The Midcoast, page 10
“Oh,” Ed said, “big deal.”
“It is a big deal. We don’t have the money for another kid. Don’t have the space. Look at our house—it’s a Goddamn tuna can.”
Ed looked around the bathroom.
“I didn’t mean ‘look at our house’ literally,” she said.
“No, I know, but I hear ya,” he said. “I can fix it.”
“Fix what?”
“The trailer.”
“You can’t fix the trailer,” she said. “The problem is that it is a trailer.”
“So we’ll get a real house.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“So I’m just supposed to trust you?”
He thought about that for a second, then went back to drying himself with the towel.
“Yuh,” he said.
“Yuh?”
“I’m gonna make it work.”
But she wasn’t letting him off that easy. She was doing her best to frown, to remain skeptical.
“What?” he said, throwing his towel on a hook, watching it hold, then not hold, then slide off the hook and onto the floor. “I got this.”
And, somehow, he did. Two months later, after a few more big hauls, the family moved out of the trailer and into a two-story, three-bedroom house in Bremen—one village north of the Pound, two miles closer to Damariscotta.
* * *
—
The details of that day on North Haven have been pieced together with the help of a bank investigator (let’s call him Nate) who, several years ago, was looking into the unnatural death of his younger brother, reading police files and interviewing locals, when he stumbled upon records of the burglary. At first, the case didn’t stand out. It was only one of many that Nate looked at briefly before dismissing. He couldn’t see any connection between the break-in at the big cape and the death of his brother. He had died of a drug overdose, and Nate was only going through the motions of a real investigation because his parents had become fixated upon finding “the evildoers” who had sown the seeds of their son’s demise. They wanted to know who was bringing all those pills to the region, they said, so that they might spare the lives of other sons and daughters. This was how they planned to grieve. Nate never expected to find anything that the police hadn’t already found, but, in deference to his parents’ wishes, he took a few days off from his job in Delaware, made the trip up to the Midcoast, and began looking into the matter. If nothing else, his parents seemed pleased to have him home.
What we discovered last summer, when everything came to light, was that the drugs were finding their way to the coast—and to northern New England, even some parts of Connecticut and New York—on boats piloted by the Thatches and their crew. This was the enterprise they moved on to once Ed decided that the income derived from looting houses was not enough. The papers have depicted Chuck as the muscle, Ben as the brains, and Ed as the glue that held everyone together, and while that’s all true, basically, it also undersells how important Ed’s vision and ambition were to the operation. It was Ed who convinced himself that his family needed more than it had, and who pushed the gang into deeper and deeper waters after a half decade of successful, nonviolent, relatively harmless larceny up and down the coast.
Recently I read an article in the Press Herald reporting that after years of steady decline, drug use amongst young Mainers was once again on the rise. According to this study, nearly a quarter of high school students said they had been sold, offered, or given an illegal drug on school property over the past year. I hope all we’re talking about is a little pot. But I know there’s plenty of meth in Maine, and for a while, there seemed to be an abundance of bath salts, too. These two substances weren’t moved by the Thatches (not, I presume, because they had any moral clause that prevented them from running this type of contraband in from Canada, but rather because it could be so easily manufactured closer to home, rendering the Thatches’ services unnecessary). At first, Ed and his crew brought only marijuana around the border. Then they discovered a hankering for khat, the loose leaves chewed for cannabis-like effect favored by the Somali immigrants who had settled in Lewiston, of all places, as part of a government immigration strategy. Then the Thatches started bringing in cocaine, ecstasy, and, at the end, heroin. This last substance has been blighting all our state’s small cities and villages for at least a decade now. Earlier I alluded to that other side of Maine, the one that Ed came from, the one that I did not come from, and at first it was easy for some of us to assume that this was the only part of the state adversely affected by opioids—but of course that wasn’t true.
Last month the Bangor Daily News published an obituary written by a man who had been married to a woman who had been raised in relative privilege near Augusta. Her mother was a state legislator. The obituary detailed the woman’s problems, starting in high school (private, for what it’s worth) when she first started to drink. It wasn’t long before she was showing signs of addiction. At various points, she had been convicted of shoplifting and soliciting. She had spent four years trying to get sober, in and out of methadone clinics. She lived with her cat, Bullwinkle, and loved to share videos of the big fella via social media. Her favorite food was chocolate-chip-cookie dough. She had green eyes and liked to change the color of her hair. Her body was found behind a parking garage by a seven-year-old girl.
I doubt this obituary, the details of the woman’s life, would have concerned the Thatches—or, for that matter, any of the people they did business with. They saw addicts as a demographic. As a market to be tapped. Customers wanted what they sold. So they sold it. Most of it went through Lewiston. This was always the less sophisticated end of the supply chain, run by a man they called Lew, short for Lewiston, out of the back of a liquor store. The Thatches didn’t ask questions about where the product was sold, but they did have one rule: None of it was ever supposed to make it back home to Lincoln County.
