headed through the woods, in the general direction of Louis’s house. I was distracted, defending myself from the onslaught of mosquitoes, so it took a few minutes, but I came out in Louis’s pasture, closer to the road than I had intended. It was just dusk, dark enough so that I thought I could sneak up next to the house without much chance of being noticed, especially if I approached from the front of the place, where nobody much went. I checked for the horse first, and then I went for it.

  I saw him just before I got to the corner of the house. He was an eastern screech owl, no doubt about it, I had looked up the listing in Sibley the night before. Smallish for an owl, mottled brownish gray, ear tufts. The tufts look like ears but they are not, they’re just little bunches of feathers on top of the owl’s head. The owl can lay them back like a cat or point them up if he wants to, but his ears are actually openings on the sides of his skull under the feathers, one higher than the other so he can triangulate on the sounds his dinner is making before he catches it. I don’t know why he had the ear tufts, I can’t think of a possible survival advantage they gave him, or why some owls have them and others don’t. Maybe a lady screech owl would never look at you if you didn’t have them, who knows. He heard me coming, of course, and he flew away, but I got him before he did. I can’t really describe the feeling that gave me, it was almost a physical chill. I don’t understand why I was so interested, either, but I can tell you that right then, that owl was fucking beautiful. For a fraction of a second, just an eyeblink, I was tempted to forget everything else, follow the bird and watch him hunt, but instead I just watched him fly away.

  It was Sam Calder Sr. sitting in the Averys’ kitchen. He was on one side of the kitchen table and Louis was on the other, Eleanor standing behind her husband with her hands on his shoulders. There was one more woman in there, too, I couldn’t see her but I could hear her voice. I assumed it was Sam’s wife. I couldn’t tell what any of them were saying, I could hear only murmurs. Louis was agitated, though. I could tell from the tone of his voice and the way he sat in his chair that he was not happy. Eleanor stood calmly, patting Louis once in a while. She loved him, you could feel it coming right through the wall of the house, she loved the fucking guy. Jesus. What would I have been if I’d had a woman to love me like that? Shit.

  I followed the edge of Louis’s pasture down to the road, then followed the road around to where the wagon track up into the woods started. Long way around, I know, but I’d had it with the Leatherstocking routine, at least until I got some bug spray. I got back to where I’d left the Subaru, fired the thing up, and drove back down out of the woods. I turned my cell phone on, but I couldn’t get a signal, so I drove to the convenience store where I’d seen Hopkins romancing his girlfriend and called Louis from the pay phone. I told him I wanted to go hear Roscoe’s band at the VFW, and he said that he and Eleanor would be glad to look after Nicky. I could hear Sam Calder Sr. in the background, and Louis didn’t seem in any hurry to get back to him.

  “Is that Sam senior I hear?”

  “Ayuh,” Louis said.

  “He still harassing you about that field up in Eastport?”

  “Ayuh.”

  “Why don’t you throw him the hell out?”

  “Can’t,” Louis said, with a trace of sadness in his voice. “Events have conspired against me.”

  I remembered that Louis had seemed kind of dour the night before, and I wondered what had happened.

  There was a different woman working behind the cash register in the convenience store. She probably thought I was nuts. I bought gas, and a whole bunch of other shit, too, maps, a flashlight and batteries, bug dope, some chocolate bars, Poland Spring water, a big hunting knife to go under the seat, and so on. You’d have thought I was going to the North Pole. I had picked up a bunch of new mosquito bites, though, and in a classic case of locking the barn door after the horse was dead, I doused myself with repellent. The bugs had reminded me, Maine is not New York City. You got to be prepared up here, or something will start chewing on your ass.

  I’ve never been into music. People look at me and assume I’m into rap, but I’m not. To me, rap ain’t nothing but some guy talking shit, and you can get that for free anytime. It’s interesting, though, you look at kids who go for that, they usually live someplace where it’s okay to go around blowing smoke out of your ass. Where I come from, you never make threats, it’s not safe. You’re gonna do something, you either do it or you keep your mouth shut and you step out around. A lot of the places I’ve sublet, though, people are really into their sound. Old dudes from the sixties hang on to those old LPs, I been inside places where they had boxes and boxes of them. I imagine them blowing reefer and putting that old crap on the turntable, remembering back when they were gonna change the world. My thing is, I’ll go out somewhere to hear guys play, but I’m not gonna start buying their stuff and lugging it around with me. That’s in the city, though, where you can go hear music any night of the week. Not so easy out here in the boonies.

  I guess that’s why I decided to go hear Roscoe’s band. There was a pretty good crowd when I got there, the parking lot was almost full, about half cars and half pickup trucks. I had to park the Subaru way out back, down in a dark corner. I could hear the music as soon as I got out. It was, I guess, country and western, but with a twist, with a French Canadian accent, you might say. I would call it an improvement over the original, because the guy’s girl might have broken his heart and left him for you, okay, but instead of whining about it, he was gonna come over to your house and kick your ass.

  There was an old soldier at the door, white hair and sad eyes. He took my five bucks and nodded me inside. The place was one big room and one small one, the small one being the bar. Roscoe’s band was set up at the far end of the big room, and they were dressed like shitkickers, white shirts, black ties, jeans, cowboy boots and hats. They were loud and energetic—Roscoe’s shirt was soaked with sweat. He played the fiddle. He didn’t have it up under his chin, though, he had it
jammed into his belt and he was wailing on it, man. You might not like his style but you couldn’t fault his enthusiasm. A half dozen couples were jumping around on the dance floor in the middle of the room. Roscoe looked at me over their heads, nodded at me, and flashed that Teddy Roosevelt grin of his, but then he was lost again, submerged in what he was doing. There were round tables scattered around the edges of the room, about ten chairs each.

  I noticed Franklin first. You couldn’t miss him. He was sitting at a table on the far side of the room, next to his father. I saw him glance at me and I waved to him. He looked down at the table but he waggled three thick fingers at me. Bookman caught the motion, saw me, and waved me over, motioning to an empty chair next to his son. I made my way around the perimeter of the room, nodding at the few faces I’d seen before. More than ever, it seemed to me, I stood out in the sea of plaid flannel shirts and white faces, different in every aspect. They tolerated me well, though, smiling and nodding in spite of my brownish skin color, black leather jacket, and running shoes. Ex-cop I used to know liked to call them felony boots.

  I sat down next to Franklin. He stuck his hand out to me, looked down at the ground while we shook. My hand is not small but it was lost in his dry leathery mitt. He didn’t squeeze too hard, though, there was a gentleness in him you would never expect, looking at the guy.

  “Hi, Franklin.” I had to shout to be hear over Roscoe’s band. “You like the music?”

  “Too loud,” he rumbled back at me. “Hurts my ears.”

  I leaned forward and looked over at Bookman. “Your son is an honest man.”

  “Yes, he is. How are you?”

  “Thirsty. Can I get you something from the bar?”

  He nodded, waggling an empty Budweiser bottle.

  “How about you, Franklin? Can I get you something to drink?”

  He glanced at me and looked down. It was the most eye contact he’d ever give you. It was incongruous that this huge bear-child could be so shy. “I don’t drink,” he said.