Bloodline (5 page)

Somebody ought to take these gang kids out and teach them how to shoot straight.

That was life for kids in Boston, three hours and several light-years away from Albion, Prosperity, and Belfast, Maine. On the streets of Roxbury and Dorchester, kids ran the risk of dying from a stray bullet. But what were the risks here? I wasn't sure. Maybe driving drunk on twisting country roads. Latching on to the wrong guy or girl and a life of domestic hell. Or the welfare rut. Or the habit of petty crime that saw whole lives spent moving from county jail to state prison to county jail. Or even more subtle than that, maybe it was just the risk of growing old too fast, and living a life full of regret.

Maybe.

I didn't really know, when it came down to it, and the plan for the day was to see if I could at least begin to find out.

But how?

There was a funny thing about small-town reporting. It was hard.

In the city, you had hundreds and thousands of people to pick from. They stood in bunches on street corners, in subway lines, gathered by the fountains in shopping malls. City people were accustomed to strangers, so they didn't spook easily. They might tell you to drop dead, or some raunchier equivalent, but at least that was the beginning of a dialogue.

In the closed world of small-town Maine, a stranger was an event, an aberration from the routine, something inherently suspect. A stranger asking questions was more suspicious still.

And there was the logistical problem. Where were these kids I needed to get to know? Behind which trailer door? In which house, set back at the end of a long driveway carved out of the woods? And when I knocked, who would answer? Daddy? Gramma? Some guy with a handgun on his hip?

Well, Jack, I said, starting the truck and heading back toward Prosperity, that's why they pay you the big money.

My first stop was home. Bumping down the road, I waved to the girls who were living in the cabin near the corner, where the road turned from pavement to gravel. The girls were from New York and Massachusetts and went to Unity College, five miles away in the town of Unity. They were athletic and wholesome and their cars, a Jeep and a Subaru station wagon, had racks for skis and mountain bikes and kayaks and sailboards. The college girls were nice kids but they kept somewhat to themselves, as if Maine were one giant national park and their neighbors were just the people at the next campsite: strangers who would be gone in the morning.

When I went by the Varneys', Clair was on his tractor, an old but immaculate John Deere. He was tilling under a section of his vegetable garden and he waved and I waved but I didn't stop to talk. For the first time in many months, I had built up some momentum and I didn't want to lose it.

I grabbed a couple of notebooks from the desk, three pens from the jar by the phone on the kitchen counter. At the door, I stopped and pondered the jackets hanging on the hooks. I was wearing a brown canvas hunting jacket from L.L. Bean. It was comfortable and durable, but I wondered if it didn't have too much of an air of gentry. I took it off and put on a faded denim. Then I grabbed a Red Sox hat, a real one without the plastic adjustable band.

Outside, I viewed my ensemble in the window of the truck. Would you talk to this man? I smiled my most winning grin. Hey, I talked to myself all the time.

A whole schoolful of kids and on Saturday they slipped away into the landscape like guerrilla fighters.

It was late afternoon, getting chilly, and the sun was dropping lazily toward the low ridges to the west. I was at the counter at the Western View Restaurant in Knox, a few miles east of Prosperity. There were four stools and two were occupied: one by me and the other by a dishwasher, a boy about sixteen who was passing his break by eating half an apple pie. A few employees like him and this place could kiss its profits good-bye.

But nobody seemed to mind. The cook was standing by one of the tables, talking to three guys who were having coffee and eggs, hash browns and bacon, the hell with cholesterol. The three guys had gotten out of a big dump truck, which was idling noisily in the parking lot. They were all in their forties, all big, with muscular upper bodies and no buttocks, the kind of physiques you saw in men who lifted a lot but spent a lot of time behind the wheel. I figured they'd be over to see me any minute, having noticed from across the room my superior metabolic conditioning. I would generously suggest they join their wives' aerobic dance programs. They could begin by chasing me around the parking lot.

At the moment, my metabolic rate was elevated by coffee, which the waitress kept pouring and I kept drinking. She was high school–age, slim and pretty, and friendly in that breezy way that comes from deep-seated self-confidence. Her parents had done something right.
She was also one of the few teenage kids I'd seen in my travels that day, and I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject of teen pregnancy without seeming too, how shall we say, forward.

I smiled at her as she breezed by with the coffeepot.

“You ready for a refill, Dad?” she said to the biggest guy from the dump truck.

This was not going to be easy.

I sat at the counter through another cup, and waited as my self-confident friend served a fiftyish couple who had pulled into the parking lot in a dressy new Ford pickup with Connecticut plates and the big metal racks that are the trademark of antiques dealers. They ordered decaf and seafood baskets and the woman, who was dressed in jeans and running shoes and expensive jewelry, got out some sort of magazine. The guy, ruddy-faced and ruggedly-handsome under an Irish tweed cap, gave the waitress that lingering look that is the mark of a lecher.

I didn't want to be there when she introduced him to her daddy.

When I paid the bill, I left a dollar tip by my cup, on top of the paper placemat with the venison recipes on it. I gave the waitress another smile that I hoped she'd remember when I came in again, then went out to the parking lot, where the antiquers' Ford was laughing at my Chevy. As I sat there consoling the rusty old steed, three girls in an old four-wheel-drive pickup drove in and parked. One girl got out and tossed her mane of hair as she climbed down from the raised-up cab and walked to the restaurant door. She came back in a minute with a pack of cigarettes in her hand.

It was the girls from the hallway at the high school. I wondered if they would, like, remember me. I got out of the truck and walked over.

“Hello, ladies,” I said.

“You're the lost guy,” one of the girls said.

“And still lost,” I said.

