Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  “Sometimes I wonder about you,” he said, pulling at the starter cord. His saw revved, the sound ripping the quiet of the morning. He leaned toward me and half shouted in my ear.

  “And if I were you, I’d get Roxanne back. A girl like that comes along once in a lifetime. I married mine.”

  I smiled at him.

  “End of free advice,” Clair said, and put the saw to the tree, spewing a plume of flesh-white chips.

  We cut for most of the morning, working our way into a hardwood stand that had some good-size maple and beech and, on the fringes, yellow birch. This was our firewood. I got five cords every year. Clair got ten, keeping six for himself and giving four to Mrs. Hazlett down the road, a widow with no children. He’d been doing it for years, cutting it, splitting it, delivering it. He was being neighborly. She paid him in blueberry pies.

  I was along because Clair’s wife, Mary, didn’t want him to bleed to death in the woods if he had an accident working alone. It could happen, and every once in a while, somewhere in these Vacationland woods, it did. One misstep. One moment of inattention. Screw up while you were working in the woods and you couldn’t fix it with a correction.

  We worked without speaking, except to shout when we were ready to drop a tree. They slammed to the ground with a whump, branches that had been stretched high skyward suddenly tangled in the brush. It was sad and final and, every time, gave me pause. I felt as though we should have a moment of silence.

  But there was no silence as we worked, sweat dripping from our faces. The roar of the saws was muffled by my ear protectors, Marine-issue headgear that was really intended to protect the ears of a shooter on a firing range. The way things were going they could be just the ticket.

  As I worked, the events of the night replayed in my mind. There was something reckless and dangerous about Jeff, a disregard for his own life that would make him tough to deal with. Would he get away with leaving threats on an answering machine? Ultimately, no. Would it be too late for Donna or me, or even Roxanne? Hard to say. Justice at best is mostly too little, too late.

  And there would be no hiding from the guy if he decided to come after me. Kennebec, with its three-block downtown, two tough bars, and one courthouse, was compact, shrunk like the Observer newsroom. Everything within arm’s reach. It was like Jeff was the school bully and I had to stay on the playground. What had Donna’s life been like, stuck with the guy in a bedroom?

  I wondered what made a guy like that so angry at the world. Had he spent his whole life in a rage? What was it about women that frustrated him so much? What made him want to beat them into submission? See them as property, territory to be conquered and claimed and consumed?

  “I bet you’re not wearing anything under that, are you, honey?” the one guy had said.

  The son of a bitch.

  And now Roxanne was headed south, having seen the worst that central Maine had to offer. I don’t want to can vegetables. I don’t want to be threatened by some filthy pig in my own house. What made that guy think he had any right to even look at Roxanne, much less say what he had said, take even one step in her direction?

  “Jack,” Clair shouted. I was lost in thought, limbing the last pale-leafed branches from a birch. “Good enough.”

  I turned off the saw and pulled off the headgear. Clair walked back toward the yard and in a minute there was a clacking as he started his venerable John Deere, which rumbled up the track. He turned it around and backed an old handmade trailer toward the trees we’d cut into four-foot lengths. When a cord of wood had been stacked, he climbed up on the old tractor and clacked his way out of the woods, the logs lined up like bodies from a battlefield. I followed, swatting flies.

  Clair parked the tractor near the trucks. I filled both saws with gas and oil and put my headgear back on and started cutting the wood right on the trailer. In an hour, all those big majestic trees had been reduced to chunks, like a whale chopped into slabs of blubber. We filled my truck and Clair’s truck and put the saws and toolboxes and gas cans on top.

  “Well, I guess that should do her,” Clair said, wiping his forehead with a blue bandanna.

  “Yessuh,” I said.

  Clair went to the cab of the Ford and opened a small plastic cooler and came back with two cold, wet bottles of Budweiser. He handed me one and we opened them and raised them in salute.

  “To the god of the woods,” Clair said.

  “Amen,” I said.

