by Gerry Boyle
“Pretty cozy. Build it yourselves?”
“Me and Bobby.”
“Not Coyote?”
“He hadn’t come up here yet. This was back, I don’t know, ten years ago.”
“Coyote from Massachusetts, too?”
Melanie paused. Her eyes narrowed over her mug.
“You can tell you’re a reporter,” she said.
“Oh, yeah? How’s that?”
“Everything you ask has a reason. Some piece of information you want. Are you a good reporter?”
I hesitated. “Pretty good.”
“Bobby told me you worked for the New York Times.”
“Among others.”
“So you must be pretty good.”
“It’s all relative,” I said.
“So who would you write this story for?”
“The Boston Globe, maybe. I haven’t pitched it yet, but I don’t think they’ll turn it down.”
“The Boston Globe. Front page?”
I smiled.
“On a very slow news day. I doubt it. I’d hope for it to make the split page. The New England section.”
She eyed me some more over her mug.
“You seem pretty sure of yourself.”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“The Boston Globe. Getting a story in there would give us a boost, don’t you think?”
“What kind of boost?”
“I don’t know,” Melanie said. “Credibility. Like this thing is for real. I would think that anything you’d read about in a paper like that would have a lot more credibility.”
She was thinking. It seemed like she was thinking about something else.
“So you’re involved in the legalization movement, too?”
“Oh, yeah. I think it’s outrageous what this government does to people. It’s a police state; it really is. Anyone who really thinks about it agrees with us. They do. Anybody who cares about other people and things being unfair. Do you care about that, McMorrow?”
The name came to her easily, as if she had thought about it, as if she wasn’t totally surprised to see me.
“Yeah, I do,” I said carefully, setting my mug down on the table. “That’s one of the reasons I do this.”
Melanie looked at me just as carefully. My eyes met hers and then I looked over her, out the window to where a figure had appeared, moving between the trees. Melanie turned.
“Oh, that’s Stephen,” she said, oozing motherly pride. “My son. He’ll want to meet you.”
Stephen did a good job of disguising his enthusiasm. First he gave my truck a careful inspection, as if he thought he might find a police-issue homing device under the rear bumper. Then he strode up to the house, pushed open the door, and glared.
“Stephen, this is Jack McMorrow. He’s a reporter. You heard your dad talking about him last night.”
“Hi,” I said. I smiled.
“Hey,” Stephen said. He was fourteen or fifteen, tall like Coyote, but his hair was shorn, like five o’clock shadow all over his head. He had his mother’s coloring and a small hoop in his left ear, which made him look like a street tough from Barrytown, in Dublin. His jeans were ragged, his boots were black, and his sweatshirt was camouflage green. He didn’t smile. He didn’t say another word. He walked by me and past the chimney into the kitchen. I heard a refrigerator door open, then close.
“He’s hungry,” Melanie explained.
Boys will be boys.
“Stevie,” she called. “Do you know where Bobby and Coyote are working today?”
“Nope.”
“You didn’t hear saws when you came across?”
“Nope.”
“Or the truck?”
“Nope.”
The refrigerator door opened and closed again. I took a sip of compost tea. As I put my mug down, Stephen came through the room again, this time carrying a rifle, a .22. That he didn’t point it at me and pull the trigger probably was due to his deep respect for me and my profession.
“Where are you going?” his mother asked.
Where could he go? There wasn’t a paved road for three miles, another house for five. To find another human, he’d have to take a compass and rations.
“Out,” Stephen said.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
Stephen paused at the door, took a box of cartridges off of a wooden shelf and shoved them into his pocket.
“Yeah,” he said.
Stephen opened the door and left.
“Squirrels for dinner?” I said.
“Oh, he just likes to have it with him,” Melanie said, getting up from her chair.
“Like a teddy bear?”
“Well, you never know what you’re going to run into in these woods.”
“You could get a dog,” I said.
“Bobby’s allergic. Cats, dogs. Dogs are the worst.”
She got up and headed for the kitchen.
“More tea?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “This is fine.”
Melanie refilled and came out and sat back down on the couch. She looked like she was ready to settle in for a long chat. Out here in the woods, people probably didn’t just drop in. Probably once or twice. A year.
“So are you as involved in this hemp movement as your husband?” I asked, going to work.
“Yeah, I guess. He’s the talker, though. As you probably noticed, he likes to talk.”
“I did.”
She smiled apologetically.
“That’s Bobby. When we were in Valley, he knew lots of people. I mean, I couldn’t walk down the street with him without him stopping to talk to this guy and that guy.”
“So do you guys really like it up here? Florence is the end of the earth. And this is the end of Florence. Don’t you miss, I don’t know, traffic? And crowds of people and noise?”
Melanie stopped cold and looked at me. It was like she was a motor and it had stalled. Then it started again.
“No, I don’t miss it,” she said. “I mean, jeez, we had a guy killed right in front of the building next to ours. They shot him. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Right in the middle of the day. The schools had just gotten out and all the kids on the block, little kids three years old, older kids, are standing there watching the blood run out of this guy onto the sidewalk. How can you miss that?”
She stopped, as if she’d said enough to convince herself, yet again.
