Maggie Boylan

by Michael Henson

  She looked across to the pool hall. Half an hour, she thought. It’s been that long at least. That boy’s liable to be there till closing time. What do I do till then?

  The wind picked up a scatter of leaves and blew them across the yard and in the rattle of the leaves it seemed she could hear the scrawny thing and the heavy girl going at it hammer and tongs.

  Not another soul was out. She reckoned there were people drinking coffee at the Square Deal Grill and people in line at the bank and one or two that stood at the drugstore counter for a prescription. But the wind had driven everyone off the streets and off the square. The trusty’s rake leaned against a wall.

  Leaves had gathered under the shrubs, leaves in the gutters, leaves on the windshields of the parked cars.

  She looked at her sweaty, balled-up twenty and wished she would not do what she was likely now to do. She crossed the street and looked into the window of the pool hall. The neighbor boy stared at the table and slowly chalked his cue. Another broke a new rack.

  So she had time, plenty of time by the look of it. That neighbor boy would play out every dollar in his pocket before he drove her back to Wolf Creek. And then he would want to dun her for gas money, and all she had in life was that twenty.

  Her hands began to tremble; she began to ache in every bone at the thought of all that dead time and the money getting hot in her hand. She knew where she could get something for her twenty, something that would ease her mind and take away the ache and blunt the hard edges of memory and the world, something that would set the world aright.

  The next gust of wind pushed hard against her. The snows of December were just around the corner. She shivered at the thought and gripped her twenty hard. It was ten cold miles back to Wolf Creek. She looked toward the jailhouse where her old man sat in his cell, then through the pool hall window where the boys were racking up another game. She hesitated for another moment, then with a curse for the neighbor boy, for Deputy Burke, for the heavy young girl and the scrawny thing, she followed her twenty down the alley.

  Timothy Weatherstone

  IT WAS Timothy Weatherstone’s first day as a deputy and his first official act was to take the cuffs off Maggie Boylan. Insufficient evidence, said her lawyer. Case dismissed, said the judge.

  “Score one for you, Maggie,” said the sheriff.

  “I didn’t know we was keeping score.”

  “Oh, we’re keeping score,” he said. “And one of these days, we’ll win.” The sheriff was lean as a fox, dressed in his sharp-pressed, black-and-gray uniform with gold sunrise patches at the shoulders and a shining gold badge on his chest. Maggie was lean as well, but perilously lean, like a fox half-starved. She wore a sweatshirt and blue jeans busted out at the bony knees. “So you’re free to go,” the sheriff said. “Until next time.”

  She looked at the sheriff and then looked away as if she might spit but thought the better of it. She rubbed her wrists where the cuffs had bit them, then looked up to see who had set her loose. “Timmy Weatherstone, is that you?”

  Weatherstone winced to hear Maggie call him “Timmy.” He was sure that Tom Burke, the other deputy in the room, was grinning behind his back. Here he was, the rookie, fresh out of college, trying to prove himself, trying to stand up as a professional, and first thing, he gets called “Timmy” by the likes of Maggie Boylan, raggedy, strung-out, withered-to-the-bone Maggie Boylan.

  “You don’t remember me,” she said. “But I used to hang with your mother when you was just a baby.”

  He did not remember, but he knew the stories and did not want to be reminded.

  “We used to call her Aunt Jenny, she was so good to us spite of all her trouble. I used to give you your bottle and change your diaper. That was before she got saved and quit running with us wild young girls. And now you’re a deputy.”

  “It’s his first day on the job, Maggie,” said the sheriff. “Don’t ruin it for him.”

  “I wouldn’t ruin nothing for him,” Maggie said. “He worked too hard to get here.” She stood to put on her coat—a big, blue denim barn coat that hung off her shoulders and covered her hands so that she had to roll back the cuffs. “He could of been on this side of the table, except he straightened up.”

  “That was years ago, Maggie,” said the sheriff.

  “You’re right. He’s made something of himself,” she said. “If your mother was here, she’d be proud.”

  Tim Weatherstone did not want to hear his mother mentioned by the likes of Maggie Boylan and would have said so. But after six months, even at the mention of his mother, the words still piled up in his throat.

