Paula, the she-wolf of the center, openly disapproved of me and Jessie hanging out. In my first week, she hauled us into her office, where a big framed portrait of President Ronald Reagan hung on the wall along with a yellow Gadsden flag, the one with a coiled rattlesnake and the words “DON’T TREAD ON ME” below it.
Paula frowned at us. “Kurt,” she said. “Jessie.”
“Paula,” I said. Jessie grinned.
Paula leaned forward, her big man-hands woven together. “Guys, this is serious. We have rules here at the center, rules you agreed to.” She held up one of the sign-in sheets that I hadn’t bothered to read. Neither had Jessie.
“What rule have we broken, Paula?” I asked.
She gave me a totally fake smile. “None yet,” she said, all teeth and gums. “But you’re a boy, and she’s a girl. Things happen.”
This was getting good. “Things?” I asked, crossing my legs and arms. Jessie was grinning more now.
“Things like relationships, Kurt. Which can lead to —”
“Which can lead to rock ’n’ roll, which can lead to dancing, which can lead to extramarital sex, you mean?”
Jessie was giggling now.
Paula’s toothy smile disappeared. “Kurt, at Casco Bay, we’ve been doing this for a long time,” she said, all serious. “We know from experience that physical intimacy can simply become a substitute for dependency, which can make getting clean a lot harder, even impossible.”
I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “So, you’re worried we might have sex, Paula?”
Paula looked like she wanted to be somewhere else.
“Here’s a secret, Paula,” I said, almost whispering. “Do you promise to keep a secret?”
“Yes, of course, Kurt,” she said, recovering a bit. “Here at Casco Bay, we pride ourselves on complete confidentiality.”
“Good,” I said. “Because here’s the thing, Paula: I’m into boys, not girls.”
There was a long silence. Jessie — who to this point hadn’t said a single word — leaned forward. “I’ve got a secret, too,” she said. “I’m into girls.”
I looked at Jessie, surprised and delighted. “No shit! Really?”
Jessie smiled. “Really.”
Paula regarded us, the personification of a word my dad sometimes used: gobsmacked.
“Joan Jett,” I said. “Super hot, is she not?”
“Oh yes,” Jessie said, laughing. “Hot.”
Jessie was really laughing now. Turns out, Jessie adored Joan Jett; in fact, after the meeting, she told me she sometimes called herself Jessie Jett. True story.
Paula wasn’t laughing, though. She stood up and looked at her watch. “Well, I’m … I’m glad we’ve cleared this all up. Thanks for coming by, Kurt and Jessie.”
Jessie and I stood up. “So, Jessie and I can continue to be informal-sharing time buddies, then?”
“Yes, of course,” Paula said quickly, clearly wanting us to leave.
President Reagan smiled back at us as we left.
CHAPTER 11
Special Agent Theresa Laverty glanced over the personnel file on the desk one more time. Like most members of the Portland Police Department, Detective Frank Savoie had been assigned to the bomber case. But, like just most of the Portland cops, he’d been relegated to scut work: knocking on doors in the neighborhood near the bombing site, asking people if they’d seen anything.
There was a knock at the door of the interview room and it opened a crack. The detective peered in the room. Laverty motioned him in, then stood up and extended a hand. Savoie returned her firm handshake.
“I’m FBI special agent Theresa Laverty,” she said. She noted the surprised look on the detective’s face. She wasn’t sure how much he’d been told about this meeting, but it seemed not much. She waved him to a chair. “I’ve asked the chief if I could meet with you, Detective Savoie, because of your history.”
“My history?” Savoie asked suspiciously, taking a seat. He rubbed a tobacco-stained hand over his stubbly face. “What history?”
Laverty took in Savoie’s wrinkled shirt, ill-fitting jacket, and tie that looked like it had come from a Dumpster behind a Salvation Army store. After a long pause, she continued. “Detective, I’m based at the FBI field office in Fort Myers,” she said. “In Florida.”
“I know where Fort Myers is.”
