Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  Like the reflector strips on his boat, the cell phone was a safety feature. Staggering home from Harlequin House, I had found the truck in my yard with George’s lobster traps stacked in the bed. Probably Tommy had stopped off while bringing the truck over to George’s, so Sam could come along and give him a ride back.

  But now both boys had gone off somewhere else in Sam’s car. Wade wasn’t around, or my father. Nobody home, house locked up because Wade’s gun shop was full of weapons, and me with no keys; they were down the heating duct at Harlequin House.

  For a stupefied moment I’d just stood there wondering what to do. I couldn’t call Ellie because I didn’t want to risk Will being at her house, figuring out it was me on the phone, and knowing I’d escaped. And I couldn’t stumble around town looking for help, for the same reason; he might not be at Ellie’s and if he realized I was free, who knew what he might do?

  Worst case, he could get a message to Ronny somehow, tell him to hurry up. And then good-bye George. What Will would do about me I wasn’t so sure but I didn’t think I’d like that, either.

  Bottom line, I had to get to the jail in Machias. The truck key as always had been under the visor and for once the old heap had actually started on the first try; Tommy’s doing, probably. Now, slamming the phone back into its holder, I turned the truck onto Route 1; pressing on the accelerator I got the old rattletrap up to sixty and then to sixty-five.

  It wouldn’t go faster, coughing when I tried to make it, but the engine noise didn’t change from its low, amiable hum. It gave me confidence, that sound like the buzz of an aging bumblebee. Passing first one hitchhiker and then another—around here the thumb was a common method of transportation, but I couldn’t risk stopping—I even began to think I might reach the jail without further disaster.

  But my optimism was premature. Nearly thirty miles of forest and fields, divided occasionally by glittering saltwater inlets, went by without a cough, lurch, or shudder from the truck. As I approached the long hill on the outskirts of Machias, however, the engine gave a shuddery gasp. The battery light came on as I got the vehicle over to the side of the road. The starter motor ground valiantly but to no effect as I turned the key.

  But as luck would have it, I’d pulled in right alongside another thumb-jockey. My luck, not his, as he saw immediately. He’d be better off walking than trying to promote a ride in this junk heap.

  “Need any help?” he asked, approaching the truck. He was a good old boy from the backwoods, his boots muddy, beard scraggly, and blue eyes bright with the messianic light that comes to men who’ve been hunkered down in their cabins for too long, brewing up crackpot theories.

  But he was all I had. “Yeah. Get behind the wheel?”

  The look on his face as he scrutinized me told me how I must appear to him: bruised and bloody, lips raw from the tape I’d torn off them, eyes like a pair of peeled grapes.

  In fact, in the possible crackpot contest I took the prize. “Please,” I added humbly.

  The guy nodded. That’s one thing about hermits out of the backwoods. With them, your personal grooming isn’t an issue.

  He got in and popped the hood in a way that made me think he’d done this sort of thing before. I filled the same Big Gulp cup I’d used the last time from the gas can George kept in the truck bed, hoisted myself up onto the front fender, and peered into the engine compartment.

  Now, which hole had I poured that gasoline into? Not the oil dipstick, not the radiator… Gingerly, I found and unscrewed the fuel line from the carburetor. Which luckily this truck had; no fuel injection, bless the old beast, just an old-fashioned carburetor, fuel pump, fuel line, and spark plugs.

  Very carefully—if I messed this up, a big ball of flame was going to be the result—I began dribbling gas from the soda cup into the carburetor. “Okay, turn the key.”

  The hermit guy obeyed. The engine turned over a couple of times but then coughed irritably and stalled again.

  More gas, just a teensy stream. “Turn it again. Please.”

  Cough, cough. But then—bingo. Gas began spurting out from the disconnected fuel line; with trembling hands, I screwed it back on. Truck exhaust spewed in a fragrant plume from the back of the vehicle, and the engine noise smoothed out.

  I slid off the fender, slammed the hood, and swung into the cab again as he slid over. “Where you going?”

  “Bangor.”

