Home Body, page 3
We were alongside the park, where paths wound through the arching black trees. A couple of people were walking dogs. A skinny guy in a red stretchy outfit was shuffling through the snow on skis. An unshaven guy in mismatched boots held up a scrap of cardboard that said, “Please help.” I had a vision of Rocky in Central Park, helpless as a pet-store rabbit.
“I’ll get a job in a big museum or something,” Rocky blurted.
“Oh, yeah? My father worked in a museum in New York. He studied bugs. You mean that kind of museum?”
“No, I mean the kind filled with old stuff. I like things that are old.”
“Your house, the one you don’t have, is that filled with old stuff?”
“No. It’s new and boring. But I don’t go there.”
He glowered, and I didn’t say anything. Then he said, “This the way to the hospital?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t think I want to go there.”
“Why not? They’ll check you out.”
“They want permission to look at you. Your parents or something.”
“You tried to get looked at here before?”
He hesitated. We were grinding up the hill toward the hospital.
“They wouldn’t help you?” I asked.
“I left. They were wanting to know who I was with and stuff, and I said, ‘Nobody,’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll have to call so-and-so.’ Some social worker. I’m like, ‘No thank you.’ And I’m gone.”
I glanced at him, smiled at his tiny bit of bravado. We came out of St. John and into the circle in front of Maine Medical Center. Three cars in front of us an old woman was being hoisted from a wheelchair into the passenger side of a taxi.
“You’d think she’d have somebody to come and get her,” I said.
“Maybe everybody she knows is dead,” Rocky said solemnly.
I glanced at him. He’d said it with empathy, and I wondered if he was an orphan, bolted from some foster home. Brand-new.
“So what was wrong with you?”
“When?”
“When you came here and changed your mind.”
“Ah, nothing. I had this, like, cut on my foot. It was getting all infected and stuff. It had pus coming out of it.”
“Yuck,” I said. “So what did you do? After you left, I mean.”
“I got this stuff at the drugstore and I put it on it and it went away. It got better. I didn’t need these doctors and nurses. Your body, it has all these lymph nodes and stuff.”
“Is that right?” I said.
“Yeah. It’s how you heal. White blood cells. They march right in and kill the infection germs.”
“You learn that in school?”
“Yeah.”
“Who was your teacher?”
“Mr. Leonard.”
He caught himself, like divulging even that much made him jumpy. I could see him looking for the door handle. The woman finally was loaded into the taxi, and the driver wrestled the wheelchair into the trunk. He got in the taxi and pulled away, and we moved up a place in the line.
“I could just get out here,” Rocky said.
“No, I’ve got time. Wait just a minute and I’ll drop you right at the door.”
“No, that’s okay.”
“No, really. I don’t mind.”
I could see him tensing in the seat.
“I’ll get out here.”
“Hang on,” I said.
He was fumbling for the door handle.
“Rocky, buddy. You could have internal bleeding. You could hemorrhage or something. You really shouldn’t—”
I started to put my hand on his shoulder, but he opened the door, slid out, and started down the driveway, bent at the middle like he was carrying an invisible load on his back. There were cars behind me and I couldn’t back up. I watched in the mirror as Rocky disappeared around the corner of the hospital building, running away like a wounded deer, heading for deeper cover.
6
k
We were the doddering daily of Bangor, junior to the Bangor Daily News. Circulation was modest, ad lineage was slipping, but the Clarion was family-owned and run with an odd lack of concern for the bottom line. The family, the Danforths, had made big bucks in land speculation, timber, and shipping, originally, and, oddly enough, the newspaper. The younger Danforth clan had degenerated or evolved, depending on your point of view, into a scattered band of trust-fund hippies from Blue Hill, Maine, to Marin County, California. They were sculptors and painters and musicians. One of the granddaughters made violins, and a grandson made necklaces from deer antlers. Their grandmother, our fearless leader, made only occasional editorial dictates to the Clarion from her Victorian mansion overlooking downtown Bangor.
The staff plodded along with impunity.
Her name was Tippy Danforth, and in the three months I’d been on the staff I’d gotten to know her pretty well. Her cause was primarily cats, but any other stray animals would do. She was known to stake out trash cans in restaurant parking lots, baiting her Havahart traps with salmon and swordfish. Cats and kittens trapped by Tippy Danforth were handed off to other animal lovers in her network, like hostages taken by jungle insurgents.
Robust and mannish, Tippy came to the newsroom every week with the latest installment of her column, “All God’s Creatures.” The column usually retold an animal story sent in by one of Tippy’s many compatriots, but it sometimes was more hard-hitting. Once she told how animals were used in horrible experiments so companies could produce important products, like mascara. Each column ended with a plea that a featured cat be adopted. Tippy warned that potential adoptive parents would be subject to a background check.
When I walked into the newsroom that day Tippy Danforth was standing by my desk, waiting for her personal editor.
She nodded, but kept talking.