  The sheriff pointed to Maggie’s tent of a coat. “Isn’t that Gary’s jacket?”

  “I don’t reckon it’s none of your business, but yes it’s his jacket. He don’t need it where you got him.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he does.”

  She looked into the property bin. “Is this everything?”

  “You signed the receipt.”

  “But I had a ten-dollar bill in my pocket.”

  “You signed the receipt, Maggie. It says fifty-seven cents on the receipt. Fifty-seven cents is what you get.”

  Maggie glared at Thomas Burke and he looked away.

  “You were intoxicated at the time you signed that receipt,” the sheriff said. “You might have been in a blackout.” He looked at Maggie and he looked at the deputy with the sharp edge of his eye.

  “Somebody blacked me out of my money,” Maggie said. She muttered something else, low and indecipherable, and continued to mutter as she signed for the rest of her property.

  “What would you do with ten dollars anyway, Maggie?”

  “I’d walk over to the Square Deal Grill and get me something to eat for one thing, cause what you people feed a body ain’t fit to patch a sidewalk.”

  “Gary seems to like it good enough.”

  “Gary don’t speak up for hisself like I do.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he does,” the sheriff said. “But then, you can’t please everybody.”

  “Well, it’ll please me to get the fuck out of here.” She pushed back the sleeves of her coat and picked up her fifty-seven cents. She stuffed the coins into the pocket of her jeans, looked up at Tim Weatherstone, and gave him a once-over from the badge on his chest to his spit-polished shoes.

  “I don’t reckon you could give me a ride home, could you, Timmy?”

  “You got a free ride here, Maggie,” the sheriff said. “You only get the one.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” she said.

  “But he answers to me.”

  Maggie gave Tim Weatherstone the once-over once again and said, “You look good, Timmy, all spiffed out and trim and ironed all sharp. You done good for yourself. Just don’t forget . . .”

  She paused and rubbed her wrists again. She glanced a reproach toward Burke and one toward the sheriff, then looked back to Timothy Weatherstone and said, “Don’t forget where you come from.”

  * * *

  TIMOTHY WEATHERSTONE knew where he came from. He came from a house a mile up the holler road from Maggie Boylan herself, though the house he lived in was now, six months after his mother’s death, nearly bare as the cell of a monk. His older brother and his older sister had come down, one from Cleveland, the other from Columbus, each with a pickup truck and a list. They left him with a bed, a dresser, a kitchen table, four rooms full of echoes, and some pictures on the walls.

  * * *

  AS SOON as Maggie Boylan was out the door, the sheriff was on his feet. He checked to be sure she was gone down the hall, then he went to the window to be sure she was gone out of the building. Satisfied, he called Deputy Burke into his office.

  Tom Burke rose. He was a big man, round at the gut and round at the shoulders, and he rose slowly. Weatherstone, who had the lean body of a runner, watched him with a mixture of pity and contempt. It must take two full yards of leather, he thought, just to make his gun belt.

  “Sit down,�
� the sheriff said. Then he kicked shut the door.

  Weatherstone could hear only that the sheriff spoke loud and the deputy soft and the sheriff spoke long and the deputy short, and if he could have figured out anyplace else to go, Weatherstone would have gone there, for he did not want to see the deputy in his shame as he did when, finally, Burke emerged with his face red and his jaw clenched.

  Without a word, Burke stepped to the desk, pulled a set of keys out of a drawer and slammed it shut. “You ever serve an eviction before?” Before Weatherstone could answer, he said, “That’s what I thought. Come on, I got to show you how it’s done.”

  He handed Weatherstone a clipboard with a Notice to Vacate attached and walked out the door without waiting to see if Weatherstone followed. In spite of his weight, he was down the stairs and through the lobby, across the parking lot and into the driver’s seat of the cruiser before Weatherstone could catch up and get his hand on the passenger door. He was barely in his seat and not yet buckled in when the deputy threw the cruiser into gear and punched it. The tires barked and kicked up gravel as he pulled out of the lot and into the street and they chittered all the way down Court Street and around the corner at Main.

