Bloodline (2 page)

“Irises,” I said.

“Yeah. But I didn't know they were like dog owners. You know, after a while they look like their dogs. The guys with the beards looked like their flowers. What a riot.”

“They were nice people.”

“I'm sure,” Slocum said. “Which brings me to my reason for calling. What do you know about birthin' babies?”

“Not much.”

“Then you're our man. This is the story. Kids having kids in the boonies. You know. Six generations in a trailer and all that. The antithesis of the first-baby-at-forty syndrome that is so rife among urban professionals. What's it like to be a grandmother at thirty? What's it like to be stuck out in the woods with some screaming brat and some guy who spends all his time under his pickup truck. You know, the rural hopelessness thing.”

“I take it this wasn't your idea.”

“Not exactly,” Slocum said. “It's Maddy's. She's the editor. One of those sensitive liberal types.”

“She must hate your guts.”

“Give her time. Right now she likes me because I told her I knew a first-class writer who would be perfect for this piece.”

“How much?”

“Three thousand plus expenses. Five thousand words. We hire the photographer.”

“When?”

“Sixty days. Let's say December first.”

“Payment on acceptance?”

“Oh, yeah. Hey, Jack. This is a class operation.”

“Then how'd you get in?”

“Slipped in the back door,” Slocum said.

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I'll do it,” I said.

“Jack, my man. Going to be fun working with you again. Now tell me. What's this I heard about people getting killed at this little paper you were with?”

“It's a long story.”

“I've got time,” Slocum said. “I'm working for a magazine now. I mean, in this place, their idea of deadline pressure is taking an hour for espresso instead of two.”

“It's a longer story than that,” I said.

2

I
sat at the big oak table and had tea and toast. Outside the window, goldfinches were swinging like ornaments on the pods of the milkweed that had grown up among the rubble of timbers and angle-iron and tractor parts. Most were unidentifiable hunks of rust, but there were old chrome car bumpers that still glinted from the thick weave of saw grass and burdocks and daisies and asters.

When I'd first moved in, in early spring, I'd had the idea that I would clean up all the junk. The stuff had been gathered by the woman who had built the place and still owned it, but now lived in Santa Fe. Her name was Millie Tint and she was a sculptor and painter who'd come to Prosperity from Brooklyn back in the sixties. We'd connected through a friend in New York but we'd never met. When I'd sent the April rent to her post office box I'd enclosed a note asking if she'd mind if I cleaned up some of the debris out back. Millie sent me a one-word response, written in charcoal pencil on a torn piece of paper: “Why?”

I had the note stuck to the wall by the stove. Over the summer, it had become my credo.

Why clean up the junk that had been out back for twenty years? Why pore through
Editor & Publisher
to find another newspaper job?
Why worry about my career when there was beer in the refrigerator and, as of this week, $9,308, give or take a couple of hundred, left from my
Times
retirement money? Why worry about the path that had taken me, at the age of thirty-eight, from a job as a reporter at the best newspaper in the country—kiss my ass,
Washington Post
—to a home-built bat-trap of a house on a dirt road in the backwoods of Maine? Why try to plug the cracks in the house when I could pretend I liked having bats swarm around my head all night? Why put pressure on myself when I could sit out back with a six-pack of Bud and look at stars that were so bright that when I'd first come to Maine, it was like a cataract had been scraped from the sky?

And why get involved in a freelance deal with Dave Slocum?

“Because he called,” I said aloud, shrugging to myself. “And three thousand bucks is a lot of beer.”

I made another cup of tea and considered what I'd gotten myself into.

This wasn't going to be like Zen and the art of iris-growing, hanging out in beautiful gardens with people who were like the most gentle of scientists. It wasn't going to be writing about a school board meeting in Androscoggin, knocking out fifteen inches on whether elementary-school kids really need sissy stuff like art and music. Or writing a series about some big paper company throwing its weight around a small town. Or even explaining in print that a member of your own newspaper staff had been murdered.

Like a eulogy, that story had written itself. Shortly after that, I'd packed up and left—not because I'd chickened out, but because the owner had decided he'd had enough of me and my “stirring things
up,” digging into the black pool of muck that was life in that little town. He told me to hit the road, and the surface of the black pool congealed behind me, like chocolate pudding. I'd gone into hiding, but Slocum had reached out from my old world and found me in my new one.

From the Yankees to Little League to an occasional pickup game. Irises. It was hard to explain.

I hadn't bothered to try with Slocum. He was glib and slick and very big-city, fun in a bar at night, but nobody you wanted to see the next morning. He wouldn't understand what I'd accomplished in the last six months—that I'd been accepted by people who didn't tolerate phonies, who didn't know the East Side from the West Side but would have tagged Slocum with a scarlet “P.”

But they talked to me, and that was something. Wasn't it?

I sipped the last of my tea, which was now lukewarm. The goldfinches had moved on, bounding across the field in their undulating way like a school of bright yellow porpoises. It was sunny and breezy and the field was full of butterflies, getting in a few last days of flight before September turned cool. Six months since I'd worked. Six months of drinking and reading and walking in the woods. Six months, and practically the only people I'd seen were the people on the road. I got up from the table and put the dishes in the sink. Probably I should have washed them, but I decided to go down the road instead. As I walked across the yard to the truck, I felt this funny little tremble of regret, like I was going to say good-bye to somebody, like I was leaving something cherished behind.

