by Mike Bond
He walks off like I was never there.
There was no point to tell him both my sentences were overturned. That I was never guilty. Because wherever he’s headed next, all he’s thinking about is how to get me back Inside.
And any hope I had of staying incognito is now gone.
PRECISELY NOON Maine time, 07:00 in Hawaii, Mitchell calls. I had taken Bucky’s snowmobile up the trail still trying to track my shooter, and now cut the engine on the ridge above the Missalonkee Hard Riders clubhouse so I could hear him.
“It’s a disgrace,” he says.
I wondered how he knew I’d been pulled over. “Damn right.”
“Did you know about these crooks?”
“Some cops are.”
“Cops? I’m talking about these Legislators! Man they are bent.”
I was confused. “What’s new from that?”
“I’ve been going through some nasty bank records from Maine’s public servants. These folks take campaign money from the Wind Mafia, then they take more Wind Mafia money under the table, cash into different bank accounts, PACs, their spouses’ bank accounts… One guy, a stickler for public probity, this guy is, a leading Democrat, pillar of respectability with four daughters –” Mitchell fumed on.
“That doesn’t necessarily make him a crook –”
“Each daughter has over million bucks in a savings account, all foreign banks.”
“Jesus Christ I’ll marry them.” I thought a moment. “So maybe he’s rich.”
“Rich? Rich? The bastard was a potato farmer till the potato market went south so he bought himself a seat in the Leg. He wasn’t rich then but he sure is now.”
“That’s American capitalism for you.”
“I’ve been up all night chasing down these crooks –”
“Mitchell you gotta sleep some time.”
“This other dame from Portland she sends her Wind Mafia money to the Caymans! Just like some drug dealer! What’s a state Representative doing with three accounts in the Caymans?”
I didn’t explain you that Mitchell gets really upset with the corporate-political corruption in our country today. As he sees it, he’s in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and a lot of our good friends are dead because we tried to protect our country. Thus being reminded of what a festering pit our government has become gets him very pissed off. I’m pissed off too but have lost hope of anything better.
“Mitchell,” I says, “all we can do is live honorably ourselves.” This is total bullshit but I’m hoping to calm him down.
“No,” he says. “That’s not right. We take care of people, Pono. We take care of our country.”
Over Mitchell’s voice I hear a snowmobile coming. “Hold on,” I says but Mitchell just keeps expostulating. I slip the .243 from under the tarp and thumb off the safety. The snowmobile comes up the trail on the far side of the clubhouse and pulls up in front. It is dark blue.
The driver is wearing a full gray snow suit and boots. He has a rifle slung over one shoulder. I can’t tell what kind, but it’s large caliber. Like a .270.
“Mitchell,” I break in on his rant and tell him what’s happening. “You think it’s the guy tried to kill you?” he says.
“It’s a dark blue machine.”
“On the satpix I never could tell; too late in the day and too cloudy.”
“I’m going to slip down the hill, have a little chat with our friend.”
“Pono you can’t kill him. You’ll be Inside forever –”
“I’m not going to kill him, just discuss things. On second thought,” I added as more snowmobiles came into hearing, “maybe I’m not.”
The other machines pulled up at the clubhouse and the drivers and passengers all went inside. None of them were carrying rifles.
“Gotta go now,” I said.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“If you were here,” I said though the topic was painful, “you and I would go down there and solve this.”
“The good old days.”
For the thousandth time I felt washed with sorrow that this powerful dynamic guy was now a legless cripple with no sex life. That a guy who could run twenty miles with full gear now has to roll himself to the bathroom.
“Don’t worry, Mitchell. We’ll catch these guys.”
“Your snowmobiler shooter? Maybe.” Mitchell was still pissed off. “But these crooked politicians – who’s going to catch them?”
THAT NIGHT I went looking for Abigail in all the Hallowell bars and found her at the Liberal Cup. It’s a wild place with lots of good beers and it’s loud and the food’s great. “What a coincidence,” I says, “running into you.”
She looked straight through me. Like I was a pane of glass or maybe an ice sheet on her next free climb. “Abigail,” I says.
“You heard what I said.”
“What you said about what?” I said, quoting from The Idiot’s Guide to Never Getting Laid.
“I don’t do guys twice.” She sucked down beer, gave me a mock smile. “You included.”
“So don’t do me. Talk to me.”
She checked out the room. “What you have to talk about?”
“I want to know you.”
“I don’t want to know you.”
“We had so much fun – you did too… I love just listening to you.”
Her lip curled. “I don’t care what you love.”
“Please let me in, Abigail? Please?”
Her face turned glacial. The light went out of her eyes. I had a sudden stab of fear, of what she could do.
“Have it your way.” She tossed back her beer, checked the room one last time, dropped a ten on the bar. “Let’s go.”
AFTERWARDS, leaning on one elbow looking at her naked made me joyous with how lovely she was. Her skin had a golden glow in the dim streetlamp through the frosted window, her hair a lustrous velvety sheen, her body slim and lithe, and she had nice feet and didn’t paint her toenails. No lipstick, mascara, nothing. Just her face, her real face, with its passing storms of fear and happiness.
