“I think he’s up there committing slow suicide,” Maggie told her old man. She had her own connections, so she stayed away, even after Randy told her, right on the courthouse square, “We got you covered,” by which she understood that Randy the Man would front her if ever she came up dry.
And many a night, when she couldn’t hook up, Maggie had lain in a detoxified fever, burning and nauseous, crazy sick, her shocked cells demanding just a little hit, just a stupid little upfront hit to take this pain away.
She shivered and cursed and hoped to die, but I’m damned, she thought, if I’m gonna go up that hill.
Eventually, sometimes, she did. Terrible things happened, but sometimes she made that climb.
But that was over now. She was through with Pillhead Hill and anyone associated with it.
“What if my PO sees me?”
“You’re not setting up housekeeping with him,” Edie said.
“But . . .”
“It’s business,” Edie said. “Take care of your business.”
Maggie readied a cup and poured it full. She muttered a curse with as low a mutter as she knew how, but Edie said, “He’ll want the whole pot, so you might as well bring it over. And I don’t care what kind of bitches you call me.”
Maggie took the cup in one hand and the pot in the other and muttered her way to Randy’s booth. He let her set the coffee in front of him without taking his eye from the window. He waved away the cream and the sugar she tried to give him.
“You doing all right, Maggie?”
“I’m doing fine,” she said. She couldn’t look at him for fear of the judge, so she looked out the window as well. “Everything’s fine,” she mumbled.
“Your old man still over in the jailhouse?”
“Yeah, he’s still in there.”
“And he’s got another couple months?”
That, she thought, and another six days. But she just nodded.
“I’m glad to see you working,” Randy said. “I thought you were gone to Marysville for sure.”
Maggie wanted to tell him all about the little lying crack whore, and the judge with the galvanized eye, but she thought better of it. “I’m still here,” she said.
“And I hear you’re clean.”
She wanted to ask, Who told you that? Instead, she let him tell her how good a thing that was and how she’ll not regret it and how he wished he could quit smoking or for that matter this damn coffee which he drank five or ten pots of every day and it’s the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night and he don’t hardly get any sleep what with the coffee and those boys that’s staying with him but hey, people gotta do what they gotta do, you know? They sure like to party, but me, I like to . . .
Randy seemed to have forgotten what he liked. Without another word, he set down his coffee, stood, slapped a five-dollar bill down on the table, and pushed past Maggie and out the door.
He balanced a moment on the front step of the Square Deal Grill. He gave a hard look to the main door of the courthouse, a brief look, a glance, but hard enough to drive a nail. Then he crossed the sidewalk in his squared-up wrestler’s walk, opened the door of his Jeep, hammered another glance toward the courthouse door, settled in behind the wheel, and drove off with his fat tires squealing.
A moment later, as if summoned by Randy’s hard eye, Maggie’s judge came out the courthouse door. Not the front door, but a little, hardly used, side door. He walked straight across the lawn to where the county reserved a spot for his SUV, got in, and drove off in the same direction as Randy the Man.
Maggie stared down the street until both cars took the bend in the road and disappeared. Then she took the pot back to the coffee maker.
“You’re not gonna believe this,” she said.
“I never do,” said Edie.
“No, really,” Maggie said. “I just saw the judge that sentenced me take off after Randy the Man.”
“And?”
“Why would that judge want to see Randy the Man?”
“He’s a judge. He can see anybody he wants.”
“Well, what’s he gonna do with Randy the Man?”
“He’s a judge. He can do what he wants.”
“But what if he’s buying drugs?”
“He’s a judge.”
“But don’t he have to follow the law like the rest of us?”
“How many judges did you know up in Marysville?”
“Not a one.”
“There’s my point.”
“What point?”
“He’s a judge. He’s got the law in his hip pocket.”
“But that ain’t right.”
“Maggie, what do you know about right? You been wrong since you first drew breath and now you want to talk about right?”
Why, Maggie wondered, is everybody so dedicated to setting me straight?
“You don’t know any more than a bird about what that judge is up to. You don’t even know for sure he was following Randy.”
“I seen him.”
“You just happened to see him get in a car right after Randy the Man got in a car and you just happened to see him drive for a few blocks that just happened to be in the same direction as Randy the Man. And you think you can make a case from that?”
I saw what I saw, thought Maggie. I saw what I saw.
* * *
ONE AFTER another, day and night, the cars came down Maggie’s road from the north and up her road from the south. They worked through the turn, shook the bridge floor, scratched their way up the hill and, minutes later, rolled back down. Sometimes, a bright, new SUV scrambled up the hill and an old beater rolled back down and Maggie knew that someone had gotten the bad end of a deal and their car would end up in the row of cars parked behind the house. And one day she thought she knew the SUV that went up the hill and thought she saw her judge driving the beater that came back.
This ain’t right, she thought. But she said nothing at the Grill and nothing on the phone to her old man.
And the boys on Pillhead Hill continued night and day. Sometimes, when the wind was right, Maggie heard snatches of music way up into the night, or high-pitched women’s laughter, or the gunning of a motorcycle that set the dogs to barking all up and down the road.