“I guess you can’t,” I said.
I thought for a moment.
“Isn’t it awful tough to make a living up here?”
Melanie looked out the window.
“No,” she said. “Not at all. I mean, we grow a lot of what we eat. We heat our house for nothing. We don’t have a mortgage or anything. A little payment on the land, and we can usually scrape that together. When we need cash, Bobby cuts wood for Harold Bouchard for a few days. Makes two, three hundred bucks, and we’re good for a month or so.”
“You don’t miss just walking into a Kmart and buying stuff? Slap down the old Visa card?”
Melanie looked at me, her face hardening.
“You go right for the jugular, don’t you, McMorrow?”
“I don’t know about that. I’m just curious. I don’t mean to offend you, and I’m sorry if I did.”
She looked some more.
“No, I don’t, Mr. McMorrow. Because that’s what’s wrong with this country. We’ve lost our independence. We’re sucked into the corporate industrial complex. Buy a new car. Buy a new TV. Watch this show that tells you you’re shit because you don’t have a new car. If only people understood that . . .”
She paused to take a breath. I looked into my tea. It looked like algae on a pond. I put it down and reached to my back pocket and took out my notebook, slipped a pen from my shirt.
“So where does getting high fit into all of this?” I asked.
Melanie looked at the notebook. It was the moment. Would she talk for the record? Would this story be easy or hard?
&n
bsp; “Well, Bobby’s the one you should really talk to, but I think it’s a natural, self-sufficient way to, you know, it’s from nature. The Native Americans used nature to be spiritual and worship their gods and the earth and stuff, and it’s time we got back to that. Bobby explains this better than me, but you see, corporate America is against marijuana because they can’t control it. What happens to Budweiser if you can grow marijuana in your own garden? It’s like this country wouldn’t be depending on corporations anymore. Corporations are destroying this country—you know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” I said, scribbling in my notebook. “I guess I do. Now, does your son smoke pot?”
Melanie looked chagrined for a moment, then put her PR face back on.
“He chooses not to. That’s his choice. And that’s what’s so beautiful about this movement. Freedom of choice.”
“Would you let him if he wanted to?”
“I’d want him to take a hit of pot instead of riding around drinking beer.”
“So you really don’t see anything wrong with it?” I pressed.
“I don’t know, McMorrow,” Melanie said, her Massachusetts accent slipping back to the surface. “Nothing’s simple, you know? You ought to talk to Bobby, really. He’s the talker of the family.”
She got up from the couch and put her mug on the table. I got up, too, and we both walked to the door. Melanie opened it and went down the stairs to the yard.
“I know Bobby would like to talk to you.”
“I should have called first. It was just a nice day for a ride, and I thought I’d come check out the area. I haven’t spent much time up this way.”
“Well, I’d tell you to go out and try to find him, but I don’t know where he is. And you can get lost in these woods pretty easy if you don’t know what you’re doing. Down below is all bog and up on the hill is a lot of blowdowns. Bobby says it disorientates you.”
“What about Stephen?”
“Oh, he knows every square inch of this place. He’s got a tree house he built himself and a cabin and everything else. I don’t even know where the cabin is.”
She looked off toward the woods, where a tote road wound up a hill and disappeared into the trees. I stood there and listened. I heard blue jays and chickadees and, off in the distance, the hacking of crows. I stole a sideways glance at Melanie and she seemed a little nervous.
“I’ll come back,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow. I’ll call tonight and make sure everybody will be around.”
Melanie looked relieved.
“That would be better,” she said.
She turned to me and held out her hand again. We shook and I walked to my truck, while she went back to the house. By the time I hit the driver’s seat, Melanie was gone. I sat for a minute.
There was something strange going on, and it wasn’t just a bunch of old hippies living out in the boonies. There was tension in both Melanie and her son. And where was Bobby? And Coyote? Why did this family live with a psycho with a phony name? Why did they live here?
I started the truck and took another look. Solar power. A mammoth garden. Decapitated sunflowers hanging from the eaves to dry. Two four-wheel-drive trucks with gun racks. A moody kid in the woods with a rifle, and Dad and his buddy off cutting firewood. A mother with more undercurrents than the Bermuda Triangle.
MAINE—as the saying went—THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE.
I backed around and eased down the grade to the rocky path home. The truck lurched and bumped down the hill, the transmission whining in first gear. I negotiated the other side of the hill and back down again, both hands on the wheel, one foot on the clutch, the other tap-dancing from brake to gas.
In this tunnel in the trees, the light was dim and dappled, and I had to concentrate to see the bigger rocks. The truck rattled and jounced and the jack and spare tire banged in the bed. I turned the radio on but got static and turned it off. As I reached, I let go of the steering wheel with one hand and at the same time bounced off a big rock.
There was a pop. And a snap.
A spring, I thought. I stopped, put the brake on, and got out. The motor ticked. The woods were quiet. I lay down on the rocks behind the back left wheel and looked.
The spring was fine. So was the one on the right side. I looked for anything else that might have snapped but couldn’t see anything. Relieved, I rolled away from the truck and jumped up.
And there it was. A small hole in the side of the bed. Perfectly round.
