Deadline (13 page)

It was a funny process, primitive and painstaking all at once. There were a million and one mistakes that could be made and we'd made most of them, hacks at a craft that people honed over decades.
But that day, it went pretty smoothly. There was a minor snag when Paul realized he'd forgotten to dummy a four-column ad on an inside sports page that Vern had finished laying out. So they called each other names, the woman who ran the operation, Lois, called us children, and we slammed the thing home in near record time.

“Lois, baby, give me five,” Vern said, lifting his hand high over her head as we stood outside the press room waiting for the first run to end.

“Vernon, baby,” Lois said, “grow up before it's too late.”

We stayed long enough to take a few copies as they came off the press, damp and smelling of ink. I still considered the whole thing a minor miracle, seeing my words in print, and I stood and scanned the pages while the pressmen, a couple of nice old Finnish guys in blue coveralls, waited to see if there were any problems. The older guy, Milt, picked up a paper and started reading the story about Arthur.

“Booze?” he asked me.

“Never touched it,” I said, and he said “Humph” and tossed the paper down on the stack.

Page dummies and photos and boxes of supplies went in the trunk. We got in the car and Vern and Paul traded places, with Vern in the front and Paul in the back. I liked it better that way because Vern was easier to not talk to, and I was tired.

We drove to the other side of North Conway, past the worst of the tourist traps, and pulled into a country store on Route 202. Vern got out and shuffled inside and came back in a couple of minutes with our weekly order: a six-pack of sixteen-ounce Budweiser cans, a big bag of pretzels, and a
Boston Globe
. I pulled back out into traffic and Vern pulled out three beers. I put mine between my legs, waiting to open it until we were well out into the woods. When the lights were behind us, I opened the beer and the ritual of postpress relaxation began.

Vern looked at the
Globe
sports section, using a flashlight from the glove box. Paul smoked a cigarette in the backseat, opening the window a crack to flick out the ashes. I turned on a country-western station and drove along at the speed limit, one hand on the steering wheel.

Our reward. Sometimes we'd talk. Sometimes we'd ride in silence, with the black woods running along both sides of the car and the radio connecting us to the rest of humanity. My brain would shut off for an hour. Usually.

On this trip, it switched back on after half of the first can of beer. It sorted the events of the past few days. It sorted and resorted, shuffled and reshuffled. Arthur's photos. My house. The canal. Vigue and St. Amand. I tried to grasp something from it all, something I could take as fact—true, irrefutable fact—and build on.

That Arthur had a kinky hobby that could get him in trouble?

That I couldn't think of any reason for him to be down at that canal?

That he wasn't suicidal, as far as I could tell?

That somebody had wrecked my house for a reason?

That St. Amand would rather that I stopped writing about them and went away?

Were those facts? I wasn't even sure of that. I wasn't sure of anything except that I was tired and confused and couldn't stop things from happening long enough to figure them out. I'd won awards for investigative reporting. I'd spent weeks poring over people's expense vouchers and canceled checks to find payoffs and kickbacks. How complicated could this be?

When I finished my beer, I dropped the empty can in the bag at Vern's feet and took another. I opened it, took a sip, and looked in the rearview mirror, where I could see Paul's cigarette glowing in the dark.

9

I
'd never liked the Base Camp. It was a bar, a pickup joint, and I liked pubs, places with pigs' feet in jars and bartenders who knew everybody by name, including the old men who had their own seats at the bar. Besides, whoever had named the place had been mistaken. The only expeditions mounted from this place were to the next bar down the block. The mountaineers eyed each other lustfully through the blue cigarette haze.

We sat at a table near the bar, facing a line of dungarees and derrieres. The Celtics were on the television above the liquor bottles and Vern squinted to see the score. The waitress came and blocked his view.

She was small and bleached-blonde and tough-looking. Paul called her Lindy, and ordered a pitcher of Bud and a large pizza.

