Deadline (12 page)

I parked the car at the door and rifled the mailbox on the way in:
Newsweek
, a bank statement forwarded from New York, and a letter from a friend in Oshawa, outside Toronto, also forwarded from New York. I ripped the envelope open as I climbed the stairs two at a time. At the landing on the second floor, I stopped.

The door was open. The frame was splintered, all bare and jagged. I pushed it gently and it swung partly open.

In the middle of the kitchen, the refrigerator lay on its side. The door hung open and milk and orange juice had mixed in a yellow pool on the floor. A loaf of bread was sitting in the pool, stomped flat. Counters were covered with cereal and rice and sugar. Red wine had been splashed on the wall.

I walked stiffly to the living room.

My stereo was upside down on the floor. Chairs were tipped over and books were strewn everywhere. In the bedroom, the bed was on its side and all my clothes were in a pile in the middle of the floor. Someone had urinated on the pile, making long sweeping yellow streaks on white sheets.

I felt weak, short of breath. I swallowed and looked at the room. Record covers were thrown into the bedroom. I could see Miles Davis,
Dave Brubeck in a tie. Bill Evans, with something to be depressed about. I started to reach down to pick them up, then straightened up and stepped to the kitchen. The telephone receiver dangled from the wall. I picked it up by the cord and called the cops.

“Somebody's trying to tell you something, chief,” Vigue said, still standing in the doorway. “Boff anybody's wife? Late on some bills?”

I shook my head and kept mopping. LeMaire, J. was in the living room, taking pictures with an automatic Canon so the carnage would be recorded for posterity and the insurance company.

“Nobody you've offended?” Vigue continued. “Maybe just pissed off?”

“How the hell should I know?” I said. “Maybe we left somebody's name off the honor roll.”

LeMaire, J. sloshed through the pale orange pool. Vigue walked to the end of the kitchen and looked through the door.

“They missed the bathroom,” he said.

“Great. I'll sleep in the tub and eat off the toilet seat.”

“Could have pulled the toilet off the wall. Then you'd have the neighbors pissed off, too.”

“There aren't any. They moved out,” I said.

“Maybe you got them pissed off.”

“They loved me like a son.”

I almost mentioned the St. Amand story but held back and wrung the mop in the sink. Curry and his people wouldn't go for this sort of thing. Maybe a few of the workers would, if they'd had a few, but this wouldn't keep a story from going. If they wanted to slow things down, they'd have to hit the office.

LeMaire, J. crunched back into the living room with the camera dangling around his neck. He looked like a demented tourist. A paramilitary Smokey Bear.

“How you gonna secure it?” he asked.

“Secure what?”

“The premises. Lock the place up.”

“I don't know,” I said. “What's left to protect?”

“They could burn the building down,” he said.

“They can do that in the hall.”

I put the mop headfirst in the sink and bent to look. We had stood the refrigerator back up but the door wouldn't close. In the back, next to an overturned tub of cottage cheese and a cabbage, were three cans of Ballantine, lying on their sides like ejected mortar shells.

“Wasn't kids,” Vigue said, over my shoulder. “With kids, beer's the first thing to go.”

I reached in and tipped the cans back on their ends. One small step for man …

“I'm not kidding, chief,” Vigue said, almost cheerfully. “Somebody picked you out for this one.”

8

D
inner that night was part of a loaf of oatmeal bread and a hunk of bright orange cheddar cheese, the only real cheese they had at the store at the bridge. I was the only one at the office, and I ate at my desk and worked, editing releases, rereading the Arthur editorial, shuffling papers, and wondering what I was being warned away from.

At nine o'clock I got up and locked the door from the inside.

At nine-fifteen, Mrs. Beauceville from the funeral home called and said she had an obit. I took it—four inches of copy to sum up the entire life of a man named Randall Pelletier. He was born in St.-Prosper, Quebec, and moved to Androscoggin when he was fourteen. He worked in the paper mill under various owners for forty-seven years, retiring due to ill health. He died four years later at sixty-nine, and was survived by one daughter, Imogie Brant of East Hartford, Connecticut. There was no mention of Imogie's mother. Friends could call Friday from two to four p.m., Saturday from one to three.

Good-bye, Mr. Pelletier.
C'est la guerre
.

It was beginning to pile up, Pelletier and Arthur and all the rest. Stacked on top of me, an awful dragging weight.

I got up from my chair and turned off the lights, then went over to stand in front of the window. It was flurrying and the snow blew like dust in the gutters. Most of the stores were dark, with fluorescent lights left on to discourage burglars.

How desolate.

A northern outpost with me sitting in a little storefront office writing about people no one else had ever heard of, people who would live and die here without ever venturing into the outside world. Whole lives played out in Androscoggin, Maine, with generation after generation coming and going like the issues of the
Review
. Inevitable. Unstoppable. Fading into the deepest, darkest obscurity in the blink of an eye.

Oh, how I hated this feeling. I hated the questions that I couldn't drive away when I felt like this. Was this it? Was I kidding myself when I found this rewarding? Was I on some long downward slide? Was I some kind of washed-up loser at thirty-five?

Jack McMorrow. Small-town reporter, laboring away in the ragged nameless mountains of western Maine, typing in the night. Alone.

Maybe that was most of it. I was lonely. It had been a bad day, as bad as I'd had in quite a while. And Arthur dying. It was natural to be let down about all of this. But was that all it was? I didn't know. I just didn't know.

I looked out at the street. A pair of headlights rounded the corner by the fire station and drew closer until the form of a pickup materialized. The truck was dark, sagging in the rear with loud exhaust. As it rumbled by I saw that it was a Chevy, very rusted. The driver glanced up and saw me in the window. I saw a beard, a cigarette, and then he gave me the finger.

