by Mike Bond
“Things fell apart when he got back.”
I recoiled. “He volunteered,” she added. “I thought the war was a crime, and GW Bush a war criminal –”
“Nearly anyone who served there, saw combat, will tell you that.”
“So I said to my husband, you go into this atrocious war and I’ll divorce you.” She gave her fleeting smile. “We were on the way out, anyway.”
“Why?” I risked.
She seemed glad of the question, sliding her Allagash Lager in wet circles on the table. “I fall in love for sex, maybe…” She seemed suddenly vulnerable, alone.
“We all do,” I said.
“So with the second husband I tried intellectual companionship instead…he’s a professor at Bowdoin…that didn’t work either…”
“Why?”
She flashed that magnificent smile again. “You know me…”
“I’ve never forgotten you…I can remember whole afternoons…”
She slapped my hand. “Enough of that.”
“Erica, there’s never enough of that. It’s the lovely glue that holds us together, it’s warm, it’s profound…the secret of life, the gift of progeny and the gift of the soul –”
She snickered. “You’ve become a poet, I see.”
“You’re in a relationship now?”
“I don’t have time for men. I work twelve hours a day, six and a half days a week. I make six hundred thousand a year, have a beachfront condo in St. Thomas I never use, buy tickets to Europe but never go.” She reached out, surprisingly, and squeezed my hand. “Would love to have kids but don’t have time.”
“How do you do it?”
Her eyes widened. “How do I do what?”
“You win all your cases. I looked you up: you’re famous.”
“I imagine winning. In my planning I start with the victory and then work back from there.”
“From there?”
“I go back each step. What caused that one to succeed. Then the previous one.” She looked away, back at me, gathered up her purse. “I think we’re done.”
I stood. “Yeah, sure.” I was furious, distressed, sad, and wanted her. I dropped a twenty on the table and we went out. She walked a half block beside me, took out keys and pushed a button. Ahead of us a titanium 911 flashed its lights. I had an inspiration. “Lock that car,” I said.
She looked at me, puzzled. I took her arm. “I’m going to show you something unforgettable.”
Perhaps the two Allagashes had relaxed her, or the memories of teenage lust? With Erica you never knew. When I opened the squeaky passenger door of Bucky’s 150 it almost fell off. She stepped back to look the truck over. “This yours?”
“It’s Bucky’s. The guy you’re going to defend.”
“No I’m not.” But she got in the passenger seat, squealing the broken coils. “This better be quick.”
“I promise you it will be. And fun.” I negotiated the 150 into first, swung round and headed up Commercial Street toward Munjoy Hill, the Eastern Promenade and Fort Allen Park, where fifteen years ago we’d made love in her father’s Cadillac SUV one rainy night, but when we wanted to leave its tires kept slipping on the steep wet grass, couldn’t climb the hill, so regrettably I drove it further down the grass to get up some speed, but then couldn’t get back even to where I’d been, till we were on the edge of the cliff above the ocean and had to call a tow truck that itself got caught by running over its own tow bar, so we had to call a second truck to tow out the first – all of which enraged the older generation and brought a sharp, painful end to our relationship.
I turned into Fort Allen Park down the same hill and pulled over. We sat bathed in luscious darkness, Casco Bay’s thousand islands spread out before us like a diamond quilt. “I don’t get enough of this,” she said.
I glanced out at the lovely dark bay and lustrous islands, the magic of it all. “This?”
She reached for me. “Sex.”
Widow’s Web
BUT ERICA STILL WOULDN’T represent Bucky. “I contacted Matt Rusko,” she said when I called her for the third time next morning. “He’s a good criminal attorney, said he’d be willing to talk.”
“How much?”
“You’d have to discuss with him, but I believe it’s about three-fifty.”
“Three-fifty?”
“An hour.”
It took a while to realize she meant three hundred and fifty dollars. “This has to be pro bono, Erica. And Bucky needs you.” I felt that somehow in the details was the proof Bucky was innocent, and that somehow she’d find it.
