by Gerry Boyle
The feeling wasn’t fleeting but it wasn’t permanent, either. What could have been? I still could have been working for the Times. I still could have been living on the West Side, or moved down to Soho. I could have been writing about kids killing each other, covering the gang funerals, listening to the politicians preach about peace in a city that, for so many, meant anything but. I could have been living for the daily fix that was my byline, the indescribable rush I’d felt every time I’d said, “Hi. I’m Jack McMorrow from the Times.” I could have been hitting the clubs, meeting women, listening to jazz, walking the back halls at my late father’s haunt, the Museum of Natural History. I could have been feeling the pang that came with the knowledge that I’d voluntarily traded that life for this one.
But I wasn’t. Much.
Instead of all that, I had my good friend Clair and a new chain saw. I had a hideaway in the hills of Waldo County, Maine. I had built my own house, sort of, and could shoot a rifle straighter than most. I could write the same stories but in small towns instead of big housing projects. I knew the woods and the birds. I read my books, listened to my music, and I bowed to no one, played nobody’s game.
On top of all that, I had Roxanne.
I sat and sipped and weighed it all and, of course, it never quite balanced. But then it was getting darker and colder, and I got up to start a fire in the Jotul. I was on my knees, crumpling newspaper, when the phone rang. I got up and grabbed it.
“McMorrow,” the voice said. “Bobby Mullaney.”
“Hi.”
“Hey, man. I don’t know what to say. If it was Stevie, I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry anyway, but if it was Stevie, I’m really sorry. I just don’t understand it. He’s been going through some tough times; you know what it’s like to be fifteen, but nothing like this. Nothing anything like this.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“He ain’t home yet. But, man, I just had to call you as soon as Mel told me. I mean, we’ll pay for your truck or whatever. And if this happened, it won’t happen again. I’m telling you right now. I thought I’d taught him a gun wasn’t a toy. I still can’t friggin’ believe it. Was it definitely a bullet? A twenty-two?”
“Yup. Right into the bed, above the back wheel. I was about halfway up your road there, coming down a rise. I heard the pop and I thought I heard a crack, too. I got out and looked, and there it was. It went through the outer metal but not the inner wall.”
I paused.
“Was he probably the only one out there?”
“I don’t know. We get hunters, but not usually by the road. This time of year, it’d be birds. It wasn’t a shotgun pellet, was it?”
“A friend of mine says no. He knows guns.”
“Well, shit, man, I don’t know what else to say. I wish I’d been at the house when you got here. I really wanted to talk to you some more. About the story, I mean.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know about—”
“Oh, man. I hope we can still do business. This is very important to a lot of people.”
“My life’s important to a lot of people. Including me.”
“Well, how ’bout we meet in a neutral place or something, if you’re nervous about coming back here. Madison, maybe. The restaurant in Madison. Around noon. And I’ll talk to Stephen. If it was him, he’ll tell me. If it wasn’t, he’ll tell me that, too.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on, whaddya say? I’ll buy you lunch. Even if you don’t write anything, at least let me do that. And pay for the truck.”
“There’s nothing to pay for. It’s an old Toyota four-wheel-drive. One more hole doesn’t make any difference.”
“Lunch then.”
“I don’t—”
“It can’t hurt, can it?”
I hesitated.
“Well . . .”
“Okay. I’ll see you there. And I am sorry. But I gotta tell you: If it was Stevie, he didn’t try to hurt you or nothin’. The kid can shoot the eye out of a woodchuck at fifty yards with that gun.”
“Great,” I said. “I feel better.”
6
There’s even a good Massachusetts connection,” I told Tom Wellington at the Globe the next morning. “One of the leaders of this thing is a transplant from Valley. He’s living in this tiny town called Florence, tucked away, way up in Somerset County.”
“What’s his name?” Wellington asked.
“Mullaney.”
“Well, no wonder he left. Dominicans run Valley now. The Irish mob’s ancient history.”