She continued, expressionless. “My area of focus, my expertise, is extremist organizations — criminal ones. And, as you have undoubtedly seen in the media, there is speculation that the bomber was in some way associated with the United Klans of America.”
“Yeah,” Savoie said, shrugging. “So what?”
Laverty eyed him intently. “Detective, what I’m about to tell you is highly classified. Not even your chief of police has been briefed. And I would like to stress that it must remain completely between us … agreed?”
Savoie didn’t look at all impressed that someone from the FBI was about to relate something to him that was top secret. To accentuate this, he grunted. “So, why tell me?”
“My understanding is that you worked on a case involving Far Right extremists here about three years ago.”
“Yeah,” Savoie said, his features leaden, betraying nothing. “So?”
“So,” Laverty said, “I’ve been assigned by my superiors to pursue that angle here. We believe …” She paused. “I believe that the Klan had nothing to do with the bombing.”
Savoie slouched in his chair, thick fingers drumming on the interview room table. He frowned. “And why do you think that?”
“Two reasons,” Laverty said. “One, it’s far too obvious. Given our total inability to find out anything about our suspect, it seems unlikely that he would so helpfully provide us with the mailing address of a Klan branch in Alabama if it were of any use to us.”
“Sure,” Savoie said, “but that hasn’t stopped a whole lot of your special agents from chasing their tails down in Alabama, has it?” He said “special agents” with a trace of a sneer.
He was right: the Klan thing was a red herring. “We have to chase every conceivable lead, Detective. We have no choice. Just like the Portland Police Department.”
Savoie nodded.
“Detective Savoie,” Laverty continued, measuring each word carefully, “I have a theory about the bomber’s philosophy, about his belief system.”
“His philosophy? There’s a fucking philosophy behind killing thirty kids in a daycare?”
Laverty let the comment go. “The bomber was motivated, I believe, by a book. A novel.” She watched Savoie’s face. “It’s a very obscure book, but one that may be about to become much better known.”
She reached down and extracted a magazine from her bag and placed it on the table. She pointed at the magazine, which advertised “Heavy Metal Guitar Heroes” on the cover. “Detective, are you familiar with a young man, a local kid, who calls himself X?”
Savoie sat back, his face betraying actual emotion for the first time. “For fuck sakes!” he bellowed. “Don’t tell me that little bastard is somehow involved in this!”
Laverty looked as unhappy as Savoie. “I’m afraid the little bastard is. He knows … or says he knows … certain details he shouldn’t. And that could create all kinds of problems.… I need your help.”
CHAPTER 12
Thomas M. Jones was meticulous. He had everything he needed, and everything was in its place.
He had a four-person L.L. Bean trail tent with a green fly, floor and side walls, and a tan roof. The tent’s colors made it almost impossible for anyone to see Jones’s secret camp in the woods — not that anyone else had ever come near it. The nearest human was at least a couple miles away.
It was nighttime, but Jones wasn’t inside the tent. The New Hampshire woods were unseasonably warm, so he decided to stretch out on his L.L. Bean North Woods sleeping bag, which he had placed on top of a Bean’s folding cot. All of the L.L. Bean gear had been stolen by Jones, months earlier, fr
om a summer home in Mother’s Beach, outside Kennebunkport. The place was owned by some rich Canadians. They wouldn’t even notice the break-in, and the missing camping gear, until they returned to open up in June.
The camp was about an hour’s walk east of the spot where Jones had submerged the stolen Mercury in the Androscoggin River. He looked around, his eyes having adjusted to the dark: there was the tent, the fire pit, and a folding canvas chair where Jones would sit and read. There were two Coleman coolers, buried in the dirt, to keep food from going bad. And he’d brought along lots of books, as usual.
He looked around the camp perimeter. To one side was an outcropping of rock, then the small clearing where he’d pitched the tent, then a wall of pine trees. After walking around the area for almost an hour, Jones had located the ideal spot for the tent — a flat, dry patch covered with a bed of pine needles.
