by Gerry Boyle
I listened and couldn’t help but smile. Bobby Mullaney had one mark of the city still on him: the gift of gab.
“So, Jack, you gonna help us with the cause here? ’Cause, man, it’s a grave injustice that’s going down. This state has goddamn Gestapo and they are doing terrible things to innocent people. I mean, I know people who have lost everything for growing pot. You grow a few plants for your own use, in the privacy of your own home, you get called a drug trafficker, like you’re some sort of Colombian drug lord. These are peaceful, gentle, law-abiding people, and they’re getting treated like vicious criminals.”
“Well, it is against the law,” I said.
“And the law is friggin’ obscene. But even that, they bend it. They stretch it. They lie in court. They lie to get warrants. They lie about what they find. I mean, it’s a goddamn police state. And the only way to stop it is to put it to the people, once and for all. Legalize it. Take the cops out of it. Take the crime out of it. You want to smoke pot, plant a plant next to your tomatoes. You don’t want to smoke pot, don’t.”
Mullaney took a breath. A couple of teenage boys eased up and he moved over toward them. “You guys registered to vote? . . .”
There was a brashness to his pitch, but at the same time, a naiveté that was almost endearing. He could have been behind a carnival booth, selling vacuum cleaners door to door, used cars in a seedy lot, fake Rolexes to tourists in Times Square. The guy drew you in with his openness. He’d fill a lot of petitions. He’d make great copy.
He came back.
“So what do you do in Prosperity, Jack?” he said.
“I write stories. For newspapers. Magazines.”
“What kind of stories?”
“News stories. Feature stories. I’m freelance now. I was a reporter.”
“No shit, man,” Mullaney said.
He looked at me, a sharper interest in his eyes.
“Where’d you do that?” he said. “Here in Maine?”
“Some. Mostly New York.”
“New York City?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Where at?”
“The Times.”
For a moment, Mullaney considered me and said nothing.
“I was wondering,” I began. “Maybe there’s a story here. About the legalization movement in Maine. It’s probably been covered for papers here, but not in Boston or New York.”
He thought.
“Yeah,” Mullaney said slowly, his grin returning. “Yeah. We could use some big-time press. Especially by somebody who isn’t in the cops’ pocket. I could introduce you to some people.”
“That’d be good,” I said.
“Hey, here’s another one of us now.”
He looked to his right, my left. A guy was approaching carrying two paper cups from the cider booth. He was tall and very lean, with a dark stubble of beard and long hair that was tied back. He wasn’t smiling.
“Hey, man,” Mullaney said, as the guy set the cups down on the counter. “Somebody I’d like you to meet.”
The guy looked up but his expression didn’t change. His eyes were deep-set and black. His hair was black, too, falling almost to his waist, held back with what appeared to be a piece of bone and a leather thong.
“Jack, this is Coyote,” Mullaney said, the only one of us grinning.
“Coyote, this is Jack. He’s a reporter. He’s gonna do a story on us for the Boston Globe or the New York Times.”
Coyote looked at me and I looked back. Our eyes met. Locked. There was a flicker of something, some sort of challenge. It was a look I’d seen in very tough guys. Prison inmates. Gang members. Riker’s Island. East New York.
I didn’t expect to see it here.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, still meeting Coyote’s gaze.
He waited, then nodded. Slowly.
2
Mullaney did the talking for a few minutes and then turned his attention to the teenagers, who were undecided. That left Coyote and me. Coyote hadn’t said anything yet, and I didn’t help him out.
“Jack what?” he began.
“Jack McMorrow.”
“What’d you cover in New York?”
“Metro stuff. Cops. Courts. A little local politics, but it wasn’t my thing.”
Coyote looked at me. “You got a Times ID?”
“Hey, man,” Mullaney put in, turning back to us. “We’ve been talking. He’s good people.”
“Could be,” Coyote said. “But we’ve got to be sure. He understands. He’s from New York. Probably not the first time he’s been asked. Nothing personal.”
I looked at him, considered his odd mix of organic and tough. Add a little leather and he could be an outlaw biker. Cut his hair and he could be doing four to six for assaulting a cop. But here he was in the land of sugar-free ketchup and spiritual healing.
“Coyote,” I said, digging in my back pocket for my wallet. “Is that Native American or something?”
“I’m one-quarter Oglala Sioux,” Coyote said.
Baloney, I thought.
“That’s interesting,” I said. “Red Cloud and all that.”
“We’re related. Distantly.”
Give me a break, I thought.
Our eyes locked again. I handed him my old Times ID, my face in the photo full of ambition. When that picture was taken, I was headed for the top. Unstoppable. Somehow I came up a little short, like making it to Wimbledon but never getting past the second round.
“So you quit, or get fired?” Coyote said.
“Quit,” I said.
“Why?”
“To run my own paper in Maine.”
“So what happened?” Coyote asked.
“It’s a long story.”
“I got time.”
“I don’t,” I said.
Coyote looked at the ID, then up at me. His face relaxed just a bit. A little bit. Mullaney moved over to talk to a man and woman at the counter. Coyote handed me my ID and I put it back in my wallet.
