Deadline (3 page)

Androscoggin was an outpost, the big town for a dozen or so poverty-stricken hamlets where a few people scratched out a living, working in the woods, maybe doing a few weeks in the dowel mill in Dixfield at four bucks an hour. When those jobs ran out, there was bartering truck parts, or fixing some out-of-stater's camp, which didn't pay much, but did put beer on the table. And there was always the State, two or three hundred bucks a month from AFDC.

Against this backdrop of hangover to hangover existence, the mill smelled pretty good.

But it wouldn't smell much today, I thought, watching the plume against the blue sky. It would be a good day in Androscoggin. It would be a good day for an autopsy.

By eight-thirty, the Pine Tree had thinned out a little. There were three Canadian chip-truck drivers at the counter, having cigarettes and coffee and eggs before they headed back up through Coburn Gore and home to Quebec. Their loads were dumped at the mill and their rigs were parked out back. I'd noticed the names on the cab doors: Guy Laurent et Fils, Yves Martin et Fils, Marcel Nadeau et Fils.

I wondered what their daughters did.

The three drivers were hunched over their plates and when I sat down next to one of them, I could hear short bursts of French and then a few words in English: “That son of a bitch.”

The waitress, the new one named Stacy or Tracy, put a white cup down in front of me and poured coffee without asking or even looking at me. I was looking at her fingernails, which were painted a dark maroon, when a hand touched me lightly on the shoulder.

“Hey, Jackson,” Vern said quietly. “How's it going?”

“Okay, I guess. How 'bout you?”

“Can't complain. You go down there last night?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Bad?”

“Bad enough, I guess. Arthur on the ground and fifty people staring at him.”

“Circus, huh?”

“Yup,” I said.

Stacy or Tracy put a cup down in front of Vern. Her lipstick was dark maroon, too. I opened the plastic container of half-and-half and poured it in my coffee. The spoon had a piece of something on it but I picked it off and stirred the coffee, then took a sip. Vern asked one of the Canadians for the sugar, in French.
Le sucre
. He slid it over and Vern said, “
Merci
.”

Thank you, Mr. Berlitz.

“So what the hell happened?” Vern said to me.

“They don't know. There's supposed to be an autopsy today sometime. They get a cause of death and then they decide where to go from there. That's what Vigue said, anyway.”

“That's it?”

“I don't know. I guess so. They didn't seem too worked up about it. Probably figured Arthur was a little screwy. Probably jumped in. Hard to tell what they're thinking. Going by the book, I guess.”

“Why would Arthur jump in the river?”

“The canal, you mean.”

“Whatever. The water.”

I shrugged. Sipped. The coffee wasn't hot enough.

“Friggin' Keystone cops,” Vern said. “Don't want to leave McDonald's. Get their uniforms dirty.”

He took a sip of coffee and scowled.

“Just 'cause the guy wasn't a friggin' lawyer or a doctor or some bigwig, they don't give a shit.”

“I don't know about that,” I said. “Maybe they just need a little time. I don't know. I always thought Vigue was pretty straight. Not stupid anyway.”

“Ah, they're all the same.”

I didn't say anything.

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

I thought for a second.

“I don't know. I really don't. What do you think? I don't know what he'd be doing down there at all. You know? How would he even get there? Walk?”

“He have his camera?”

“I didn't see one last night.”

“Maybe they ought to drag that section of the canal there, you know? Check with the taxi people, see if he got dropped off someplace around there.”

“In the middle of nowhere?”

“Well, he wouldn't walk down there, half a mile from anything in the friggin' cold. So he had to get a ride somehow.”

“Maybe you ought to head up the investigation,” I said.

“Who'd do sports?”

“I'll rewrite the
Sun
. That's what you do, anyway, isn't it?”

“Beats leaving your desk,” Vern said. “Speaking of which, Jackson. You know we're gonna have to find somebody to do film?”

“Ah, yes, the wake is over. You been in the office yet?”

“Just for a sec. Martin's there. I think he wants a briefing.”

“Oh, Jesus. Just what I need. He didn't say that, did he?”

“No, he was just sort of wandering around. Had his column in his hand, doing the old Martin shuffle.”

