The Midcoast, page 20
Ed’s phone began to vibrate. He pulled it from his pocket and checked the screen. Steph. Most likely calling to ask him how he expected her to get to the hotel. Ed silenced the call, but by the time he looked up again, the Ranger was gone and so was Dougie’s friend.
* * *
—
Ed and Steph had reserved a room at the Hilton Garden Inn on the Auburn side of the river, and that night they went to dinner at Marché, a restaurant Steph chose based on its mostly positive Yelp reviews. I asked Steph at some point how she and Ed could continue to eat out so frequently even after Ed stopped receiving an income from stolen goods and banned substances, but Steph said, “Oh, come on, Andrew,” like I was failing to see the bigger picture, before ticking off their various legitimate revenue sources and reminding me of the robust profit margin to be made on every one of them. “And also,” she said, “this is Lewiston we’re talking about. I know Marché sounds fancy, but it’s not. We weren’t spending that much money.”
Steph ordered two glasses of chardonnay that night, and Ed drank three stouts and then a rum-and-Coke to wake himself up. After dinner, back in the hotel, Steph read in bed—a book about marketing—until she fell asleep sitting up. Once she did, Ed went to the window and peered behind the drapes, across the river toward Lewiston. It wasn’t all that late, but the town looked lifeless from his second-floor vantage point. The only movement Ed could see came in the form of the upriver rapids tumbling off the rocks and into the flatter part of the waterway, heading calmly toward the bridge, sliding past the graffiti on the factory walls. Some of the textile mills had been converted into office space but all the windows had gone dark by now, everything tinted blue by the riverside security lights.
Time to go. He dropped the drapes, crossed the hotel room, shut off Steph’s lamp, and then he was in the lobby, stepping through the sliding glass doors, entering the clear black night just as a siren flared in the distance and slowly wound away. He climbed into the Silverado. The radio came on, a George Strait song, volume low. Ed put the truck in gear, and he was about to back out of the lot and go looking for Dougie Page when he remembered the other thing he had planned to do—check in with Allie. So he stopped, pulled out his phone, texted, Who are you doing, and hit send just as he recognized the typo. So he tried again: HOW are you doing?
He waited to see if she might respond right away, but she didn’t, so he put the phone in a cup holder and drove out into the city.
There weren’t many headlights in the streets that night, the buildings dark and vacant. Ed went along College Street toward Bates until he arrived at the liquor store, the destination he had had in mind all along. He parked in front of the same house he had found before, the one with the overgrown yard and newspapers on the porch. He shut off his lights, waited, and observed, listening to the country station to kill the time, farting intermittently, watching as the customers, some of them students but most of them local derelicts, entered and exited.
After thirty minutes, Ed saw the man he had seen earlier—Dougie Page’s contact—appear in the alley. He was shuffling along the far sidewalk, opening the door to an Acura with tinted windows and chrome wheels. Ed had always hated Acuras, Steph told me at some point, recounting the story Ed had given her sometime after the visit to Lewiston. “He called them Dumb Shit Cars.”
I asked her why.
“Because their drivers were always dumb shits.”
The sedan’s headlamps came on, and then it pulled into the street. Ed had slipped out of the hotel to find Dougie, not this guy, but Dougie’s Ranger was nowhere in sight, and it was possible that the one would lead Ed to the other, so, flipping on his own lights, Ed guided the Silverado away from the curb and tailed the sedan at a distance. They went for several blocks toward campus, and then Ed watched as the Acura stopped in front of a residential building, red Budweiser sign buzzing on the third floor, no lights on the second floor, the blue wash of a television swimming between the windows on the first floor. The man walked onto the porch, holding up his beltless pants as he climbed the steps, then vanished inside. A few minutes later, he reemerged and went back to his car.