As the cars came from north and south, each one bore a bank account, a week’s pay, or fifty dollars from selling off the piano someone’s grandmother left them. They carried the college tuition, the Christmas toys for the kids, the house payment, the support payment, the car payment that was overdue. They carried the egg money or tobacco money or money earned giving blowjobs to truckers. Entire houses went up the hill, along with farms and small businesses, reputations, and self-respect. Years went uphill, bundled like cordwood, stacked for sale, ready to burn.
It’s a terrible thing that happens up there on that hill, Maggie thought. But she longed for the terrible thing. Each frailed and fouled nerve was alert to the chance. Each addled neuron ached to be filled with that ecstasy and disaster.
She only wanted a reason.
* * *
SHE WAS in the habit of calling Gary the last thing at night before he had lights out and before she had to try to sleep before work. But this time when she called, it wasn’t Irby, the usual second-shift jailer.
“Who’s this?” she asked.
“Officer Weatherstone.”
“Timmy?”
“Who’s this?”
“Timmy, let me talk to Gary real quick before it’s lights out.”
“Can’t do it, Maggie.”
“Why not? I call every night.”
“I got orders, Maggie.”
He had orders. She argued, but Timmy Weatherstone had orders, in writing, in plain sight, and he didn’t care what Irby did on his shift and he wasn’t going to let her talk to him like that and how did she get this number anyway? She cursed him seven times blue and reminded him what a snake he had for a mother before he hung up on her with a curse of his own and she thought, Now
I’ve gone and done it. She was gospel sure she was headed off to Marysville on the next bus north.
So why not?
* * *
THIS IS just like death, Maggie thought. She was warm; she was at peace; she was free of pain. Everything was still. She was swaddled in light.
She tested her limbs and found that her arms and legs were heavy as timber.
This is what death is like, she thought. This might be death itself.
But death would not perch an IV bottle over her like a plastic buzzard. Death would not run a tube down into her arm and death would not post a monitor with red blinking lights by her bedside. She propped herself up and widened her gaze. Death, she knew, was not a hospital room and death would not leave so bearish a man asleep in a chair nearby.
She thought she knew him, but she did not know the big yellow teeth exposed by the man’s slack jaw. Perhaps he sensed that someone was staring at him, for he caught himself mid-snore, pulled his lips down over the teeth, and looked around. When he saw it was Maggie, he brightened.
“So you’re back among the living,” he said.
“What’re you doing here?”
“I’ve been taking a little power nap,” he said. “The real question is, what are you doing here?”
Maggie looked around and shrugged. “I don’t even know how I got here,” she said.
“You know you just about took the big nap,” he said.
She shrugged, as if to say she would not have minded. “So I reckon I’ll be going back to prison.”
“Maggie,” he said. “If you can’t be careful you might as well be lucky. And you’re a lucky woman. You’re lucky to be alive and you’re lucky enough to time your overdose for a Friday night just before a treatment bed came open.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means that if I can get you out of here and into that treatment bed before court opens on Monday, you don’t go back to prison.”
“What day is it now?”
“It’s Sunday evening, we’ve got to be rolling.”
Within an hour, Maggie was pronounced fit to leave. A nurse untethered her from the IV and the monitor, stood her up on her shaky feet, helped her dress, and rolled her in a wheelchair to the parking lot where her PO waited in his car.
It was dark and snow had begun to fall as they pulled out of the lot.
“Can I go home first?”
“We’re not taking any chances.” He took one big paw off the steering wheel and pointed to the backseat with his thumb. “Your girlfriend from the Grill packed a duffel for you. No need to risk starting this whole thing over.”
Maggie fretted in her seat. “The meds is starting to wear off,” she said. “I’m gonna start geeking soon.”
“We’ll get you there soon enough. And they’ll give you whatever you need.”
Maggie was not convinced, but there was nothing she could do about it. The treatment people, she knew, would just tell her to tough it out. She did not feel tough at all, but she would have to tough it out. She slumped in her seat and watched the lights of the houses roll by. Here and there, she caught a glimpse into a kitchen or a living room—a couple at table or the flicker of a television—and felt lonely and out of sorts.
What a mess my life has been, she thought.
They left town and the fields began to open up around them. The lights were fewer than before. They hit the highway and the car began to pick up speed. Her PO, who had been silent and wary as they drove through town, began to talk about this and that and Maggie supposed that she should listen. But mile after mile, she continued to watch the lights tick by, the near lights and the lights far out on the hills, lights that in their distance might as well have been stars.
The Girl Who Spoke Foreign
THAT GIRL was talking in her sleep again.
Maggie Boylan sat up in her bed and listened. Everything else was quiet. Outside her window, snow fell on silent snow. The third shift monitors were dozing at their stations. Everyone else was sound asleep. Everything else was perfectly still. There was only this muttering girl with her moans and curses.
Oh fuck, Maggie thought, not again.
