Crying for the Moon, page 15
“You’ve got a nerve on you like a toothache, Maureen, coming here, asking me for help, after you set the cops on us.”
“First off, Jacky, promise soul to God, I never set the cops on ya. I just said Bo was mad at you and Deucey,” Maureen said with a little bit of a tremor in her voice. “And second off, I didn’t know where else to go.”
The door opened and a jubilant Fox burst in, his flaming red hair shoulder-length now. “Okay, Jacky. We’re all ready to peel out. We’ve got our last million. A doctor down the southwest coast has a hunk of cash and—Oh . . . hello . . . Maureen, I didn’t know you were here.” His look to Jack fairly screamed, What the fuck is she doing here? There was an awkward pause.
“Oh, hey, Fox,” Maureen said. Suddenly, she was in her hospital room in Carbonear, seeing a flash of red hair as a baby, her baby, was being taken away from her. Did she dream that little scene? With that cocktail of drugs—the Miltowns, the epidural, the novocaine—she really couldn’t be sure of her memories from that day. She caught herself gawking right at Fox’s bright red head and blurted out the first thing on her mind: “Fox, ever hear anything from Carleen? You know, my friend Carleen, who started living with that guy Perry? You know, the fella you knew who owns The Rainbow Steps? Remember you were working for him or something?”
Fox shot Jack a worried look. There was another awkward pause.
“You know, Joyce’s sister, Carleen? God, I never hear anything from Carleen anymore.” Maureen was hoping one of them would say something about Carleen. Neither of them said anything; they just stared at her blankly. Finally, after a long, almost endless silence, Maureen stood up and said, “Well, I’d better not keep you guys, where you’re so busy . . . getting ready for that big job.” Maureen laughed hollowly. She was afraid she would just keep on saying the wrong things, one after another, and nobody else was saying anything, and so she feared that she was going to keep talking until there’d be nothing left of her; she’d just be talked out.
“Yea,” Fox said, holding Maureen’s gaze till she had to look away. He turned to Jack. “I’ll see you later.” He walked out of the room. Another long silence.
“Maybe you’re not as stunned as you look, Maureen,” Jack said.
Maureen tried to smile. “Yea, and that’s lucky, isn’t it? Because if I was that stunned, I’d probably be dead, like all those turkeys. You know turkeys: they’re so stunned, they’re always going around looking up at the sky when it’s raining with their mouths open, so they end up drowning.”
Jack’s look was putting Maureen further off than she already felt. He didn’t say anything.
“Like, that’s really stunned, right?” Maureen said, wishing that the nuclear warheads they had in Cuba would fly over right now and land at the DAFT office here on Duckworth Street and obliterate everything. Why couldn’t she just shut the fuck up?
“How’d you know I’m in AA?” Jack said.
Maureen didn’t have an answer. She couldn’t very well say, “I overheard you at the apartment.”
“I don’t know—it’s just around. People know, that’s all,” she said.
“You seem to know a good bit about a lot of stuff, Maureen.”
“I’ll tell you the God’s truth, Jack: I don’t. I wish I was a person like that, but I’m not. Bo was right. He always said, ‘Maureen,’ he used to say, ‘you know fuck all about fuck all.’”
Jack’s eyes narrowed at the mention of Bo’s name.
“Jesus, Maureen . . . All right, I’ll take you to one meeting, but then you’re on your own. Now, get out of the office. I got work to do.” He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty. Where will I pick you up?”
“I don’t know.” Maureen’s mind raced to all of the places she didn’t live anymore. “I’ll meet you here, I guess. I’ll be here for seven-thirty.”
Boy, that was gutsy, Maureen thought to herself.
Or stupid, her mind said.
Well, I had to do something. I could end up in jail.
Or dead, her mind said. If you keep bothering the Dunne boys, you won’t have to worry about jail.
Yea, keep a good thought, Maureen said to her mind.