  We drank in long cold gulps, standing in sweaty silence as the blackflies buzzed around our heads. Clair finished his beer and stuck the empty bottle in with the wood. I took a last swallow and did the same.

  “Back to the ranch,” Clair said.

  He walked around to the front of his truck. I walked to mine. He opened his door and paused.

  “Jack, I mean it about those Kennebec yahoos. You could get in over your head.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “This guy’s got nothing to lose.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “And you don’t shoot a gun at a man unless you mean it.”

  “I did,” I said.

  Clair climbed into the Ford and the motor rumbled.

  “And you patch things up with Roxanne, or I’m gonna be some pissed,” he said.

  I grinned. Clair did too.

  So I drove slowly home. The wood went in a pile behind the shed, to be stacked later. I went inside and peeled off my sweat-soaked shirt and took off my boots. There were wood chips worked into my socks, and my jeans smelled of oily exhaust. I dumped them in a pile and turned on the shower and stepped in.

  When I got out, I heard a voice.

  On the answering machine.

  “Give me a call or stop in. We’ve got some things to talk about.”

  It was Albert. He did not sound pleased.

  I got dressed in the house that now echoed with Roxanne’s absence and got in the truck and headed for Kennebec. If nothing else, I could buy beer.

  “I’m not sure where to start, McMorrow,” Albert said. “You filed after I left, so I didn’t see it until this morning. I don’t know what to say, except what the hell is this?”

  He had traded his green ensemble for a brown one. The day’s Observer was spread out on his desk, open to an inside page of the first section. My story was at the top of the right-hand page, with a thirty-six-point, three-column head.

  The story was circled in red. I didn’t see a gold star.

  “It’s a story about what went on in court yesterday,” I said, shifting in my chair. “You hired me to cover the courts.”

  “Yeah, but I expected you to report the results.”

  “The results aren’t what went on.”

  “It’s what we do,” Albert said. “We report the dispositions, maybe provide some details about cases of particular interest. This is, like, I don’t know, it isn’t exactly a column, but it isn’t exactly a story, either.”

  “Sure it is. It’s the story of what went on in a public courtroom yesterday.”

  “Some of this didn’t go on in the courtroom.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I said. “Conduct my interviews in the front row?”

  “I didn’t expect you to conduct interviews.”

  “Then you don’t need a reporter. You need a stenographer. Hold down your costs and send a tape recorder.”

  Albert looked down at the paper and said nothing. Behind his head was Cumberland County. Behind the partition, something rustled. In the Observer newsroom, all walls had ears.

  “I got a call from Linda Tate, the assistant DA, at home this morning,” Albert said.

  “Yeah?”

  “She was not pleased.”

  “So what’s the bad news?”

  “I mean she was really not pleased,” Albert said.

  “It’s not my job to please her.”

  “Yeah, well, we depend on her office for a lot of information. She can make our job pretty goddamn difficult.”

 
“Putting out a newspaper is supposed to be difficult. If it’s easy, you’re not doing it right.”

  Albert gave me a hard look.

  “That’s what they taught you at the New York Times, huh?”

  “They taught me that a good newspaper doesn’t kiss anybody’s ass.”

  “What are you trying to say, McMorrow?” Albert said coldly.

  “Nothing. I’m just saying that when you cover a courtroom proceeding, you can’t kowtow to the DA.”

  “Who said anything about kowtowing?”

  I paused. Something rustled behind the partition again. Charlene walked by one way, then the other. I could hear David Archambault’s voice. He was on the phone.

  “Listen,” I said. “That case was the highlight of the docket yesterday. A woman comes in and pulls her shirt half off to show the judge where some guy bit her. You don’t want me to report that?”

  “I just don’t know that it has to be reported quite like this,” Albert said. “Chasing the lady out in the parking lot.”

  “Reporters chase people. It’s what we do.”

  “Not at this newspaper.”

  I started to say something, then held back.

