Bloodline (3 page)

“There's a first,” Clair said.

“Oh, hush,” she said.

“You're right,” I said. “Look at the label on just about anything and it looks like they took all the cans out from under the kitchen sink and just dumped it in.”

“And people gobble it all up,” Mary said.

“I swear that's what's wrong with this country,” Clair said. “Productivity. GNP and all that. Most of the people in this country are working at half energy. Drones, you know?”

Mary Varney ate a couple of bites and went back to the stove, where she was boiling canning jars in a big kettle. She bent over to pull another pan out of the cupboard and her shirt rode up above her jeans, exposing five or six inches of smooth muscular back. For Clair's sake, I tried not to look, but still I could picture her. More of her than her back, I mean.

She was a handsome woman, small and strong with blonde-silver hair pulled straight back, and, I thought, a perfect match for Clair. They could have been in ads for vitamins or self-help books: the good-looking fiftyish couple who give the rest of us hope. Fit. Capable. Productive. Content with their lot in life.

We were an odd threesome.

I'd thought this before and I thought it again as I sat there eating the beef from their steer, the vegetables from their garden. Mary was pulling the jars out of the steaming water with a pair of tongs. Clair got up to put an orange cat out the back door. There was a calendar on the wall to my right, one from the auto parts store in Unity. Somebody had torn off the picture of the girl and Mary had made notes for each day. “Can paste tomatoes.” “Henry to vet's.” “Pick last cukes.”

If I had a calendar, and I didn't, it would show the day and the date.

Period.

We were so different, and yet they'd befriended me almost from the time I'd moved in, just down the road. It had been February, cold and wet, and I'd been tinkering with my old Volvo, which had
conked out at the end of the driveway, when Clair had come by in his majestic red four-wheel-drive Ford pickup. Looking up at him in the driver's seat, I felt my testosterone level plummet.

Clair had asked what the problem was, as if I had a clue. I had told him what I knew, which was that it wouldn't start. He had looked down at me benevolently, then, without another word, had pulled his truck up a few feet and then back to the Volvo. Climbing down from the cab, Varney had pulled a tow chain out from behind the seat, hooked it to the car's front axle. Without saying more than a half-dozen words, he had towed it and me down the road and into his barn.

“You a mechanic?” I remember asking, as I had stood beside the woodstove and watched as Varney had poked at the Volvo's innards.

“Nope,” he'd said. “It's your regulator. It's junk. You know you really shouldn't even have this thing on the road.”

Varney wasn't a mechanic. He wasn't a woodsman. He wasn't a farmer or a hunter or a retired soldier. He was all of these things and none of them. And whenever you thought you had him pegged, he did something that threw you off again. Like telling you, over a couple of Budweisers, that he really could have stayed in Thailand because the Buddhists were in harmony with their world. Like the American Indians. Or saying, as he worked on his tractor or his truck, that he'd been rereading Thoreau's
The Maine Woods
the night before and decided that he, Varney, had been born a hundred and fifty years too late. Or the time he'd told me, in uncharacteristic seriousness, that I should get married and have children because it was the most joyous thing a man could do on this Earth.

“Bones, there's nothing lonelier than a lonely old man,” he'd said.

So what did Bones contribute to this relationship? It had taken me a while to figure that out. I was from New York, and other places like it. I was a newsman, which meant I didn't know how to actually do anything. I'd never fired a gun. I'd never been in Vietnam. Until I'd come to Prosperity, I'd never even run a chain saw. I lived in a run-down house owned by a New York artist.

But I could talk about Thoreau, which Varney couldn't do at the auto parts store. I knew the basics about Buddhism, and even a couple of Buddhists. I was respectful of Mary and asked about their two married daughters, Susan and Jen, who lived in North Carolina and Maryland and were married to an Air Force pilot and a State Department something or other. When the college girls jogged by, I didn't leer at their backsides.

Much.

And I was a good listener. A listener by trade.

So dessert was a small dish of homemade coffee ice cream. As we finished up, Mary Varney said she was going into Unity to get some more jar lids. Clair said he was going to start hauling in some firewood he'd bucked up on the edge of the woods last winter and left to dry. I offered to help and Clair said, no, he was just going to putter around. I said I had work to do too, that I was going to be doing another magazine story.

“More gardening, I hope,” Mary said, her back to me as she put the dishes in the dishwasher. “I really enjoyed that one on the irises.”

“No. No more gardening. This time it's something I know even less about. Kids.”

Clair looked incredulous.

“Yeah. Kids,” I said, getting up from the table. “Kids who have kids. Fifteen-year-old mothers. What it's like to be fourteen and have two children.”

“Where do you go to do that?” Mary asked.

“It's supposed to be about kids out in the country,” I said. I sorted my words carefully so that they wouldn't offend two people who had grown up in the town of Prosperity, and after seeing the world for twenty years, had come right back.

“Kids who live in rural Maine but face a lot of the same problems that poor kids see in the city,” I said.

Both Varneys looked skeptical.

“I have to talk to the magazine people again,” I said. “I'm still not exactly clear on what they want.”

Or whether I still had the nerve.

Because this was going to take some. Getting these kids to talk to me. Their mothers. Their fathers. Their boyfriends. Sitting in their trailers, drinking black coffee and breathing cigarette smoke. People rattling through the door and looking at you like you'd just landed from another planet and they'd be glad to get you back on the ship and headed home.

Which, after coffee, is exactly what I did.