“Mushroom, green pepper, and pepperoni?” he said.

“Fine,” I said.

They were the ones pushing to stop for something to eat. I felt like just going home.

Vern nodded to the waitress. She sauntered off like she was doing us a huge favor and we sat in silence and watched the crowd. It was a little after seven and the place was already filling up. No homework to do.

The beer came in a couple of minutes, thumped down on the scarred table by the same blonde charmer. Paul did the honors. I told myself I'd drink my share of the pitcher, eat a couple of pieces of pizza, and go right the hell home. It had been a long day over the light tables, a longer night at the terminal, and I wanted to call Roxanne and climb in bed. Ideally, she'd be there for both, but that probably wasn't going to happen.

We drank. Vern watched the Celtics and Paul eyed the women. I sipped my beer and watched no one in particular.

To my right, toward the rear of the room, a half-dozen guys were playing pool. They moved back and forth from the pool tables to a counter where their beers were lined up. They weren't very good pool players, from what I could tell, and they cursed after each shot.

To my left, three guys were talking to two women. The women were worn and weary, the kind who would look fifty when they were thirty-five. They'd probably spent the last five years in places like this, where just breathing the air would cut ten years off your life.

One woman was blonde, white blonde with black eyebrows. She was about twenty, wearing strategically torn dungarees and a sleeveless T-shirt with thin straps, and her breasts sagged. Her friend was shorter and wider from the waist down. Her hair was dyed, too, but it was reddish and brown at the roots. Both of them were smoking long, dark-colored cigarettes and drinking white drinks, probably coffee brandy and milk.

As I watched, one of the guys leaned close to the blonde and shouted something. She laughed and spit out some of her drink.
He grabbed her rear end and then grabbed her friend, too, and the friend smiled and pretended to slap at his hand. He took a swig from a Bud longneck.

The guy was big, with a beer gut and muscular arms and shoulders. His hair was just long enough to show some vanity, and he had a weak chin. The fatal flaw.

I watched and tried to pick up the words over the Celtics and the music, which was loud and metallic. As I listened, the guy suddenly turned and looked at me, then turned back to his friends. They laughed and looked back at me and I felt a rush of blood hit my face. I turned to the pool players and then the pizza was slapped down, with three paper plates. Vern grabbed a piece, pulled the string of cheese toward his mouth, and then watched as a lump of cheese and sauce fell on his lap. Paul guffawed. Vern looked unhappy. I said I'd get some napkins.

Swinging wide of the big guy and the girls, I walked toward the end of the bar where there was a metal napkin dispenser. I pulled a wad out and swung even wider on the way back.

The big guy seemed to be moving toward me between the tables. I detoured toward the wall but he detoured, too, until he was standing in front of me. I stopped to let him by but he just stood there.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“You're not excused,” he said.

His T-shirt said
BIG JOHN
'
S, HOUSTON, TEX
. He hadn't shaved in a few days and he was scowling. Not that I was any prize.

“Could I get by?” I said.

“You like to horn in on other people's conversations?” he said.

“Not particularly. Mostly I just want to get back to my table before the guys with me eat my pizza.”

“Screw your pizza.”

I couldn't believe it. People around us were watching. A girl at the closest table got up and took her drink. I stopped smiling.

“I don't want any trouble. Hey, I don't even know who you are. Whatever you're all worked up about, it's got nothing—”

“I'm not worked up. I just don't like some candy-ass listening to my conversation, you know what I'm saying? Why don't you mind your own goddamn business?”

“That's exactly what I'm trying to do.”

“You better try harder.”

I swallowed drily and looked at him. He was a good two or three inches taller than me, forty or fifty pounds heavier. His hands were at his sides and his eyes were both intent and vague. He smelled like stale beer and cigarettes. I realized my heart was absolutely pounding.

“I'm too old for this crap,” I said, my voice far away. “If you want to screw around, do it with somebody else.”

