by Richard Ford
Boyce looked at his bowl of berries. “Maybe they’ll want some blackberry pie.” It was okay—to relent. Now he would meet them—the McDowells—at least in a way.
“May be.” Fenderson broke into his broad smile, his big, raucous teeth on display. He didn’t like Fenderson. Something was cold and sinister about him. Though it didn’t matter. “I’ll sure ask ’em,” he said, then he made a “whew” sound and started back toward his truck, happy with his victory and for it to be easily accomplished.
HE’D ORGANIZED A PIE BY FIVE. THE LATTICE CRUST, ROLLED WITH a vodka bottle, wasn’t sweet enough, so he’d sprinkled sugar on. He had too many berries, so that he had to bring up the bigger, scorched Pyrex from the basement. Naturally, he lacked gelatin, which meant the pie would be runny, which was acceptable if it was sweet enough, which it would be. He’d leave it on the stove top. A pie would pronounce the house as welcoming, denote residence. If it hadn’t sold by Labor Day (ten days off) maybe he’d consider a low-ball—have another whack, Mae would say. Change his mind. He didn’t have firmer plans. Though he still hadn’t asked the price.
But then what to do now, while the house showed? He and Mae had never visited the bars in the village. She’d lacked the “requisite desperation for the American pub,” she’d said, preferred her glass of Pouilly in the gazebo, watching swallows hit through the evening light, hearing bells across the bay chiming hymns. “Softly and tenderly . . .” Sometimes she’d sing.
Locals called the little bayside village Gilesburg from ancient charts. Though newer maps had it as Amity, a joke, since lobstermen ran down the kayakers, sliced one another’s lines, smuggled in weed, and gave the finger when they snatched your parking place at the hardware. “No lights, no running water, shit in a hole, and schtup your sis is how they prefer it,” Mae had said. “Very much like life in the North of Ireland—not that I was ever that fortunate.”
He drove in to the village along Shore Road, rounding the long bight of the bay as the sunset occurred in all gold. (The McDowells would be viewing it now.) First, the girls’ camp gate, then the dump, then the quarry, the Dollar General, the strip of failing retail, a bulk farm, a wrecked-car pasture, moccasin outlets, plus the staple of uniform Maine settlement—ruined boats on blocks, traps-and-buoy piles, wood splitters and canvas Quonsets—every single person with a rusted truck, a broken plow blade, a dirt bike and a dog. Out of sight of water, Maine was Michigan with no sense of humor. And then after Columbus Day, the Mainers reclaimed it all. Businesses went dark, restaurants were shuttered, locals ignored you if you went in the ditch, and summer cottages not burglar-proofed turned up re-purposed as meth labs or torched or both. The sheriff took time off. He couldn’t survive here, Boyce understood.
Tiny Main Street sloped straight to the public dock and the dry storage berths where the sports wintered their yachts. The old town bars were for boatyard crews, nail-pounders, and fights—somebody’s wife pairing up with the wrong house painter or the wrong house-painter’s wife. Grudges were savored; everyone was armed. It was all recorded in the little four-sheet Amity Argonaut Mae used for starting fires. He didn’t visit except for the Post Office.
The Launch Pad, however, was new to the street. A new red BAR sign hung below a new red neon lobster. Clean windows, attractive light within. Just one drink, Boyce decided, then drive to the house. A hand-lettered placard at the Launch Pad door announced “Canadian money always welcome. Canadians almost never.” Inside was fresh pine paneling, a long, lacquered bar with Christmas lights on the back-bar mirror. A small, empty dining area was in the rear with netted globes and candles and silverware laid. The air smelled of sawed wood and something cooking. Somebody, Boyce supposed, believed they saw a future here.
Only, it didn’t seem open. Though in a moment, a tall, slump-shouldered teenage boy stepped through the swinging kitchen doorway, talking on a phone, and motioned Boyce to sit at the bar, then stepped back out of sight. Male voices in the back became audible over the sound of a dishwasher. Someone would know how things with the girl turned out that afternoon. She’d seemed very happy on her gurney.
