Maggie Boylan

by Michael Henson

  Again, at the same hour, the black-haired woman stood in the rain and called up to her man. And again, by the rules, he knew he should put a stop to it, but could not bring himself to do it. For five minutes, maybe ten, they called to each other over the drumming rain. Then she left and all was quiet until just before dawn when the sheriff relieved him and sent him home.

  He hung a blanket over his window to block the foggy daylight and the sound of the rain and he slept like the dead.

  * * *

  HE WOKE by midafternoon, so refreshed and so restless from all the residual caffeine still hammering in his blood, that he took a notion to drive into town and pick up his check—his first check—and to pay some bills.

  The rain had stopped sometime in the morning and a steady wind had driven most of the clouds to the east. Sunlight glinted in the flooded furrows and in the choked ditches. The creeks had backed up into the low ground and cattle in the feedlots stood ankle deep in the glittering muck. The calves, never having known such brightness, blinked and bawled.

  * * *

  IT TOOK a moment for Weatherstone’s eyes to adjust to the dimness of the office, but he saw, once he could see, that Burke, still in uniform, wore neither badge nor gun belt. He and another deputy—a sergeant—stood over Burke’s desk and on the desk was a cardboard box.

  “Well, son,” Burke said. “I see you’ve come to my retirement party. It don’t look like much of a party, but it’s the best I can do for now.”

  Burke showed the sergeant a stack of books and the sergeant nodded, so Burke put the books into the box.

  Weatherstone went to his mail slot and pulled out his check.

  “I see you’re starting to collect that county check,” Burke said. “You’re getting your first and I’m getting my last and the first shall be last and the last shall be first and that’s the way it goes.” He saw the puzzlement in Weatherstone’s eye and said, “Oh, I don’t reckon you know what’s happening. See, your buddy, the sheriff has informed me that my services are no longer required by this department.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Not exactly on my own free will, but then you knew that.”

  Burke showed the sergeant a pen and a couple pencils, got the sergeant’s nod, threw them into the box, and started to fold up the lid.

  The sergeant looked to Weatherstone. “Can you wait here a couple minutes? I got some paperwork to fetch.” Weatherstone nodded and the sergeant left the room.

  “So tell me,” Burke said. “Actually, you don’t have to tell me, but I’ll ask anyway. Did you tell the sheriff about our episode with Maggie?”

  Weatherstone shook his head, ever so slightly, no. Then he turned away.

  “No? Well, that’s good. I reckoned Sheriff had wormed it out of you. I figured you’d try to hold your ground, but he’ll dig at you like a terrier does a mole.”

  The sheriff had, in fact, dug it out of him. But he had not had to dig hard. The sheriff asked and Weatherstone had told the story willingly, without hesitation. It had been wrong to take Maggie’s money and so, he told. But still, he felt a wave of guilt. He tried to speak; he felt he should say something, but he could not think of what he could say. He knew it showed in his face, so he turned his face away.

  But Burke had studied what showed in his face. “It’s okay, son. You just did what you thought was right.” The sergeant came back and passed him a paper across the desk. He signed it and passed it back. “He’d have got me one way or another.”

  Weatherstone nodded. He did not know what he could say.

  “So don’t worry about me,” Burke said. “I’m gonna buy me a cheap banjo and set on the porch and pick till my social security kicks in.”

  He hoisted the box and the sergeant led him out the door and down the stairs.

  * * *

  IN THOSE soggy, work-bound, housebound days when he had not been able to run, Timothy Weatherstone had started into something like withdrawal. He was tired when awake and restless when he slept and the echo of his footsteps in his near-empty house took him to the near side of crazy.

  But now, the rains had stopped. The waters receded from the swales and the ditches and a farmer had busted up the beaver dam. So his path was clear; he could hear the pound of his feet on the pavement again and the scratch of his shoes on the gravel.

