Deadline (2 page)

The cop turned out to be Lieutenant Vigue who, by the time I got to him, was all worked up—not by the tragedy of Arthur's death, but by the traffic snarl it was causing where the mill road met the highway.

Vigue was standing in the road, waving a flashlight and motioning like one of those people who direct jets on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Half the town had stopped to see Arthur pulled from the
water, and now their cars and trucks were streaming back onto the highway while Vigue held back the log trucks that waited in a long dieseling line, their air brakes hissing impatiently, drivers commiserating into the mikes of their CBs.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” I said. “What's happening?”

“You know what we know,” Vigue said.

“What's that?”

Vigue looked at me sideways, tense and irritable in the flashing glare of the strobe lights.

“Not much. It's Arthur. He was in the river. He's dead.”

“Who found him?”

He looked at me sideways again.

“You in a hurry or what?”

I shrugged. He pulled the clip mike off his jacket collar and held it up.

“Nine-one, nine-three.”

His radio chirped something unintelligible.

“You got the names, times on this one?”

Another chirp.

“Bring it down here, will ya?
New York Times
is here.”

Chirp again.

The last of the viewing audience pulled out of the mill road and high above us the trucks began to move through. They roared and rumbled and spouted plumes of exhaust smoke, like huge mechanical dragons. We stood by Vigue's idling cruiser and waited. He lit a cigarette, his face taut and handsome in the flicker of the lighter's flame.

“So what do you think happened?” I said.

“Who the hell knows?” he said.

“Where's the autopsy?”

“Augusta.”

“State guys in on it?”

“Only on paper. Unless it turns out to be something.”

“Like what?”

“Not suicide. Not accidental. Five bullet holes in the back. Something like that. But don't get your hopes up.”

“Even without that it's strange,” I said.

Vigue waved a balky truck through.

“That so?”

“Don't you think so? I mean, how'd he get here? Out here in the middle of nowhere. Mill people don't even come down here. He didn't drive. You see him walking all the way down here? In the cold? What's he gonna do? Go for a swim?”

“Wouldn't be a long swim,” Vigue said. “Friggin' ice water sucks the life right out of you, Mister Man. Only good thing is they don't smell when you pull 'em out of the water.”

“Nothing like a silver lining,” I said.

“Yup.”

We stood for a minute as the cars wound their way up to the main road above us. A police cruiser came down the access road, driven hard and fast the way cops like to drive. It pulled up and stopped and a patrolman got out, leaving the motor running. Cops like to do that, too.

His name tag said
LEMAIRE, J
., and Vigue looked at him and then nodded toward me, just barely.

“How's the mild-mannered reporter tonight?” LeMaire, J. asked.

“Just wonderful.”

“What can we do you for?”

I asked for names. LeMaire, J. told me a trucker from Quebec, a chip hauler, called it in. There was some confusion because the trucker, one Yves Martin, forty-six, of St. Agathe, called it in
en français
. He'd been flagged down by two kids, boys in their teens, who were wandering through the mill yards, probably looking for something to break or steal, when one saw something in the water where the river cuts through the mill canal.

“That was Arthur?” I said.

“You saw him, didn't you?” Vigue said.

I had my notebook out.

“For the record. Official, you know? You ID'd him as Arthur Bertin.”

“Two-thirty-five Carolina, Androscoggin,” LeMaire, J. said, reading off a tiny yellow coil-bound pad. “DOB six twenty-six forty-six.”

I scribbled. My hands were stiff from the cold.

“Any sign of foul play?”

“Not at the present time,” Vigue said, his voice slipping lower, more serious. “No sign of anything except a dead body. You have to wait for the results of the autopsy. So it's under investigation. Pretty much. I can tell you we won't have much to move on until the cause of death is determined.”

“But what do you think now?”

“What do I think?” Vigue said.

“Yeah,” I said, stuffing my pen hand in my pocket. It was an old trick: The pen goes in the pocket; the source tends to relax.

“What do you think?” I continued. “On the face of it, you know? Preliminary or whatever.”

“Hey, preliminary, it looks like a guy drowned. He's in the water and he's dead. But preliminary is preliminary. It isn't the final ruling.”

“You mean accidental drowning? Accidental?”

“Under investigation. That's what I mean. When the autopsy comes in we'll know more.”

“But Lieutenant, you know how you were saying the cold, how it sucks the life right out of you—”

“That was off the record.”

“Okay. Off the record. Between us. If somebody got thrown or pushed in the water, or whatever. You know you wouldn't be able to find a way up that concrete wall. You saw the wall. What I'm saying is, the guy would drown but it wouldn't be an accident. Right?”

Vigue lit another cigarette with the lighter from his breast pocket. The lighter was green plastic. It glowed under his face and then went out and then he looked at me.

“Friggin' A,” he said. “I thought this guy was supposed to be a friend of yours. What's the matter? Drowning ain't good enough for you? Ain't front-page? Gotta be a homicide?”

“Doesn't have to be anything. Just has to be true.”

“Well, here's what's true: Arthur Bertin is in the water. He's dead. We don't know what happened, but we'll find out. Maybe.”

I wrote in my notebook.

“And they say cops are cold bastards,” Vigue said.

“We're all cold bastards tonight,” I said.

In the glow of the cigarette, I saw him smile.

2

I
woke up the next morning with a vague, nagging pain in the back of my head that reminded me I'd had too many beers too fast the night before.

