Bloodline (4 page)

I smiled. She didn't. Everyone else stared.

“Hi, I'm Jack McMorrow,” I said, moving to the counter.

Her eyes didn't even flicker.

“I'm a writer, for magazines, and I live in Prosperity.”

She still stared. Maybe I should have brought my piece on irises.

“And I know it might sound sort of vague,” I said, “but I was hoping to talk to somebody who works with kids.”

“We do a lot of that here,” the woman said.

Not only vague, but stupid.

“I don't mean classroom work, really,” I said. “I mean counseling sort of things. Their lives outside of school.”

She was still sitting at her desk, with only her head turned toward me. I tried to read her button but still couldn't. I smiled again. She didn't, again.

“We have guidance counselors. Career counselors. Crisis counselors. Substance abuse counselors,” the woman said.

“And counselors for the counselors?” I asked.

She gave me a hard stare and reached for her phone. Five minutes in school and already I was being expelled.

“Is Mr. Leonard in?” the woman said. “Oh, there's someone here with a question I think he should answer. No, it's not that important.”

Maybe not to you, I thought. But I've got a houseful of bats to feed.

“You have to talk to Mr. Leonard,” the woman said. “He's the principal, but he's in a meeting and won't be out for an hour, and then he's got to leave for a meeting in Augusta.”

She said this in a tone that put Mr. Leonard's meetings on a par with emergency sessions of the UN Security Council.

“I'll come back,” I said.

Don't bother, her look said.

“Thanks for your help,” I said.

She sort of nodded and turned back to her desk, which was piled with some sort of forms. I started to turn to leave, then stopped.

“One question you might be able to help me with,” I said. “What's your button say, there on your shirt?”

She looked at me as if I'd asked the brand of her underwear. First things first, I figured.

“Cooperation,” the woman said, slowly and with evident distaste. “Makes it happen.”

“Ain't that the truth,” I said, giving her a long look and my most disarming grin. She looked away and said nothing.

Jack, I thought as I walked to the door, you haven't lost the old touch.

Back in the hallway, the commuter rush had thinned. I took a right and continued deeper into the school. There was a display case with computer printout signs proclaiming
THE STUDENTS OF THE WEEK
. Beside the signs were blurry black-and-white photographs. The students of the week were two girls and two boys, all of whom looked relatively wholesome. My buddy from the parking lot was noticeably absent.

I shuffled along and, for a second, realized that I was probably old enough to be a visiting parent, which made me feel older still. How long we cling to the fallacy of eternal youth.

The corridor was going past classrooms now, and through the doors I could see teachers standing in front of classes. A heavyset guy
was saying “Now, people,” in a way that told me the people weren't listening. At the next door was another guy, young and blond and probably a coach. On the board behind him were the words
JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY
. If the coach could make that relevant to these kids of the looming twenty-first century, he was earning his pay.

At the next crossroads, I decided to break down and ask directions. Four girls were huddling near a bank of gunmetal-gray lockers, and I stopped behind them and waited for them to notice me. This offered the opportunity to listen to a few seconds of academic debate.

“So I'm like, ‘Jimmy, I'm goin' out with Ronnie,' a dark-haired girl was saying. “He starts, like, punching the side of his truck. I'm like, ‘Oh, my God. I gotta get outta here.'”

“Did you tell Ronnie?” a tall girl, in black stretchy pants, said.

“Oh, yeah, right,” the first girl said. “I'm gonna go, like, ‘I was down at the pit with Jimmy and he was hittin' on me.' I mean, he'd kill me and then he'd really kill Jimmy. His probation officer told him he was, like, this friggin' close from being revoked.”

She held up two fingers with long red-painted nails. “He frigs up once and he's gone,” the girl said.

On that note, they looked up and saw me.

“Excuse me, ladies,” I said. “I seem to have lost my way.”

I took “like, a right” and “like, a left” and eventually ended up back near where I started, up the yellow-brick corridor, past the trophy case, to a door over which hung a small sign that said
GUIDANCE
. Maybe if I kept going down the hall there'd be signs for
HELP AND CONSOLATION
, and
CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
. Sort of an open-air bazaar for your emotional and spiritual needs.

But I turned in at Guidance because it was guidance I needed. There was nobody in the outer room. Just a cup of coffee on the desk. A computer terminal which was humming quietly to itself. On the wall behind the desk was a poster picture of a black fuzzy bear cub. Underneath the bear it said
HAVE A BEARY NICE DAY
.

No psychobabble here.

I waited for a minute and listened. A couple of kids went by in the corridor, their heels tapping against the tile floor. I waited another minute and was turning to leave when a woman came through the door fast and low and caught me in the shoulder.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said.

“An emergency?” I asked.

“They're all emergencies,” the woman answered. “Are you a parent?”

“No,” I said, “but someday I hope to be one.”

She was small and dark, maybe twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Sort of pretty, with dark hair and large intense brown eyes set in deep shadowed hollows. Her sweater was thick and coarse and hand-knit, probably in the Andes or someplace. Her earrings were long and silver and no doubt made by some local artisan whose sweater came from the Andes, too.

“Jack McMorrow,” I said. “Are you the guidance counselor?”

“The one and only,” she said, as if all the king's horses and all the king's men would have a tough time putting these kids back together again. She turned and walked into the office to the left of the bear poster. I assumed the invitation to accompany her was implied.

Her name was Janice Genest, pronounced like
genetics
, and she pronounced her first name “Janeece.” It gave the name a tongue-twister sound but she was all business. She shook my hand over her desk. Her hand was tanned and strong. She was attractive in a handsome sort of way. High cheekbones and dark brown eyes. A lot of unruly hair pulled back and clipped. Very little makeup and very slim. A woman too busy to preen. And too busy to clean her desk, which was a mess. The poster directly behind her—a boy and a girl in sunglasses and leather jackets, models masquerading as tough kids—was an ad for condoms.

