RandomActNEWpub

by Random Act (retail) (epub)

  She closed the door.

  I was ready with a prompt but Harriet began. “There were just the three of us. My dad wouldn’t just lose the job, though. He’d pretend he was still working and go off every morning to drink up whatever little money we had, until there was nothing for rent or groceries or the light bill.”

  “And you were evicted.”

  “I remember trudging down the street with everything I owned in this pink plastic suitcase. Walking into a town office, a city hall. Listening as my mother tried to persuade them to help us. And I remember the feeling of those people looking at us like we were trash and they didn’t want us sitting on their chairs. Well, I can tell you. When someone comes here, I never make them feel like they’re less than anyone else. I won’t have some little girl carry that memory because of me.”

  Harriet looked away into the distance, like there was more audience somewhere behind us.

  “I had to fight my way through it. Portland, Westbrook, Lewiston. I was the new kid. The poor kid. The homely kid with cooties, wearing clothes from a thrift store. For a while that was my nickname. ‘Hey, Goodwill.’ But you know what?”

  I shook my head.

  “My mother was tough and she taught me not to take any crap, so I didn’t. When there was a beat-down, a bunch of them on me, I made sure they paid. This one time in Kennedy Park—five girls on me, and I put two of ’em in the hospital.”

  She smiled at the memory. I wondered what it was. An earring ripped through an earlobe? Teeth broken?

  “Let’s just say, I know what it’s like on the street.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “How’d you end up here?” Clair said.

  “Finished up at Riverport High and then community college. Working fast food, cleaning offices, even did a month in a slaughterhouse. People bringing in their chickens and pigs. They’ll raise ’em and eat ’em, but they won’t kill ’em.”

  She shook her head.

  “How’d you get into this line of work?” I said.

  “After school I did admin work, mostly for nonprofits. Started here as a volunteer. I was good at it, ’cause I understood the people, you know? Then the place needed someone to keep it from going under. And I stepped up. I’m not bragging, but I think when I go to a group or the city or a foundation, and I tell my story, they know this is more than a job for me. And you know what?”

  “What?” I said.

  “The clients know that, too. The families. The old alcoholics. Mutt, and probably some of the other guys you saw today. I fight for them, and I guess they’ll fight for me.”

  “And Teak?” I said. “Did he have your back?”

  “When his illness was under control, sure.”

  “What role does this place play in him getting his meds?”

  A flash of annoyance.

  “We have a case manager three days a week. She’s not here tonight.”

  “Did she see Teak in the past few days?”

  “I can’t talk about clients’ medical records. I shouldn’t say anything about Teak at all. Except he needs somebody to speak up for him. To say he isn’t a monster.”

  “But the case manager would normally see somebody like Teak,” I said.

  “Clients with mental health issues do see someone.”

  “And they get their meds here?”

  “Some, not all. Some go to the outpatient clinic. They have a State team that works with some of the homeless, looks for them on the street.”

  “Was that team working with Teak?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What if he went home to Ledge Harbor. Was there somebody to look out for him there?”

  “I don’t know. I just knew him here.”

  “Did he stay in the house on Center Street?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ever see him go into such a psychotic state that he was a threat to other clients?”

  She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. There was another knock on the door, and the lady with the cowboy hat poked her head in again.

  “Miss H., are there any more number-three diapers?”

  Harriet got up from her chair.

  “There’s nothing in the baby closet?”

  “Only number-ones.”

  “Oh, gee. I know there’s a box someplace.”

  She turned to us.

  “I’ve got to run. No bigger emergency than a pooping baby.”

  I flipped my notebook shut. We got up and walked to the door, and she herded us out, all the way to the front entrance, where the line was down to a heavyset couple with three little kids. We stepped out onto the sidewalk, where a cab was pulled up. I leaned down and the driver lowered the window.

  “Gotta get to Prosperity,” I said.

  “You and me both, brother,” the driver said.

  Riverport was a city that, unlike Portland to the south, hadn’t papered over its past. We drove through downtown streets with storefront churches and head shops in buildings with nineteenth-century detail. Strip malls and car lots next to cannibalized Victorians, the cars rolled onto what had been lawns but were now scrapes of frozen mud. The once-grand mansions draped with crude fire escapes, tacked with rows of cheap mailboxes filled with mail for “Occupant.” And it all looked out over the oil-black, ice-filled river.

  Teak and Mutt, Lindy and Harriet. It was like they inhabited some postapocalyptic city that the sun had deserted, everyone scrounging in the snow and grit. I wondered if Teak had turned this place into his own ice planet, like in the comics. Does the psychosis transform reality? Or does the reality shape the psychosis? A question for someone.

  We rode in silence until the driver hit the interstate and headed south. He reached over and turned the radio on, country-western loud enough for us to talk.

  “Do you think you could be a narcissist and still run a homeless shelter?” I said.

  “It was all about her, wasn’t it?” Clair said.

  “The story about cooties must get ’em to open up their wallets at the fund-raisers.”