  There was but a sliver of moon now and Weatherstone ran half-blind, relying on memory to keep him on his half-remembered path and free of any stumble-place or pothole likely to take out an ankle or wreck a knee. He ran his dark path, past Maggie Boylan and Pillhead Hill with its usual noise of music and voices and, once he hit the gravel, his nerves exulted in the bath of endorphins that flooded in with the miles.

  He ran down past the wreckage of the beaver dam and made ready to turn around. Then, sudden as snakebite, he went down. He had stepped into a shadowy spot where the rains had guttered out the gravel and his ankle crumpled back on itself and pulled the props from under him and he was all of a sudden face down in the damp of rock and rock dust and sand. He raised himself up on his hands and waited. There was no pain at first, just a low feeling in the gut that was close to despair.

  Jesus, he whispered, just let me walk. Just let me get to work tomorrow. Then, the pain washed through him and took all his brain away. He stifled a cry—he did not know why, for there was none to hear him cry—but in the next wave of pain he gave up a stream of curses so fluent and accomplished that he surprised himself with them. He cursed with enough animal energy to set half a dozen dogs barking up and down the holler road and the owls to booming in the woods to either side. He cursed himself up onto hands and knees and tried to stand and cursed himself back down when he could not stand and cursed around on the ground on the side of the road until he found a stick he could use to crutch himself up. He was at the farthest reach of his run, miles from home. He had no phone and the only cars on the road at this hour would be headed to Pillhead Hill to buy or to sell. His ankle throbbed him like a little naggy child. It was time to stop thinking and move. But he had no idea how to use a crutch. He put his toe to the gravel, tried to take a step, and went brainless again with the pain. He found, after a couple more painful tries, that he could grip the stick with both hands, plant it in the gravel, and hop forward on his good leg. So he cursed and crutched his cold, crippled way back up the road, past the abandoned farmhouses and the carcasses of barns, past the trees where the sheriff smiled from his poster. He had to stop twice to rest. Finally, he came around the bend and saw the lights from Maggie Boylan’s house.

  “Maggie,” he called. It was too far away for her to hear, another hundred yards at least, but he called anyway. “Yo, Maggie,” he called again. The owls hooted him back and the half-dozen dogs took up the chant again.

  By now, his good leg had begun to tremble from exhaustion and the stick had begun to blister his hands. But he hop-walked all the faster, for once he got to Maggie’s house, he would be able to rest. Maggie, who had known him as a child, would take him in and feed him and let him get warm and, he hoped, would let him use a phone.

  He hobble-hopped up to her gate and through the gate and up her walk to the porch. He was drunk with pain and he was cold. “Maggie,” he roared and the word roared back at him off the glass of Maggie’s door.

  “Maggie, are you there?”

  She was not. With a string of final curses, he stumbled to the couch that was on the porch and collapsed upon it. He tucked his feet up under him, wrapped the afghan around him, and shivered himself to sleep.

  He woke—somewhere in the night, an eagle of pain had lifted him out of his sleep—and there was Maggie Boylan in her old man’s oversized coat. She had paused just across the road at the foot of the bridge, wondering, probably, who could it be on her porch?

  “It’s me,” he called. “Tim Weatherstone.”

  He thought she would roll him out a carpet of curses. Instead, she nodded and started across the road, slow-stepping toward him with a glaze o
f perfect contentment across her eyes.

  She stopped just short of the porch and peered. “Timmy?”

  “Yeah, it’s me, Timmy.”

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  He told her the story and she nodded again. Then, moving slowly as if she were under water, she helped him into the house, set him down on a couch, packed the ankle with ice, heaped blankets around him, and brought him hot soup and a little white pill.

  “What’s this?”

  “Don’t ask. Just take the motherfucker.”

  He would have argued—he told himself he should argue; there were so many reasons to argue and so many things that could go wrong—but he had been shivered with pain for too long and he was weary and broken-willed, so he took the pill and washed it down with a slug of soup.