“Maybe this isn’t worth the trouble,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” Coyote said. “We just have to be careful. Drug cops will stoop to anything. Even impersonating a member of the press.”
The faintest of smiles flickered across his face.
“But there’s nothing illegal about lobbying for legalizing pot,” I said. “What are you so worried about?”
Coyote gave me a long look, then, for the first time, reached for his cup of cider.
“Like I said, drug cops will stoop to anything,” he said.
I waited for Mullaney to finish making his pitch. The man and woman, fortyish and trying not to show it, had signed the petition and were chatting before going on their way. While I waited, Coyote saw no need to engage in small talk. I was leaning on the counter when I felt a nudge behind me.
“Hi,” Roxanne said. “I got sick of waiting.”
I turned to her. She stood close.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You ready?”
“Will be in a minute,” I said.
Roxanne looked up at the sign, which said LEGALIZE HEMP NOW! She looked at Mullaney, then at Coyote. He looked at her and she looked away.
“What are you waiting for?” Roxanne asked me.
“To talk to this guy. I might do a story on their effort to legalize marijuana. Maybe the Globe. New England page kind of thing, if they’ll go for it.”
As I talked, Coyote listened and watched. Roxanne, not me. I decided I didn’t like the guy. Maybe I’d leave him out of the story. The best revenge. Or maybe I’d put him in. Something told me there was an outstanding warrant for him somewhere. A photo would be nice. Better yet, a nice clear fingerprint.
“Hey, man,” Mullaney said, as the man and woman went on their way. “Another voter. Step right up.”
He slid the clipboard with the petition in front of Roxanne. She scanned it, then slid it back.
“No, thanks,” she said.
“No, th
anks?” Mullaney said. “Don’t you realize the damage that is being done by this drug war? Don’t you realize that families are falling victim to the police state right here in Maine?”
“Families fall victim to themselves,” Roxanne murmured.
“Well, excuse me, sister.”
“I’m not your sister. I don’t agree with what you’re doing. Let’s leave it at that.”
“But don’t you understand that this country is steeped in hypocrisy?” Mullaney went on. “It’s soaked in alcohol. Alcohol is the cause of more problems in this country than marijuana could ever be. Ask any cop which drug they’d prefer to see legal. They’ll tell you that it’s alcohol that causes domestic abuse. Child abuse—”
“Uh-uh. Abuse is caused by people who can’t face their own lives and responsibilities. This is just one more way out. When your baby’s crying and you’re stoned, zonked out, who goes and picks her up?”
“Would you rather have that person drunk on alcohol?”
“No,” Roxanne said. “I’d rather that person wasn’t stoned or drunk. And I’m sick of irresponsible adults, adults who won’t grow up, who are so goddamn weak they won’t even take care of their own kids.”
She turned to me.
“I’ll meet you at the gate,” she said, and she walked away.
Mullaney watched, openmouthed. He had very white teeth. Coyote watched, too, following Roxanne’s backside with his eyes.
“Jeez,” Mullaney said. “She a friend of yours?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What’s her problem?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
“Went up one side of me and down the other, didn’t she?”
“That’s her right,” I said. “She works all day protecting children from their parents, their parents’ friends. She sees more than most people.”
“Well, Jesus. Alcohol is the pisser there.”
“She wishes there weren’t any pisser at all,” I said. “Give me your phone number. If they bite on the story, I’ll give you a call.”
Mullaney wrote it on a pamphlet. Coyote was still looking down the row, toward where Roxanne had disappeared.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned, startled, then understood.
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” I said.
And I gave him the same look he’d given me, or as close as I could come, not having spent time in San Quentin.
Roxanne was at the main gate, leaning against the chain-link fence with her arms folded against her chest.
“Hey, baby,” I said. “Need a lift?”
She looked at me and forced a smile, then fell in beside me as I went through the turnstile and out onto the road.
“You okay?” I said.
“Yeah. They just, I don’t know, touched a nerve, I guess.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, it’s no big deal. It’s just sometimes I can’t just let it go by. When people are like that.”
“Why this one so much?”
Roxanne sighed as she walked, then slipped her arm through mine.
“I spent yesterday morning, all morning, with these kids in South Portland. Two gorgeous little kids. Towheads with these glowing blue eyes. A girl and a boy, six and nine. Father disappeared, last seen in Georgia. Mother keeps forgetting to come home. Last time, the babysitter, who was no brain surgeon herself, said to hell with it and left. We got called ’cause the cops found the older one, the boy, trying to walk to the store at six in the morning, down Broadway, this busy street. No jacket, sneakers untied, all by himself, to get his sister some Cheerios. Six-year-old, home alone. Cops had to break the door down ’cause the boy had locked her in and lost the key.”
We waited for a break in the traffic, then crossed to the pasture where the cars were parked.
“At least somebody was thinking of her,” I said. “Where was the mother?”
“Passed out,” Roxanne said flatly. “At a party. She’d go to a party and she’d get so drunk and stoned that she’d pass out in a chair or on a couch and nobody else would be much better, so she’d just stay there all night.”