  “Think she has a family?”

  I took out my phone, went to the Loaves & Fishes website. Harriet’s bio.

  “Lives in Riverport with her cats, Mouser and Toodles. Has several nieces and nephews whom she loves dearly.”

  “So that place is her whole world,” Clair said.

  “A world that revolves around her,” I said. “You noticed who she never mentioned? Lindy Hines.”

  “Hines wasn’t homeless. She doesn’t amplify Miss H.’s own story.”

  We rode down the highway, got off at Newburgh and cut over to Route 202. The taxi sped south between the black walls of woods, climbing the hills as we approached Dixmont. We were the only car in sight, and the driver, a skinny guy with a mullet and big eighties eyeglasses, watched the roadside warily, like we might be waylaid by desperadoes.

  “You sure you guys got the cash for this?” he said. “It’s gonna be, like, seventy bucks.”

  “We’re good for it,” I said.

  “You live out this way?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Freakin’ deserted, man. Give me a nice trailer park any day. Least if some maniac breaks in, I scream, somebody’s gonna hear me.”

  I smiled.

  “Speaking of that,” I said. “You know this guy Teak?”

  “The hatchet guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That why you were at the shelter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You cops?”

  “No.”

  “What are you?”

  “I’m a reporter. He’s my audio engineer.”

  “Like podcasts?” the guy said.

  “Yeah.”

  Another long pause as he processed it. Talk? Not talk? T
hey can’t make you.

  “You know the guy?”

  “You don’t need my name, do you?”

  “No. Not at the moment.”

  “ ’Cause I don’t know what the owner would think. Me being in the paper.”

  “Fine, just background for now.”

  “Okay. Well, sure. You could say, according to somebody who drove the crazy bastard around.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “That whole crowd, nobody has a driver’s license. They’re either whacked out or on meds, or they’re drunks and none of them can afford a car anyhow. They call us. Job security.”

  “Teak called a lot?”

  “Sure. Guy was always dragging something around. Lumber. Tools. Some shit he found by the side of the road. One time he calls me to this spot way out on Union Street, practically in Levant.”

  “How would he call? He didn’t have a cell phone.”

  “Sure he did. Flip phone like you buy in Walmart, with the minutes on it.”

  “Doesn’t that require a credit card?”

  “I don’t know how it works,” the driver said. “I never used one.”

  “Right.”

  “I get out there to East Bumfuck, he’s standing there with this friggin’ beam, like a twelve-foot eight-by-eight, pressure-treated. I say, ‘I can’t put that in this cab.’ He says, ‘How ’bout if I cut it in half?’ And he takes out this little handsaw from someplace in his jacket—he had all kinds’a shit in there—and he starts sawing away. I wait, and he cuts the thing in half and we load it in the trunk, the ends sticking out.”

  “What did he want it for?”

  “Who knows? Some hobo jungle project.”

  “Down under the bridge?” I said, an area I knew well.

  “No, the City Forest off Stillwater. He was building some kinda fort. Guy may have been a wingnut, but he didn’t sit on his ass all day. I’ll say that for him.”

  “How did he pay for his rides?”

  “Cash money, homey. Guy wasn’t broke. They’re all on some sort of disability, while the rest of us work for a living. I mean, it ain’t like they got a lot of overhead.”

  We were coming down a long grade, the driver feathering the brakes. The taxi skidded slightly and he corrected. He looked back at me.

  “What’s your name?”

  I told him. He looked more nervous than the road and the woods would warrant. He took a breath like he was shoring himself up and said, “Yeah, well, all of us knew him, driving cab. Going on about his freakin’ comic books.”

  “He talked about all of that?”

  “All kinds of crazy shit. Planet this and that, King such-and-such. Like it was all real. He thought he was one of them. That was his problem. I mean, at the end. From what they say. Killed the lady with the hatchet. Right out of the story.”

  “Right.”

  We were almost into Unity where we’d take a left, head southeast. There was more traffic now, mostly pickups, and the yellow taxi looked like it had escaped from New York City. I watched the guy, the way he was chewing his lower lip, his mind grinding on something. I said it almost as it came to me.

  “You drove him that morning, didn’t you?” I said.

  He glanced back and I knew.

  “Hey, he wasn’t any more whacked-out than any other time. He goes, ‘Hey, Dickie. Home Department. Gotta buy a tool.’ And off we go.”

  “He wasn’t angry or agitated?”

  “Seemed fine, for him anyway. Kinda quiet. Sometimes he rambles.”

  “Where did you pick him up? At the shelter?”

  “No, downtown. The bridge on Franklin Street,” he said.

  The Franklin Street bridge, which Lindy Hines’s apartment looked out on. They would have had to have left almost at the same time.

  “He was just standing there?” I said.

  “Right there at the curb,” the driver said, “like he was waiting for the bus.”

  18

  k

  It was seven miles from Unity to Prosperity, ten minutes to consider it. The driver wheeled into the dooryard at Clair’s place, seemed reluctant when I told him to pull in as far as the barn. Somebody could get killed here, never be seen again.

