BOYLAN was a pretty girl back when she was in school. But wild. Wild enough that, at fourteen, she ran away to Nevada; at fifteen, someone had to pluck her off a railroad bridge before she jumped; at sixteen, she had her first conviction and her first child; at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, she had more wild times with even wilder men, a couple more children, and a rap sheet of drunk and disorderlies. There should have been a string of theft charges as well, but the only thing Maggie seemed to do well was steal, for things disappeared when she was around, things small as cigarettes and wedding rings and large as bales of hay and two-ton trucks, and she was always suspected, but never charged.
By the time James Carpenter came out of the Army and joined the county sheriff’s patrol, the pretty young girl was just a memory, but the wild woman was in full force, for Maggie had the weight and muscle of a farm woman and she had the grizzle and fight of a cornered animal.
Each time Carpenter came out to the house on a call, Maggie heaped her curses on him and his partner—he knew better than to go out there alone. She fought, scratched, wrestled, and battered until they could stuff her into the backseat of a patrol car. And then, often as not, she would bang her head against the cage until her forehead bled and they would have to truss her up like an old rug and she would lay up in the cell half the night banging on the bars with a tin cup and shouting out her curses, which seemed endless in their variety and their bedrock vehemence.
Somewhere along the way, she dropped the wild men and settled on sixty acres her daddy had left her when he died. And she married a man who hoped that love would tame her. But it had not worked.
Finally, the judge sent her away for peddling amphetamines at the truck stop in Wolf Creek. She did three years in Marysville, then three months more in a halfway house, and had a tough parole officer who kept her on 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