Having grown up in the woods, Jones knew enough to place the tent in a spot where he would have a natural windbreak. Wind could make a tent a lot colder at night and rattle the flaps, resulting in plenty of noise. So, Jones had also positioned the tent under the branches of an enormous pine. In that way, the tent would be in the shade for much of the day. Jones knew that a tent placed in direct sunlight could become positively sauna-like in no time. He also wanted to avoid the camp being spotted by anyone in a plane or helicopter.
Details, details.
There was a stream a few hundred paces to the east, but he’d been careful not to set up any closer than that. In the spring, seasonal rains could lead to flash flooding, which could wash away a camp. The soil could also get marshy, attracting lots of blackflies and mosquitoes. In the months of April and May, water could draw wild turkeys, too — which might attract hunters. So, Thomas M. Jones knew to always avoid setting up camp too close to bodies of water.
Between the rock wall and the tent entrance, Jones had built a fire pit. That way, heat would be directed back into the tent on the cooler nights, and the fire would be less likely to be seen by prying eyes.
At the moment, however, no one else was around, and it was quite warm. That was why Jones had pulled the cot outside, so he didn’t have anything obscuring his view of the sky — it put him at ease. Wearing just cabin socks, a pair of Dickies cargo pants, and his favorite T-shirt, the Portland bomber stretched out, looking up at the stars.
On the front of the T-shirt was someone’s hand-drawn graphic of Friedrich Nietzsche, complete with the philosopher’s famous bushy moustache. Below it, Nietzsche’s equally famous maxim: “THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL US MAKES US STRONGER.”
He put his hands behind his head and listened to the sounds of the woods.
There was a shortwave radio in the tent, but Jones didn’t bother to turn it on. He’d listened to it at various times during the day, and the reports offered nothing new: there were grim recitations of the number of dead, the number of wounded, and the requisite audio clips of the police insisting that they were chasing multiple leads in many states and countries, all of which would soon lead them to the killer or killers. But Thomas M. Jones knew that part, at least, was a lie. He knew the cops didn’t have the slightest inkling who he was or where he was. He’d covered his tracks too well. Thinking about it, Jones laughed out loud, amused by their incompetence.
It wasn’t like they couldn’t have caught him, either. On the day of the bombing, in fact, his journey had taken him south, then north on the Maine turnpike — passing through multiple toll booths, no less. He had stopped to get gas and to pee a couple times at roadside rest stops. He had made no effort to avoid the security cameras positioned above the toll booth laneways. At one of them, he had even looked up and flashed a toothy grin.
Despite all that, nobody had looked twice at him, much less said anything to him. They were all glued to news bulletins emanating from their transistor radios, or looking at the shocking images on TV, with the same clips being shown over and over. He’d slipped by them like a ghost. He was a ghost.
The Portland bomber deeply loved the woods. To him, it was home. It was the only place where he had ever felt safe, and where the noise and the clamor and the venality of “civilization” couldn’t reach him. He despised cities. He had acquired that, at least, from his parents. In the abandoned huts and cabins in which he had grown up — in Maine and New Hampshire mostly — Jones’s parents had certainly encouraged their son to oppose modernity like they did. They rejected the outside world, as they called it, because it wasn’t progressive enough.
Thomas M. Jones, however, hated it for an entirely different reason. He hated it because it was too progressive.
The woods, meanwhile, were orderly and logical. Everything had a purpose. Every living thing, no matter how small, had a role to play. Nothing was there without a purpose. Everything, as Nietzsche had decreed, was simply there to be dominated — caught, killed, eaten, used — by powerful men. Like Thomas M. Jones was, and like he always intended to be.
By the age of ten, Jones had concluded there was a hierarchy of power, and it was inviolate. It was not to be questioned. Everything that existed, existed to serve the purpose of the Superman — him, and those like him.
His mother had seen this in her son before his father did, and he knew it had worried her. “Everyone is equal,” she’d say, insistent. “No one is better than anyone else.”
“Then why did you and father move away from everyone else?”