  Not this time.

  The fare was $62. I tipped him $20, got a receipt for the Times. The guy pulled out fast and sped off.

  We crossed to the barn, turned on the lights in the workshop, and went inside. Clair started crumpling newspaper for the stove, tossing it into the firebox. Some cedar kindling followed, then some small pieces of ash. He lit the paper and we stood and watched the flames as they illuminated the room.

  “There’s a little park down on the stream,” I said. “People drink down there, shoot up.”

  “He could’ve slept there,” Clair said.

  “Might be one of his regular stops, looking for cans and bottles.”

  The fire crackled, a pocket of gas igniting and throwing sparks onto the floor. Clair stamped them out with his boot and closed the door. We watched the flames through the glass, the volume turned down.

  “What if he didn’t just pick Lindy Hines out that morning?” I said. “What if he was stalking her?”

  “He didn’t tell the cabbie to follow her,” Clair said. “He said to go to the store.”

  “How would he know she was going there? Unless they were hanging out.”

  “No indication of that.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Harriet said Lindy hadn’t even been to the shelter proper. And I can’t picture Teak hanging around the administrative office, where she’d picked up the financial stuff.”

  “No.”

  Clair opened the door and put in a couple of pieces of maple.

  “I don’t know him well enough,” I said. “Not to write about him.”

  “Go meet him at the jail,” Clair said.

  “I will, if he’ll go for it,” I said. “But friends and family first. Got the friends covered.”

  “Now the family.”

  “Right. You go into a conversation with somebody like Teak with maximum background so you can follow the twists and turns of the conversation, encourage him to keep talking, build on whatever he reveals.”

  “Interesting. I just thought you went around asking a bunch of questions, and when your hand was tired from all that scribbling, you wrote the story.”

  “That’s the rule,” I said. “This is the exception.”

  I walked out of the barn and into the darkness. It was cold and I tucked my hands in my pockets as I started across the dooryard, headed down the path to home. Clair tamped it down with a gravel roller towed behind a tractor, like the old-timers did in the days before they plowed snow. The path led between thickets of alder and blackberries, now bare whips with needle-sharp thorns. It was a moonless night, a damp wind out of the south coming in on my right. I followed the faint path—my boot prints, smaller ones for Sophie from our trips to feed Pokey. I’d have to come back, tuck him in. Unless Clair did it, in which case he’d call.

  Clair’s guard was never down, more than forty years after the war; the same rules protected him, and he protected us. A bunch of drunks in a basement. Gangbangers from the city. A vengeful mom sworn to take Roxanne out. A thief ready to burn our house down with us in it. An evil dad in our woods with a long gun, bent on vengeance. Clair had always had our back.

  Nobody like him had been looking out for Lindy Hines, but, then again, how would that have been possible? Who could have had her back if the threat had come from nowhere, for reasons that couldn’t be explained, like lightning from a clear blue sky?

  The guilt that was becoming familiar trotted out the same refrain: Maybe if I’d stopped to chat. Maybe if I’d spent one extra minute, she would still be alive.

  As I approached the
house, I was still thinking. Something didn’t fit. Lightning just doesn’t come from a clear blue sky. Or is there more to life than dumb luck? If we take one in the back, is it because we couldn’t see it coming—or because we neglected to look? I’d once thought that if I worked hard enough, I could keep Sophie safe, Roxanne safe. As long as I was on guard.

  No more. We do the best we can, but sometimes we’re still just squirrels crossing the road. Most of the time you’re lucky. Other times, your luck runs out.

  I came out of the trees, saw the lights on in the second-floor bathroom. Tub time. I turned for the end of the shed, started to cross the driveway and sensed something to my left.

  I whirled, got an arm up.

  “Jack, it’s okay. It’s me.”

  Marta was to my left and three feet to the rear, tucked into the wall of the shed. She hurried to me, took me by the arm. She was one of those people, like you were magnetized and she was metal.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “I’m sorry to bother you like this. But we need to talk.”

  She started to guide me toward the road, her arm intertwined with mine.

  “I didn’t see your truck, so I waited,” Marta said.

  “It’s out of action for a bit,” I said.

  “Accident?”

  “Something like that.”

  We were down by the road and she turned left, started east. I was about to ask her where we were headed when I saw a glimmer of light on chrome. The Audi pulled off onto the roadside along the woods.

  “You could have just knocked and visited,” I said.

  “She’s got enough to do,” Marta said. “Doesn’t need me barging in.”

  We reached the truck and she circled around, scuffling through the snow and dry grass. She opened the door and the interior stayed dark. There was a click and the passenger door unlocked, and I climbed in. My jeans made a scrunching noise against the leather.

  We sat. Marta turned toward me.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Louis,” she said. “I thought I understood him, what he’s gone through, but he’s gotten really distant. It’s like he just disappears. Emotionally, I mean.”

  “He does that,” I said.

  “This past week, it was like we couldn’t get enough of each other. And not just in bed.”