“Me? You must be nuts. That’s like going to an obstetrician for a brain injury. The law is very specialized, Sam. It’s not my discipline, defending people who kill people.”
“Bucky didn’t kill that guy.”
“Like I said last night, Sam, how do you know?” She paused, exasperated. “The law is precise, it wants facts, not opinions.”
We’d been down this road already. “Erica, you know that half the time the law’s wrong, that lots of cases are judged wrong, that’s there’s lots of people in jail who shouldn’t be and a lot more who aren’t in jail but should be. Don’t give me that Justice weighing the scales crap.”
“It’s all we’ve got, Sam.” Someone spoke behind her, she turned from the phone, came back. “Look, I’ve got to go –”
“When can I see you?”
“I’m leaving in half an hour for Tulsa for a deposition, be back day after tomorrow.”
“Let’s have dinner, the night you’re back…”
“I get in late.”
“I hate to eat early.”
“Gotta go,” she said. “See you.”
“I NEVER SEE YOU anymore,” Lexie said jokingly, which meant she wasn’t joking. Our affair five years ago had been very intense and I have a sharp memory of how her mind works.
“This is getting so complex.” I sagged wearily into the kitchen chair where barely a week ago she’d told me her woes, and when I’d promised myself to help her. “It’s not just getting Bucky off, impossible as that may seem, it’s this whole Maine wind tragedy that’s somehow connected with it… And I can’t see a way to get one without the other.”
She leaned toward me, elbow on the table, chin in her hand. “How’s that?”
“Well,” I delayed, trying to think it out. “If it was a setup, and somebody killed Ronnie to blame it on Bucky…” I couldn’t figure what came next. “Then it’s got to be wind industry-related, so if we reveal it we’ll blow the whole thing wide.”
“What whole thing?” she said.
“The Maine wind scam, the foreign companies, the lies, the investment banks, the politicos…” I looked at her, exasperated. “Maine’s going to lose it all. Like Bucky.”
“Shifting Baselines Syndrome,” she said after a moment. “You can see it right here in my biology classes. People are used to what they have, think that’s the baseline, the way things have always been. Fisheries biology researchers realized a few years ago that annual population counts don’t take into consideration the original baseline – a sea full of fish – so today’s depleted oceans are assumed to be the way things always were. We’ve lost ninety-five percent of nature, but we think the five percent that’s left is all there ever was.”
“Like my ancestor Elias talking about the Kennebec River solid with fish. Now if one salmon shows up everyone gets ecstatic.”
“My students, they want to understand life, its processes, but the environment around them is getting so degraded we can’t get back to baseline. Shifting Baselines,” she repeated in that semi-prophetic way she had. When she hadn’t had any sex for a while. Which reminded me of how wonderful it would be to do it. Which meant it was time to leave.
“Going over see Uncle Silas,” I said, knowing she wanted me to stay.
“Yeah?” She acted surprised, then, “You should.”
“Sometimes he just loses it, I have to sit there, wait for him to co
me back.” I didn’t want to tell her about Bucky’s girlfriend. Not wanting to add to her sorrows. Also knowing the minute I told her, after she got done being pissed off, she’d drop her clothes and come after me. Which was such a lovely temptation that if I’d been a medieval monk I’d have retired to my stone cell with its bed of thorns and whipped myself till the lust was burned out of my bones, i.e., till long after I was dead.
Instead I went out to the bunkhouse for Bucky’s coat and boots. It was snowing hard, 18 below, a typical Maine day. The blizzard and accompanying ice particles were horizontal on the howling wind. I unplugged Bucky’s truck from the battery warmer and scraped new ice off the windshield. The engine wouldn’t catch so I popped the hood and sprayed WD-40 into the Holley 2-barrel carb, and like an old mare tricked by a handful of oats she caught on the first turn, spouting more than her share of CO2 and particulates, and as we rode off into the wintry evening I had the suspicion Bucky’s Ford 150 like Don Quixote’s Rocinante had its own views on how to pursue my war against the windmills.