  “Listen, McMorrow, you’re a good writer,” Albert said.

  “Thanks.”

  “We’re lucky to have you here, though I have to admit, I think there must be a skeleton in your closet someplace.”

  “Every closet has at least one. Some are chock-full.”

  He looked at me. I looked right back.

  “Tate made a good point, I thought,” Albert went on. “She said, ‘Why single out this case?’ She said it isn’t fair to the alleged perpetrator, who hasn’t been convicted as yet. I mean, these are just allegations.”

  “What do you think? She bit her own belly?”

  “Well, no—”

  “And God almighty, if we waited for convictions to cover cases, we’d never cover another trial again. We wouldn’t report arrests. You do cover arrests here, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Albert said. “But we do it without making a ruckus about every little case that comes along.”

  “I don’t consider a woman being bitten and beaten and terrorized a little case.”

  “Oh, come on, McMorrow. Guys have been whacking their wives around for as long as there’ve been wives. That’s reality.”

  “Right,” I said, and I stood and reached over his desk and put my finger on my story.

  “And that’s reality too,” I said.

  “Reality is a DA who can make our lives miserable.”

  “Maybe we should do a story on that. My take on Tate is that she runs that courtroom like her own little fiefdom.”

  “It is her own little fiefdom,” Albert said. He paused.

  “And this is mine,” he said slowly, with just a hint of a threat. “So tone it down a little, will you?”

  I looked at him.

  “That was toned down,” I said.

  Albert’s phone rang, like the bell at ringside. He picked it up and I left.

  As I walked through the newsroom, Charlene looked up from the desk and gave me a shy, knowing smile. Archambault, still on the phone, gave me a thumbs-up.

  9

  Roxanne didn’t come home that night. She left a message that she was staying in Cape Elizabeth with her social worker friend, Kim. I slept alone and not very well, then got up and drove into Kennebec as a steady rain fell. The truck whirred down through the hills and pastures, past old farmhouses sinking into the ground, barns with their ridgepoles snapped, crumbling mementos from a time when hard work was its own reward.

  It was a long time ago.

  There were trailers and ranch houses and, every once in a while, a big monstrous new house with gates and gold-painted eagles, built by somebody with money and a subscription to House Beautiful. And finally there was the Kennebec River, black in the rain, and then I was on the bridge looking across at the houses that were all jammed together. It seemed odd in this sprawling, empty state, as if the town were some sort of refugee camp, the fences of which had only lately come down, and the weary residents had decided it wasn’t worth trying to escape.

  I pulled off the bridge and headed up Elm Street to the courthouse, following a woman on a bicycle with bags of empty cans tied to the back, one on each side. She crossed into the courthouse parking lot and I pulled in behind. She got off her bike and started digging in the metal trash can for empties. I dug in the rubble on the seat of the truck for a pen.

  It was arraignment day and there was a blue paddy wagon pulled up to the courthouse door. Beside the paddy wagon, a cluster of defendants stood and smoked, peering out from under their sodden baseball caps. I threaded my way through them, stopping by the trash can.

  “The back of that red Toyota is full of cans,” I said. “Help yourself.”

  She turned and looked at me. Her face was almost handsome, with tanned smooth skin and not very many teeth. She said nothing, then headed for the truck.

  Inside it was a full house, lawyers and defendants milling in the lobby as though it were intermission at some crazy opera. I went to the bulletin board by the soda machine and looked at the docket list. It was long. A woman in for bouncing seventeen checks. A guy charged with cruelty to animals. Several simple assaults. Kids caught with beer. Kids caught driving with beer. Kids caught driving drunk after drinking the beer. Several people caught driving after their licenses had been taken away for driving drunk.

  A commercial for Prohibition.

  I turned from the board and looked around the room. People were chatting in clumps. Lawyers to their blue-jeaned clients. Girls and guys to other girls and guys, as if arraignment day were some sort of reform-school reunion. In the corner five or six cops, state, Kennebec, and county, were joking around. With them were a couple of detectives or probation officers. To tell them apart, I’d have to pat them down.

