Maggie Boylan. Michael Henson
care about the rules when they set you up and fired you.”
“Maggie, they suspended me.”
“Well, we know they fired you. Don’t lie.”
“Maggie . . .”
“Everybody knows they set you up and they fired you. They knew you was on their case about county workers at the golf course and they knew you had their number about old Lard Bucket getting blow jobs from the girls in the jailhouse. They knew you was on their case about all the little hush-up deals that go on in the county, so they set you up.”
“Maggie . . .”
“They did. Everybody knows they did.”
“Maggie . . .”
“Don’t lie. Everybody knows you never give that boy no fifty dollars just so you could ball that little cracked-out bitch of a girlfriend he’s got. He’s just a lying, snake-eyed, drug-running ex-con that’ll say anything to keep from going back to Chillicothe. He’d lie on his own mother for a nickel rock. It’s true. Don’t lie.”
“I can’t say anything.”
“I know. Because you got a court case and the lawyer’s done told you don’t talk to nobody about it. But I know. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
“I can’t say anything.”
“You don’t have to. I know exactly what happened. You went down to that trailer to see that little lying cunt because you thought she could tell you something about the low-life deals going down with that courthouse gang and she set you up. Didn’t she?”
“I can’t say.”
“I could understand it if you did want to get a little off her. Old Lard Can gets his right at work. But everybody knows that’s not why you was there.”
“Maggie, I can’t say.”
“You don’t need to say nothing. I know all about it.”
* * *
YELLOW FIELDS, black fields, gray hills in the distance. Maggie talked on. “I know what you’re thinking. How does a crazy bitch like Maggie Boylan know so much about what goes on?”
Which was not exactly what he was thinking, but it was close.
“I got my ways, you see. I watch. I listen. I think for myself. I don’t just take what everybody says is gospel. All them good people that look down their noses at you, all they do is think what somebody tells them to think. Ain’t a one of them thinks for themselves. But anyway . . .”
The crossroads store was by now a half mile down the highway, but the road to Maggie’s sixty acres was just ahead on the left. He turned on the blinkers to make ready.
“No,” she said. “Just take me back to Gleason’s. I got to get me some baloney.”
He hoped his grimace didn’t show.
“Anyway, what I was saying, don’t ever go around a little lying whore like that without you got a witness. If you can’t get no one else, I’ll go with you. Cause they’ll fry your ass ever time. You think you know these people, but you don’t know them like I do. They’ll sell you out for a six pack and a carton of cigarettes.”
He pulled to the edge of the lot. His first inclination was to let Maggie off there, on the highway shoulder, on the off chance no one would see her climb out of his truck. But a wave of defiance rose up in him. All his life, those old men had watched him. And all his life, he had worried over what they thought of him. Let them watch, he thought. They can think whatever they want. He pulled up bold as life by the gas pumps in front of the big restaurant window and the eight watchful eyes of the four old men who did not disguise their staring this time as Maggie stepped bold as life out of the truck.
Maggie stood a moment in the open door with her old man’s coat pulled up around her ears. The wind skipped a plastic bottle across the pavement and she shivered the coat higher on her shoulders. “They’ll leave you to hang,” she said. “And won’t a soul stand behind you when they do.”
She reached under the seat for her purse and pulled something else out with it. “Here’s your hammer you was missing.” She smiled, sweet and sly. She laid the prodigal hammer on the seat and started to pull her purse onto her shoulders.
Later, back home, after the wind died down, he would go out to clean up his battery’s corroded posts and to put the hammer back in its place. He would find, on the floor of the passenger side, the empty bag from the pharmacy. Stapled to the bag, he would see the slip of paper that told what was in it. It would be none of his business to look, but he would look anyway and he would see nothing for high blood pressure and he would know then that Maggie Boylan had gotten stoned on her dead mother-in-law’s Oxys right there in his truck and he, Maggie’s fool, had not noticed a thing.
But at that moment, as she stood in the open door, with the big wind pulling at the wings of her coat, he felt ready to tell Maggie Boylan he would wait. He was ready to give her a ride to the house. He was ready to defy the stares and the talk. He was ready to make the big mistake.
Instead, he told her, “You take care, Maggie.”
“If you ever need me for anything,” she said, “you know where I am.” Then she turned and walked away. The wind gusted across the lot and blew up a great column of dust and paper scrap. Maggie staggered a moment in the wind and turned to say something more. But the wind tore the words away. She staggered again and maybe it was the wind or maybe it was the Oxys. James Carpenter knew that Maggie Boylan, Oxy-addled, thieving Maggie Boylan, was wasted down to the near side of nothing. But in her oversized coat she looked slim as a girl.
Black Friday
IT WAS the day after Thanksgiving at the Once Removed secondhand store and Maggie Boylan burst through the door, already talking. Sarah Hunter was on the phone with her mother, her poor sick mother in Columbus, but you could not shush Maggie Boylan.
“Sarah, I got to get some money,” Maggie said. She was dressed in a big, loose, oversized denim coat with the sleeves rolled back, jeans all out at the knees, and a pair of men’s work boots. But she held out a pair of shoes—flawlessly white walkers like nurses wear and a pair of jeans, crisp and new and embroidered with flowers and spangles, hung over the shoulder of that big loose coat.
Sarah Hunter had hoped for more customers today. She had put up her Christmas decorations and she had discounted some of the better items. But there had been hardly anybody in all day. Now, at midafternoon, two women stood over by the children’s bin, rummaging for school clothes. They eyed Maggie carefully. They were in their own big coats. They continued to turn over jumpers and T-shirts but their eyes worked back and forth from Maggie to Sarah to the bin.
Maggie set the shoes and the jeans on the counter where Sarah could not miss them.
“Hold on,” Sarah said into the phone. “I’m getting interrupted.”
“I need you to help me,” Maggie said, “Christmas is coming up. I got to get my babies’ presents out of layaway.”
“Let me call you back,” Sarah told her mother. “I got to deal with something here.”
“You know I’m sober now,” Maggie said. “Can you tell? I’m getting fat.”
Maggie was not getting fat. She raised her shirt to show her belly and she was not fat at all. Her ribs were like a line of coat hangers; her belly was gaunt. In fact, Maggie Boylan was all elbows and knees; she flopped about in her open coat like a horsefly inside a tent. Sarah Hunter had known Maggie since they both were girls. They had grown up friends and she could not bear to look at the hollow of her belly. She could not bear to look at the bones of her face.
“See? No more of that crack. No more Oxys. I can’t live without my Vicodin on account of my back, but I don’t do no more of that crack.”
Sarah