  In just a moment, all seemed right, the most right it had ever been. The pain had moved to a place a hundred yards down the road; it was no longer his pain; it belonged to some other person who merely dressed like him and looked like him. The room around him seemed to sing; the blood rang in his ears like a tambourine. It seemed he was lifted from the couch and its warm nest of blankets into a wordlessly joyous space that delighted him and terrified him and which he did not want to leave. He looked around him; everything in the room had its own radiant life. And in the midst of all, sat Maggie Boylan, skinny and serene. Keeping watch with her nightingale eye, she looked just like the mother of all.

  Liars

  EDIE O’LEARY—her name was Edna, but everybody called her Edie—had lived so close to the bone that, even now, at two years sober, she looked to be all bone herself, lean as a rib, sinewy and intense.

  It was January and there was a bitter, January wind, but she was aching for a cigarette so she was out on the front steps of the Square Deal Grill. It was the middle of the morning rush and there was no one else to work the booths or the counter. The best she could do was to fire up a quick one. She had just time enough to suck down three shivering hits and to see, across the courthouse square, Deputy Tim Weatherstone, stringing yellow crime scene tape across the front of the drugstore.

  Three hits on her cigarette, that was all, and she had to get back to work. No one said anything—they all knew better than to say anything. But she could sense six pairs of eyes at her back and a worried cook in the kitchen. Someone’s order was ready; someone wanted his check; the caffeine level in the room was growing critical.

  She stabbed her cigarette out against the doorframe, then carefully inserted the half-cigarette back into its pack, dropped the pack into her apron pocket, and came back inside to catch the order, refill the depleted coffee cups, and fetch that bill.

  “What do you reckon happened over at the drugstore?” one old farmer at the counter asked another.

  “I have no idea,” the second farmer said.

  Edie O’Leary had an idea, but she kept her idea to herself.

  The two farmers shrugged and continued to watch out the front door and across the courthouse lawn to where the yellow tape fluttered. By now, the sheriff and a state trooper had arrived to ponder the broken door and the glass on the sidewalk.

  “Do you reckon it was a break-in?” the first old farmer asked.

  “Probably was.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around.”

  “I hear there is.”

  “Ever drugstore in ever little town from here to Gallipolis has been hit.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And over in Kentucky, it’s just as bad.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “And you don’t dare leave your house, they’ll strip it to the bare walls.”

  “That they will.”

  “Used to be you never had to lock your door.”

  “Never did.”

  “Ain’t like that no more. Ask me why, I say it’s the drugs. It makes them crazy.”

  “It does.”

  “Makes them so crazy for it they’ll do about anything to get more.”

  “Bout anything.”

  “It makes you wonder just what is this world coming to.”

  “Makes you think.”

  * * *

  EDIE O’LEARY did not have much time to think while she was at work. And she liked it like that. In the one slack hour between the breakfast run and the lunch rush, with nothing to occupy her mind and hands, it was too easy to let stress, worry, and regret invade her mind.

  So she was grateful when Tim Weatherstone came in, wearing his new county uniform, starched so stiff it looked like armor and pressed so sharp it could have been registered as a weapon. He was young and he walked with a young man’s strut and he swaggered with a young man’s swagger. But Edie O’Leary had known him since he was a boy.

  No, she told him, she hadn’t seen a thing. Yes, she got to work at five in the morning, but she wasn’t looking at such an hour to see whose windows were broken, so no, she didn’t see a thing, and no, she didn’t hear a thing, and no, she didn’t know a thing until she saw the yellow tape, so that by the time Weatherstone left, she was no longer grateful to have seen him at all and she was reminded of way too many times she had to answer way too many questions.

  So she was only half grateful to see Maggie Boylan headed toward the door of the Square Deal with Sheila Hacker by the elbow. Maggie steered Sheila up the steps and through the door.

  “Come on, babe,” Maggie said. “Edie’ll front us some coffee. That’ll help your nerves.”