I'd come home straight from the river, pulling into the Food Stop at the bottom of the hill to buy a six-pack of Ballantine Ale in sixteen-ounce cans. The girl behind the counter, a kid with a mane of bleached-out mannequin's hair, had been watching a cop movie on the television and had kept her eye on the screen as she took my five-dollar bill and handed me change. I'd gone out the door in a hail of gunfire, and had driven up Oxford Street to the big yellow house that, with its rotting trim and faded paint, was a last slap at the Victorians who built this town, and on up to my place on the second floor. My parka and notebooks and pens and wallet had gone on the kitchen counter. I'd sunk into the big chair and, with the beer and the cabled-in news of much more dramatic tragedies on the television, did a pretty good job of blotting Arthur and Vigue out of my mind.

But now it was time.

I got out of bed and went to the window in the living room and looked out on a slate-blue sky behind bare brittle oaks. It was clear
and cold, the kind of late November day that is neither winter nor fall, but something drier, more pure. Through the trees, above the roofs, I could see the steam plume from the mill, bent sharply to the east like a billowing white pennant on a wizard's castle. The blast of cold air from Canada would keep the wizard's laboratory stench from settling on Androscoggin, sending it downriver instead.

In Androscoggin, the air would be sharp and clean. Fit for a tourist, not that many tourists would breathe it.

They didn't come to Androscoggin, the tourists. They did go by it, pounding down Route 2 as fast as the weather and the pulp trucks would allow. Some were headed west, people from places like Fredericton and Woodstock in New Brunswick, making a dash for the White Mountains, which began cropping up thirty miles outside of town. Since the McDonald's had gone in across from the Route 2 Exxon, there had been no real reason for anyone to turn off the wide two-lane highway. They did slow down, but it was usually only long enough to gawk at the mill, wonder how people could live with “that awful smell,” and hope New Hampshire was nothing like this. When tourists did make the loop through downtown, their foreign cars and new Blazers bristling with skis, their Suburbans pulling travel trailers, you knew that it was because of a wrong turn or a leaking water pump or some other mistake or misfortune.

In fact, the route to Androscoggin from the south was like a long series of wrong turns, all of which went against your better judgment.

The cars that flowed into the state from below, squeezing through the tollbooths at Kittery like they were entering some vast national park, kept to the coastline. Most people drove up the interstate to Portland, where they were reassured by the city skyline and the fact that you could come this far north and still see the temperature flashing
on top of a bank tower. At Brunswick, they peeled off onto Route 1 and angled up the coast, dropping down the various peninsulas, from Bath to Bass Harbor, that were like fingers of civility in a place that was otherwise dark and untamed.

But to get to Androscoggin from the south, you didn't go to Portland. I did the first time I came to town, but I was told that I had wasted a good half-hour inching along Route 302 through places like Windham and Raymond and Bridgton. The route of choice, I learned, was right up the Maine Turnpike to Auburn, off on Route 4, with its mini-malls and trailer parks, and on through the crossroads towns of Turner and Livermore. The towns and settlements between them were tired, as if it took tremendous effort to just keep going, and the effort had been ongoing for a very long time.

First-timers would be unsettled by the weight of inertia that had settled over the place and would look to the wooded hills for solace. They would watch the hills as they angled northwest on Route 108, until the Androscoggin River broke through past the village of Livermore, and the river gave the road a purpose and a route. And then the thunderclouds of steam crept over the horizon and the road bent left with the river and there was the mill, all stacks and vast woodpiles, as if all the trees in Maine had been cut down and dumped right there. There were trucks and railroad cars and miles of empty yard dotted with scattered rusting junk, and then, after all that, there was a glimpse of the town hidden behind all of it.

Androscoggin was a paper company town, as industrial as anything surrounding a Pennsylvania steel mill or an aluminum smelter in some bleak stretch of Ontario. This surprised people who had
not been there, including people I knew back in the city. From their apartments in the East Village, in Fox Point in Providence, their condos inside the Beltway around D.C., they pictured a tiny town with a village green and old duffers with Down East accents sitting on the porch of the general store.

“This isn't like that,” I would tell them, the few who called, the even fewer who cared. “I don't know. It's kind of hard to explain.”

Androscoggin had been built in the late nineteenth century by rich men who wanted to become richer by turning trees into paper. They made their fortunes and everyone else made a living and raised families on the tenement-lined streets that grew up around the mill like military housing. More than a hundred years later, people from Androscoggin were still enlisting for lifetime hitches in the wood room, the pulp mill, and on paper machines. They wore St. Amand Paper jackets and bought four-wheel-drive trucks and snowmobiles. Their families were fed and clothed. Some of their children enlisted, too, filling the ranks that retirement never thinned. Others went to college and never came back.

They went to live in cities and towns that did not smell like rotten cabbage, which Androscoggin did, especially on overcast days when clouds sealed the valley. On days like that, the smell was strongest, seeping everywhere, like some kind of poisonous gas. But it smelled every day, every night, a constant reminder that SAP paid the bills—that if you didn't want to work at the SAP, most likely you'd have to go somewhere else to work for less money.

Not that a reminder was needed.

The mill was everywhere, sprawling along the river, fed by lines of wood trucks and railcars that never stopped coming. Pulpwood, cut in eight-foot lengths, was piled so high that from a distance,
the stacks looked like silver-gray hills, mountains of twigs. The mill itself loomed over the town so massively that drivers—skiers, hunters, fishermen—coming toward Androscoggin on Route 2 would pull to the side of the road and stare, amazed that anything this monstrously huge could have been built so far away from everything else.

How far? Let's just say we had the last McDonald's for a hundred and fifty miles. The next one was in Quebec.