An enormous man came gliding through the swinging kitchen doors, wiping hands on an apron. “S’okay!” the man said, going behind the bar and picking up a towel to finish. “Wha-canna-getchya?” He seemed very pleased with himself
“Stoli, rocks. A double,” Boyce said, wanting to seem pleased, too.
“Playing two!” the bartender said. He had round, packed arms inside a T-shirt, a weight-lifter’s dense chest, a tiny waist and a large head with oiled, dark curls. His head swayed as he talked and poured. His looks were too big for him to be truly handsome. His T-shirt said GO SEAHAWKS. “Vacation-land, are we?” the bartender said, holding the glass up, pretending to measure.
“I’m renting the month out on Cod Cove,” Boyce said and smiled.
“Wow. Ok-ay.” The bartender set the drink down. He reached and clicked on the big TV above the back bar. With the remote, he ran through channels until he found Fox. “Keep you company,” he said. “Sound, no sound, it’s the same price.”
“No sound’s good.” He felt not significant here but unexpectedly good, while strangers combed through his rental house. At the end of the bar, a young woman had emerged from the Ladies—the toilet noise still going. “Do you know anything about the girl they found down at Nicholl’s Cove?” Boyce addressed the bartender.
“Do we know anything about the girl they found down at Nipples Cove?” The bartender smiled, addressing the young woman seating herself several stools down in front of an empty glass. “This spellbinding creature is her first cousin,” the bartender said. “We’re all cousins here. Our ears don’t exactly match. Did you notice?” Both his earlobes held tiny diamonds.
“Nothin’ about you actually matches,” the young woman said. She looked toward Boyce. “She’s fine,” she said about the girl on the gurney from the morning. “She drinks too much. Surprise, surprise. I may do the very same thing tonight.” She nudged her glass forward with her little finger. “That was so good, I’ll just have one more.” She smirked. “After which your sorry services will no longer be needed.”
“My sorry services?” the bartender said, enjoying himself.
“I know far too much about them,” the woman said.
The bartender set down a drink on a napkin in front of her. “No one’s complained about my services so far.”
She touched her fingertip to an ice cube and submerged it, then looked at the TV, showing American soldiers in desert gear with automatic weapons, breaking into a house made of mud. They were smashing in a metal door with a battering ram, then crowding through the opened space.
The bartender was departing to the kitchen. “Scream out if you two need me. This nice man’s offered to pay for you, sweetheart. He’s a sport.” He went gliding off, light on his feet.
“No, he didn’t,” the young woman said and turned her head to the side with a small smile that said she wanted to be recognized as a nice person. “I’m Jenna.” She had on camo-cargo pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been wearing for a while. When she smiled, her eyes crinkled, and her face brightened and showed well-cared-for teeth. “Who’re you?”
“Peter,” he said and smiled. The Christmas lights on the back bar winked every two seconds. Sinatra was singing “South of the Border, Down Mexico Way.” It was very good to be here. He relaxed and breathed deeply for the first time all day. The Stoli made his brain go plush. He might easily have been driving down a dark highway, headed south, but he was here.
“What do you do?” the girl said.
He smiled again. “Lawyer.”
“Where at, in Maine?”
“New Orleans.”
“Woo-hoo. Bourbon Street.” She directed her gaze back to the TV. “Never been there. Want to.” A reporter was talking to the camera before a night sky that contained an immense spotlit mosque. “Do you have some children?”
“One,” Peter Boyce
said. “She’s grown up.”
“So how old are you?”
“Fifty-five. If I remember.”
“So,” the girl said, “you like had your daughter when you were how old?”
“Twenty-seven, I guess.” He turned half toward her to signal this was all right, what they were doing. Burbling away, Mae would’ve said. She hadn’t been patient with it.
The girl took a sip of her gin and tonic. “I’m twenty-four,” she said. “So are you divorced?”
“I’m not. No.”
The girl looked at him appraisingly, raised her chin an inch, rounded her eyes as if she’d detected something and was about to not trust him. A deceased wife wouldn’t mean anything to her. No reason to go on. “What’re you doing here?” she said. “Are you, like, on a trip?”
“Renting,” Boyce said. “Just the month. Out on Cod Cove.” With one drink down, he needed to eat something. He felt slightly woozy. Route 1 offered only the Sea Biscuit and a Vietnamese where he’d gotten sick before.