  In the side mirror, a line of cars approached from behind us. I let them pass, waiting for my chance. And then I saw it.

  Not my chance. Something else. “You don’t want to ride with me,” I said.

  The guy looked over, not sure he’d heard correctly.

  “I mean it. You really don’t want to ride with me, trust me on this. Get out.”

  His eyes met mine, his brow furrowed with the injustice of my pronouncement, and I saw him thinking about whether or not to protest vehemently. After all, he had helped me, so didn’t I owe him a ride? But then, to my relief, he gave me the benefit of the doubt and hopped out. Meanwhile I kept waiting for my chance to get back into the traffic lane, at the same time watching a vehicle making its way up the hill behind me . . .

  I hit the gas hard, spinning gravel as the truck shot out onto the pavement. Probably it wasn’t a good way to treat an ailing engine. Or the backwoods guy either.

  But coming up behind me, passing everything in its way, was a collection of mismatched fenders and out-of-square chassis with the big front grille of an old Buick Roadmaster and a windshield held on by a row of C-clamps on either side.

  It was big, it was fast, and it was without a doubt the same car that had been following Ellie and me the day we’d visited the Condons and Ginger Tolliver.

  Wildly the vehicle swung out and shot past two more cars, just missing a log-rig loaded with a pile of thirty-foot tree trunks, speeding uphill. We hadn’t hit the steepest part of the grade yet and George’s truck was already slowing, laboring in third gear.

  Will was even more thorough a bad guy than I had thought. He must have gone back to Harlequin House to check on me, found me gone and George’s truck nowhere around, and drawn the correct conclusion.

  There was a blare of horn and a harsh squeal of tires as my pursuer narrowly missed hitting an oncoming vehicle head-on. I tromped the gas. The truck lurched and backfired, barely avoiding a stall.

  And then with a sudden hard gleam of his ferocious-looking front grille in my rearview, there he was.

  Right behind me, bumping me.

  Hard. Behind the big car’s wheel I glimpsed Weasel Bodine’s unattractive face, his two big front teeth hanging out as he gripped the steering wheel one-handed and grimaced with the effort of rubbing his few brain cells together.

  He hit me again. The lobster traps piled in the truck bed lurched alarmingly, and the steering wheel tried to jump right out of my hands. With the next impact—or maybe the one after, which was not to my mind a particularly better option—he would force me right off the road or into the path of another car.

  Bang! The lobster traps jostled again, the entire pile of them sliding backwards a foot. Too bad, I thought grimly, that the truck bed wasn’t filled with iron spikes. They’d be at about the level of Weasel’s head, and . . .

  Wham. The truck’s tailgate flopped open, its spit-and-baling-wire repair job not quite up to a game of highway bumpercars.

  And neither was I, as I desperately wrestled the truck back into its own lane. What Mister Overbite meant to do once he caught me I wasn’t sure, but I had a feeling Will’s instructions had been X-rated for violence. Will needed me silenced, and after all, the promise of a big payday had worked on Perry Daigle. Why wouldn’t it also banish the fear of prison from Eastport’s very own homegrown version of Bucky Beaver?

  But then as a new thought hit me my mouth imitated Weasel’s and fell open, too: I didn’t need spikes. What I needed were the brakes, good timing, a bit of luck . . .

  And a reason for Weasel to hit even harder, ne
xt time. So gazing into the rearview, I smiled my sweetest smile and let my middle finger send an unmistakable message.

  Which infuriated him, as I’d expected. These guys, they take everything so personally.

  Well, so did I. Gripping the wheel I watched Weasel roar up behind me again, waiting until the instant when I felt the first metal kiss of his big front grille on the rear of the truck.

  Then I stomped on the brake. The impact whipped my head back, snap-ratcheted the seatbelt against my chest, and sent twin bolts of pain slamming through my knees as they slid forward and smacked the lower dashboard.

  It also sent lobster traps sliding relentlessly downhill off the truck bed, right into the C-clamped windshield of Mister Future False Teeth of America’s junkyard-dog chase vehicle.

