The Midcoast, page 26
EJ climbed into the back of the Lincoln and worked his large body to the middle of the bench, sliding his hamstrings across the leather upholstery, his knees pressing against the seat backs. There were two men up front. The man on the right, the one who always sat on the right, wore oval, thin-framed glasses. This was Lew. The driver EJ had never seen before, but the drivers were always different. This one had dark hair that sprang off his head in corky nubs, and he wore a brown sweatshirt with a gold, sequin-lined hood. Puerto Rican or Dominican, EJ guessed. The breeze outside tussled the leaves behind the railroad station, but the air in the car remained stuffy and stagnant, steeped in cigarettes and cowboy cologne, Lew’s scent like the open back door of a midmorning dive bar.
Lew turned, gave EJ a nod, and faced forward again. Then he asked about the Canadians.
“We’re working on it,” EJ said. Other than the jacket, he wore a flannel shirt, blue jeans, work boots. He kept his fists in the pockets of his coat, right hand on his service weapon, although he didn’t anticipate having to use it. He gazed through the window at the sun reflecting off the hood of his cruiser, waxed earlier that morning. He was only allowed to meet with Lewiston on his days off. His workdays were supposed to look like any other cop’s, preserve the routine. This was his father’s rule. Now everything was changing, though, had changed already, and after so many years working with his dad and his uncle, taking so much pride in Ed’s confidence—ever since that snowy evening in the garage—EJ sometimes struggled to imagine what he might do next. The only way he could think to spend the free hours was by going to the Lincoln gym twice a day. But there were only so many dumbbells to lift, only so many times he could pull his chin up to a bar. Given a choice, he would have said no to dealing with Lew ever again, but it wasn’t up to him, and actually he’d been looking forward to the meeting, to the purpose it gave his day.
“We need product,” Lew said.
“I hear you.”
“Has to happen. You can’t just back out and let everything fall to shit. That’s not how it works.”
EJ looked around the car as Lew went on about the ill fate that had befallen his business, covering all the territory that had already been covered, mounting an argument that, in essence, balanced upon the honestly very cruel unfairness of it all. EJ nodded and said Uh-huh as Lew spoke, making gestures of sympathy without capitulation. There were rosary beads hanging from the rearview, a wooden cross dangling from the beads, and something in one of the cup holders—a plastic crest, the kind you might find on the grille of a Chevrolet, the shape of an italicized plus sign.
“Ask him about demand,” Lew said to EJ.
“I’m sorry?”
“Ask him.” Lew nodded at the driver. “About demand. You know, supply and demand? Ask him about it.”
EJ asked the driver how demand was.
“Same as fucking ever,” the driver whispered. EJ wasn’t especially interested in the answer but found himself leaning forward to hear the driver’s voice. It had a harsh quality, almost a hiss. “Except we got nothing to sell.”
“Why are you whispering?” EJ asked.
“He crushed his vocal cords in a car accident,” Lew said.
“Not an accident,” the driver said. His eyes flashed upward, meeting EJ’s in the rearview. He looked angry; he would have been yelling if he could, but the effort had an inverse effect on the whisper, lowering it further. “Fucker rammed me on purpose.”
“His throat hit the steering wheel,” Lew said.
“That can mess with your speech?” EJ asked.
“Sounds like it,” Lew said, finding the impediment amusing, apparently. He lit a cigarette and rolled the window down just enough to ash through the crack.
“Anyway,” EJ said, “about your boats.”
“Our empty boats.”
“Can’t help you there. But I’m supposed to tell you to paint them gray.”
“Gray,” Lew said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, they’re not gray. They’re white. Who gives a fuck the color.”
“I don’t know, makes them blend in with the weather, I guess,” EJ said. “That’s Today’s Hot Tip. Listen, I feel like we’re just talking in circles at this point. You know we have to back away for a while. We know you want to take over the import. That’s fine. We support that. But while you were lying low, the Canadians found other distributors to work with. We’re trying to help you change that. We are. But for now, we’re stuck. And you’re stuck because you don’t want our heat. So let’s just call it what it is and know that we’re all working toward the same goal here.”
Lew rolled down his window all the way. He hacked and spit, then tossed his cigarette outside and rolled the window back up. “This is a waste of time,” he said.
“You’re the one who wanted to meet,” EJ said.
“You get us a new supplier—or more product—or we’re coming down to the Midcoast and kicking shit around until we find what we’re looking for. You hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” EJ said. He started dragging himself back across the leather seat toward the door, but on his way he happened to look forward, between Lew and the driver, to that Chevy crest. “Hey,” he said to the kid. “Where’d you get the thing?”
The kid glanced in the mirror. “What thing?” he whispered.
“Where’d you get the Chevy emblem?”
It took a moment for him to answer. “Just picked it up.”
“Just picked it up.”
“Yeah.”
“Where?” EJ asked.
“The street.”
“So you just saw it on the street and thought, ‘Hey, I want that’?”
“Yeah. I did,” the kid said. “That a problem?”