  Maggie marched the girl to the counter and planted her on a stool. “Edie’s my old running dog,” said Maggie. “She’s sober now, but she’s not stuck-up sober like some.” Sheila was younger than Maggie and Edie by ten or fifteen years and she was tagged with initials on her hands and studded with metal rings in her lip and brow. She placed her hands flat on the counter, looked to the window, and bit her lip.

  “She’s worried, because she thinks they’re gonna charge her for the break-in at the drugstore. But I told her, don’t worry, I got your back.”

  The girl looked out to the window and shook her head. She hunched her shoulders up and pulled her head down into the collar of her coat and tongued the ring in her lip.

  “She’s all shook up and nervous and she needs a cup of coffee,” Maggie said.

  “Maggie, I can’t give you coffee every time you drag yourself in here.”

  Maggie looked to the girl. “You see how she talks to me?” She gave Edie a look. “I ain’t asking for me. It’s for her.”

  The girl’s hands did not move from the counter, but they shimmered, leaf-like. Her knuckles were red and her nails were bitten to the nub.

  Edie poured coffee for the girl and one for Maggie and thought, This is trouble in the making.

  “They got it in for me,” the girl said. “I know they do. They got no one else they can blame, so they’re gonna try to pin it on me.”

  “So I’ll just tell them, you was with me all last night.”

  “But what if . . .”

  “What if what?”

  “I don’t know. I just know they’re gonna try to put it on me.”

  “Don’t worry, babe. I got you covered.”

  Edie O’Leary rapped once on the counter. “Maggie,” she said. “Come back here a second.” She marched Maggie to the back booth and sat her down. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do with that girl,” she said, “but I see a truckload of trouble coming.”

  “She’s just a kid,” Maggie said. “I’m trying to help her out.”

  “You’re gonna help yourself right into a jail cell.”

  “Somebody’s got to help her.”

  “By telling the cops some kind of bullshit lie? Look, suppose she did it—which, if she did, I don’t want to know about it—but if she did and you’re trying to stand in the way, well, there you go. You might as well put your hands out for the cuffs. And if she didn’t do it, what the hell does she need you for?”

  “I’m telling you, she’s just a kid. She do
n’t know how to handle these things.”

  “And you do? Maggie, it’s not that long since you handled yourself a year in Marysville.”

  “I knew you was gonna throw that in my face.”

  “I didn’t throw it in your face.”

  “Then why did you even bring it up?”

  “Because you always seem to forget it.”

  “How am I supposed to forget going to prison and losing my kids?”

  “I don’t reckon you ever will, but do you ever want to get them back?”

  “Are you saying I’m unfit too?”

  “I’m saying. . . .” She took a deep breath for patience. “I’m saying that you’re putting yourself in a bad place.”

  “Because I want to help that girl? I thought you was better than that.”

  “Maggie . . .”

  “Used to be you would help somebody like her.”

  “Maggie, I’m trying to help you.”

  “Help, my ass. I thought you was my friend.”

  “You can think what you want, Maggie.” Edie O’Leary was done with patience now. “I got to get back to work.”

  Two secretaries from the courthouse had sat down at the counter. The girl stared out the door.

  “Come on,” Maggie called to her. “They don’t want the likes of us in here.” She grabbed the girl by the elbow and pressed her out into the street. A feed mill truck had to hit the brakes to keep from turning them into mulch. The driver honked and Maggie waved him the bird. Maggie talked the girl around the corner and out of sight and she was gone.

  Soon, everyone was gone. The secretaries took their coffees back to the courthouse; the old farmers paid up and went their way. The cook came up front to say that everything was ready and he would be back before lunch. So she was alone with her thoughts. She busied herself with filling the saltshakers and the napkin holders, but really, there was nothing to do until the first of the lunch crowd came around. To keep the old thoughts cornered, she threw on a sweater and went back out to the step to smoke. She came back in, all ashiver, dialed her sponsor, and left a voice mail. She wiped the counter clean and polished the racks that held the menus. Everything was as clean as she could make it.