Maggie Boylan. Michael Henson
a short leash for another year after that. She stayed clean, Carpenter supposed, for he never had another call out to the farmhouse near the crossroads until OxyContin blew into the county like a long, ugly storm. So it started all over again.
* * *
OXYCONTIN WAS a terrible thing. It could turn a good man into a thief, a good woman into a prostitute. It could make a farm go to seed; a house go to foreclosure.
Three days after his wife died, he caught a man in his kitchen at three in the morning. You’re too late, he would have told the man if he hadn’t run. Her cousin had stolen the pills from her bedside before she was even cold.
* * *
HE ASKED her, “They still got your old man in jail?” They were near the place where the cedar woods gave way to the golf course at the edge of town.
Maggie looked at the end of her cigarette, decided there was one more draw in it, took that, and threw it out the window. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s another raw deal. Expired tags. That’s all they got on him, expired tags. They’ve had him for two whole months in that little shithouse of a jail. They tried to get him for running dope and they tore his car to pieces looking and couldn’t find nothing but them expired tags he was running on till his check would come in. So they took that poor man in and I don’t know how I’m gonna ever make his bail and he ain’t never smoked more’n a joint or two in his whole life, but they think just because I sold some drugs ten years ago, which he was never involved in, they still think they can find something on us, and the poor man ain’t done nothing wrong except put up with me and raise them kids when I was in the joint.”
James Carpenter had his doubts. In twenty years on the force, he had never known anyone to be held any time at all for expired tags. Rumor had doubts as well, for rumor had it that her old man took the fall for Maggie to keep her from being sent up again.
“They think because he’s married to me, they can find something on him. But what they don’t know is, I’m clean. Can you tell? Can you tell I’ve picked up weight? Seven pounds in a month. I’m off the drugs, been off for two months. Look at my eyes. See? They’re clear now. They ain’t got that cloud. Things ain’t never going to be like they was.”
James Carpenter nodded his approval. He was sure this was another one of Maggie’s lies, but he had decided it was easier to go along.
My God, my God, he wondered. What have I got myself into?
* * *
MAGGIE BOYLAN had once been a regular part of Carpenter’s work life, but in the months since he lost his job, he had seen nothing of her at all. It was strange, and a little embarrassing, to have her now in the cab of his truck when before, she had ridden behind him in a patrol car, cuffed to the backseat and cursing.
He glanced over to her ravaged face with the bones all knocking at the doors of her flesh and tried to see in her the pretty, wild girl.
But that girl was gone, as if she had never been, chased away by smoke and needles and a flood of cheap vodka.
3
“I’LL MEET you right here,” she told him in front of the drugstore. “I’ll just leave this purse right here if you don’t mind.” She pulled out her billfold and stuffed the purse under the seat. “If I ain’t on the street, I’ll be in here after these prescriptions.”
That was all well and good; he wanted to spend as little time in town as possible. Get in, get your business done, get out. That was how he liked it ever since the trouble with the job and all the assaults on his reputation. He had to check in with his lawyer and drop off some papers relating to his grievance and appeal. Fifteen minutes max, and he would be ready to head back home.
It took only ten minutes for James Carpenter to do what he had to do. But twenty minutes later, thirty minutes, forty minutes: Maggie Boylan was nowhere in sight. He checked briefly in the drugstore and did not see her there. He could have asked, but that would have meant telling the whole town he had been hanging out with Maggie Boylan and he did not want to feed the rumor mill. So he waited and fretted in the shadow of that damned courthouse.
He should have left her behind. Any normal person would have left her. But there was that purse under his seat. She had trapped him twice now with that purse. The wind shook the courthouse trees and skipped scrap paper across the courthouse lawn. He muttered around the block, talked to a couple of the old men on the benches of the courthouse square, went in for coffee at the Square Deal Grill, came back around, and saw her, leaning against the fender of his truck as if he was the one who was late.
She must have bummed another light. She held a cigarette close to her lips; tobacco smoke ran away from her in a gust. He was ready to tell her off for leaving him to wait so long, but she stared at the sidewalk and did not raise her eyes. Bright tears streaked her guttered cheeks.
So he held his peace. She said nothing as he got in the cab and she said nothing as she pulled herself into her seat. He asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right, it’s them courthouse motherfuckers. They think they rule the fucking world. Hell, they ain’t even motherfuckers cause their own whorish mothers wouldn’t have them.”
He turned the ignition and everything was dead again.
“Oh fuck,” she said. “Please get me out of this tight-ass town. I can’t stand these bluenose motherfuckers with all their little sheephead smiles. Get me out of here before I kill somebody for sure.”
James Carpenter looked behind the seat of the truck, but the hammer was not there. He was sure he put it back in its nest among the other tools he kept in the truck, but maybe, in his hurry at the crossroads store, he had mislaid it.
“If my old man wasn’t in that jail right now, I’d blow that whole place up. I’d drop that motherfucker right around their ears, ever lying sack of shit walking those halls, just to see them buried in the rubble.”
She continued to curse as he rummaged through his tools. The hammer was nowhere to be seen, so he pulled out a tire tool, which he thought a little awkward for the job. But it worked. Just a little tap, and he was able to start the truck back up.
“Yeah, I’m all right,” she said. “I just want to shoot me a couple deputies.” She had not stopped cursing the whole time he had tinkered with the battery and she showed no signs of stopping now. “I’d like to blow the balls off them all. If they had them, which I doubt.”
Carpenter’s own thoughts about the courthouse gang were not so far off from Maggie’s, but he hated to stoke his resentments. “They’re just doing their job, Maggie,” he told her, just to remind himself.
“No they ain’t. Their job ain’t to keep me from visiting my own husband. Their job ain’t to tell me I can’t see him cause I didn’t have no ID. They know damn well who I am. And if they don’t, I’ll sure enough let them know. They let every skank and crack whore and hustling bitch in the county visit their man, but they won’t let Maggie Boylan see her man who ain’t done no harm to nobody, just too damn broke to get his tags up to date.”
“Maggie . . .”
“Which I’m sorry I was late, but they was ready real quick with those pills and I remembered it was visitor’s day and you wasn’t back yet so I thought, hell I won’t be but a minute and it’s right across the street and all. So I’m thinking I’ll just go over there and tell Gary how I been trying to get money for his bail and all, but I got his mom to cook for and to get the pills for and I ain’t had an unemployment check in over a month and I can’t get nobody to explain that to me and that big old lard can that works the front desk at the jailhouse says I can’t visit cause I had that little trip to Marysville.”
“They got their rules.”
“No they don’t. They got one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for the likes of you and me. You know they do. They didn’t care about the rules when they searched my old man’s car to look for dope. They didn’t