EJ waited, but a deeper explanation didn’t feel like it was forthcoming, and the conversation, now that EJ had a moment to think about it, had probably gone as far as he wanted it to go, maybe farther. Probably EJ shouldn’t have asked about the crest. His father was missing one. The driver had one. For no reason.
Time to go. EJ had forgotten how little he actually enjoyed these meetings. He felt glad to be leaving and glad his family was leaving the business for good. He didn’t like having to think one thing, say another. He slid to the door, opened it, and left. The sun was fading behind a wide gray cloud, and the afternoon felt suddenly cool.
But then he heard a voice coming from behind him, a strained whisper: “Yo.”
The driver. EJ turned. The kid was standing outside the Lincoln. He held up the crest. “I can’t use this shit,” he said. “It’s for a truck. I don’t got no truck.”
EJ didn’t move. He kept his hands in the pockets of his coat, right hand gripping the firearm.
The driver frisbeed the crest at EJ. The breeze caught it, knocked it down at EJ’s feet. He crouched slowly and picked it up, keeping his eye on the driver, and then he finished the walk to his cruiser.
* * *
—
In a drawer in his parents’ kitchen, EJ found an envelope and tucked the crest inside. The spring sunset was going dark, the only light in the house falling from the recessed overheads in the kitchen ceiling. He knew his parents were on their way back from Amherst, and briefly he considered waiting, but the encounter in Lisbon Falls had left him feeling unsettled, and he wanted to keep moving. On a piece of yellow notepaper, he wrote:
Mom, Dad—
Sorry I missed you. Dad, picked this up for the truck.
—EJ
He took a step toward the door but glanced one last time at the envelope. It struck him again as strange, really strange, that Lew’s driver had been in possession of the crest. It was also strange that he had given it to EJ. Or thrown it at him. Like a test almost.
He thought for a moment, then grabbed the pen and added one more sentence to the note: Call me before you put it on. Then he slid the note inside the envelope and went to the door. He would go to the station, he decided, and look up incident reports from across the state, starting with Androscoggin County. If the driver, the kid with the whisper, had been in an accident that crushed his windpipe, and if it had happened in Maine, then a write-up ought to exist somewhere. As soon as he found something, and as soon as his dad was home, they would talk it over.
He left the house, closed the door behind him, climbed into his cruiser, and pulled forward along the gravel. The road had been resurfaced that afternoon, so EJ—knowing that his parents would be hosting Allie’s team later in the week and that they would want the driveway to stay pristine between now and then—drove more carefully than usual up the hill, toward Bristol Road. After a cold winter, the leaves were just starting to bud, and EJ could see all the way through the woods to the main road, where headlights flashed behind the tree trunks—
Then one set of headlights turned onto the Thatches’ road. EJ watched the car through the windshield as it weaved through the trees, toward his own advancing vehicle. At this point in the evening, he knew, the headlights would almost certainly belong to his mother or his father. Or no, that couldn’t be right—Steph had texted on their way out of Amherst to tell him that Allie’s team had won. That was only three hours ago. His parents couldn’t be home for another half hour—and that was if they drove without stopping and made good time. The headlights emerged onto a straightaway just as EJ came onto the same length of gravel. EJ blinked his lights on and off. If it were his mom or dad, arriving earlier than expected somehow, they would pull over and he would slide his window down and they would say hello, talk about the game, and he would tell them about the crest he’d left in the envelope. But the other headlights never blinked back. The car rolled closer to EJ, and as it did he could finally see past the lamps—the grille, hood, and windshield all unblinded for the first time—and see that it was not his father’s Silverado. It was a silver sedan. A Lincoln.
Both vehicles approached each other cautiously—but even so, EJ had barely more than a second to determine what to do before the cars passed each other. Fifty yards separated the two cars, then forty, then thirty. Abruptly EJ cut the wheel and hit the brakes, sending the SUV into a skid across the fresh dirt. The sedan braked, too. If EJ acted efficiently, he felt sure he could take the other car by surprise. He opened his door and walked around the front of the cruiser, toward the Lincoln. He tried to look through the headlights, but they were too bright, turning the night almost entirely white. He could make out the silhouettes, nothing more, of the driver and the passenger. Pulling the gun from his pocket and releasing the safety, he fired one round at the driver, another at the passenger. The shots echoed off the bare tree trunks. The passenger went instantly still, but the driver kept moving, grabbing at his shoulder or the door handle. It looked like he was trying to say something. EJ took another step forward and fired two more rounds at the driver, whose mouth finally stopped moving, his body motionless.
* * *
—
In my second interview with Steph, during a discussion of the earliest days of her marriage, we had a small misunderstanding. I asked her if she thought EJ had ever felt guilty, I meant about Steph’s decision regarding her unborn child, whether to stick around Damariscotta or resume her previous course and apply to colleges, but she said, “For what? What happened to those lowlifes? No. No way. That was their own fault.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“I meant: Did EJ ever feel guilty for diverting you from your dreams?”