“What can I do for you, Mr. McMorrow?” Genest said.

I pointed at the poster.

“It has to do with that,” I said. “Sort of.”

She didn't flinch.

I told her about
New England Look.
The story, I said, was about teenage pregnancy and how it shapes the world of rural Maine. She listened with no-nonsense directness and I tried to make every word count. It was as if I had gotten in the door with the head of a very large company and I had one chance to make my pitch.

“So here you have this vicious circle,” I said, both of us still standing. “They have kids at sixteen because their mothers had kids at sixteen. And I would guess—you would know more about this than me—that when you have kids at sixteen, it's tough to do a heck of a lot more. You must see this. Grandmothers who are thirty-five. All these generations packed into a few years.”

“The record is thirty, I think,” Genest said. “That was the grandmother. The great-grandmother was under fifty. But looked sixty-five.”

“Hard life?”

“Harder than yours or mine. You know, it's a matriarchal thing. The woman, or girl, has the babies. Mommy's boyfriends come and go. Stay long enough to make more kids. In jail as much as not. Alcohol is part of it ninety-nine percent of the time. He's a drunk. She tries to keep things going but it's pretty hopeless, so she ends up a drunk, too. Between drinking and cigarettes and general abuse, nobody lives very long.”

“It does sound kind of hopeless,” I said.

“Close to it,” Genest said, shuffling through phone messages on her desk. “Unless you get 'em early.”

“Which is what you do here?”

“Try. Like fishing with a net full of holes. Too many of them slip through. Sexually active at thirteen. Hanging around with guys who are twenty. Lambs among the wolves, you know? Little girls looking for a man to love them. Men looking for something else. I mean, it's a minefield. Try to teach them about contraception and some fundamentalist parent goes to the school board. Contraception? I've got fourteen-year-olds who need prenatal courses. Fetal alcohol syndrome. What smoking does to a fetus. Nutrition. You can't grow a healthy baby on warm Pepsi and potato chips.”

She shook her head.

“But that's what they pay you the big bucks for,” I said.

Genest almost smiled. Almost.

I told her I'd like to talk to her more. She shrugged her shoulders.

“Hey, I can talk, but what good is it going to do?” she asked. “I mean, my kids don't read
New England Look.
So it's sort of like a freak show, isn't it? Parade the poor dumb bumpkins up and down for the people who went to Williams and Wesleyan. So when the summer people come up to Owls Head or Hancock or any of those places,
they'll think twice about crossing over to the west side of Route 1. I mean, face it: They don't really care about any of this. Not really. Come on, Mr. McMorrow.”

“Jack.”

“Okay, Jack. But I'm right, am I not? I mean, what's the point? So these people in rich suburbs around Boston and Hartford and Greenwich will maybe have a pang of pity before they put the magazine down and jump in the Volvo to take the kids to soccer practice? Or drop little Erica at ballet?”

“If you think like that, the
New York Times
would only report on Scarsdale. Pretend the Bronx doesn't exist,” I said.

“Maybe they should, for all the good it does the kids in the Bronx. I did my student teaching in Roxbury, in Boston. This woman from the
Globe
came and did a story about violence in the schools. You know. Kids bringing guns to class. Shooting at each other at locker break. That place was like the Wild West, it really was. And this was back when that was news. So the story was fine. I mean, she did a good job. Talked to a lot of people. But in the end, what did it change? Kids are still killing each other. Drugs and drug money are just eating them up. And some guy in Newton skimmed the story before he turned to the important stuff. Like the Red Sox.”

“But people should know,” I said. “The chances of it doing your kids any good may be, I don't know, slim to none. But if nobody knows, they're just none. Forget the slim.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, conceding maybe a millimeter. “But I only have so much time, and spending it talking to you may be wasting it.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“Nothing personal,” Genest said.

A buzzer went off in the hall, followed by a growing roar, like a subway train approaching. There were footsteps and then the shuffle of somebody behind me. I turned to see a girl. She was small and slight with thick black eyeliner and bright red lipstick that made her look like a female impersonator.

“Miss Genest,” she said urgently. “I gotta talk to you.”

I smiled at Miss Genest and excused myself. I said I'd still like to talk to her.

“Whatever,” she said.

As I stepped out the door, the girl slipped in, giving me a practiced glance that was supposed to be provocative. She smelled of cigarettes and bubble gum.

5

T
he smaller maples on the fringes of the swamps were always the first to go. They flared crimson and red-orange and orange-red, Crayola colors that were shocking against the still-deep greens of the bigger maples and alders around them. These were the first brushfires, fuses that sizzled around the low, wet edges of the woods and ignited the blazes that would, in two or three weeks, engulf the hardwood ridges around Prosperity with the beautiful flames of autumn.

It was mid-September and the first color was beginning to creep in. It appeared suddenly along the roadways as if sprayed by some graffiti artist during the night. Each day, the colors would spread, so gorgeous that I would stop the car and get out and just stare, trying to absorb this thing that was wondrous but passed as quickly as a sunset.

It was Saturday, mid-morning, and I had stopped on the Albion Road, on my way back from the Albion General Store, where I had picked up a coffee and a
Boston Globe.
I sat by the side of Route 137, at a spot where flickers of red were showing in a line of swamp maples that grew along the margin of a bog. Four-wheel-drive pickups rumbled by, their big rippled tires whirring on the pavement. I picked up the
Globe
and read a page-one story about a teenage girl who, sure
enough, had been shot and killed in Roxbury. A very pretty girl, she smiled sweetly in the photo in the paper. She had been caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between two feuding gangs.