Ed followed in his truck while the man—Dumb Shit, as Ed was now thinking of him—drove for several more blocks before parking in front of another house, this one almost indistinguishable from the first. Ed rolled down his window and lowered the volume on the radio even further. Again the man went inside for several minutes. Ed looked down the street. The night remained cloudless, the ambient city glow turning the rooftops white but ceding jurisdiction, at street level, to the tall flickering lamps. When the man came out of the house, he got back in his car and Ed put the truck in drive, following him at a distance. As Ed drove and observed the man making his drops, two things must have occurred to him: First, it was possible that whatever Dumb Shit was dealing had come in on Thatch boats. Lewiston might have had a surplus. And if this were the case, Ed should put a stop to it; this is what Steph had demanded of him, after all. But Ed was also struck, again, by how close they were to campus, how close they were to his daughter, and if Allie did end up enrolling at Bates, he wanted to make sure that all the lowlifes—especially those who he had once done business with—had been purged from the region.
The Acura made two more stops, and on the third stop, while the man was still inside, Ed popped open his glove compartment, dug around until he found his black ski mask, and exited the Silverado. He crossed the street and reached the sidewalk just as the man was coming down the stairs. As Ed approached, he pulled the ski mask down over his face, unhooked his belt buckle, and removed the belt from his jeans. The man never saw him coming. Ed grabbed him by the jacket and shoved him against the Acura, pinning him against the window.
“Hey, Dumb Shit,” Ed said.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” the man said, attempting—but failing—to free himself from Ed’s grip. Ed raised the belt and smacked the man on the side of the head with the buckle.
“What the fuck?”
Ed hit him again.
“You gotta stop,” Ed said, through the mask.
“Stop what? You’re hitting me.” The man struggled to break free again, but he couldn’t. Ed swung the buckle and it glanced off the man’s ear and put a crack in the window of the Acura.
“You gotta stop what you’re doing,” Ed said.
“The fuck does that mean?”
“Take a guess.”
“You don’t know shit about what I’m doing.”
“Yuh,” Ed said, “I do.” He moved his free hand to the man’s clavicle and dug his thumb deep beneath the muscles, digging toward bone. “I know all about it,” he said. “And you gotta stop. Let everyone you work with know they gotta stop, too.”
“Fuck you,” the man wheezed.
Ed squeezed harder. “And you know what else?” he said. “You should get a belt.”
“Fuck you!”
Ed swung the buckle at the man, again and again. “Belts,” he said, “are very,” between blows, “frickin handy.”
Dumb Shit slumped, his back sliding down the window of the car, his arms overhead. “Just fucking stop already!” he said.
“Yuh,” Ed said. “I’ll stop if you stop.” The man was groaning, clutching at his ribs. “You’re gonna get in your car and drive away now. You’re gonna flush that shit down the toilet or toss it in the river—whatever you gotta do to get rid of it. You got me?”
The man tried to swing at Ed’s face, but Ed blocked him, then hit him with the belt buckle three more times.
“I’m gonna ask you again,” Ed said. “Do you. Got me?”
This time the man didn’t respond.
“That a yes?” Ed asked.
The man couldn’t bring himself to utter anything else, but Ed felt he had been understood.
“Good,” Ed said. “Now get in the car.”
He released his hold on the jacket and waited until the man started moving, until he opened his door and slid gingerly behind the wheel. After a moment, the car turned on and pulled away from the curb. Ed watched him go, then hustled across the street to his Silverado. He was breathing hard now. He took off his ski mask, threw it in the backseat, and turned on the truck, putting his blinker on, then speeding until he caught the taillights of the Acura. It turned left, then right. Ed did, too. It accelerated and decelerated. The driver seemed to know that Ed was behind him, seemed to be trying to lose him.
“Go home, ya dumb shit,” Ed said out loud, knowing the man couldn’t hear him, realizing it probably wouldn’t have mattered even if he could. The man wasn’t going home. He was circling the same neighborhood, lapping the same blocks, driving more and more slowly. And then, after a meandering chase that brought them right back to where they started, the Acura stopped. Ed hit the brakes, too, his fender nearly bumping the smaller vehicle’s taillights.