“What’d she have to say for herself?”
“Oh, she was sorry and oh, it wouldn’t happen again and oh, ‘Please don’t take my children away, they’re all I have—they’re my whole life.’ ”
“So what are you going to do?”
“We have them temporarily. We’re going to try to make it permanent. Take them,” she said.
We were at the truck. I opened the door for Roxanne. “Well, that’s good.”
“No, Jack, it isn’t. Those little kids don’t get it. They want their mommy. They don’t want these strange grownups.”
“So what will you tell them?”
“Nothing they’ll understand,” Roxanne said. “And they’ll sob and sob and you just try to hold them and then you get people like this bunch out there preaching like pot is the cure for cancer and the common cold. I just—I don’t know, I just lost it.”
I pulled the truck out of the pasture and headed east, toward home. The maples made a golden canopy over the road, and underneath it, the line of fair-going cars inched along. A caravan of registered voters. Roxanne looked out the window and let out a long breath.
“Hope I didn’t foul up your story,” she said.
“No. I understand. I just figured I might be able to make three or four hundred bucks in two or three days. A day up there, a morning on the phone, an afternoon to write it. I’ll see what Tom says at the Globe.”
“Well, if you need a social worker, I know where you can find one.”
“I always need my social worker,” I said.
Roxanne smiled and took my hand.
“After all that, I don’t suppose you’d offer one a glass of red wine,” she said.
“But what if you consume an entire glass and are unable to make it home to Portland and therefore have to stay the night at my house, where the guest room isn’t finished, or even started, for that matter?”
“What if?” Roxanne said, and as we drove onto Route 3, headed for the coast, she lifted my hand to her lips and kissed it.
Ten miles east, as the road lowered itself into the shadowed hills of Waldo County, I turned off and drove north toward Prosperity. The road was twisting and black, and the hills were steep and thick with trees, glowing orange and yellow even in the rain. Roxanne was quiet for several miles and then I turned off the two-lane road onto the dump road and she suddenly turned to me.
“That guy scared me,” Roxanne said. “The one with the long hair and the dark eyes. I don’t usually say this, but something about him . . .”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t usually say this, but he scared me, too. A little.”
3
In the morning, I woke up and smelled wine, saw the glasses on the table beside the bed. I remembered holding Roxanne close to me, her bare back against my chest, my arms across her breasts. We had been quiet and then we’d been moving slowly and time passed and we’d twisted and rolled and had been not so quiet, and then everything was dark and warm and still.
Roxanne was still asleep, her dark hair strewn across the white skin of her back. I slid out of bed and pulled the sheet and blanket over her shoulders, then reached for boxers and jeans and a T-shirt. Picking up the wineglasses, too, I eased my way down the loft stairs. I put the glasses beside the sink and pulled on my clothes. The cork went back in the wine bottle. The kettle went on the stove. I took the atlas off the bookshelf.
Florence was on map 23, one grid south of the Sugarloaf mountain range, one grid southeast of Rangeley Lake. There were two ways into the town: Route 4 from Farmington and Route 156 from Wilton. It was a good twenty miles from either town, and there was very little in between.
Of human design, that is.
There were lakes and ponds and mountains and hills, and on the map each little hill had a name, awarded it by some intrepid trapper or settler, now long dead. I pictured it as a part
of Maine where the towns were forgotten hamlets, the people mostly poor, and the only tourists hunters who came up from down south every fall, baited bear with apples and bacon grease, went a week without bathing and drank too much.
God’s country.
I studied the page, the chicken scratchings that showed the hills and ridges, the expanse of roadless white that made it look like the map had been drawn in the dead of winter. The kettle rattled. There was a creak in the loft and Roxanne appeared at the head of the stairs. Naked.
“The casual look?” I said.
She smiled sleepily and disappeared, then came downstairs wearing one of my plaid flannel shirts. I got up and poured her a mug of coffee. She dumped sugar in and stirred and yawned.
“Somebody wore me out,” Roxanne said.
“I was about to say the same.”
“But it looks like you’re raring to go.”
“I guess,” I said.
“But you haven’t gotten an okay from the Globe yet.”
“I’ll live dangerously.”
“You going today?” Roxanne asked, raising her mug to her lips.
“I don’t know. What are your plans? Want to come?”
“And risk a scene with your marijuana buddies?”
“They’re not my buddies,” I said. “It’s work.”
“And you’re happiest when you’re working,” Roxanne said.
I looked at her, her hair still mussed, her soft white skin.
“Not happiest,” I said.
Roxanne smiled.
“Well, happiest with the exception of that. I need to head home early anyway. I’m back in court tomorrow morning.”
“Another happy home?”
“Of course,” Roxanne said. “I’ve got some more work to do on it. You going there this morning?”
“I told Clair I might cut wood with him, but I might call and tell him another day.”
“You are raring to go, aren’t you?”
“It’s been a while. The ale cupboard is getting bare. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not if I can take a quick shower,” Roxanne said, stretching appetizingly.
“We could take a quick shower.”
“With you, that’s an oxymoron.”