“You ought to show more respect for the editor emeritus.”

“Ah, I'm only kidding. We'll all be old and useless someday.”

“You're halfway there already,” I said.

“Watch it. I'll quit and you'll be covering sixth-grade basketball and taking the pictures.”

I shook my head.

“So he's got the latest installment of ‘Yesteryears'?” I said.

“His blast from the past, coming at ya.”

“Better read than any of your meandering drivel.”

Vern nodded solemnly.

“Yessir, we sell out up at the Sunset Home.”

Stacy or Tracy bustled by and shamed me, subliminally, into getting to work. I asked Vern if we still needed prints made for the paper that week. He said he had an entire basketball section to finish and, as far as he knew, all the pictures were still in negatives in Arthur's
darkroom at home. We didn't have anybody who was really good at processing film or making prints.

“You never did any of that in your checkered career as a journalist?” I asked Vern.

“Any of what?”

“Photos. Processing film.”

“Hell, no,” Vern said. “Papers I worked for, we took our film down to Photomat. None of this
New York Times
shit. You big boys were sending people to El Salvador, I was hitching a ride on the JV bus. You're writing one story a week, I'm cranking out four a day.”

“I thought you always worked for weeklies.”

“Weeklies, dailies. All small potatoes.”

“
Pa-day-duhs
, you mean. You sound like a flatlander.”

“I am, Jackson, I am,” Vern said, taking a swallow of coffee. “A flatlander lost in the Maine wilderness.”

“A Mormon among the Apaches.”

“That's right. A missionary out there with the heathen unwashed.”

He smiled.

“He was a weird guy, you know?” Vern said.

“Arthur?”

“Yeah. Don't you think? So friggin' solitary, you know what I'm saying? In two and a half years, I don't think I ever saw him talking to anybody as, I don't know, as an equal. You know? It was always whoever would tolerate him. Cops. Firemen.”

“Us.”

“Yeah,” Vern said.

“People who were getting paid anyway,” I said.

“Right. If it was part of the job. Did you ever have him over to your place for dinner?”

“No. Maybe I should have.”

“And talk about what?” Vern said, holding his cup out for more coffee. “What it was like at the
New York Times?
”

“Maybe he would have liked that.”

“Maybe. But I don't think he could take much head-on conversation. A heart-to-heart over a few beers. Up close and personal.”

“But you know right away,” I said. “You come to a place and you look around and you see that nobody has anything to do with the guy. And these are people who have known him their whole lives.”

“So you figure there's a reason.”

“Didn't you?”

“I guess,” Vern said. “You back off, sort of.”

“Unless you're some kind of social worker.”

“And I'm not,” Vern said. “And you're not either.”

Stacy or Tracy came by with the coffeepot and I shook my head, no.

“Where were you right before you came here? To this paper?” I asked Vern.

“In the dairy country of Wisconsin,” he said. “Working for a weekly. With my nose buried in the want ads in the back of
Editor and Publisher
.”

“Did they have somebody like Arthur at your paper out there?”

“Typesetter named Alice Neilson. Lived with her cat. Had pictures of the old thing all over her desk. She could set type like a son of a bitch, though. What about New York?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “New York is full of them. The
Times
, too.”

“All the lonely people,” Vern half-sang.

“You got it,” I said.

Vern left, walking up the block to LaVerdiere's drugstore to get the
Boston Globe
, his daily ritual. I let Stacy or Tracy give me a fresh cup of coffee and sat and felt a little guilty about Arthur—that I didn't feel anything that resembled grief.

I felt bad, but it wasn't grief. It was just feeling bad, sort of lousy, as if something had gone wrong. A big mistake in a story. The car breaking down. A guy you know drowns.

Hey, what can you do?

I'd known Arthur since I'd come to town, what, seven months ago. I'd seen him every day—every day I'd been at the paper anyway. He'd come into the office in his thrift-store plaid pants with his hair all greasy and his lenses and camera bodies all clacking together in the Army surplus ammo pouch he used for a camera bag. If I was on the phone, he'd wait, lurking out front in the big room, checking the basket for the prints we'd already published. He'd wipe the grease-pencil marks off them and, if I said it was okay, he'd sell the pictures to the mothers of the basketball players, the fire department, the Ladies' Aid, the officers of the Grange. When I'd come to the paper, the new guy from New York, he'd asked me if it was okay if he kept doing it and I'd said, Sure, as long as it wasn't something we needed for the files.