  Weatherstone glanced at the Notice. He did not know the name, but he knew the place and he knew it was near a gravel quarry on the western edge of the county. But they were headed east and Weatherstone wondered, but he thought it better not to ask.

  In moments, they were on the eastern edge of town where the golf course bordered the cedar woods that ran unbroken to the farms along Wolf Creek. A hundred yards past the city line, there was Maggie Boylan, backward-walking down the gravel shoulder.

  She saw the cruiser and she turned and began to walk forward.

  “Now look at that,” Burke said. “She’s flipped us the bird.” He laughed. “She’s making good time,” he said. “But she’s got a long walk if she walks it all. Nine miles out and then a couple miles up the holler.”

  Weatherstone knew exactly how far Maggie had to walk. He ran past her house nearly every night. Right across the road from Maggie, a dealer’s house perched at the top of what they called Pillhead Hill, so she once she got home, she needn’t go far to get what she wanted.

  Burke slowed the car to match her pace. He told Weatherstone to roll down his window and he leaned forward to speak past him. “You wouldn’t be hitchhiking, would you, Maggie?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. That would be illegal.”

  “You certainly appeared to be hitchhiking.”

  “I certainly appeared to be looking back to see who was likely to run me over.”

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you Maggie?”

  “Never in my life.”

  “Then why did you lie about me back at the office?”

  “That ten dollars? That wasn’t a lie. And you know it wasn’t a lie.”

  “Do you just like the thought of making me look bad?”

  “I don’t need to make you look bad. You do that all on your own.” She stopped and faced him so that he had to brake the cruiser. “I might lie to get myself out of trouble,” she said. “But I never lie somebody into trouble. You took my ten dollars and you bought you a blow job from some girl who couldn’t make bail and you did it just because you could.”

  “Now you just lied again, and in front of this impressionable young man.”

  “It ain’t no lie, motherfucker.”

  “What did you just call me?”

  “I’ll tell you what I called you. I called you a liar and a thief.” She leaned toward the window to look past Tim Weatherstone. “Liar,” she said. “Thief.”

  The deputy tapped Weatherstone at the elbow. “You heard her,” he said. “You’re a witness.”

  “Don’t pull him into your bullshit,” Maggie said.

  “Just stay right where you are,” said Burke. “I think I need to write you a ticket.”

  “Ticket for what? Minding my own business?”

  “Disorderly conduct,” the deputy said. “You cuss out a deputy, that’s disorderly.”

  “Disorderly? You want to see disorderly? I can show you disorderly.” She kicked the cruiser door, turned, and began to walk away. “Fuck you,” she called. “I’m taking my disorderly self home.”

  The deputy pulled the cruiser onto the shoulder. “Fleeing and eluding,” he called. “Obstruction of justice. Resisting arrest.”

  Maggie launched a string of curses into the wind.

  “I believe I heard a threat. That would be a charge of menacing.”

  Maggie’s curses flew out of her like a flock of crows.

  “Come on back, Maggie. I got to give you these tickets.”

  She continued to unfurl curses into the wind and Tom Burke laughed. He put the cruiser back into gear, hit the light bar, scratched off the gravel of the shoulder, pitched the cruiser into a sharp U-turn, and headed west.

  * * *

  THEY DELIVERED the eviction notice to an old man in a little, wind-battered trailer set on a weedy patch of ground above the river. The quarry had chewed up the acres to within a hundred yards of where the trailer sat. They could hear the roar and clank of the dozers and the trucks at work. Gray columns of dust rose from the pit and dispersed among the blackened ironweed and yellowed foxtail of the overgrown pasture that was left.

  At the trailer, a splitting maul leaned against a chopping block near the porch and firewood was stacked neat as pie inside a converted corncrib. Wood smoke puffed comfortably from the chimney of the trailer.

  In spite of the nip of a December wind, the old man sat out on the front step of his trailer, as if he had been expecting them. He rose from his step when they pulled into the yard and stood with his hands in his pockets, straight and slim as a hoe handle but not nearly so smooth.

  “What’s with all the water jugs?” the deputy asked. They were lined up on either side of the steps, full jugs to the left, empties to the right.

