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 care about the rules when they come out to the house without a scrap of a warrant to look to see was we cooking up meth. They didn’t care about the rules when they sent me off to prison with my kids crying in the gallery. And I know they didn’t 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
