crossroads station just outside the little crossroads town of Wolf Creek. Off to one side, on the other side of the grocery section and the Post Office window, beyond the tools and the laundry detergent and the quarts of oil and transmission fluid, four old men sat at their coffee as they did every morning in the restaurant section in the same restaurant booth by the front window and they watched everyone who came in for a stick of beef jerky or a bag of chips or a sandwich from the deli. They were good old men, with no harm in them, retired farmers and loggers and one old part-time farmer who had been his fourth-grade teacher.
But they talked. They watched everything and they gossiped without shame. And now the story would get around that he was seen with Maggie Boylan and that story would complicate his life even more than it was already. But done is done. Maggie had him pinned there with her backpack purse on his seat, so she was on for the ride to town.
The old men did not seem to turn—it would not be right to stare—but their eyes turned to watch Maggie leave the truck and enter the store and they watched her stalk down the grocery aisle and right up to their little table where they shrugged all four of them around. Each one kept a pouch of Red Man Chew in the pocket of his coat but not a one of them smoked. Maggie had better luck with a trucker at the counter. He gave her a cigarette and a light and she came out to the truck inhaling desperately.
“You don’t mind if I smoke in here, do you? I’ll hold it out the window.” She cranked the window down and exhaled into the open air.
“I’m so glad you could give me a ride,” she said. “My mother-in-law’s got that high blood pressure and you don’t play with that and she can’t get out on her own and she needs that medicine bad. If you hadn’t come around I don’t know what I would of done because these folks around here is all too proud to be seen with me, like they ain’t got their own shit to deal with, pardon my French, so I really do appreciate you doing this and I don’t know how I can thank you.”
All this, as he cranked and cranked the ignition which, for some reason, at this moment and under the eight eyes of the four old men, had gone deader than a hammer. No horn, no dashboard light, not a whisper from the starter. So he guessed the problem. He got out, lifted the hood, and saw right away that a white crust of corrosion covered the positive post of the battery and it had chosen this under-the-eight-eyes moment, when he was already strapped for time and Maggie Boylan was perched in his cab in front of God and everybody, to break the connection. No connection, no juice. He knew the quick fix, though. He pulled a hammer from behind the seat, came back around to the battery, and gave the cable end a tap.
Just a little tap, no sense in breaking the post, but a little tap was enough to tighten the cable end onto its post, so in a moment, he had the truck started and had pulled out onto the highway toward town.
Maggie picked up the hammer and admired it. “That’s an old railroad hammer, ain’t it,” she said.
“My grandpa worked for the B&O.”
Maggie studied the hammer a moment more. “I bet it’s worth some money.”
He shook his head. “Flea market, couple bucks.” If Maggie thought his grandfather’s hammer was worth anything, it might slip away with her when she left the truck.
“You fixed that battery pretty slick,” Maggie said. She set the hammer down between them on the seat. “I was afraid we’d be stuck there till tomorrow evening.”
“I wish everything in life was that easy to fix.”
“Don’t I know it? But I always did think you was a smart one. Even when you was still a cop and you’d have to haul my drunk ass to jail and my kids’d say you was mean and all, I’d tell them, he’s just doing his job, honey, and he ain’t all hateful like them others.”
James Carpenter remembered something entirely different. He recalled that Maggie Boylan had cursed him with names he had never been cursed before or since, names almost Biblical in their damning power, names that seemed to have been pulled full-formed from the earth, like stones or the roots of strange weeds. She had her full weight and strength back then and fought like a wet cat right out in front of those children with their eyes dark and wide.
But that was years ago and now those children were gone to foster care. Since that time, Maggie had done a stint in Marysville and a halfway house and had come back to trade the alcohol for OxyContin and the OxyContin for crack cocaine and to trade the crack back for the Oxys and whatever else she could find. And to lose half of her body weight so that now she was a spiky little burned-out sparkler of a woman, nearly weightless, withered and hollow-eyed as if she had been thrown into a kiln and dried.
“I always said it was wrong the way they done you,” she said. “You was the best cop this county ever had. And I’ve knowed them all.”
He said nothing to this. Who could stop Maggie Boylan when she was on a roll? An ambulance passed with its red lights awhirl. The wail of its siren moved up the musical scale, then down as it passed, headed toward Wolf Creek.
“That’s what I want to do,” Maggie said. “I want to be an EMT. They taught us CPR up in Marysville and I told myself, if I can ever get myself straight, I’m gonna go to school and get certified for that shit. I could save me some lives.”
He wanted to tell her to save her own life first, but he knew she was not about to listen. He knew she would continue to talk all the way into town, which she did as he drove on, checking the condition of the fields as they passed. As she talked, they passed fields marked by shattered cornstalks and the daggers of cut tobacco and barns bulging with tobacco hung to cure, some still a pale green and others gone the color of leather. There were fields stripped black by the plow and ready for winter planting and still others unplowed, unpastured, grown over with ironweed, Johnson grass, and yarrow, surrounding farmhouses gone gray and leaning ahead of the wind.
And closer to town, there were still others, pastures or cornfields just a few years ago, now landscaped level as a putting green with long lanes leading up to houses so new and excessive that it hurt his eyes just to look at them, the new houses of people with new money or the second homes or retirement homes for people from the city.
“Anyway,” Maggie said. “Everybody knows they done you wrong up there. And the ones that’s left is a bunch of suck-ass perverts, God damn them all to hell.” She did not apologize for cursing this time. “And after you just lost your wife from cancer. Double-damn them, that was low.”
James Carpenter looked out at a gray barn hung thick with curing tobacco the color of a dull flame, and he did not hear what Maggie said next.
* * *
HIS WIFE was sick for nearly a year and, for nearly a year, James Carpenter slept barely three hours a night. He went about the business of arresting drunk drivers and investigating stolen calves; he endured conferences with doctors, visits from nurses, and the indignities of home health care, all in a half-wakened, half-somnolent state, so that once the funeral was over and his daughter flew back to California, he slept for three days straight.
That made for trouble with the sheriff, but it was nothing like the trouble to come, for when he woke, he found he had developed a habit of restlessness and found himself still sleepless, alert in every cell.
At three in the insomniac morning, he walked through the rooms of his house, listening to the owls and the coyotes and thinking hard.
For the world had shifted under his feet and he was aware now of a new sense of who was wrong and who was being wronged, who was stealing and what was being stolen.
2