“So what,” she yawned, “makes you think you care about me?”
There had to be a way not to lie. “At first I just wanted to fuck you. Now I really care about you. Want to be with you.”
She dabbed at sweat in her belly button. “Wasting your time.”
I kissed her belly button, down between her lovely thighs, loving the taste of her. She pulled me up, kissed me deeply and we got going again.
A while later she checks her watch on the nightstand. “It’s eleven damn thirty. I have to be up at six to prepare for a committee meeting.”
I nestled against her, half asleep. She was warm and sweaty and smelled deliciously of sex. I tucked the blankets up around us. “I’ll make you breakfast.”
She snuggled closer, slim fingers up my ribs. “I can’t believe I’m sleeping with you again. Has to be a bad sign…”
“It’s wonderful,” I mumbled. “Delightful.” As often, I was an unwilling double agent. Being with Abigail was beyond joyous, but I was really there to find out who shot her husband. And why.
Which she clearly didn’t want me to know.
Or did she even know?
Go Deep
DESPITE WHAT I’d told Mitchell his revelations saddened me. I’d had a lingering faith that Maine Legislators were honest people trying to do their best for the people. In fact some of them were so homely I just automatically trusted them. And, as Sylvia’s Professor Donnelly had said, Maine people have a tradition of trusting each other. And of fulfilling that trust.
But money corrupts, and most elected officials have their price. In Maine, I was learning, that price is often very low.
Would the wind companies bribing the most legislators also be the most willing to kill? Not do the killing themselves, surely, but just make it happen? Killing isn’t hard to do, and can get rid of lots of problems literally overnight.
ERICA WAS SEVENTEEN and I fou
rteen the summer I left Hawaii for Stroudwater to work on Uncle Jack’s farm. She was already an expert at the dance of love and gave me a master’s degree before I even went to college. There are few things more fun than an afternoon of sex in the warm grass beside a cool stream in the shade of a benevolent oak, when the magnificence of a young woman’s body is new to you and the mysteries of sex just starting to be revealed.
Not that she was a patient teacher. She simply removed my brain, what there was of it, and abraded my private parts while she blissfully explored her own private nirvana.
But between times she was nice to me. Showed me what to do and when, and that the finest thing in life is indescribable bliss.
Apparently in France, those masters of bliss, teenage girls often have relationships with more experienced men – no inarticulate fumbling or putting things in the wrong place, just lovely lessons in orgasmic joy – while teenage boys are taken under tutelage of more experienced women and learn what it’s all about and how to bring fun and joy to a woman and himself.
So although Stroudwater is three thousand miles from France and Erica was my elder by only three years, I got a bit of a French education.
Feeling slightly fourteen again, I called her up.
“Bradley, Cohen and Tillson,” a sonorous woman’s voice.
“Erica Tillson please.” I tried to sound lawyerly.
“Who is calling?”
“Sam Hawkins.”
“Will she know what this is in reference to?”
It’s in reference to ancient fucking, I wanted to say but wisely held my tongue. “An old friendship. From Stroudwater.”
Seconds later the sonorous lady was back. “She’s in conference all day. I shall leave her your message.”
This didn’t sound auspicious, but I gave her my Hawaii cell. “Please tell her I’m in Maine. And that it’s important.”
Sure it was important, but not to Erica. One thing I remembered from fifteen years ago: to Erica nothing was important except what she wanted.
So I was dreaming if I thought she’d give a damn about Bucky. Or about the death of Maine.
PORTLAND’S A STRANGE TOWN. It draws you in while revealing nothing about itself but tourist talk. Once the second-largest seaport on the East Coast, sending magnificent sailing ships with Maine crews and captains all over the world, Portland is now a remnant of brick buildings and wooden colonials on a long narrow headland jutting into Casco Bay.
The site must have been beautiful – a granitic pine-clad promontory of rivers, streams and bays of pure green water, the deep cold salty tang of the sea. But that was hundreds of years ago and today’s downtown Portland is a jumble of concrete, plate glass, steel, and crumbling highways, its innards gutted in the 1960s by federal “urban renewal” projects that tore down most of its ancient buildings and replaced them with overpasses, freeway exits and glass office towers.
Congress Street, once a magnificent downtown of classy department stores, restaurants, offices, libraries, bookstores and bars, was then killed by the suburban maul – sorry, “mall” – built on what had once been part of the Hawkins family farm, not far from where superbrain Erica had taken me by canoe for those amorous episodes. Of course now Congress Street is a dirty windblown tunnel of empty storefronts, junkies, dumpster divers and broken sidewalks.
It all went round in my head too many times. I’m sure you have the same feeling.
Speaking of dumpster divers, or the folks who stand in the wind and snow and rain on street corners with their cardboard signs asking for food or money – they’re dirty and unshaven in tattered clothes, and they go off to the side every once in a while to suck on a cigarette. They remind me of one of my Special Forces HALO jumps (High Altitude Low Opening) – which means you jump out of a plane at about 38,000 feet but you don’t get to open your parachute till about 900 feet AGL (Above Ground Level, wherever in Hell that happens to be). As in every jump I went through the usual, falling in my Extended Cold Weather Gear through 50 below at two hundred miles an hour then yanking my chute at 900 AGL.