Jostling along in Bucky’s truck made me think of him: a tough, incredibly haunted soul, of how all our lives had so insanely intertwined. And of Lexie alone in that Maine farmhouse on the forest and steppes, on old caribou tundra not long ago covered by two miles of ice, land the Penobscots and Micmacs had loved every inch of.
And now Lexie’d ended up here because of me – if we hadn’t met that night in Honolulu at WipeOut, hadn’t had our wild affair, she wouldn’t have come four thousand miles from Hawaii for my trial. Where of course she’d met Bucky who’d come to testify against me. And who after I got twenty years talked Lexie into moving with him to his family’s farm in Maine, far from anything she’d ever known or been, or wanted.
Maybe women are as stupid as men.
A HANDLE OF BLACKBERRY BRANDY was $14.95 at Cumberland Farms and I wasn’t driving all the way to Hannaford to save a dollar.
As before, Silas was sitting under that ratty afghan in front of the fire. He nodded in gratitude when I gave him the bottle. “There’s two tens in the sugar bowl. On the kitchen shelf.”
I got two glasses, put three ice cubes in each, filled them with blackberry brandy and sat across from him. “Snowing like crazy out there.”
“Mmmm,” he smiled. “Lovely.”
“Not if you’re driving in it.”
“On snowy nights like this we used to hitch the horses to the sled and drive for miles, the runners squeaking under the new snow, the horses’ warm breath, the girl next to you under the rug…”
“Speaking of girls,” I says, “reminds me of Bucky’s girlfriend. Like you said, sometimes after a day or so you remember things…”
“Yes I do, young man. That’s true.” He leaned forward on his stick. “Did you get the two tens?”
“You keep your money.” After a moment I added, “I have a hard time imagining Bucky having an affair,” to bring the subject back up.
“If it does the pipes could freeze.”
“If what does?”
“Like I said, if it gets any colder.”
“A night like this, yes they could. You want me to run a trickle in the faucet?”
“Already have. You going out tonight?”
“I’m going back to Bucky’s.”
His eyes glinted. “You too?”
“Me too what?”
“You in the sack with Lexie while Bucky’s away?”
I laughed. “No, I’m not,” happy to say the truth. “Not like Bucky with… what was her name?”
“Name?” He picked at the afghan. “Yes. Unusual name…” He clacked his teeth. “One of the old ones, you know. Biblical… Damned if I haven’t forgotten it again.”
I bit back my impatience. “You should write things down. That’s what I do.”
He sat there, eyes far away, gumming his teeth. “Imagine yourself writing it down,” I said. “What it would look like written down.”
“Absalom, Absalom,” he muttered, and I wondered what deity he was praying to now.
“That’s it!” He leaped forward in his chair. “Abigail!”
“Abigail?”
“That’s the name Bucky said once, let it slip. His girl-friend’s name is Abigail.”
Oh shit. I was such a fool. I’d been duped again.
There couldn’t be two Abigails. Or could there?
I felt like a fly in a black widow’s web.
“I’M SCREWING your girlfriend,” I says next day to Bucky through the bulletproof glass.
He stares back. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“What is she then?”
“You didn’t listen, my little story about Waziristan?”
That was the one about the source we had in the Paki-Afghani mountains, we never knew if he was doubling us till the Taliban killed him. Then we knew, too late, he’d been for real. “I can’t get the connection.”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend, she was a way to reach somebody.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
I didn’t know if he was putting me on or just trying to derail me. “I haven’t the faintest fucking idea.”
He waved his finger. “Didn’t you see the sign? No profanity in here.”
The whole place was profane. Bucky was profane. I was sick of it all.
“Through her I was in getting in touch with her husband,” Bucky added. “He was coming around. You know what he’d been hustling…”
“Industrial wind?”