The way she talked was some kind of foreign, so that Please came out as Pliz! And Pliz no! So, over and over, it was Pliz! And Pliz! And No! And then a long string of perfectly crafted curses. Then the curses trailed off and the girl moaned and muttered and twitched and gasped and Maggie knew that, for the second night running, she could have no hope of sleeping.
The girl was just a young girl, barely old enough to be in this place. But she carried such a burden of cursing and grief. She was a tiny little thing, skinny as a weasel and just as loopy. But she bellowed out her curses like a bull in rut, curses not even Maggie would curse, curses made up of words Maggie could not even understand but which she knew to be curses by the vehemence of them and by the way it broke her heart to hear them.
The girl twitched and gasped so that Maggie couldn’t bear it, and she stood, threw her jacket over her shoulders, and stared as the girl mumbled and muttered and sighed and pulled the blankets up around her neck.
All day long, she don’t have two words to say, Maggie thought. Then she goes to sleep and she can’t shut up.
Maggie had tried last night to sleep on one of the couches in the group room, but the third shift people had run her back to her room. She had begged to be switched to another room, but they turned her down. She had tried stuffing her ears with tissue, but the tissues fell out. So she was stuck with all this muttering and cursing that made it impossible to sleep.
It’s that powerless shit, Maggie thought. I’m powerless. And powerless means you’re fucked.
It was bad enough that she was stuck in here with all these mental cases—Maggie knew she had a little problem with OxyContin, but she wasn’t mental—but then she had to put up with this little girl with the big barrel of a voice.
Tomorrow, when Maggie fell asleep again in group, that skinny little vixen who ran it would tell her again she was being resistant.
But she wasn’t resistant. She sat when she was supposed to sit and she stood when she was supposed to stand and she read what they told her to read and she wrote what they told her to write and she joined hands in the circle and mumbled the prayer along with the rest.
Resistant! she thought. If she wants to see resistant, I can resist my ass right out the door and up the road.
But she knew what was up the road. The judge had laid it out for her.
* * *
THE GIRL fell silent for a moment, but Maggie knew better than to hope. And sure enough, in seconds, it was Pliz! And No! And a new string of curses. Pliz! and Pliz no! she called over and over and it was clear that, in whatever desperate dream she was in, the girl was pleading. She settled down to muttering again and Maggie thought, if the girl would just keep it at that level, I might be able to sleep through it after all. But right in the middle of the muttering, the girl sat bolt upright. “No!” she shouted. “Pliz no!”
They say you shouldn’t wake them, Maggie remembered, though she couldn’t see what harm it would do. The girl didn’t shout again and, after several minutes, the wild, tormented dream seemed to have left her. But the girl suddenly sucked in air as if she had been punched. She held her breath for several long seconds, then released as if she had just surrendered. Maggie pulled her chair over to the girl’s bed and sat where she could watch more closely. Over and over the girl sucked in air, held it, and released it. But at least for now, she was done with the shouts and the curses.
Quiet as a mouse in the daytime, Maggie thought. But she’s the handbells of hell at night.
To look at her in the daytime, who would ever know? When first she saw her, Maggie thought the girl was part of the staff, she looked so serene and untroubled. She was so blond and perfect—movie star blond and movie star perfect—that the men on the unit and even the counselors and even the doctor on his stroll—each did that little jiggle of the head where
they wanted to turn and follow her around the room, but didn’t want to show it.
Quiet as a mouse, with dark, wide eyes like those of a mouse caught in a trap. To Maggie, she seemed a timid, useless mouse of a thing. But that did not stop the men from turning her way. The girl endured the eyes, when she lifted her own to see them, with an unreadable look that seemed alternately sly and despairing.
The girl was blond in the daylight, but in the moonlight from the window her hair looked white as lamb’s wool, her face pale, her brow flexed tight as corduroy. Gradually, the girl’s breathing leveled, her brow relaxed; she began to breathe soft and natural as a baby.
Such a baby, Maggie thought. I wish the fuck she would let me sleep, but she’s such a poor fucked-up baby.
And through the small hours, until she finally fell asleep in her chair, Maggie watched over the white-haired girl as over a child.
* * *
SOMETIME IN the middle of the night, a man and a woman from the third shift stood on either side of her and wanted to know, “Are you all right?”
“I was fine till you woke me up,” Maggie muttered. She cursed them both with no real enthusiasm—she knew she had been beaten on that count—and they guided her or lifted her—she couldn’t remember which—from the chair to the bed.
Finally, the morning light and the chatter of the morning birds woke her. Maggie sat up and looked around.
The girl was gone. Her bed was made up neat as if it had been an envelope licked and sealed. And all her little items, her books, her makeup, her lotion bottles, and whatnot, were tidied on the dresser top like soldiers in formation.
The loudspeaker went off and Maggie guessed it was the breakfast call. But that was only a guess. There was no real way a body could tell what fell from those wheezy, asthmatic speakers. She knew they said breakfast or lunch because everyone else started for the cafeteria. She knew it announced group because they all headed for the group room. But anything else might as well have been in French or even in the girl’s incomprehensible language.
Maggie Boylan Page 9