“He didn’t divert me from anything,” she said.
“He didn’t?”
“Why would you blame him?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s just—sometimes people blame themselves for things their parents do, even if they shouldn’t, even if it’s beyond their control.”
Steph waved away my theory. “That’s a little too Freud for me,” she said. “EJ knew that he was lucky to be on the planet. When your parents are only eighteen years older than you, it’s not hard to do the math. At some point, he realized he could either feel unwanted or he could feel lucky. I mean, you’re saying he should blame himself—”
“I’m really not—”
“But honestly, he should congratulate himself. Think about it. If it weren’t for EJ, we wouldn’t even have a family. And you know what? He would even say that sometimes. He would come up to me and give me a big hug and say, ‘Aren’t you glad you had me?’ And I would say, ‘I sure am, EJ.’ ”
It was one of the only times I didn’t believe Steph. It’s not that I thought she was misrepresenting her son or her relationship with him; just that I didn’t believe that the specific moments she seemed to be recalling had actually happened.
Didn’t matter what I thought though. Steph kept plowing ahead: “He would say the same thing to Allie, you know. He would look at her and say, ‘I’m so proud of you, sis.’ ” At this point she started nodding, thinking back, or appearing to think back, through years and years of memory. “And then he would say, ‘But just remember, if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even exist!’ ”
She kept nodding, more and more vigorously, I think to prevent me from noticing that her eyes had begun to tear up. And then she excused herself, left through the sliding glass doors—the former barn doors—and walked onto the porch, where she stayed for the next ten minutes, just barely in view, staring at something in the sky.
* * *
—
EJ placed his weapon in the passenger seat of the cruiser with a shaky right hand. He turned that hand into a fist and held it in his left palm, squeezing until the tremor subsided. He was breathing sharply, shallowly. He forced himself to draw in a deeper lungful of air. The breath snagged, but he tried again and continued to try until the breaths finally stretched down and filled his chest, his heart rate slowing to a manageable pounding. He looked through the passenger’s-side window at the sedan. He had seen worse. Had he? He could imagine worse. From what he could tell, the bodily evidence remained in the car, which was fortunate. Now that the night had gone fully black, EJ should be able to drive the sedan under the cover of its own headlamps without anyone noticing the damaged windshield. But he couldn’t leave his cruiser here. He would need help.
But not from Ed or Chuck. He wanted to protect his family for as long as possible, so he texted Jason Page instead: Can you come down to my parents place? Need you ASAP. Important.
Then EJ turned on his police scanner, black numerals assembling on the red screen. He split his gaze between the sedan and the main road, watching cars on the far side of the trees to make sure their paths stayed perpendicular to the driveway.
After several minutes, Jason texted back: On my way.
EJ stayed in his seat, staring at the stage made by the cruiser’s lamps, until finally he remembered that time was passing—and passing quickly—so he forced himself to leave his vehicle.
He opened the front door of the Lincoln and checked for pulses but found nothing, found himself holding warm, lifeless wrists. He wanted to keep everything in the car if possible, but the bodies couldn’t stay in the front seats, not if he planned to move the vehicle. So he eased himself into the backseat. He pulled the passenger’s shoulder toward the shifter, yanked on him until he was sideways, the torso slotted in the gap over the park brake. EJ hauled on the man, gripping from under the armpits, then dropped him in the backseat. The corpse lay awkwardly across EJ’s lap now. He was heavy. The new position granted EJ a clear view of his face. He was not Lew. He was just a young kid. White. EJ didn’t recognize him. The bullet had folded his right eye inside out. The socket looked like crushed raspberries. His left cheek was remarkably clean but pitted, either from acne or meth or both. Back to the eye. It was sickening. EJ had seen enough of it. He shifted along the seat and let the corpse fall to the footwell. He kicked the body until it was deep beneath the level of the seats. Nobody would see it unless the car was stopped and someone looked through the windows and down—but the odds of that happening were reliably low at this time of night in this part of the world.
EJ dropped the backseat, opening a channel to the trunk, then started heaving at the shoulders of the other body. The driver. This one EJ recognized. He was the kid with the crushed vocal cords, the one who had given EJ the Chevy crest. EJ pulled him all the way across the backseat before shoving him in the trunk. Then he heard something. The police scanner, crackling from inside the cruiser. He jogged back.
The dispatcher, Connie, was asking one of the two on-duty officers to drive down Bristol Road to see about a report of gunshots.
EJ picked up the handset. “This is Thatch,” he said. His voice sounded dry, so he cleared his throat and glanced around the cruiser for water, but he hadn’t brought any. “Where on Bristol Road?”
“One five seven Bristol is where the nine-one-one call was made,” Connie said. “Resident thinks shots came from north of there.”
“You know what? That’s over by my folks’ place, and I’m heading there anyway. I can poke around. Probably just kids shooting at a mailbox—I don’t mind writing it up.”
“If that’s what it is,” Connie said, “maybe we should send someone else so they can make sure the kids stop shooting at mailboxes, know what I mean?”