  The C-clamps let go and then the windshield did. He tried swerving to avoid the traps, which sent him into the guardrail lining the side of this steepest part of the hill. The last thing I saw as I pulled away was steam rising out of the hood, as he climbed out.

  Gosh, I wished I had a camera. And time to use it.

  Instead, five minutes later I pulled the truck into the lot outside the courthouse in Machias. The building also housed the jail, the registrars of deeds and probate, and numerous other offices where people were in the habit of behaving soberly and respectably.

  But respectable behavior had gotten me nowhere. It was time for a new strategy.

  New and different; my only reason for thinking I could pull it off was that I had to. George’s life depended on it.

  If he still had one.

  The Washington County courthouse was a lovely old redbrick building on a narrow side street. Built when there were fewer inmates and far less litigation, its surrounding streets were jammed with traffic and parked cars.

  The small lot near the front door was reserved for official vehicles. I pulled the truck in there. Leaning on the horn, I made sure that I would be noticed.

  Then I got out. Fell out, actually. Yelling while I did it.

  Clambering up, I spied two uniformed officers ambling from the sheriff’s office. Their long-suffering looks said I wasn’t the most disruptive drunk they’d met that day.

  I’d soon fix that. Digging around in my bag, I pulled out the bottle of ipecac I’d taken from Will Bonnet’s medicine chest and swigged thirstily from it, then threw it as hard as I could. It shattered on a squad-car windshield.

  The cops’ faces hardened; perfect. Now if I could just keep the ipecac down for a little while longer . . .

  “Lady, you’re intoxicated. You need to come with us.”

  As firmly as they could without actually lifting me off the ground, the two officers seized my arms and escorted me up the front steps, down the tiled corridor, and into the booking area of the jail.

  Fussing and squalling, I let myself be propped in front of the officer in charge of accepting me into the county’s custody.

  “Name?” he asked tiredly.

  “Who wan’s tah know?” I gave him the old bleary-eye. His glance in return was the one you might give to the bottom of your shoe, while you are scraping something off it.

  Oh, this was going fine. Or it was until the strangest thing happened. State Trooper Hollis Colgate stepped out of a side room, still talking to whomever he’d been visiting. I tried turning away quickly but it was too late.

  He’d seen me. And recognized me. Now Colgate was headed toward me and whatever he did or said, it would cause a delay.

  I couldn’t afford one. Go away, I thought at him. But he stopped right in front of me.

  “Okay,” the booking officer said to the two cops still holding me. “Is there any ID on her?”

  “None that we saw,” one of the officers replied.

  And then in one of the most inexplicable events of my life, Hollis Colgate turned his back on me and walked away.

  “Not on her, anyway,” the other cop confirmed, as Colgate went out through the front door of the building without another glance at me.

  Baffled, I turned my attention from Colgate back to the matter at hand. They’d gone through my bag, as I’d expected they would. It was why I’d stashed my license and other ID items in George’s glove box, and why I’d had to swallow the ipecac syrup so dratted early. Any time now the syrup would produce the effect that made it such a useful, even lifesaving, first-aid remedy.

  Which—abruptly—it did.

  “Aw, Christ,” yelled one of the officers. “Horace! Get a mop out here, will you?”

  Horace was apparently the inmate on janitor duty that day but I never got to meet him. Instead I was hustled rather roughly through a door marked “Intake,” and into a small holding area.

  “Think you’re gonna be sick again?” inquired the hard-eyed female officer in the holding area. She patted me down with brisk thoroughness; fortunately I hadn’t made a mess of myself, only the floor.

  The officer was immaculately groomed and her expression said clearly what she thought of me: not much.

  “I’m not really like this . . .” I managed.

  “Yeah, sure. Until now, and all of a sudden you are. Take my advice, when you get out of here, get with the program. Come on,” she added, not unkindly. “You can sit in the sickroom while they finish your paperwork.”

  “Am I going to jail?” I put the proper fear in my voice.

  “Probably.” She escorted me toward another door. “If you were just intoxicated, maybe not. But now you got destruction of official property, disorderly conduct.”