“Because we disagreed with the choices they’d made,” she told him. “Not because we thought we were better than them. We just wanted to live a different life, a better life.” She reached out and touched his arm. “With you.”
He’d pulled his arm away. “I don’t like the outsiders,” he said, his little jaw set. He crossed his skinny arms. “I think we are better than them.”
She looked at him with that pained look, the one that he hated the most. The weak look, the one he associated with women.
That was around the time that he started to form his opinion about the order of things, as he and his parents squatted in a one-room shed deep in the woods in northern Maine. That was when things started to change for him.
Even now, eleven years later, he could feel the anger rising in him like a fever.
APRIL 25
Mr. Dennison: Out here at the edge of the woods — where I am free in the tearing wind, where I am exempt from your rules beneath a familiar sky — there is a design at work. Not God’s design. God is dead, if God ever existed.
The design is plain as the bark on a birch, alone in a stand of pine and spruce and white cedar. And it is there in the echo of a loon’s call, deep in the night. And in the swoop of the broad-winged hawk circling overhead. The dominant alpha wolf watching you from river’s edge, warning you. The bear heading toward its next meal, hulking, massive, unafraid.
In all of it: strength is the constant. Only the strong survive here.
Without strength, everything will perish.
CHAPTER 13
I kept up with what was going on at home and with the gang as much as I could from rehab. We had access to all the local papers but were only allowed a limited amount of phone calls and no visitors.
It seemed as if the bombing had pitched Portland into deep shadow, everything grinding, airless, and bleak. Reading about it made it hard to breathe some days. Everyone seemed to know someone who had been hurt or killed. Everyone had been affected in some way. Day after day, the Portland Press Herald printed grim profiles of the victims. The ones about the kids were the worst. Some had been only two or three years old; they hadn’t lived long enough to fill up the assigned biographical space, so there’d be stuff about how “her smile would light up every room” or “he was an angel, and now he is with the other angels in Heaven.” It was beyond horrible.
For weeks, the radio and TV news aired similarly upsetting reports: The widower of a YWCA volunteer forced to explain her absence to their three young kids. Or the physiotherapist, hired to help people with disabilities who
had been on the job at the Y for only a week. The vets who got together at Michael’s in downtown Portland to remember their fellow serviceman, killed while picking up his veterans benefit check. Think of it: a veteran got killed by a bomb in his hometown after having escaped death in the jungles of Vietnam.
Nobody had done a profile of either Eddie Igglesden or Nagamo yet. Not really. Their names had shown up on an early list — “Missing and feared dead,” the Press Herald headline read — but that was it. The media didn’t seem to care all that much about two dead punks, I guess.
But we did. So, X and the members of the Punk Rock Virgins decided to put on a show to pay tribute to our friends. Bangor’s Mild Chaps and the Sturgeons said they’d play, too. A cousin of the drummer in the Sturgeons had run the Portland African-American Resources Center on the old Y’s third floor and was among the dead.
Gary’s was still the scabby, safety-pinned heart of the Portland punk rock scene, so it made sense for the gig to happen there. There’d be no cover, just a raucous, rollicking punk rock wake to celebrate our friends.
There was no way the Hot Nasties could play, of course. Our drummer was dead, and I was still in rehab. So, the Punk Rock Virgins — the feminist punk trio made up of Patti, Sister Betty, and Leah Yeomanson — kind of stepped up to become Portland’s punk voice. “Eddie and Nagamo need to be remembered, too,” Sister Betty told me one day on the phone. “They were family.”
I told her it was killing me that I couldn’t be there.
When Agent Theresa Laverty arrived at Gary’s on the day of the gig, she saw X helping one of the punk girls to put up a big picture of their deceased friends on the wall above the drum kit. The photo showed the couple smiling, arms around each other, as they stood at the bar where they’d met.
With Laverty was Portland police detective Frank Savoie, along with recently installed local police chief Richard Chow. None of them were very happy to be back at Gary’s. The three approached the stage.
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