Maybe if she spent time with Jack, she could find out what happened at Bo’s apartment on Tuesday and she could—
Oh yea, right, Linc Hayes. Maureen’s mind turned on her. You’re the real Mod Squad, you are. Oh, you’ll find out who did it. Right. Of course, you will, where you have a hard time even finding out where your arse is using both hands.
Maureen tried not to listen.
When she went downstairs, into the shop, Joyce was waiting for her. She grabbed Maureen by the arm and spat out, “What are you doing here?”
Maureen was taken aback and Joyce’s anger frightened her, so of course, she came back at Joyce twice as angry.
“I could ask you the same thing, Joyce. And by the way, I saw the letter from the Canadian High Commission in Jamaica.”
“Keep your voice down.” Joyce practically hauled Maureen out into the street. “What are you doing poking around where you’re not wanted? Do you think all this is a game or something?” Joyce was shaking, she was so upset. “It’s not. Some big players got some big money in all this . . .” She gestured vaguely toward the DAFT premises. “And you can’t fuck around with these people.” She tried to calm down. “Listen to me, Maureen: we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the heat away from the boys. The boys are the only thing keeping Carleen alive right now because”—Joyce grabbed Maureen’s arm again and tightened her grip until it really hurt; Maureen didn’t make a peep, though—“Carleen got arrested at the airport in Montego Bay with three pounds of cocaine strapped to her legs.”
Maureen gasped. She couldn’t help herself.
“She’d already gotten through customs and everything,” Joyce said. “She was just getting on the plane when it happened. The wind blew up her skirt and they saw it and stopped her and arrested her on the spot. That bastard she was with—”
“Perry,” Maureen chimed in.
“Yea, Johns, the one she was living with, the one she was muling for, he had nothing on him, so he got on the plane, went back to Montreal and left her there. Even water costs money in jail in Jamaica. All they give Carleen is rice and sugar water twice a day. She could die if no one from the outside brings her any food. She’s in constant danger and so are other people.” She looked pointedly at Maureen. “Just think for a second, Maureen,” Joyce said in a warning voice, pulling Maureen even closer. “For once in your life, try to listen. Even if you don’t give a shit about yourself, my little sister is sleeping on concrete in front of a hole-in-the-floor toilet. One person in her cell was already murdered just since Carleen got there. The only reason—the only reason—that Carleen is alive today is because Jack and the boys got the word out that she’s got to be looked after, and they’re paying one of their ‘friends’ down in Jamaica to go in there once a day and visit her and bring her in food. So face it: I am going to do everything in my power to not upset or bother the boys, and so will you if you care about Carleen. What do you think you’re doing poking around here, making trouble about Bo?”
“Joyce, there’s something big going on. I know there is—and it’s got something to do with Bo and Carleen.”
“Look, shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s got nothing to do with Carleen. Except the people who make it possible for Carleen to stay alive could, if you keep poking around and fucking around, find themselves in jail—or worse . . .”
Joyce looked straight in Maureen’s eyes, then turned sharply on her heel and walked away.
Maureen was left there feeling like she’d been hit in the back of the head with a piece of two by four, and all of a sudden, the words she’d read in Carleen’s diary appeared: “I would never do that to Reenie. She’s my friend. If she was fucked up, I’d look after her.” Maureen knew that was true, but she didn’t know what she was supposed to do about it or even where she was supposed to go. She knew she had to be at the cop shop in the morning, but if she tried to save herself from being arrested and charged, would that mean she’d be condemning Carleen and abandoning her all over again, for the third time? She was feeling like Simon Peter. She could almost hear the cock crowing in the distance, but she moved along the street, lost in fear and panic, and found herself blindly heading down to work, down to the film-strip library, even though she hadn’t been there in days.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WELL, THE DEAD AROSE AND APPEARED TO MANY,” Gerry said when he saw her. He looked even smaller and older than he had the last time she’d clapped eyes on him. He looked thinner too; he was almost see-through.