“He was seeing through it, for the first time. Was going to come out against it.”
“No way, the wind companies own him, all the enviro groups –”
Bucky chuckled. “So who did it?”
“She was going to divorce him anyway. She’s certainly not grieving…”
“Not true.” Bucky shook his head. “Not true.”
“So you weren’t sleeping with her?”
“I’ve never touched another woman since Lexie.” He watched me a moment. “Thanks to you.”
“To me?”
“That I met her.”
“Yeah, when you came to testify against me.”
He shook his head. “When I came to tell the truth.”
“What you said wasn’t true. And it got me twenty years.”
“You were out in months.”
“Not due to you.” I was getting furious. “You like this?” I waved at the prison walls, other inmates in their orange suits, the bars, handcuffs and bulletproof glass. “So you do the time. I’m finished trying to help you.”
He smiled. “You fucking Lexie?”
“Hell no.” I wanted to add but didn’t, though I’d love to.
I walked out angry and disillusioned. Looking back at the grim walls I was reminded of Thomaston, the even grimmer Maine State Prison Stephen King fictionalized in his novella that became The Shawshank Redemption. As often, it amazed me that our culture is so dysfunctional that millions of us are behind bars.
In four weeks I was supposed to be in Tahiti. I wanted very much to be there. But with all this going on I’d begun to fear I wouldn’t make it. Don’t give it up, I told myself. No matter what.
In three hours I was meeting Abigail at Slates. How to get her to explain the real deal? She didn’t even know I knew Bucky. Or that I knew quite a bit about her husband. Though not why he died.
To her I was some guy she’d met in the Capitol cafeteria who she liked to go to bed with.
I liked that part too.
Totally Screwed
SHE WAS at the same table near the back where three nights ago I’d sat entranced by her songs. And where the two of us had talked like old friends.
Her smile when I leaned down to kiss her should have warned me. But I still couldn’t decide what to do. Would she give more away if she thought I didn’t know?
“So tell me about Bucky,” I said.
Her eyes barely widened. For a few moments she seemed to be calculating. “How much you
know?”
“Most of it. Just need you to clarify a few things.”
“So you tell me.”
“That’s bullshit. What’s up, Abigail? I want it all.”
She looked into my eyes, almost amused. “When I told you my husband and I didn’t sleep together any more, that didn’t mean I had no sex.”
“That’s what you implied.”
“Nuh-uh.” She shook her head. “I had Bucky.”
This was crazy. Bucky had just told me they’d had no sex. “You were fucking him?”
“Absolutely.” She gave me that penetrating smile. “Jealous?”
“Hardly.” However it did strike me that Bucky and I kept ending up in bed with the same women. And getting put Inside.
She tugged a lock of hair under her chin. “I bet.”
“You and I are both sleeping with other people, no big deal. It’s fun.”
She widened her eyes. “You fucking Lexie?”
“Bucky just asked me that. The answer, sadly, is no.” I sat back, watching her face like a mask that kept shattering. “How’d you meet Bucky?”
“He was testifying against one of these horrible wind projects. I was representing Senator Coleman, who’s been paid to vote for them.”
Coleman was the Legislator who had wanted to change Maine politics till he became a Senator and one of the state’s big-time Democrats employed under the table by the wind industry. I shook my head in frustration. “Doesn’t he care about Maine?”
She rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. “Follow the money.”
Crazily I thought of that country ballad The Long Black Veil, where the guy hangs for a murder he didn’t commit because he won’t admit he was with his best friend’s wife. “Why don’t you tell the cops you were with Bucky the night your husband was killed?”
“You idiot.” She bit her lip, appraising me. “You don’t understand why I couldn’t?” She looked away a moment, calculating again, abruptly stood, tugged on her coat and walked out.
I sat stunned, knowing I should go after her but so pissed off I didn’t. By the time I’d paid and went outside she’d vanished.
This was nuts. Tomorrow I was going back to Hawaii, to hell with them all.