A bullet hole.
5
“Twenty-two,” Clair said. “Didn’t even dent the inner wall of the bed. Probably shot from a pretty good distance.”
“Somebody who can shoot?”
“Unless he was aiming for your head. Then it was a bad shot.”
“Is the glass half full or is the glass half empty?”
“Whichever makes you feel better,” Clair said.
We were standing by my truck outside the front door of his barn, down the road from my house. I’d stopped there before going home to stare at the hole in my truck some more.
“The little bastard,” I said.
“Friend of yours?”
“Fifteen-year-old kid with a bad attitude. I was talking to his mother for a story. This marijuana legalization thing. Way out in the boonies in Somerset County.”
“He doesn’t want you doing the story?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it is a pretty small-caliber gun,” Clair said. “Maybe he can’t make up his mind.”
“Small-caliber ambivalence?”
“Right. He’s reaching out to you. All confused inside.”
“Thank you, Dr. Varney,” I said.
Clair pushed his John Deere hat back and grinned. “And to think I spent twenty years in the military when I could’ve been on talk shows, making real money.”
“Never too late,” I said.
I felt the hole in the truck with my index finger.
“It was only the one shot,” I said. “I stopped and got down on the ground and looked ’cause I thought I’d broken a spring or something. It made this crack. Worst road you’ve ever seen. All rocks and boulders. I was a sitting duck, inching along.”
“See, there was no second shot. The kid is just having trouble expressing his feelings. Maybe this is his way of saying he’d like to have somebody like you around. Toss a football on a Saturday. He just has trouble putting it into words.”
Clair smiled.
“He has a dad,” I said. “Lives with him and everything, but something isn’t right.”
“Evidently.”
I opened the truck door.
“Well, I guess I’ll go home and call his mommy and tell her what Junior’s been up to. Want to cut tomorrow?”
“If the weather permits,” Clair said. “Seven?”
I nodded, then slid onto the seat and started the truck.
“Hey, Jack,” Clair said, putting his big hands on the edge of the door and leaning toward me. “You know a twenty-two will kill you just as dead as a fifty-caliber machine gun. It just takes a little more precision, that’s all.”
“So you’re saying I should be careful?”
“I’d give it some thought.”
I put the truck into reverse and gunned the motor.
“That’s the trouble with you Marines,” I said. “You’re such worrywarts.”
When I got home, the house was cold but so was the ale. It was after three o’clock, which was close to five, which was the time I felt morally and ethically justified in having a drink, so I opened a can of Ballantine and went and stood by the back window and took a long swallow. Then another. When the pint was a third gone I turned from the window and the woods and went to the desk. I hit the button on the computer and the answering machine, in that order. The computer whirred, the tape hissed, and Roxanne told me she loved me.
Life was good.
Almost.
Roxanne said she was calling from her office to tell me and
would talk to me very soon. I couldn’t call the office on a Sunday, so I would have to wait. We did a lot of that, Roxanne and me, but the reunions were worth the wait.
Almost.
I would have liked to talk to her now, in person, but we’d tried that arrangement and it hadn’t worked out. Roxanne needed me, but she needed other things, too. I needed Roxanne but I needed other things, too, and our other things weren’t the same. So we had settled for tumultuous weekends that were more like joyous collisions. We would drown in each other’s arms and then we would talk. Have dinner. Talk some more.
Sitting there at the computer, I brought myself back. Drank some ale. Began typing my impressions of my visit to Florence, of Melanie and Stephen and their homemade house in the woods. My notes were barely legible, but barely was good enough. If I met fast-talking Bobby Mullaney again, I’d bring a tape recorder. If I met his son or his buddy, I’d bring my rifle.
If . . .
I sorted through the junk on the desk and found the pot pamphlet with the Mullaneys’ number on it. Took a sip of ale and dialed. The phone rang several times but I waited. Finally, a breathless Melanie Mullaney answered.
“This is Jack McMorrow. Did I bring you in from the garden?”
“Oh. Yeah. But that’s okay, I needed a break anyway. Bobby still isn’t back.”
I told her that was all right. And then I told her why I was calling.
“Stephen?” Melanie gasped. “He wouldn’t do that. You must be wrong. It must have been a rock or something. Stephen wouldn’t—”
“Well, it wasn’t a rock. It was a twenty-two. If there was somebody else out in your woods with a rifle, then maybe it wasn’t Stephen. But you’d know that better than I would.”
Melanie said she didn’t know what to say. She said she was sorry. She said she would talk to Stephen. She said she would have Bobby call me. I said that was fine, and I gave her my number. Then I hung up and thought that mothers, organic or otherwise, were all the same.
I went to the refrigerator and got another ale. Then I went to my seat by the window and opened the can and sipped, and watched the light begin to fade beyond the woods. Sometimes, at this time of day, I would sit and wait past dusk before turning on a light. The house would be still and dark and the woods would loom, all branches and shadows. And if I was lucky, a deer, or even two or three, would tiptoe out of the edge and over to the old apple trees. They would browse and I would watch, feeling the inner calm that came when I was in the woods with the birds, or in a field watching the searing stars, and knew, at least for the moment, that I was in the right place.