3

“H
ey, it's Bones,” Clair Varney said, looking up from the bench in his barn. “Jesus, what you doin' up? Ain't dinnertime yet, is it?”

“Bones” was short for Lazy Bones, which Varney said I was. But lazy was one thing he wasn't. If it was ten o'clock, he'd been up for five or six hours. His two-acre vegetable garden was tilled. The last of the tomatoes and cukes were picked. Mary, his wife, probably had fifty quarts of sauce canned, just that morning. Varney, tanned and fit with silver hair and forearms that still did justice to their Semper Fi tattoos, was scraping at a big chunk of steel that had come off of the top of the motor in his truck.

“Started steamin' like a bastard yesterday,” he said, staring down at his work. “I knew she was close, but not that close. Goddamn lucky she didn't blow halfway to East Cornpatch. Gasket was junk. Goddamn things they call a gasket today, I wouldn't blow my nose on.”

He looked up at me.

“So, Bones. When we goin' huntin', anyway? We got to get you a deer. Nice big eight-point buck.”

“I'd have to wrestle it down,” I said.

“Well, Jesus, man. We'll get you a rifle. Maybe even a bullet or two. You think you'll need more than one?”

“Only if you want me to get your deer, too.”

“Oh, listen to him,” Varney said, picking up a putty knife and whittling at the motor head on the bench. “Gonna get me my deer, too. Bones, we're gonna make a hunter out of you yet. Get you one of those guns that the flag pops out of, says
bang
. The deer'll die laughing.”

I grinned and picked up a greasy bolt from the bench and put it down, then looked for something to wipe my fingers on.

“Seen any?” I asked.

“Oh, hell yes,” Varney said.

He whittled at pieces of old gasket. Sort of like a sculptor, I thought.

“Me and the old lady went out back to the old orchard last night. Musta been, I don't know, six-thirty. Quarter to seven. I says, ‘Just sit there and hush your mouth.'”

“You said that, did you?”

“Well, maybe I did put it a little bit nicer. So we're sitting there on a couple of grease cans. Marmon left 'em up there when he was cutting that oak and beech up on the ridge. Goddamn son of a bitch. Stove the place all to hell and shorted me to boot. But anyway. What goes around comes around, right? So we're sitting there and we're real quiet and it ain't five minutes before they come. There were two does, one good-size one, and then a third one comes out of the woods, sniffing and slow like, and I says to Mary, ‘You just wait. These girls are gonna have an old man with 'em.' It's getting a little darker and there he comes, big old boy, eight points, over two hundred pounds, and he's out there under those apple trees, eating the drops, tame as
a goddamn sheep. From here to that shed. Could've hit any one of them with a rock.”

“But they won't be there November first,” I said.

“Won't be there. Won't be anywhere where you'll find 'em easy. They'll go back in those cedar swamps way up on—well it used to be part of the old Wilkinson place. Old man Wilkinson, he's dead now. What a tight son of a bitch he was. Used to hay with him when I was a kid, me and my brothers. Penny a bale. Had to beg to get that out of him. Old man owned something like six hundred acres. So friggin' crooked, they didn't bury him, they screwed him into the ground.”

I smiled. Varney put the putty knife down and dipped his fingers in a can of hand soap. He was meticulous that way. Always clean-shaven. Hair short and neat. Tools all lined up like the barn was a BMW garage in Westchester.

What twenty years in the Marines will do for you.

“We gotta get you shootin', Bones,” he said, smiling, but more with his eyes than his mouth. 'Cause you know what's gonna happen. I could look for that buck for years and not even see a track. You'll walk out there the first morning and he'll tap you on the shoulder.”

“He does that, I'm gonna tap him back,” I said.

Varney pulled a clump of paper towels from the dispenser above the bench.

“Ain't that the truth,” he said. “Hardest thing to shoot is something that's lookin' you right in the eyes.”

For a moment, Varney was quiet and you could hear the flies buzzing in the warmth of the windows. He did this every once in a while. He'd go off somewhere else, disappearing into the wells of his eyes. I waited, as I usually did, and then he was back, the lines on his temple crinkling as he smiled.

“Come on, Bones. Come on in and have something real to eat, instead of that tuna fish or whatever it is you live on.”

Dinner was pot roast, potatoes, carrots, and cabbage. Mary Varney piled it on a plate and put it in front of me at the table, then swooped back with another plate that was stacked with warm cornbread. I sat there feeling sheepish, as I always did when she waited on me, and she came back with a tall glass of milk.

Clair Varney had the same.

“He's been eating tuna fish again, Mum,” he said.

“Jack McMorrow,” Mary said, “I've told you. You don't know where that stuff has been.”

“Only place to eat out of a can is a foxhole,” her husband said, buttering his cornbread. “And then only when you can't find something better.”

“I was reading in the paper this morning,” Mary said, sitting down across from me to a miniature version of my meal. “The obituaries. Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer. You know it's got to be because of the air we breathe. The water we drink. The food we eat. Our bodies get filled with chemicals. The other day I was at the checkout at Bud's over in Unity and this man in front of me has all this stuff. Ugh. This blue cereal. Diet soda, which is all chemicals. Artificial this and artificial that. It took everything I had not to say something.”