  I held back. “Who’s in there?”

  She urged me along. “One guy says he’s dizzy, I’m pretty sure he’s faking but we’ve got a nurse coming. The other one’s getting over a big headache. Don’t worry, I’ll be there with you. That’s my job today—baby-sitting,” she added with a grimace.

  Again just what I’d hoped for. The dizzy one, I figured, was Ronny. It’s what I would have done, faked a symptom, if I wanted to get in there with George.

  In fact, it was what I was doing. But George must be the one with the headache so it sounded as if I had gotten here in time, albeit with my mouth tasting like the bottom of a bird cage.

  There was a drinking fountain by the door. “Can I get some water first?”

  She stopped impatiently. “Yeah. Hurry up.”

  It was plain old city water and it tasted like champagne. “I mean it,” the officer went on while I was savoring it, “I’ll give you a card for some people who will help you.”

  I raised my head as she unlocked the sickroom door. “Because after today, I really hope you’ll have learned a lesson. I don’t want to see you again in this condition… oh, son of a bitch.”

  She crossed the room fast, removing her baton from the loop on her utility belt as she did so. She hit Ronny Ronaldson across the back with the weapon, and she must’ve had some serious upper-body strength because despite his impressive size Ronny went flying.

  Then she yanked away the pillow that Ronny had been holding to George’s face. Placing two fingers on the side of his neck, she cursed again, then slammed her fist to the intercom button in the wall above the head of the bed.

  “I need the crash cart and an ambulance. We have an inmate in cardiac arrest.”

  Finally she turned to me, and I must not’ve looked quite as skanky as I had a few minutes earlier, because the four words she said to me then were the ones I’d hoped never to hear again.

  “Do you know CPR?”

  She was already beginning to perform it, and as I’d learned at Victor’s class it works better with two people doing it.

  Even if one of them is me.

  “George! George, are you all right?”

  The two of us moved him to the floor. I knelt beside him with the heel of my hand three fingers’ width from the end of his breastbone: compressing, not gently at all, between the breaths she blew into his lungs.

  “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . .”

  I timed the breaths and ches
t compressions aloud as all the things Victor’s class had taught me whirled in my head.

  “Leave her alone,” the woman cop snapped when someone tried replacing me. “I’m getting a pulse on her compressions. Let’s not fix what ain’t broke.”

  Which meant my efforts were circulating his blood, while her rescue breathing—when the crash cart arrived she’d switched to a mask with an oxygen tank attached to it—put precious air in his lungs.

  So he wasn’t blue anymore. But he wasn’t responding, either; every time we stopped compressions to see if he had any pulse of his own, he didn’t.

  Someone led Ronny out. He’d been weeping, mumbling over and over again that he wanted to know if his mother was all right.

  That, I realized with the tiny part of my mind that could still think, must’ve been what Will threatened him with: harm to his family.

  “Ambulance is on the way,” reported one of the officers who’d brought me in. “But he says he’s got a ten-minute ETA.”

  Estimated time of arrival, in other words. The room was full of people; even Horace the janitor had wheeled his cleaning cart in to observe. But they were a blur to me; all I could see in my mind’s eye was Ellie’s face, sweetly radiant with soon-to-be motherhood.

  And all I could hear was Victor’s voice, dithering on about all the numerous ways that resuscitation could fail.

  Somebody jostled Horace’s cleaning cart and swore as the contents of its top shelf fell. “Damn it, Horace, get out of here and take this crap with . . .”

  “Wait.” Among the fallen items was a box of baking soda, used here I supposed just the way I used it at home: to deodorize garbage cans, drains, and the inside of the refrigerator.

  But when I spotted it something pinged in my memory. Baking soda. Bicarbonate of soda. The stuff, Victor had said, that your blood uses to keep from being too acid.

  Because if the blood is too acid, resuscitation won’t work. The fact printed itself in boldface on the front of my brain, superimposed somehow atop a mental picture of Sam, pouring that antibiotic powder into an injured turtle years ago.