Gerry was surprised to see her. Her work attendance had been nothing if not erratic. But there had never been much of a job to her job, and nothing for her to do there all day long. She’d just sit, all by herself, surrounded by useless strips of film that were trapped in dusty plastic canisters waiting for borrowers who never came—unless, of course, George came in and managed to get right up on her last nerve by going through the incredibly lengthy exercise of telling her every single solitary detail of the 1946 version of The Big Sleep, or all about Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, or about The Big Heat, and on and on and on and on, each telling of the film taking as long as it would to watch the actual movie. George would talk about “frails” and “stacks of wheats” and “throwing a Joe” and “spondulix” until Maureen thought her head would explode from the toxic mix of confusion and boredom.
But this time, of course, there was no George to be seen, only Gerry. Maureen had never understood why, but for some reason, Gerry liked her—not like that, not her parts, but her altogether—something about the her-ness of her Gerry liked, and that’s why the whole job charade had been allowed to go on as long as it had and why every week Maureen got a small pay packet from the provincial Department of Education. It was all thanks to Gerry.
“Gerry, I just came in to tell you that I’m quittin’.”
“Oh yes, I was wondering when the stress of your high-powered position was going to catch up with you.”
Maureen didn’t laugh. “Don’t be mocking me, Gerry. I know I haven’t been showing up that much lately and I’m still drawing down a salary, and it’s wrong, I think. It’s not right anyway, and I’m here to officially quit my job . . . Really, to tell you the truth, I just came in because I had nowhere else to go.”
Gerry looked at her with real concern.
“And I’m trying to put things right in my life before I get—” Maureen almost said “arrested.” She hadn’t known before she came down but she realized now that she was longing to get some stuff in her life straightened out. She wanted to get right with whatever part of her world she could get right with, although she couldn’t really do anything about Carleen, and she was no closer to finding out what really happened to Bo, and the baby . . . well . . . and the cops thought she was a suspect because of all the domestic abuse calls they’d received—but Maureen knew that the cops weren’t retarded and must know that she couldn’t truss up someone the size of Bo and get him into the trunk of his car, but maybe they thought she’d had help or something, and let’s face it, the chlordane—
“Before you get what?” Gerry said.
“Before I go away for a while, maybe. It could be a long while, I don’t know. I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends. Well, this is the only loose end really, other than saying goodbye to Kathleen.”
“Goodbye?” Gerry asked, looking really concerned now.
“Not goodbye ‘forever’ goodbye. Just like, you know, goodbye for now.”
Gerry, somewhat mollified by that answer, asked, “How are you planning to get by without even the job?” He paused. “I know it’s none of my business, but if you are going to put things right in your life, you’re going to have to get rid of Brutus . . . Are you listening to me, Olive Oyl?” Gerry always called Maureen Olive Oyl because of her skinny legs and said Bo was a real Brutus—and not just the comic book one either.
“I already did get rid of him,” Maureen said. Oh God, what was she saying? “No, I, I, I didn’t, but somebody did . . . Did you hear about that buddy that they found up on The Brow in the trunk of his car? That was Bo.”
Maureen tried to look as she imagined someone might look if they’d lost someone they lived with, lost them in a sudden and violent way. She wasn’t sure about a lot of the looks she was putting on lately; she didn’t have much to base them on. Mostly, she copied her more tragic, heartbroken, shattered expressions from TV, but really there wasn’t a whole wealth of looks on TV for a young woman to copy. You couldn’t very well stand around wailing and bawling clownishly like Lucille Ball all day, not that much happened to Kitten on Father Knows Best, and Mrs. Cleaver’s expression on Leave It to Beaver never changed anyway and who else was there? Most of the faces she put on lately were based loosely on Miss Kitty, the barmaid/working girl from Gunsmoke.
“Well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” said Gerry, and then he caught himself and quickly made the sign of the cross. “God forgive me. He was somebody’s son. But the way he brutalized you, my dear. Now, now, no crocodile tears, you are well out of that.”
“I’m just crying ’cause I’ll miss you, Gerry.”