“Still looking for guidance?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

She was sitting in the middle of the seat, smoking a cigarette under her hood of big hair. The girl to her right was smaller and blonder. The driver looked more like the one in the middle, except heavier. They were all wearing jeans and denim jackets, all smoking. And they all looked at me, wary but curious, too.

“I'm Jack,” I said. “I was at the school to see Ms. Genest. Thanks for your directions. I'd still be there, wandering around the halls.”

The driver and the one in the middle smiled. The smaller one kicked the middle one and giggled.

“I'm a writer. For magazines,” I explained. “I'm doing a story, and this is gonna sound kind of weird, but it isn't. Really. The story is about girls in high school who have babies.”

The smaller one snorted. The driver's expression hardened. She took a drag on her cigarette.

“Yeah, I know it sounds like I'm some kind of pervert,” I said. “But I'm not. The story is supposed to be about what it's like to have a baby in school. Somebody your age.”

I watched their eyes peering out from under black eyeliner. It was right here that I'd either lose them or hook them. I looked at them, lined up in the truck cab like birds in a nest. The small one had her work boots on the dash. She whispered something to the middle one and giggled. The middle one nudged the small one with an elbow. I smiled.

Paternally, I hoped.

“So?” the middle one said suddenly. “Lots of kids have babies. What's the big deal?”

“Well, it's just about whether they stay in school. If they don't, what do they do. Do they live at home? Do they get married?”

“Yeah, right,” the driver, the bigger girl, said.

“Here comes the bride,” the smaller one sang. “All fat and wide.”

“Sharon!” the middle one said.

“Some do, but it's a joke,” the driver said. “Guys usually ain't worth marrying.”

I looked at her and grinned.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Belinda,” she said.

Belinda was the hard-boiled one of the three, but seemed to have the most going on upstairs.

“So the guys are scum, huh?” I asked her.

“They got what they wanted,” Belinda said. “You get your kid. Got nothing to do with them. Mostly it doesn't.”

“So girls usually keep the kid?”

“Hey, it's your kid and nobody else's. Why should you have an abortion just because the guy's a dink?”

A new slogan for the pro-life movement.

“Oh, my God,” the smallest one said.

“Sharon,” the middle one said. “Come on.”

“I just can't believe she's talking to this guy about this,” the smallest one said.

“Do some kids give the kids up?” I asked. “For adoption, I mean?”

“Missy Hewett,” Sharon blurted.

“Sharon!” the middle one said.

“Well, she did,” Sharon said. “And so did that girl who used to go out with Jason. I think that sucks.”

“What do you know about it?” Belinda said. “You never had a baby. You don't know what you'd do if you were them.”

“I wouldn't give my baby away like it was a kitten or something,” Sharon said.

“Sharon, you're so weird,” Belinda said, shaking her head. “Isn't she, Dulcy?”

Sharon leaned over and whispered something to Dulcy, the one in the middle.

“Sharon!” Dulcy said.

“What'd she say?” Belinda demanded.

“Don't tell her,” Sharon said, giggling.

Dulcy was giggling, too.

“She said, if it was Jason, it wouldn't be a kitten. It'd be a puppy,” she said.

“Oh, Jesus, you guys,” Belinda said. “This guy is gonna think you're totally stupid.”

She turned to me.

“You gonna put that in your story?” Belinda asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Girl has puppy. I could sell it to the
Inquirer
.”

I smiled. Sharon was still laughing as she tried to light a cigarette. Belinda was reaching for the key in the ignition. Dulcy gave me a quick direct glance that, if I hadn't known better, I'd have thought to be an indication of something other than passing interest.

“Well, thanks, guys,” I said. “I'll see you around, I'm sure. But one more thing.”

Three heads of unruly hair turned in unison. Three pairs of black-lined eyes.

“Where do kids hang out around here? When they get together, I mean?”

“The pit,” Dulcy said.

“Yeah, the pit,” Belinda agreed.

“Where's that?”

“Right past her house,” Belinda said. “Knox Ridge Road.”

“Yeah,” Sharon said. “And her phone number is 568—”

“Sharon!” Dulcy protested, and punched her friend in the shoulder.

Belinda started the truck and gave it a blatting rev.

“Thanks, ladies,” I said.

They pulled out, spinning the tires on the gravel. Dulcy was shaking Sharon by the shoulder. Belinda was holding her cigarette out the window.

I walked back to the truck and picked up a notebook.

“You don't have to have an abortion,” I wrote, “just because the guy's a dink.”

Under that I wrote four names: Belinda. Dulcy. Sharon.

And Missy Hewett.

6

“I
really see this as a piece about women's attitudes in rural New England in the nineties,” Maddy was saying. “And if their attitudes haven't changed in a century, I think that would be very interesting.”

I was sitting at the big oak table, on the phone to
New England Look.
As I listened, I sipped from a can of Budweiser. Next to that can was an empty one. It was Monday, a few minutes before five in the afternoon. I was easing into the work week. Slowly.

Saturday night I'd had supper with Clair and Mary, then a few beers with Clair, listening to the crickets on their back porch. We had talked about the integrity of a tractor versus the integrity of an automobile. Clair had told me about a Buddhist monk he'd met in Vietnam. On the road outside Pleiku, Clair and the monk had talked about all kinds of lofty things: the worldview of Americans. Christianity and the inherent evangelism of Western culture, the way the conventional Christian notion of afterlife had shaped the world in the twentieth century. Clair said he'd been waiting for a Marine unit to catch up, and when it did, he went on toward Dak To. A couple of days later, coming back through the same way, he'd walked by the monk's body, riddled by bullets, open eyes covered with flies.