  In New York, everybody was armed. In quaint little Kennebec, the probation guys carried wallets under their three-season sport coats.

  I watched for a minute, looked at my watch. Then I went and leaned against the counter and a clerk came up behind me.

  “Are you here to pay a fine?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m here to pay my dues.”

  I smiled.

  “Just kidding,” I said. She looked puzzled.

  It was nine twenty-five, five minutes until the courtroom doors would open. With Jeff in mind, I stood and waited, my back to the wall.

  And Donna came out of the DA’s office. Crying.

  I hesitated for a second. Saw the cops part for her and look at each other and shrug. She was dressed in jeans and a light blue sweatshirt and running shoes, and she was holding her lips together as if to keep a sob from spilling out.

  Donna headed for the door and I followed. She slipped through the smokers and was halfway across the parking lot when I caught up with her.

  “Donna,” I said.

  She half turned.

  “Oh,” Donna said. “I tried to call you, but you weren’t home.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It didn’t work.”

  “What didn’t?”

  “The whole thing. None of it. The going to court. Talking to you. Getting the protection thing. The story in the paper. None of it means shit.”

  She wiped her eyes and then dug in her pocketbook for a cigarette.

  “Why?” I said. “What happened?”

  “Jeff came to the house,” Donna said, her voice quavering for a moment, then settling. “It was, like, three in the morning and he was drunk and wired and he’s pounding on the door and yelling and he scares my daughter half to death.”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Yeah. But he’s saying he’s gonna kill me and kill you ’cause nobody takes a shot at him when he’s not armed. And I’m a bitch and a slut and all this and it went on and on. I felt so bad for the neighbors. They’ve got, like, four little kids, an
d this other guy, he works graveyard at the bakery, and this lady’s home alone and Jeff’s screaming and yelling.”

  “So was he there when the cops came?”

  “Oh, yeah. And they arrested him. But he’s meek and mild for them. I’m saying, ‘Go ahead. Be a tough guy with them.’ There’s, like, three cops there and I was hoping he’d take a swing at one of ’em, but he’s like Mr. Boy Scout.”

  She finished that cigarette and seemed calmer.

  “And they arrested him?”

  “Yeah,” Donna said. “For three friggin’ hours. He bailed at seven forty-five this morning. Two hundred bucks, cash. He’s out, goddamn it. He’s out. Where’s the protection in that? How am I supposed to sleep? What about my little girl? What if he takes her? What if he takes my little girl?”

  She bit her lip, then started to cry. The tears welled up and she wiped her eyes and her makeup smeared, leaving a long black streak across her right cheekbone.

  I stood there awkwardly, not sure how, or if, to console her. The smokers were watching, glad for the distraction. Then the bailiff opened the door and told them court was starting and they went inside. I looked to the door, then back to Donna.

  “You gonna be all right to drive?” I said.

  “My car wouldn’t start,” she said. “I’m walking.”

  “Where’s your daughter?”

  “My sister came and got her this morning. When the cops were there. When we’d fight, she’d always call Auntie Marcia. She knows the number. It’s like, ‘When in doubt, call Auntie Marcia.’ ”

  “So you walked down here?”

  “To see the DA.”

  “Assistant DA, you mean. The DA’s in Augusta.”

  “Whatever. That lady there. I wanted to tell her what happened, you know? See if I could get Jeff’s bail upped or something. I mean, the guy is gonna hurt me.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Nothing. She wouldn’t talk to me. She was right there behind this door and she wouldn’t talk to me. It’s like. ‘You’re trash. Go away.’ I sat there for a half hour and then this secretary, she tells me they need the room for the lawyers and stuff and I have to leave. I’m like, ‘Yeah, what’s more important than this? Is my life nothing at all?’ Who else am I supposed to talk to?”