“What do you do for a living?” he said to the girl.
Jenna once more stirred her drink with her finger. “I wanted to be a veterinarian. Because. I really like animals. Which didn’t . . . work . . . out . . . because I wasn’t good at math. Or science. So. I help at the no-kill down in Rockland.” She looked at him very seriously. Her brow wrinkled. It was a look she’d perfected so people wouldn’t think she was dumb. She was older than twenty-four, Boyce decided. Thirty. She was too at home in the bar, telling a stranger her story.
“What do you do at the shelter?” This was just passing time. He could eat at home. The McDowells probably were gone.
“Help find good homes for the little animals. It’s fun.” She took a smaller drink and lightly cleared her throat. “I have this problem right now,” she said and cleared her throat again. She didn’t look at him, though her pale lips had composed themselves into an unhappy wrinkle.
“A problem with what?” Boyce said.
“It’s embarrassing,” Jenna said. “I don’t really want to tell you.”
“That’s fine.” It was actually better. It was almost time to leave.
The bartender re-emerged from the kitchen, just his big shoulders and his head, “You two getting along okay? Is this a tender moment I’m interrupting? You’re very quiet. I’ll just leave. Though I want to show you guys something.” In his hand he held a writhing lobster. In his other was a little mottled black-and-white puppy. The bartender knelt in the kitchen door, set the lobster on the floor and the puppy beside it. Instantly the puppy sprang at the lobster, biting its shell and snarling as if the lobster was its enemy. The lobster waved its banded claws and backed toward someplace it could defend—a corner by the kitchen door. Though the puppy kept leaping and growling and biting. “I wanted you to see my new lobster dog,” the bartender was grinning merrily. “I still have to teach him to swim. But he has the instincts.”
Jenna mouthed something silently to the bartender. The show was for her, which she knew. The bartender scooped up the lobster and the puppy and disappeared into the kitchen. Laughing erupted inside. Sinatra was now onto “I Get a Kick Out of You.” “. . . I get a kick though it’s clear to me . . .”
“He’s such a complete asshole. He used to be married to my cousin Cathy. ’Til he discovered he was gay or whatever. He’s since changed his mind about that.”
“What kind of problem have you got?” Boyce asked.
“I’m locked out of my house. Apartment, I mean.” The girl stared at herself in the back-bar mirror. She looked tired, and sighed. “It’s complicated.” She sighed again.
He didn’t need to ask questions. It wasn’t why he was here. The girl turned her face away and went on talking. “I was living with my boyfriend. Eric. Who’s a lot older. He pulls traps, although he went to community college for a semester. He likes books.” She tapped her index finger on the lip of her glass as if she was considering Eric. She looked at Peter Boyce so he could see only half of her face, which held a frown. “It’s not all that interesting,” she said. “It doesn’t put me in a very good light.”
“It’s fine,” Boyce said. Again, it was enough.
Jenna shook her head as if she disliked a great many things that were all visible to her. “Okay. Him. And me—him and I, whatever—we had a fight about something stupid. Something I did. And he moved out and took off to Melbourne Beach, where his mother has her condo. He left his boat and his traps for his brother—who does not have a license, or a brain. It was Eric’s apartment, but he said I could keep it whenever the lease came due, which is supposed to be Halloween. He said he’d come get his stuff out, and maybe we’d get back together. La-dee-dah. Not very Amity. So. I was, like, living there and working at the shelter. Then two days ago I come home, and the locks are all changed.” She fattened her cheeks. “This note on the door said, ‘Dearest Jenna . . .’ Dearest Jenna. Right? ‘Carla and me have moved back in. I took your stuff to your mom’s and put it on her porch. Don’t come around here or call me. I’ve moved on now. Love, Eric.’”
She took a good-sized drink and cleared her throat once again. “I don’t know who this Carla could be.”
Boyce said, “Did you go get your belongings?”
Jenna shook her head. “My mom lives in Ellsworth—with her boyfriend. She put my stuff in their fifth-wheel, which she offered to me to stay in. But I was too embarrassed. I’ve slept in my car for two nights. And I’m not the kind of person who sleeps in his car. I went to Orono, for Christ sake. I have a degree. Or almost.”