As I rattled back down the dirt road, maneuvering the old rust-bucket Chevy around the worst of the ruts, I could feel the doubts seeping in. I could call Slocum and tell him I didn't want to take the story, after all. I could tell him I had too many other things going. He wouldn't know that the only thing I had going was on the shelf in the fridge and came in sets of six. He wouldn't know that I had an urge
to have one right now, at twelve-thirty on a sunny, early September day. That I was deathly afraid that I'd lost my nerve for stories like the one he was talking about. That it had taken everything I'd had in me just to put the iris piece together. And the day after it had been done, express-mailed from the Prosperity post office, I'd sat out in back of the house listening to the birds, feeling the sun on my face and watching the pile of empty beer cans grow at my feet.

All day and well into the night. Numb with nature. No different from the roughneck guys who got arrested for drunk driving and got their names in the Belfast paper. I bought the paper, the
Waldo Independent
, at the store in Knox every week, and I'd found myself turning to the police blotter to see the ages of the drunks. Thirteen. Twenty-six. Thirty-eight. I'd read that one again, inserting my name instead: Jack McMorrow, thirty-eight, Prosperity. Charged with operating under the influence.

I physically shook the thought from my mind as I pulled in the driveway. Three grand, I thought. A byline in
New England Look.
A magazine that had big circulation in New York, too. All those people who had country houses in Vermont and Connecticut read it. Rhode Island, too, and all my old buddies from the
Providence Journal.
God, I'd been around.

Up the ladder, story by story, rung by rung. Hartford. Providence. New York. Then the little mill town in Maine, where the slide had begun. I wasn't sure it had ended.

4

W
aldo Regional High School was a low, sprawling brick complex that filled most of what had at one time been somebody's cow pasture, off Route 137 on the western outskirts of Belfast. Like most of the county, the former cow pasture was close by rolling dark hills, the quiet beauty of which had only lately begun to appeal to moneyed tourists from the south. For nearly a century and a half, those hills had been a beautiful but unrelenting enemy to anyone who tried to farm or log the steep terrain. While a few merchants and lumber barons made the fortunes that threw up the stately mansions in the towns by the sea, most people gouged a hard living out of woods and pastures and gardens. Instead of mansions, their legacy was tiny back-road cemeteries where many of the graves belonged to children.

The place hadn't changed much.

I turned at the school driveway, which was long and black against the still-green grass, and lined with some strange skinny trees that, in a state filled with pine and spruce and maple and oak, looked distinctly foreign. I drove between the trees and passed what must have been the teachers' parking lot. It was filled with mostly nice cars. Most of the nice cars had bumper stickers that said something complimentary
about education. I continued on, past the big gym building, and parked in a lot filled with pickup trucks, most of which were old and beat-up but none as old and beat-up as mine.

So much for upward mobility.

I walked back toward the front of the school where, presumably, I would find the main entrance. I passed a kid with a cigarette who gave me a slow assessing nod from under a baseball cap that had the name of an auto parts store written on the front. The kid was small and thin and had what in a few years would be a mustache. His construction boots were untied and looked too big for the rest of his body. On the back of the hand that held the cigarette to his mouth was a homemade tattoo that said
DAMIEN
and
RAISE HELL
! in crude block letters. I thought of asking him how Latin was going but I held my tongue.

It turned out that the main entrance was halfway around the complex, toward the front. I figured there probably was a shuttle bus from the student parking lot to the door but I didn't see one. I walked until I came to the biggest set of glass-and-metal double doors, heaved one open, and stepped into Penn Station. North.

The doors opened into a lobby that was filled with kids, all of whom seemed to be shouting something to someone. At first, nothing from the din was intelligible, as if they were all speaking some unrecognizable language. I felt like a foreigner seeing the Port Authority bus terminal for the first time.

Alone.

And these kids even had luggage: backpacks slung over their shoulders so that everybody walked slumped to one side. Maybe they all were enrolled in a masonry course and the packs were filled with their homework: bricks.

Which could have been true, for all I knew. Standing there in the lobby, with the kids bumping past me, I felt like I hadn't been in a high school since, well, high school. I stood and watched for a minute, like Scrooge brought back to his childhood by the Ghost of Christmas Past, then stepped into the maelstrom.

The tide seemed to be running to the left so I went with it, shuffling along with our nation's future. There were guys wearing bandannas and long dangling earrings. Bigger guys wearing sweatshirts that said
WALDO FOOTBALL
and had numbers and names on the back, like game uniforms. Most of the football guys were accompanied by at least one attractive girl, sometimes two or three. The girls wore lots of black eye makeup and had masses of wild, wavy, unkempt hair. They probably got up at four a.m. to make it look like they'd just rolled out of bed.

I continued along with the flow, walking behind a couple of tightly buttoned, hundred-pound boys who were carrying fifty-pound backpacks and were probably on their way to calculus. They walked close together like wary tourists in Times Square and I followed behind them until I saw a sign that said
ALL VISITORS
MUST
REPORT TO THE OFFICE
. It was hanging from the ceiling outside a door with a big window in it. I opened the door and went in, realizing as I shut the door behind me that I had no idea what I was going to say.

“May I help you?” a voice said.

I looked over a wooden counter to where several women were sitting at desks. They were all staring at me, and from their expressions it was impossible to tell which one had spoken. I picked one at random, an older woman with big red glasses and hands poised on a computer keyboard. As I started to say something, the “May I help you?” came again, from a much younger woman to Red Glasses'
right. She was perhaps twenty-five, hair in a braid, wearing slacks and a white blouse with a button that said something I couldn't make out from that distance.