Well, this time my chute didn’t open. I was 900 feet above ground, falling at two hundred feet a second, so I had four seconds to live. And no matter what I did the damn chute wouldn’t open.
That’s what happened to those folks.
But unlike me, they didn’t have a spare chute.
“YOU LEFT A MESSAGE.” Erica said, as if this were a criminal offense. But at least she’d called back.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, feeling fourteen again. “I’m in Maine and I thought…”
“You told my secretary it was important –”
“Yeah it is. But how are you? It’s been a long…”
“Look, I’ve got a very busy day.”
“Do you remember me?”
“You were just a kid.”
I risked it: “Not when you were done with me.”
Was that a suppressed snicker? “I’ve got to go. What can I do for you?”
“It’s a legal matter of supreme importance but I’ll be damned if I’ll discuss it over the phone. When can I meet you?”
“I’m not taking new clients.”
“I’m not a new client, I’m an old one.” I was getting pissed off now. “How soon can I see you?”
“Sam, I don’t have time…”
“Make time.” I scrambled for ideas. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Going home to take a hot shower.”
“I’ll take one with you.”
“We’re going to end this conversation.”
I was at my wit’s end. “Erica, you’ve had a wonder ful impact on my life.” Sometimes, I reasoned, you can get more with flattery than requests. “I’ve appreciated you all these years – don’t ruin it now.”
She reflected a moment. “You know Three-Dollar Dewey’s?”
“I can find it.”
“Seven-thirty. I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”
We can make love twice in that time, I was going to say but again was wise enough not to. “When you hear what I have to say you’ll forget about the time.”
“I never forget about time.”
AT STROUDWATER GRAVEYARD I stopped to give the ancestors a brief update. Climbed the path to the knoll of headstones under the pines. As usual it was so damn cold I had to force myself to perch on the frozen pine root while I brought them up to speed.
“Still haven’t found Bucky an alibi,” I admitted. “Turns out he had a girlfriend – and then when I went up Eagle Mountain to look for his gun, guess what? Some asshole shoots at me…”
Not a word in shock or protest.
“But I’ve met this fantastic woman from Hallowell – her ancestors must’ve lived there same time as Uncle Elias… and tonight I’m seeing Erica – remember when she and I canoed up the River? And by the way, Maine’s just as crooked as Hawaii, so don’t start acting holier than thou…”
No response.
“So what do you think I should do?” I asks, pissed off at their silence.
I sat there thinking for some reason of college football, when as a wide receiver I’d always loved running deep routes. Then realized that’s what they were telling me:
Go deep.
THREE-DOLLAR DEWEY’S is a wonderful bar and eatery on the Portland waterfront in one of those ancient brick buildings that has so far escaped attempts by developers and urban renewal experts to make Portland look like Las Vegas. There’s sawdust on the old pine floors and thick pine tables and lots of pretty women and big screens on the wall where guys in football helmets keep running into each other at high speed.
She came in at exactly 19:30 in a long black camel-hair coat and a black dress that hinted at the body beneath it. She gave a little hand flutter and crossed to my table. I stood and got a quick peck on the cheek. She tossed her coat across the other chair and looked at me. “You’re not what I remember.”
“I’m not what I remember either.”
Despite herself sh
e cracked a grin that quickly died. “So what’s this about?”
I was getting mad. “Sit down.”
She glared at me, grabbed a chair from another table and sat. It was as if she owned the place, but then she’d always been that way, had owned me entirely for most of a summer. “You look wonderfully like the you I remember,” I hazarded.
She gave a sharp grimace. I checked her left hand: no rings. “You were such a kid then,” she said.
Her brief smile was like a flash of sunlight on a dark day. The kind that melts a judge’s heart and disarms the opposition. So she can get what she wants.
I explained her about Bucky. About the wind turbines, what they did to Bucky and Lexie and all their neighbors, what they were doing to Maine, to America. To the world.
“I don’t get caught up in politics,” she said.
I leaned forward. “This isn’t politics! Your family,” I remembered, “has been in Maine since the sixteen hundreds. Don’t you care about what’s happening to Maine?”
“Look, Sam,” she looked at me almost kindly, “I’m a litigator, not a criminal attorney. And I’m certainly not a pro bono environmental lawyer. Find one of those enviro groups to take up the fight.”
“They’re all getting money from the wind industry.”
She shrugged: so what else is new? “There’s nothing I can do to help your friend.”
“He’s not my friend. I can’t stand him. Plus he took away a woman I loved –”
“Yes, but you were going to do twenty years? What woman was going to wait around for that? And why care what happens to him if you don’t even like the guy?”
I explained her the whole Special Forces thing, you help a buddy in danger no matter what. Strangely, this seemed to move her. “My first husband was in Iraq,” she said.
“Your first?”