“What can I do to help you?” Here was a very bad idea. The only thing that seemed remotely humane was also a very bad idea. He felt tired and too old to be doing what he was doing.
“Well.” Jenna pressed her lips tight together and inflated them. She didn’t have an expressive face—a face like Polly’s, in a way. “I really hate to ask this.”
“Anybody can get in a mess,” Boyce said. “Keeps lawyers in business.”
“We don’t even know each other,” Jenna said. “You’re not an ax murderer or anything, are you?
“I’m not. I told you, I’m a lawyer. Maybe that’s worse.”
“Of course, I know who you are,” she said. “Your wife died. My mom’s boyfriend’s stepson’s an EMS. They came and got your wife. I probably shouldn’t say that.”
“It’s all right.” It was. It was actually fine that things repeated themselves, even here, on this day. That wasn’t bad. It was one small adjustment.
“I’m really sorry she died,” Jenna said.
“So am I,” Boyce said. “She was sick.”
“Didn’t she kill herself?” Jenna said almost formally.
“Yes. She did.”
“Okay,” Jenna said. She smiled at him weakly. “Could I take a shower at your place?” Then instantly she said, “If it’s weird, I understand. I can ask Byron in there.”
Frank was now singing “Make Someone Happy.” “I’ve got another bedroom,” Boyce said. Too quick probably. “You don’t have to sleep in your car.”
He was now inconceivably offering a vagrant girl to sleep in his rental house. It was the thing old, drunk fools did. In two days, the girl and her Mexican boyfriend are arrested three states away, driving his car, using his credit cards, having murdered several people along the way, including him. How do you become that person? Who was that person? Was it him, now?
There was a shout out of the kitchen, followed by a clatter of pots bouncing and someone—the bartender—breaking into howls of laughter. “Oh, man,” someone said. “I can not believe you just did that! Michael will shit.” More laughter.
Jenna focused her crinkly eyes on him and frowned to indicate she knew he was thinking about something serious.
“I never lie,” she said. “I wish I could. It’s probably why I get along with animals. They don’t lie.” She gave him a pretty smile and pulled both sides of her hair away from her face. “Don’t worry about my boyfriend
breaking in your house and robbing you. He’s not that creative. And he’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
Boyce put two twenties down. “Do you want to follow me home?”
“This is also so embarrassing,” she said. “My car battery died. It’s in the lot at the Shop ’n’ Save, where I slept.” She widened her eyes again. “Can I just ride with you, if it’s okay?”
“Sure,” Peter Boyce said. “We’ll get your car going tomorrow.” This deed was done. Jenna seemed instantly happy and at home—which was the point or had become the point. Make someone happy.
ON THE DRIVE ALONG THE CURVE OF BAY, THE LIGHTED SKY WAS ALL but extinguished. Clouds above the trees revealed only a filament of platinum. House lights showed across from the south shore where year-rounders lived. Jenna commented about every road and house they passed. Who lived there, who had lived there, where a drug bust had taken place. She told him her boyfriend’s apartment—where she’d been locked out—had been handicap-equipped, which was why it was cheap. A person could do fairly well, it seemed to her, without the use of some limbs. She talked about how she wanted to devise yoga for animals. There were poses with animal names, so animals had been involved in the past. She asked Boyce where he’d been on 9/11 and also the Millennium, and when Hurricane Katrina took place, which she remembered being near New Orleans. These events were significant. She told him where she’d been on 9/11—alone, with a Vietnamese boyfriend in a cabin east of Caribou. She’d chosen an unconventional path through life, she admitted. But that was fine. She wasn’t very ambitious but had attainable goals and could make a contribution by being a good person to people and animals. She asked Peter Boyce if he had any tattoos, and when he said no, she told him tattoos were a sign someone had given up. Then she told him Stevie Wonder had been offered his sight back but had refused. There was no stopping her. Maybe, Boyce felt, driving, you didn’t pick up hitchhikers the way he’d done in college, or strike up conversations with strange young women in strange bars. Surely, though, it could be all right.