“He ran far enough, then,” I said.
“You think he’s hiding from something?”
“I don’t know. Probably no more than anybody else up here. But he’s pretty public about this pot stuff. Unless he’s changed his name and his face—you know, made up his past—then he doesn’t act like he’s got a contract out on him or anything.”
“Maybe he’s not even from Valley,” Wellington said. “What’s some wise guy from the Merrimack Valley doing up in the boonies in Maine? You can’t tell me he took up bird-watching or something.”
“Careful there. Some of my best friends are birds. Did I tell you I saw a red-eyed vireo last week?”
“I’m happy for you both.”
“And I bought a new chain saw. A Husqvarna. With heated handles.”
“Isn’t that kind of a contradiction, McMorrow?” Wellington said. “Watch the birdies and then go out and chop down the forest?”
“One of many. Let me tell you about my new deer rifle.”
“You shoot deer?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I just fondle the thing.”
“Don’t tell me it’s one of those inflatable rifles.”
“Let the air out and it fits in the glove box of your car. Of course, you need your concealed inflatable weapon permit.”
“You’ve been in the woods too long, Jack.”
“Au contraire, mon ami. Not long enough. So, how ’bout it?”
Wellington thought for a moment. In the background, I could hear the old newsroom murmur that computers had quieted but hadn’t silenced.
“Eight, nine hundred words. Two hundred fifty bucks.”
“You won’t go three hundred?” I said. “This isn’t gonna be handed to me in a press release. Mullaney’s a fast talker, and he’s got this buddy who looks like he’s done hard time someplace. Probably Walpole. And I’ve gotta cover a lot of ground for this one. You don’t jump on the T and get off in Florence, Maine.”
“Only on The Twilight Zone. Three hundred and that’s it, Jack. The bean counters down here went over my budget with a scalpel. I mean, it’s liposuction city. You know that.”
“All right, it’s a deal.”
“When can you have it?”
“A week,” I said.
“I’d like it better on Friday so I can use it for Sunday.”
“Pushy, pushy.”
“That’s what they pay me the big bucks for,” Wellington said.
“I wish I could say the same. Maybe I’ll hang up and call the Herald. Maybe the Valley paper would want a story on hometown boys making good.”
“Are they good guys?”
Someone shouted in the background.
“For hippies, they’re very well armed.”
“An ounce of prevention,” he said.
“And they wear sensible shoes,” I said.
“Take care of yourself, McMorrow. We’re short-staffed on the obit desk.”
“If you make it three-fifty, you might not feel so guilty if something happens to me.”
“I’ll risk it,” Wellington said.
And so did I.
At ten-thirty I was on my way to Madison, classical music on the radio, notebooks and a palm-size tape recorder on the passenger seat of the truck. The tape recorder had fresh batteries. I did not do things halfway.
The skies had cleared overnight but the roads were still damp and dark, with colored leaves
glued to the pavement in a long abstract mosaic. I drove at the speed limit, easing over in Albion to let a loaded pulp truck hurtle past like something plummeting from space, the tree trunks bunched between steel posts and fastened with steel cables. The truck probably was headed for the mill in Skowhegan. Within a few weeks, people in Pennsylvania or Illinois or Arizona would be wiping their noses—or worse—with that central Maine spruce and larch. If they didn’t, these towns would have one less reason to exist.
And there weren’t all that many reasons left, except for an odd combination of momentum and inertia. People lived in these hard-bitten little towns because other people had lived here before them. That was the momentum; the inertia kept them from leaving.
Some of the towns still bustled; one or two were big enough to call themselves cities. Others, thrown up alongside a stream that ran a sawmill a century ago, were simply unlikely. Their populations dwindled, people flowing out like water over the long-breached dam. The remaining residents were a mix of settlers’ descendants and big-city refugees, with different quirks, different histories, linked only by happenstance and geography.