“Somebody who isn't scared, Mr. Newspaperman?”

“No,” I said. “Somebody who is as big a moron as you are.''

I dropped the wad of napkins on the floor. Chairs scraped as people pulled away. My heart was slamming now, like a basketball on concrete. I remembered that my father had told me to guard with my left and keep my punches close to my body. No loopy swings, he had said.

I was eight then. Maybe nine.

The right came first. My left went up to block it. My right shot straight out, aimed at his face but it hit his throat, scraping under his jaw. His teeth clacked and he swung the right again and tried to grab my arm with his left hand.

Everybody was yelling. Screaming. He was against me, trying to push me back. I staggered and the right came around again and crashed into my ear. I heard myself say “Ow,” and bent my head lower and moved inside his next swing, jabbing blindly in the direction of his face.

One jab missed.

The next three connected and made a crunching, slapping sound. With the third, I felt something snap. Maybe his nose. His arms closed around me and he flung me sideways into the tables.

I hit my head on something, saw a white flash, and heard him panting as he came toward me. I rolled to the right and pulled myself up on a table, but he was coming at me.

There was blood all over his mouth and chin. The yelling was everywhere, so I couldn't think. I forgot my father's advice and swung a sidearm right. Hard.

I got a lot of air, then as he pulled his head back, my fist grazed his eye and his nose. The eyeball felt wet.

He bellowed and raised his hands to his eyes. I stood and waited. He started for me, then stopped and put his hands to his eyes again. A cop crashed through the crowd of bodies and slammed him to the floor. I was relieved for a moment and then I was on my stomach on the wet linoleum floor with a nightstick pressing into the back of my neck so hard that it hurt.

There was dried blood on my upper lip. I felt it with the tip of my tongue and then touched it gently with my finger. A piece broke off and landed on the desktop. I flicked it on to the floor.

Vigue hung up the phone.

“Badly scratched cornea and a busted nose,” he said. “What do you think, Muhammad Ali? Should we stick with the simple assault or go with aggravated? Aggravated's a felony. Look more impressive on your résumé.”

I took a deep breath.

“I told you. I couldn't just stand there. He started it, took a swing at me. I haven't been in a fight since third grade, for God's sake.”

“Beginner's luck, I guess,” Vigue said.

“Come on, Lieutenant. I didn't want to hurt the guy. He was huge. I was just trying to keep him from killing me.”

Vigue didn't look up from the form he was filling out.

“Happens,” he said. “You get a guy who hasn't been in a fight in his whole life and someone goes after him and he goes berserk. We had one guy break half the bones in another guy's face. Stove him all to hell. Just couldn't stop punching once he got started. I think he was a librarian or something. Looked like a wimp.”

He kept writing. I slouched in my chair and looked at the cuts on my knuckles. On Vigue's radio, I could hear the dispatcher calling the Androscoggin ambulance for an elderly man with chest pains.

Vigue yawned.

“You want to know who he is?” he said.

“Sure.”

Vigue pulled a torn piece of computer printout from under the form.

“Let's see. Ah, yes. The Dirtbag Hall of Fame. Cormier, Roger D. Twelve eighteen sixty-one. Address used to be fifteen and a half Hancock Street, but he said he's been living with friends. In town and up in Roxbury. Some shithole, no doubt. Let's see. Weight, one eighty-five. Eyes blue.”

“Black and blue,” I murmured.

Vigue looked up, then back down.

“Mr. Cormier was laid off from the maintenance department at St. Amand last July. They laid off ten people or something back then, if I remember. I don't think he was in the mill long. Works in the woods, mostly. Those boys tend to get a little rambunctious when some flabby foreman tells 'em what to do. So that didn't work out. He said something about wanting to leave town, go work in Oregon or someplace. A big loss for the community. Now, let's see. Arrested for OUI and operating after suspension. But it's been almost, let's see, almost five years since he's been arrested for assault.”