“Just because it’s winter, don’t think they can’t have fleas,’ she was telling one of the news assistants, a young woman named Marna who also pampered her cat. “They breed year-round. Ditto for ear mites.”
They looked at me.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said.
“What happened to your mouth?” Tippy said.
They both stared.
“Oh, that. A little bump.”
“Don’t tell us. You walked into a door,” Marna said.
She was young and sharp, a single mother and part-time student from the boonies, scraping out a life. Tippy, in her L.L. Bean boots and smudged parka, gave my swollen mouth a last look and went right on to more important matters.
“There’s the column,” she said, pointing to the pages on the keyboard of my terminal. “It’s rather a disturbing one, but I think it needs to be said. These Satanist people.”
I took off my jacket and hung it on the hook by my cubicle.
“Satanists?” I said mildly.
“Stealing cats for sacrifices,” Tippy said, waving toward the column. “It’s all in there. I heard about it from a friend of mine on the coast. Sickening. Well, I’m off.”
And she was, striding through the still-quiet newsroom like the Queen off to the hunt. Sound the horn. Load the Havahart.
Marna shook her head.
“I’m glad I just work here,” she said.
“Likewise,” I said.
And oddly enough, I was.
The Clarion wasn’t the New York Times. Its world was smaller and its news judgment sometimes provincial. But it covered greater Bangor with diligence and affection, and most of the time was a serious newspaper. When it wasn’t, I said so. Sometimes they listened. As Tippy said, I’d improved her pet column a hundred percent, and the animals thanked me.
I smiled and shook my head.
“What?” Marna said, behind me. “Didn’t they do cats in the New York Times?”
“Only on Broadway,” I said.
“I’d die to be in New York,” she said, looking dreamily at her computer screen.
“Some people do,” I said.
“When I was a kid, about fourteen, me and my best friend, Alicia, were going to run away to New York and become writers,” Marna said.
“I did a series once on kids who did that,” I said. “Ran away to New York.”
“Did they become writers?”
“One actually did. Wrote for magazines. The rest became store clerks. One was a waitress. There were drug addicts and a prostitute, and one of them got killed,” I said.
“Leave me my dreams, McMorrow,” Marna said, and she started punching her keyboard.
I ran my tongue over my swollen lip and thought of Rocky, hunched in his red plaid jacket, hurrying away on skinny legs into the snow, visions of skyscrapers dancing in his troubled little head.
7
k
It wasn’t a bad night on the desk. No major crisis. No breaking news to keep me late. I began with obits, those little prose nuggets that attempted to sum up an entire life in a hundred words.
On that day’s death list there was a woman who’d worked in a woolen mill for forty-two years. A man who had cut wood and raised eleven children. A man who kept a garden, supported his family, and didn’t raise his voice. “His word was his bond,” the obituary said.
I thought of the obituaries in the Times, where simple goodness, the most fundamental of virtues, didn’t often make the list of illustrious lifetime achievements.
I smiled.
“Good one?” Marna said.
“Very,” I said.
Reporters and editors swept into the room, released from the afternoon news meeting. A couple of the reporters waved. The city editor, Ronald Randall, rounded the corner, grimly serious as always, like he’d just gotten off the phone with the president, and the president was not happy.
“Mr. McMorrow,” he said as he strode by, headed for the photo department.
“Mr. Randall,” I said.
He said he had two stories for me to rewrite. One was rough, he said, and the other was ten inches too long. “So fix ’em,” Randall said loudly, knowing he was within earshot of both reporters. “Save the originals so maybe somebody will learn something.” One reporter was young and earnest, a woman on the way up. The other was older and tired, a gray-haired guy on the way down. Randall wasn’t making either ride any easier.
Pathetic little tyrant, I thought. Is this how you get your jollies?
I tapped at the keys. Opened directories and closed them. The health insurance, Jack, I told myself. Hold your tongue.
There was a time when I would have told him to kiss off, but this was the new me. Four nights a week and home. Write the freelance stories in between. Don’t take it so much to heart. Insurance for the baby.
I took a long, deep breath, stretched in my chair. Randall went to his desk and got on the phone.
“Can you spell ‘Pompous ass?’ ” Marna murmured behind me. “Of course you can’t. You’re a moron, and I’m God’s gift to journalism.”
“Five o’clock,” I said quietly. “He’ll be gone.”
And he was, home by five-fifteen, recounting the day’s victories to his cross-bearing wife. They didn’t have children, thank goodness, but word was that when Randall came to work at the Clarion and met Tippy Danforth, he went right out and bought a cat.
He knew whose milk to lap.
But the fearless leader did leave the rest of us to our business. I edited the stories. One was about a zealous town constable who was making himself unpopular in his little town up north. The story was a little rough, but not bad. The other was about a robbery at a branch bank out by the mall. It wasn’t clear whether the guy really had a gun; he was definitely wearing a ski mask. The story needed trimming, but not a hatchet job. I made a point to tell the reporters I thought they were good stories. They said, “Thanks,” but warily, still not sure if I was friend or foe.