Arthur had always asked if things were all right. He'd walk in quietly, the way he did, almost infiltrating the office like a terrorist or something, and suddenly there'd be a print on my desk and Arthur standing there, waiting for me to say the picture was fine or good or even great, which his pictures never were. They were adequate for a small weekly. Grainy sometimes. Almost always formula. But sometimes he got lucky, and when I told him I really liked a photo he'd wag like a puppy and ask me if I really thought so, and I'd say I did, turned. Saw teeth. Smelled gum and cigarette.
and he'd wag some more, licking up every last morsel of approval and then lapping the empty plate until it shone.

It made my skin crawl.

It was sad, this life of groveling, and now Arthur's death had been sad, too. Floating in the ice water in the canal, yanked out with a hook in front of all his acquaintances but not a single friend.

No, this wasn't grief, but in Androscoggin there wouldn't be much grieving from anybody. Maybe a few somber faces, but they'd be outnumbered by the people who were glad to have something happen, something to break up the monotony of the long winter and shift work.

I looked around the restaurant. Four old ladies from the River View up the street. More Canadian truckers. A high school kid eating toast and reading the
Lewiston Sun
sports page. Nobody looked too shook-up.

“Hey,” somebody said to my left.

I turned. Saw teeth. Smelled gum and cigarette.

“What happened to your man there? Arthur?” the guy said. “What, was he screwing around, somebody offed him or what?”

He was a union guy from the mill. Bobby something. The last name didn't come to me.

“Where'd you hear that?” I said.

He grinned. Pushed back his baseball cap that said
BUILT FORD TOUGH
in white letters.

“I'm like you,” he said. “I got my sources. Got to. Never find out anything in the paper, right?”

He tapped me on the shoulder. I told him I didn't know much yet, the cops still investigating, blah, blah, blah. He acted like I wasn't
telling him the whole story and left when somebody he knew better walked in.

But I was telling him the whole story. A guy had died, somebody who worked for the paper, and what I knew about it would make a two-inch brief. An AP person from Portland who got stuck with the late police check would know as much just from calling the state police dispatcher in Augusta or the Androscoggin Sheriff's Department.

I wondered what had been in the
Sun
. Probably a couple of grafs, inserted on the local page or maybe the jump. There was a paper in pieces at the end of the counter. I walked down and got it and looked through it until I found the brief on the local section front.

It was boilerplate. What the
Times
did when somebody without notoriety or celebrity was killed. The drug runner from the Dominican Republic. The kid from the projects in Brooklyn. The Russian lady from Brighton Beach. In New York, you couldn't keep up. You couldn't keep track. After a while, you barely could care, but in Androscoggin, we didn't have that excuse.

I left the restaurant and, in no hurry, walked down Main Street toward the office.

A couple of old ladies from the senior center smiled and nodded as they passed. Outside Perry's Variety, David Mattson from the school board waved his folded
Sun
and jumped into his double-parked Toyota pickup. One of the secretaries from the municipal building, a very nice grandmother named Toni, swished out of Alfond's Bakery with a bag of something and coffees in a tray and said “Hi” over her shoulder.

I said “Good morning” back and kept walking. I walked the length of the street, all two blocks of it, and turned around at the empty Mobil station on the corner. From there, I crossed the street and headed back toward the
Review
office, looking up at the false fronts of the downtown buildings, thinking, for the thousandth time, that they were like the facades on buildings in the Old West. The names of the original owners were inscribed in granite and cement at the top of each building: Carpenter, Hyde, Bushnell, Burr. The names of the actual builders, the Italian, Scottish, Irish, and, as a result of one of those quirks of immigration, Lithuanian laborers who shoveled and laid brick and nailed down floors, were not inscribed anywhere. I often had thought that this was an injustice, and I thought so again as I walked along, knowing that what I really didn't want to do was run the gauntlet at the office.