“What are you doing?” Ed said to his windshield. “Don’t do this.”
The driver’s side of the Acura opened, and the man came back toward Ed’s truck, his movements halting, glancing over his shoulder, reaching behind him and pulling something from his waistband. A black pistol, a nine-millimeter. Ed stayed frozen, staring straight ahead. Dumb Shit tapped the muzzle of the gun against Ed’s window. Ed put his hands up but didn’t say anything. After a long moment, the man’s breath rising like smoke, he started nodding, as if he had made himself clear. Ed saw this out of the corner of his eye. Before the man turned away, he dragged his gun across Ed’s door, from high to low. Ed couldn’t see it, but he could hear the metal scraping across metal. Then the man went back to his car, climbed in, and started to drive away.
Now, as Ed watched the sedan turn left onto a one-way street, he felt angry. He had circled this neighborhood several times by this point, once on foot, then in his truck, and he had become familiar enough with the layout. Some of the streets were dead ends. Some went in a loop. Where the Acura had gone, there was only one way out. Ed put his truck in reverse, then turned left on a parallel street, ignoring the red-and-white DO NOT ENTER sign. He turned a corner, drove past a sloped driveway, then backed into it, all the way to the garage. He shut his lights off, his fists wrapped around the wheel, squeezing hard. About twenty yards separated the grille of his truck from the street. The driveway was protected from view by a row of scraggly hedges and a chain-link fence with, on the driveway side, a BEWARE OF DOG notice clipped to the wire. This street was still and dark, all the residents asleep for the night. Ed’s phone vibrated and he looked down to find a message from Allie: Haha, not doing anyone. Just having good clean fun ;) Get some sleep, old man. See ya tomorrow! xoxoxo. As he was reading the text, headlights turned onto the street, and Ed put the phone away. Here came Dumb Shit. The Acura’s lights swept against a telephone pole just across from the driveway. Ed waited until the lights came strobing through the gaps in the bushes, and then he hit the gas. The Silverado’s tires spun against the asphalt, then caught. He accelerated down the driveway just as the sedan emerged from behind the hedge—but from Ed’s angle the motion looked reversed, as though the passenger door of the Acura were speeding toward him. In the middle of the street his front fender slammed into the side of the sedan and plowed it into the telephone pole behind it. The Acura’s car alarm went off as Ed’s airbag exploded in his face, pounding him in the forehead.
After a brief moment of darkness, Ed blinked. Something blocked his vision. Clung to his face. He couldn’t see. He beat at the thing in front of him—the airbag, that was it—until it began to deflate. He could see the front of his truck now—and a car. Almost directly beneath him. He saw blood at the shaved hairline of the driver, and he saw the driver spit out more blood. Ed put his truck in reverse and backed up. His head felt full of a heavy, sloshing liquid, but he was pretty sure his best option was to drive away. And as he brought the truck down the street and turned on his headlights, he could see where he was going but couldn’t remember where the road came from or where it led. He checked the rearview mirror and saw nothing. The car alarm continued to blast, honking and whining but receding as the truck left it behind. A piece of Ed’s truck was dragging along the pavement, but otherwise the vehicle drove fine, and he traveled a mile in the direction of the river before pulling over to inspect the damage.
When he stepped down from the truck, he found that the fender had detached at the left corner. The Chevy crest had fallen off the bashed-in grille. The driver’s-side blinker was smashed out. There was a long gouge in the door. Otherwise the truck had survived. Ed lifted the droopy side of the fender and jammed it back in place. It bowed unnaturally but wouldn’t rub on the asphalt any longer. Ed stared at his truck, trying to remember how he had broken the fender. He was in Lewiston, he knew that much. He climbed back inside and sat with the deflated airbag in his lap. It wouldn’t stay in its compartment when he tried to stuff it back in place, punching it like a sleeping bag, so he pulled his jackknife from the center console and slashed at the bag until it ripped free. Mounted on the dashboard was a GPS system, and when Ed scrolled through all the Recent Destinations, he found the Hilton Garden Inn, which, he decided, must be where he was staying.