  “The quarry sunk my well. I got to haul water from here and there, wherever I can get it.”

  “Well, the quarry wants you off the property anyway.” The deputy showed the old man the eviction notice on the clipboard.

  The old man glanced down at the clipboard, but he did not move to pick it up.

  “If you sign, it just means you received it. It doesn’t mean you agree with it.”

  “It’s my property.”

  “That’s not what the quarry says.”

  The old man spat a slim brown spear of tobacco juice off to the side. “The quarry don’t own it,” he said. “I own it.”

  The deputy shrugged. “I reckon that’s for the court to decide. Do you want me to read this to you?”

  “I can read.”

  “Well then, do you want to sign?”

  The old man sat down. He spat again, then looked up at Timothy Weatherstone. “Ain’t you Jenny Weatherstone’s boy?”

  Weatherstone nodded. Burke said, “It’s his first day on the job. Let’s don’t make this difficult.” He reached out with the clipboard again. The old man looked down at it but did not move.

  “I’m gonna write down ‘Refused to Sign’ and I’m gonna leave your copy right here.” He pulled the Notice from out of the clipboard and set it on the chopping block. He picked up a chunk of wood and set it on top of the paper so it wouldn’t blow away. “You can do what you want with it, but if you want to appeal, you have ten days to do it. Ten days. If you get you a lawyer and take your case to court you might not win, but you’re likely to get a better deal. If not, they’ll send us back out here on day eleven and we’ll have to pull you off the property.”

  The old man spat, imperfectly, at nothing in particular, and in no particular direction.

  * * *

  HALFWAY BACK to town, the deputy looked over to Timothy Weatherstone and asked, “What do you reckon is going to happen? Do you think that old man is gonna appeal?”

  If Burke wanted an answer, he didn’t wait to hear it. “He won’t,” he said.
“He’s too damn mean and he’s too damn stubborn and if he wasn’t, he’s still too damn poor to get a lawyer and who knows if there’s even a lawyer in this county that’d take on such a tangle as this. So we’ll be back out here shortly to set him out. He’s got nowhere to go, but we’re gonna set him out anyway. Meanwhile, this whole county is going to hell. You know that, don’t you? Between the drugstores and the druggies and the doctors and the dealers, I can’t tell which is worst. You get a dozen ODs on a Saturday night in one little country hospital. And what are we doing about it? Not a goddam thing. We got time to chase some old man off his property, which somebody stole out from under his nose. We got time to ticket some half-starved logger for running his truck without tags and we got time to take some strung-out chick’s kids to foster care—which, by the way, is what we did to Maggie Boylan two years ago—but we can’t stop the fucking Oxy and the Percocets and the Vicodins and it don’t even look like we’re trying. And it won’t be about five minutes before the heroin starts rolling in.

  “Just look at the jailhouse, there’s what, eight, ten people in there. I bet you dollars to donuts ever last one of them has got Oxy in his story. And by the way, I did take Maggie’s ten dollars, in case you’re wanting to know.”

  Weatherstone did not really want to know, but he nodded and said nothing.

  “I know what you’re thinking. My little run-in with Maggie Boylan out on the highway was over the top. Which it was. But do you know why I took her ten dollars? Maggie always says she’s gonna bring her old man some money, but she never does. So I did it for her. I took it and I gave it to Gary so he could buy him a pack of Bugler. Maggie will tell you what great things she’s gonna do with her little bit of money, but what she’s really gonna do is snort it or shoot it or eat it and it’ll be gone. The one person in a hundred who’s not hooked on the damn stuff is Maggie Boylan’s husband. And what’s he doing? He’s setting in that jail of ours. And the only reason her old man is sitting in that jail is that Maggie was on parole and he took the rap for her so she wouldn’t have to go back to prison. And that’s why I gave her such a hard time back there on the highway. Now she’s off parole, but he’s still in jail because . . . I don’t know why he’s still in jail. It’s his first charge ever, so he should have been out long ago. But they’re holding him for some reason, which I don’t know. My guess is they think they can pressure him to give her up. But they don’t know Gary.”