With some luck, Nate the bank investigator eventually connected the dots between the North Haven break-in and his brother’s death, but he never went to the police, so after his name surfaced during my own research, once I’d tracked him down with the help of my dad’s old patient and recorded his story, I asked him one last question, why he’d kept his findings to himself. When he told me that he thought the police might consider his evidence too flimsy, I said nothing but didn’t fully believe him, something about his overly confidential tone. Nate might have picked up on my skepticism, though, because he quickly noted that he was also hesitant because he had a family to get back to in Delaware, and the time spent in Maine had already put enough stress on his marriage. There was a pause on the line—the mention of family seemed to stir something—and then he reminded me of the only condition of our interview, that I would change his name if my book ever went to print.
* * *
—
By that point, I’d decided that I really was writing a book. At first it had felt like just the easiest way to explain what I was doing—to others and to myself—because otherwise all that time in the former pantry staring at maps, reading articles, constructing detailed timelines and tacking them to the wall might have been cause for concern. But also, the timelines weren’t entirely devoted to the Thatches; one of them in fact detailed events from my own life. I posted it right above the lamp so that I could keep track of whatever I was doing whenever the Thatches were doing whatever they were doing, making some big move hundreds or thousands of miles away from wherever I was at the time. It shouldn’t be this hard to keep track of your own life, I know, but I’ve never been good with dates, and I was so slow to accomplish anything, at least in comparison to the Thatches, the divergences would seem almost too unbelievable if I didn’t have them all jotted down on paper. While I was waiting tables in LA and living without health insurance and getting drunk on Mondays, Ed and Steph were moving into the house in Bremen and bringing their second child into the world, a daughter they named Allie. And while Maeve and I were settling into Boston, still using birth control, Allie was already seven years old, and EJ was already thirteen years old. Maeve and I were struggling to figure out how to leave the student life behind and become adults—and maybe we were a little delayed in that respect, or just cautious in the way most of our peers have been slow to embrace the big institutions of marriage and parenthood—while Ed and Steph were busy hustling their daughter to elementary school, their son to middle school, neither parent more than a step or two ahead of their children on the same developmental curve. I can’t imagine. It’d be like trying to write a guidebook to a city you’ve only just arrived at for the very first time.
6
EJ was about to grab his bike and ride to Chuck’s apartment above Wade and Tracey’s garage when his dad turned from the couch and said, “Your mom reminded you about drugs night?”
“What?” EJ said. He was tangled in his hoodie, the neck over his head, arms in a knot.
“Drugs night,” Ed said.
As part of the county’s D.A.R.E. program, EJ and his peers were supposed to perform skits about substance abuse—tonight, this was true—but EJ wasn’t sure how his dad had found out about it or why he was bringing it up now. Usually EJ rode his bike to Chuck’s, spent the night, saw his folks the next day, no big deal. Everyone seemed to appreciate the extra space. Because they needed it! They’d moved to Bremen in order to give everyone their own rooms, but then EJ’s mom had converted one of these rooms into a home office, which she also used for doing exercises with a big plastic ball and writing open letters about the state of Damariscotta’s Main Street to The Lincoln County News, so EJ had to bunk with Allie, making him the only kid he’d ever heard of with a little sister for a roommate, with wrestling figurines living in a dollhouse and volcanic geodes bookending a series of chapter books about young feminists.
“D.A.R.E.’s canceled,” EJ said.
His dad had been sitting with boots on brown velour ottoman, watching a swarm of hockey players chase a puck across the screen, but now he sat up a little straighter. “That’s not what your mom said.”
“Well, it should be canceled,” EJ said. “It’s the most hypocritical night of the year. All it does is tell you which drugs make you feel this way, which drugs make you feel that way. It’s like, Hey, thanks, now I know what kind of high I want. Plus, half the crowd will be buzzed, and Chief Hunt’s an alcoholic.”
“Not anymore she ain’t.”
“She’s still an alcoholic,” Steph said, coming down the stairs from her office. “She just stopped drinking.”
“Either way,” Ed said, “we’re going.” He stood from the couch.
“We?” EJ said.
“The whole family. Put your sweatshirt on.”
“I’m trying.”
“Allie, get your coat!” Ed yelled.
“This is so random,” EJ said.
“This is not random,” Ed said. “Not random at all.”
So then EJ was staring out the back window of his mother’s car, the inside of the window coated in cold dew. He dragged his fingers down the glass, making a squeaking, rubbing sound, leaving marks like the kind you might find on a prison wall. It was random, what his father was doing, but that’s just how Ed was, like a zombie you think is dead but who keeps reanimating and trying to attack you with hugs, noogies, and presents, a video game here, a digital watch there. EJ didn’t need presents. Presents were okay, actually. He didn’t hate the presents. It’s just that, according to lore, his family was poor. Until it wasn’t. Until it was again. His dad liked to talk about working hard, and yet he never seemed to actually work all that hard, and yet he had worked hard enough—apparently—to purchase the Lobster Pound from EJ’s grandpa, the Schooner from EJ’s other grandpa, three lobster boats from various retired fishermen, and, as of this fall, several apartments above the post office in Damariscotta. Why did the family need apartments? They didn’t need apartments. They already owned a house. What they ought to have bought was a bigger house, or at least a storage unit so they could clean out all the old junk from the garage—lobster gear, flowerpots, tennis rackets—and convert it into a more acceptable living situation for their teenage son.