* * *
—
Ed never went up to his hotel room that night. Instead he remained in the lobby, sitting in one of the vertically striped, high-backed chairs, until the sun edged its way through the blinds and Chip Smith came downstairs. Chip said good morning to Ed and asked if he could take the seat across from him. They drank complimentary coffee as Chip read the Sunday Globe. Ed stared straight ahead. After several minutes, Chip put the newspaper down and asked if Ed was feeling all right.
“Oh sure,” Ed said.
“How’d you sleep?”
“Didn’t really.”
“Me neither,” Chip said. “I never sleep well in hotels.”
“Yuh.”
“Especially when I’m worried about my daughter.”
“You said it.”
Chip folded the paper in his lap. “Now, your family owns the Thatch Lobster Pound?” he asked Ed. “Do I have that right?”
“Yuh,” Ed said. “I own it.”
“And you’re a lobsterman by trade?”
“Yuh, pretty much.”
The conversation continued along these lines until eventually Ed began to speak more freely, almost drunkenly (I know how this can go; I once took a shot to the head during a lacrosse game against Syracuse and babbled on and on to my teammates during the bus ride home, knowing full well that I should stop talking but not knowing how to put an end to it). In response to Chip’s increasingly specific questions, Ed told him exactly how the lobster traps worked, how the cages were a marvel of sustainability (I presume this was Chip’s phrase in the retelling, not Ed’s), catching the older, legal lobsters while nourishing all the younger lobsters. Most small creatures, according to Ed (according to Chip), could enter the trap, eat bait, and exit without getting hooked by the netting. He and Chip went on discussing aquaculture until Steph came downstairs and Ed said goodbye to his new friend and went out to the truck with his wife.
“Great guy,” Ed said to Steph.
But instead of responding, Steph stopped short. They had arrived at the Silverado, and she was now confronted with the broken grille. By this point, Ed’s wits were beginning to return, and he felt exhausted from a sleepless night but less disoriented than he had been immediately post–airbag deployment.
“What the hell,” Steph said.
Ed stared at the truck. He did remember an accident. He remembered following Dumb Shit but couldn’t connect the event with the man. The day was breaking bright and cloudy, and Lewiston across the river presented a rising slope of white light and silver shadows.
“Ed,” Steph said. “Would you like to tell me what happened?”
“Just went for a drive,” he said.
“And then what?”
“And then I hit a car.”
“Which car?”
“Just some car. Don’t worry about it. It’s all over.”
He had his keys out, ready to open the driver’s-side door.
“Ed, stop,” Steph said. She walked to him. She lowered his bearded chin and looked into his eyes. “You’re all dilated,” she said. “I think you’re concussed.”
“Nah,” he said, reaching for the door handle.
“You’re not driving,” Steph said. Her hand was out, palm up.
Ed shrugged and gave Steph his keys, and then she pointed at the passenger seat, so he crossed to the other side of the vehicle and climbed inside.
As they drove toward Bates, Ed took off his sweatshirt and balled it between window and headrest.
“You can’t fall asleep,” Steph said. “It’s bad to fall asleep if you’ve got a concussion.”
When Ed opened his left eye, Steph was glancing over at him, frowning. “Yuh,” he said, but then his lids started to close again and he felt himself nodding off as the truck headed over the bridge, toward Bates. Then the truck was stopping and Steph was gone, and a few minutes later both Steph and Allie were back in the truck, Steph to his left, Allie behind him. Some kind of conversation must have taken place outside the cab because Allie seemed to know already that Ed was in a strange place. “Dad, are you okay?” she asked him.