“Oh, my dear,” Gerry said, putting his arm around her, “you didn’t see that much of me at the best of times. With your work attendance the way it was, I doubt if you’ll even notice a difference now that you’re officially quit. Maybe we’ll actually see more of you. I’m always here if you need something.”
Maureen turned to go, feeling like she was leaving her last safe place, maybe her only safe place.
“Have you seen George?” Gerry asked her.
“What? He’s not here?” Maureen said innocently.
“No, he didn’t come in today. Taking a page out of your book, seems like.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MAUREEN HAD MEANT IT TO BE A KIND OF LOVING goodbye scene—like the one between Anne and Diana when Anne leaves to go to college in Anne of Green Gables—because, despite the fact that Kathleen drove Maureen right around the bend, Maureen knew that she did love Kathleen.
But she also knew that she did not want her right up on top of her all the time.
“Gosh, Kathleen, two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time. It’s a basic law of physics or something,” Maureen said as she pushed Kathleen off her lap. Kathleen looked crestfallen as she fell, but she had a determined look on her face at the same time and started inching her way back toward Maureen’s lap right away.
“Where’s Dad?” Maureen asked her mother.
“No boats in today, so he’s down to the Ritz Tavern. Where is he ever at if he’s not down to the wharf? Make yourself useful and go down with Raymond and haul him home out of it,” the Sarge said.
“Jesus. No way, Mom,” Raymond said. “Let him rot down there if he wants to.”
“Aw, come on, Raymond,” said Maureen. “We’ll go down and get the old man.” Maureen was longing to do something, anything really except just sit there, sweating bullets, worrying about the cops and trying to find a way to say goodbye.
“I got better things to be at with my time,” Raymond shot back as he went out the door.
“Yea, better things like B and E’s and breaking into the Humpty Dumpty warehouse and stealing bags of chips. You big bastard, if you’re going to be breaking in somewhere, get something worth robbing, you big stupid gom,” said the Sarge.
Raymond sailed through the door and didn’t give her a second look.
“Mom, don’t be encouraging him.”
“Oh, shut up your foolishness, Maureen. What in the fuck do you know about it? We haven’t seen hide nor hair of you this six months, and now suddenly you knows all to do about everything around here. Don’t make me laugh, my dear. He’s in with a bad crowd, Sylvie Farrell and them—big, dangerous and stupid. And if that’s the way he’s going, if he’s getting ready for the pen, he better get in with a smarter crowd . . . What are you doing here today?”
“Actually, I just stopped in for a minute. I got to go down to the cop shop in the morning.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what are you going down there for?”
“They’re questioning me about Bo’s murder.”
“You?” The Sarge fell back, staggered but not knocked down, and she was immediately on the offensive. “Murder? Murder? . . . What in the name of God have you done now? Murder?”
“Mom, I never murdered him.”
“Well, the police have got to have something on ya, Maureen. They don’t go around accusing people of murder out of the blue.”
“They never accused me of murder, Mom. They just said I was of interest and I had to come down to the police station to be questioned.”
“See, I said that, see, as soon as ever I clapped eyes on that bastard . . . Oh, he’s up at the university, you said, his father got his own business, Miss All-the-time-trying-to-be-what-you’re-not. Now, fuckmentions, now look where that’s after landing ya. You got to stick with your own kind, Maureen. Going around putting on airs. Oh, ‘I’m the film-strip librarian for the Department of Education.’” Edna minced around the kitchen and screwed up her face in a cruel mockery of Maureen.
“I quit that,” said Maureen.
“What?” the Sarge snapped. “Have you got another job?”
“No.”
“Jesus. You were lucky to get that job. You can’t just go quitting jobs before you got another one to go to. You haven’t got a fucking dust of sense. Kathleen got more sense than you do.”
“Well, if . . . you know . . . the police do charge me, then what odds?”
“Well, foolish arse, that is the most foolish thing that ever came out of that foolish mouth of yours ever. And that’s saying something. ’Cause you have made a vocation of spitting out foolishness.”