An odd collection.
Which is what greeted me when I walked through the door of Mandy’s Lunch in downtown Madison.
Mullaney and Melanie and Coyote were sitting at the counter, which was red Formica with metal holders set out for the salt and pepper, sugar and creamer. The specials were scrawled on a blackboard—pork cutlet, mac and cheese—and the waitress behind the counter was a fiftyish woman wearing jeans and a black turtleneck and dragging on a cigarette.
Nobody asked me if I wanted smoking or non.
“Hey,” Mullaney said, sliding off his red vinyl stool. “I knew you’d show. I told Mel, ‘He’ll show. He’s a man of his word.’ ”
“Most of the time,” I said, half smiling.
Melanie got off her stool, too, and nodded, a little sheepishly. Coyote was on the far side and he didn’t nod; there was nothing sheepish about him. The kid wasn’t there. Probably out by the road, winging passing cars.
I reached for a stool but Mullaney touched my shoulder and motioned toward a table. When I looked over, I saw five or six faces looking at me expectantly.
They’d brought the board of directors.
Oh, man, I thought.
It always happened when the subject of a story had too much time to prepare. When somebody agreed to talk to me, I wanted them right then, not the next day or the next week. I didn’t want to give them time for their feet to chill. Or to write a statement or make notes. Or to invite their lawyer, mother, or little brother.
As I approached the table, I wasn’t sure which I’d gotten this time. There was a thin fortyish guy with dark curly hair and round gold-rimmed glasses, a preppie gone to seed. A hunched woman in her late fifties who’d parked an aluminum walker beside her chair. A kid, maybe nineteen or twenty, with a scraggly beard and hair hugged back with a blue bandanna, printed with tiny marijuana leaves. A slight albino-looking guy with long blond hair and a very pink face. Two plain short-haired women in their thirties, who seemed to be together.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” they all said back.
“This is the reporter,” Mullaney said. “He’s gonna do the story on the truth about marijuana, and about us trying to legalize it. Where’s the story going to be printed?”
“The Boston Globe, but it might not be—”
“The friggin’ Boston Globe, folks,” Mullaney boomed.
“It’s about time,” the hunched woman said. “The Maine press hasn’t given this story shit for coverage. Did you know that only eight people in this entire country can use marijuana legally for medical purposes? I mean, I’m talking about chemotherapy. It is the only thing that helps people feel better. The nausea, you know? AIDS patients. I mean, I got MS. I tried all the drugs these goddamn doctors give you, and they didn’t do shit. Marijuana keeps my muscles from spasming—you ought to feel what that feels like, your whole back, legs going at once—but when I tried to buy pot, you know what happened to—”
“She got busted,” the seedy preppie said. “I got busted, too. Story in the paper said we got arrested in a drug sweep. I can go down to the supermarket and buy a fifth of tequila and drink it all and literally kill myself. But if I choose to grow hemp in my own garden, for my own use, I get my name in the paper—”
“But you didn’t get your truck took,” the bandanna kid said. “They took my truck—1989 Nissan four-wheel-drive. New rear end, I just put in. They took my dad’s hunting rifles. Four friggin’ plants. They say if I don’t plead to trafficking I’ll get, like, friggin’ six months. This country is so friggin’—”
“It’s a disgrace,” the hunched woman said, slapping the table. “They did this survey, they asked, like, a thousand cancer doctors if they’d told patients they should try marijuana to help them get through that chemo shit, and forty-four percent said they did. I mean, come on. What is wrong with—”
“I’m no criminal. My son, they put my picture in the paper like I’m—”
“My father doesn’t smoke pot. They bust down the door, scare my mother to friggin’ death. Find these rifles up in a closet covered with dust—”
“And the press eats it up. Drug dealer this. Drug trafficker that. I mean, do I look like a drug trafficker person?”
“People should be able to get medical relief without being pursued like criminals, while the real criminals—”
I held my hands up to quiet the din. It did.