How could he have known?

I worked until three in the morning, mostly to keep from going home. Roxanne called at eleven-fifteen to say hello. She was in bed, she said, curled up with a magazine, wearing a warm flannel nightgown.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“I guess,” I said. “Somebody broke into the house. Messed it up a little, if you can believe that.”

“What? My God, what did they mess up?”

“Not much,” I said. “Just sort of threw things around a little. Nothing too terrible. So don't worry about it.”

“Well, I will worry about it.”

“Well, you shouldn't.”

“Well, I will.”

“Well, don't,” I said.

She said good night, sounding worried anyway, and I wished I hadn't told her. We hung up but not on a romantic or sexy note. Then the coffee wore off and I felt exhausted, so I got everything ready for the morning, page dummies in one folder, copy still to be set in another, photos in a third. I left the stories on Arthur in the computer for a final check when I was fresher, then unlocked the front door and walked out in the still night to my car. My shoes made a crescendo of crunching noises in the snow on the sidewalk. Up and down Main Street, nothing moved. Stars moved in and out of the clouds, and I didn't see a single other car on the way home, if you could call it that.

With the windows open, the house was near freezing, but it still smelled like a school cafeteria, sour milk and faintly sweet fruit.

I opened the kitchen window wider and, keeping my parka on, got one of the three beers out of the refrigerator. I drank half of it leaning against the counter and then went into the living room and
stared at the remains of the stereo. From the rubble of books and papers, B.B. King stared up at me. It was an old album, early sixties, and B.B. was wearing a yellow tuxedo and a huge diamond pinkie ring. I left him on the floor and went to bed. In my sleeping bag on the floor, the beer beside me, I could see my breath in the air.

Paul sucked the last half-inch off his cigarette and flicked the butt out onto the road. Vern roused himself in the backseat and I watched him in the rearview mirror. Under the maroon coach's jacket, he was big and formless, like a sack of sand. His hair was still slick from his morning shower, and it looked like he had cut it himself. Blindfolded.

“Hard night?” I asked.

“Not really,” Vern said, yawning. “Couple beers and hit the sack. Just resting up for the home stretch, Jackson. Saving myself for the last kick, over the Alps, down the plains, and under the Arc de Triomphe.”

“Victorious?”

“
Mais bien sûr
.”

The morning was clear and cold and icy bright, with banks of green spruce pointing to garish blue skies. We were following Route 2 along the Androscoggin River, which at this point, fifteen miles west of town, ran fast enough in the shallows to keep all but the little backwaters from freezing. As I drove, I looked out at the shimmering water, rising and falling over the rips and eddies, and thought of Arthur. His shoes must have weighted him down. His socks and pants, his belt and jacket. Wet and heavy as lead. Did he have a camera? Could they drag the canal? Would they care enough to even consider it?

I knew the answer to that one.

Vern and Paul had sunk into their seats, no small feat in the spartan Volvo. Vern was probably nursing the closest thing he ever got to a hangover. Drinking slow and steady, he didn't get drunk enough to feel sick but didn't get sober enough to feel good. Paul could have had a fight with either of the two women he saw on a rotating basis, migrating from Darlene to Laurie like a Bedouin follows water holes. I'd met both of them and Laurie got my vote. She was attractive in a robust sort of way, but direct and open. She would have made a good wife or a good mother, but Paul would say she was tying him down, or she didn't understand him or some other manufactured excuse and go back to Darlene, when she was split up with her boyfriend, which was most of the time. Darlene was attractive in a provocative sort of way, a little too much makeup, sweater too small, a defiant look that dared you to undress her with your eyes. She would not make a good wife and was a terrible mother, from what I could tell, with a three-year-old daughter she left most of the time with her mother. She was weak and spoiled and had learned too early to get her way by moving her hips.

Darlene, I mean. I didn't know about the daughter.

The car whizzed between the trees. I downshifted on the corners, weaving between the ledges that jutted out of the banks. The ledges were the skirts of the mountains, the very edge of the steep ridges that climbed to the mountains to the west. The steeper the terrain was, the more life was squeezed into the valleys, trapped in the narrow catwalks along the rivers, the occasional deltas where the river jogged and a farm could be squeezed under the blue shadows. I had a theory that the mountains were the reason people here turned to ice-fishing in the winter. It wasn't the fish. It was the only chance to walk out on terrain that was absolutely flat. On the snow-covered plains that
were the ponds and lakes, the fishermen sat by their shanties, stood in clusters by the holes in the ice as if they were oil men waiting for gushers. They drank beer and whiskey and waited for the little flags on their lines to trip, tossing the fish on the ice to freeze as they breathed. Pickerel and perch and lake trout were frozen before they were dead. Tissues freeze from the outside; the brain is the last to go.

The woods gave way to farmhouses and trailers and then a small development with ranch houses lined up in a former pasture like tents in a Civil War bivouac. Another five miles and we were on the outskirts of North Conway, New Hampshire. Fast-food restaurants, strip malls, real estate offices built like ski chalets, and factory stores selling Scandinavian dishes.

Civilization.

“Here we go, team,” Vern said, as we pulled into the parking lot of the low brick building that was Conway Printing. “Look sharp. On and off the field.”

It took all day. We stood over light tables, the wooden benches with slanted opaque plastic tops over fluorescent bulbs. Our computer discs were popped into a terminal like the one in the
Review
office, and for nearly an hour, the pieces of the newspaper—news, sports, ad copy, classified ads—spewed from the typesetter in the next room. We hunched over the pages with razor knives and moved columns of copy around the pages, slicing stories into blocks and sticking borders on with narrow black tape. The photos were reshot in the camera room and the PMTs—blurry reproductions of the original pictures—were run through a waxed roller and slapped on the pages.