He clawed at the window again.
“EJ, that’s enough,” his mom said. “You’re gonna drive us all crazy.”
“I feel sick,” Allie said.
“That’s because you’re reading in the car,” EJ said.
“I like reading in the car.”
EJ glanced over at the book, a novel about a girl who uses math to solve disputes between classmates, to see if it was the same book she’d been reading yesterday. It wasn’t.
“Mom,” EJ said. “We should get Allie an iPod.”
“A what?”
“An iPod. So she can listen to books in the car.”
The car went silent.
“That’s actually a very good idea,” his mom said.
“You could get it for her as a birthday present or something.”
“Yuh,” his dad said. “We’ll do that.”
When EJ looked at his sister again, she was smiling back at him. Two of her teeth were missing. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“I just don’t want you to puke on me,” EJ said, “that’s all.”
They arrived at school late. Parents and siblings had already assembled in the ale-colored light of the gymnasium, dressed in thick layers of fleece, flannel-lined jeans, rubber-soled boots. Prevailing wisdom said it hadn’t snowed yet because Maine was too cold this winter, the air too raw to crystallize. EJ stood hidden behind the edge of the curtain, feeling the first tremors of serious anxiety. Chief Hunt, who ran the county Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, was in the back of the gym, and Mr. Matt, the school counselor, directed the skits from the far side of the stage, nodding encouragement, mouthing the lines delivered by his students, arms crossed but with one hand in the air, pointing at his chin. He had a background in theater. Seventh-graders stood before the audience, looking around, looking lost. Mr. Matt whispered, “Action.” The kids began to act like drug dealers, like students who wanted to get high, like their future selves returning to reveal how much hair had fallen out, how many troubles had befallen their lives.
EJ’s group was next. He felt panicky. It was not only that he had stage fright. He didn’t have stage fright. Only a little. The larger issue was that he hadn’t learned his lines because he didn’t think his parents would make him come tonight. That wasn’t quite true. He had tried to learn his lines, over and over, in the shower, in his head, singing them aloud—all the ways Mr. Matt had taught the students—but the words wouldn’t stick. If EJ stepped out there, he would have nothing to say. He would stand in the lights and everyone would stare at him until they started to laugh and laugh and laugh. His father would pull his hat down over his face. His mother would do that thing where she slowly squeezed the bridge of her nose with her entire hand, like she was trying to remove her face. And so—to spare his family—EJ left the gymnasium and walked down the empty hallway under the flickering lights and past the bulletin boards, out the front door, into the parking lot.
* * *
—
The night air was frigid, the birches on the far side of the parking lot pale and knobby. They rubbed against each other like toneless wind chimes. Then the wind strayed off toward the river and left the lot to the kind of quiet you were only supposed to hear in outer space. From the rows of parked cars behind EJ a dog barked, the bark muffled. EJ turned. He saw Chief Hunt’s K-9 cruiser and, in the backseat, a German shepherd, nose pressed wetly against the window. EJ, thinking the dog looked like it wanted out, found a large rock at the edge of the parking lot, told the dog to back away, and started smashing out the window. It didn’t fully shatter upon the first blow, so EJ had to hit the glass three or four more times. The dog barked, then cowered, then barked between strikes. When all the glass was gone, the dog jumped through the window, as if this were something he and EJ had been planning all along.
EJ didn’t know what else they were planning, so he walked toward the soccer field, frost twinkling into nothing as it fled from the ambient light of the school. The field was uneven and hard. Eventually EJ found a stick. He and the dog played fetch. He fully expected to be caught. He told himself not to care. He wished it were possible to commit this kind of crime and return everything to its rightful place afterward, glue the shards of glass to their window frame, put the dog back where it belonged. EJ threw the stick. The dog chased after it, disappearing into the darkness, then came back with the stick in his mouth. In the cold night, EJ awaited his fate. He wouldn’t mind if it showed up soon. Then it did show up, wearing a brown sheriff’s uniform and a wide-brimmed hat.
“Are. You. Shitting. Me,” Chief Hunt said, trying to sound like she wasn’t winded. She shined a Maglite on EJ’s face, so he visored his eyes with a flat hand. All he could see was the outline of the hat, her wide shoulders.
* * *
—
I should maybe point out that Chief Hunt was no longer really the chief of police in Damariscotta (or anywhere else) and hadn’t been since the late
In a matter of weeks, Hunt had resigned that post and taken a sideways demotion to sergeant in the county sheriff’s office. They assigned her to the K-9 unit and presented her with the leash to a Belgian shepherd named Cliff. It was mandated that she attend AA meetings, too. Everyone knew the whole story, but most people with Damariscotta roots still called her “Chief” out of habit. EJ didn’t know her as anything else. He watched her in the school’s administrative office as it was suggested—not by her, by the principal—that EJ might spend two days by her side, learning to respect authority. This would be his penance for skipping out on the skit.