“I’m Jack McMorrow,” I said. “May I sit down?”
I put the tape recorder on the table and turned it on. I asked their names and ages and the towns where they lived. Then I asked them to go around the table and briefly tell me why they thought pot should be legal, what their interest in the issue was.
Fiddling with their coffee cups, they did. Roberta with the walker. Darrin with the bandanna. Sue and Kathy, the women who resembled each other. J.C., the pale fellow with the irritated skin. Sam, with the gold-rimmed glasses.
J.C., Darrin, and Sue had been arrested; J.C. and Sue were awaiting trial, Darrin had been convicted. Darrin had lost the truck and rifles, too, and $537 in cash. Sam said the worst thing was that his seven-year-old son thought he was a criminal. Kathy said she believed marijuana was a sacred Christian herb, placed on the earth by God and used by Jesus.
“Genesis One,” she said, looking down at the table. “See, ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth . . . I give all green plants for food.’ ”
Kathy smiled serenely. Coyote stared at her but didn’t say a word.
When they finally petered out, Mullaney looked at me triumphantly.
“Well,” he said. “You gonna print it?”
They stared at me and waited for my answer.
“Probably. Some of it. In some form.”
“Oh, jeez,” Roberta said. “Here we go again. The press is so in bed with the medical establishment in this country—”
“I’m going to need some more,” I interrupted. “The drug cops up here, that sort of thing. The DA. I’d like to talk to some of you individually. I’ll talk to other people. I need to talk to you, Bobby, some more. And Melanie. I might like to see some of you at your homes. I need to know a little more about you.”
I looked at Coyote. He stared back, his dark eyes unblinking, his face a black-eyed totem. I looked away.
“Hey, friggin’ call me anytime,” Darrin, the bandanna kid, said. “After November, you can find me in the Somerset County Jail. Doing time with all the other friggin’ major outlaws. Hazard to society. That’s me, man. Rasta outlaw, man. Friggin’ cops.”
Mullaney said he had their phone numbers. They heaved themselves out of the chairs, Roberta with help from Kathy, who wore the same calm smile, still enraptured by Scripture. Roberta had a nylon pouch attached to the front of her walker and she opened it and took out some papers and handed them to me. The top page was a copy of a newspap
er story about activists in Boston pushing for legal medicinal use of marijuana.
“Read that stuff, if you dare,” Roberta said. “This is a gross injustice if there’s ever been one. I hope you’re man enough to do something about it.”
Ah, yes. If you can’t appeal to the reporter’s journalistic instincts, threaten his manhood.
With mine intact, more or less, I waited as they made their way to the door, stopping at the cash register to pay for six cups of coffee on six separate checks. For suspected drug dealers, they didn’t flash much cash.
They all left and Mullaney, Melanie, and Coyote stayed.
“How ’bout that lunch, man?” Mullaney said.
Groovy, I thought.
“Okay,” I said.
“But let’s go out to the house. You got time? We can talk more, show you around. And the kid’s got something to say to you.”
I considered it. I had no other assignments, nothing else to do. Why not? After all, Stephen had shot only the tail end of my truck, when he could shoot the eye out of a woodchuck.
“Fine,” I said.
Coyote said nothing.
7
The Mullaneys and Coyote—Melanie in the middle and Bobby driving—were in the red Chevy pickup with the oak bed and copper-colored doors. The truck rumbled over the Madison-Anson bridge and out of town to the west. I followed, digging a pair of aviators out from the tray between the seats as we turned into the sun. Bobby Mullaney drove slowly, like a man in no particular hurry. This activist business wasn’t raising his blood pressure.
Outside of town and into the countryside, we were the only vehicles on the road. The sky was blue with high, hurrying clouds and the fields and woods were brightly colored but empty. It seemed strange that the place was so deserted on a beautiful autumn afternoon. Where was everybody?