With the exception of Marna, that was true of most of the newsroom. I was an outsider, one with an intimidating big-time past. And they didn’t know the half of it.
So I was left to myself. I drank tea, read stories, and at seven-fifteen, I called Roxanne in South Portland. She answered, sounded worn-out. She said she might be coming down with something.
“Get to bed,” I said.
“I’ve got reports to finish.”
“They can wait,” I said. “They’re only matters of life and death.”
I could feel her smile.
“Thanks, Jack,” she said.
“Anytime.”
“How are you?” Roxanne asked.
“Okay. Still feeling a little isolated in the newsroom. Peer acceptance is coming slowly.”
“I meant your tooth.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“Does it still move?”
“Only if I want it to. I do it at recess to gross kids out.”
“Did you make an appointment yet?”
“No. I’ve been tied up.”
“Will you do it in the morning?”
“Sure.”
“Sure you’ll do it, or sure you won’t?”
“Sure, I’ll try to remember to do it,” I said.
“The great equivocator,” Roxanne said.
“We don’t use words like that here at the Clarion. Randall says the average subscriber reads at a fourth-grade level.”
“Only if you give them fourth-grade writing.”
“We try to be vigilant, but sometimes some seventh-grade words get by,” I said. “But hey, speaking of seventh grade, guess who I ran into on the way out of Portland.”
I told her about Rocky, the store, the hospital.
“You drove him in your truck?” Roxanne said.
“Yeah. It was cold. He’s hurt.”
“You should be careful of that. Especially if you’re alone with them.”
“He’s harmless.”
“No, I mean be careful for you. These kids will say a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true.”
“Oh,” I said. “I get it.”
“Yeah,” Roxanne said.
“You know, it’s almost like he’s not really running away. It’s more like he’s hiding.”
“Maybe from an abusive adult,” Roxanne said.
“But he didn’t seem like a kid who’s been abused for years and years. Don’t they develop a pretty hard shell?”
“Or they’re obsequious, like an abused dog,” she said. “Always cowering and fawning, looking for approval.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He just didn’t seem to fit any of that. He just seemed like sort of a quiet little guy. And you know, I think he liked me. Liked talking to me.”
“Maybe he needs a father figure.”
“I wonder what was wrong with the old one,” I said.
“Could be any number of things,” Roxanne said. “There are countless ways that relationships come apart.”
“Not ours,” I said.
“No, not ours.”
“And not our kid.”
“I hope not,” Roxanne said.
“What if this Rocky kid hemorrhages or something? What if he has a broken rib sticking in his lung?”
“It’s out of your hands, Jack. You tried to help.”
“Maybe I didn’t try hard enough.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. He’s a big boy.”
“No he isn’t. He’s a little skinny runt.”
“Who knows how to take care of himself, probably more than we think,” Roxanne said. “He’ll find his way.”
“But to what? Some flophouse? Some place full of drunks or junkies? A few years from now I could be here editing his obit. Drug overdose or AIDS, or he gets killed and dumped in a ditch.”
“I don’t know, Jack,” she said. “‘Most of these kids are survivors. They’ll surprise you. They really will.”
8
k
The route home was down the interstate for ten miles, then off the highway to the east until that road intersected with a road that went south, over hills, along ridge crests. I drove through the woods, passing occasional hamlets, silent in the still-falling snow. They were inexplicable settlements, remnants of places that had sprung up around farms and churches. There had once been small wood-framed mills propped beside streams that ran down steep, rocky pitches. Now the old buildings—the big barns, the farmhouses where craggy maples stood sentry—were falling down, pitched to their knees. As I drove through, just before midnight, everything was dark and still.
I pictured Rocky in places like these. In the country, where did you hide? The woods? He’d freeze. Abandoned houses? He’d starve. Soup kitchens and shelters? There weren’t any. Knock on doors? They’d call the sheriff, or worse, grab him by the shoulder, toss him into the pickup, and drive him home.
“What do you mean, you’re running away? Get in that goddamn truck before you freeze, for God’s sake.”
I pictured it as I swung off Route 9 and headed east to Prosperity. The back roads hadn’t been traveled at all, and the snow covered the pavement like white moss. The black woods rose steeply to my left and the road twisted and dropped and then climbed again, following the path some homesteader had trod some two hundred years before.
It was another ten miles to home, through Knox and Freedom, and then another back road. I turned off onto a dirt road through the woods, and off that road to the track through the trees. There were four houses on the little track, which crested a ridge just past my place, a half-mile in.
The road was rutted by a late December thaw. The dooryards of the houses—the college girls, the widow Mrs. Soule, Clair, and me—served as laybys where you waited for oncoming cars to pass, like in Ireland. But that didn’t happen much. A strange car on the road was an event. The driver usually was lost, or trying to be.
Which was why the footprints struck me as strange.
