Strange Fits of Passion (3 page)

When I returned to the front of the store, a man was at the counter, a man about my age and about my height. He had a handlebar mustache and was wearing a denim jacket and a Red Sox baseball cap. The jacket was tight in the shoulders, and I doubted it would button across his waist. It seemed like a jacket he had worn for years—it had a frayed and soft look—but now he had gained a bit of weight across his middle, and the jacket was too small. He wore a navy-blue sweater, and he moved his feet while he stood there. He seemed jazzed up, nervy, in perpetual motion. He tapped a beat on the counter, where he had placed a package of fish cakes, a can of baked beans, a six-pack of beer, and a carton of cigarettes. I thought he must be cold in such a thin jacket.

Across the counter was the grocer, an older man—in his late fifties? He had discolored teeth, from cigarettes or coffee, and an ocher chamois shirt that had an ink stain, like a Rorschach, on the pocket. He rang up the purchases on the counter with only one eye on the cash register. The other one was glass and seemed to be staring at me. My scarf was slipping from my hair; I had my arms full and couldn't fix it.

The only woman in the store was standing by the coffeemaker and reading
The Boston Globe.
She was wearing a green hand-knit sweater and a taupe parka. She was an impressive woman, not fat, but tall and big-boned, and I thought it was possible, though she was well-proportioned, that had she stepped on a scale, she'd have outweighed the grocer. Her eyes were watery in color, bluish, and her eyebrows nearly nonexistent in a roughened face of high color. Her teeth were large and very white, and there was a slight gap between the front two—a trait I would see often in the townspeople. Perhaps you saw it too. Her hair was graying, clipped short, in a style I would describe as sensible. I thought she was probably fifty, but I also thought she was a woman who had early on settled into a look that would last her many years. When she turned the pelves of her newspaper she looked up at me.

"That's five hundred and eighty-two dollars," said the grocer.

The man with the handlebar mustache took his wallet out of his back pocket and smiled at the weak joke. He handed the grocer a ten-dollar bill and began to speak to him. I may not have the dialogue quite right, but I remember it like this:

"Everett Shedd, you're goin' to make me a poor man."

"Don't be bellyachin' to me, Willis. You're poor all by yourself."

"That's so. It's a bitch season. Jesus. There in't a man in town makin' a dime this time a year."

"You pull your boat yet?"

"No; I'll do it on the fifteenth, like I do every year. Tryin' to eke out a coupla more miserable weeks, though the pickin's is pitiful."

"Don't get sour on me, Willis. You're too young to get sour."

"I was born sour."

The grocer snorted. "That's the truth."

The man with the handlebar mustache picked his change off the counter and lifted the paper bag of groceries. I moved forward with the milk and coffee cake and beer and set them down. Quickly I tightened the scarf around my head with my free hand. The man with the handlebar mustache hesitated a minute, then said, "How you doin', Red?"

I nodded. I was used to this.

"What can I do you for?" asked the grocer. The glass eye was looking at me. It was blue; the other eye was a grayish green.

"I'll take these," I said, "and I was wondering if you knew of a motel where I could spend the night, with my baby."

This came out fast, as if rehearsed.

"Passin through?" the grocer asked.

I touched the items on the counter, reached in my purse for my wallet. The strap from my shoulder bag lurched down my arm, causing me to have to shift the baby.

"I don't know. I'm not sure. I might stay," I said. I lowered my eyes to the counter—a scuffed rectangle of gray Formica, bordered on one side by a canister of beef jerky strips, on the other by a display of candy canes. I knew the grocer must be wondering why a woman alone with a baby wanted a motel room on the northern coast of Maine, possibly for more than one night, the first week in December.

"Well, I'm afraid there's nothing in St. Hilaire," he said, as if genuinely reluctant to disappoint me. "You have to go over to Machias for a motel."

"There's the Gateway, halfway to Machias," said the man with the handlebar mustache, who was hovering near the magazine rack. I looked at the magazines—
Yankee, Rod and Gun, Family Circle,
and others. I saw then the familiar title, and my eyes stopped there, as if I'd just caught sight of my own face in a mirror, or the face of someone I didn't want to be reminded of.

"Muriel has about a dozen rooms. She'd be glad of the business."

"That's so," said the grocer. "Save you goin' into Machias proper. Motel's not much to look at, but it's clean."

Caroline began to whimper. I bounced the baby to quiet her.

"That's three thirteen," said the grocer. He said the number like this: "thuh-
teen
," and I always think of that pronunciation when I think of the Maine accent.

I paid the man and opened my coat. I was sweating in the hot store.

"Where you from?" asked the grocer.

I may have hesitated a fraction too long. "New York," I said. The two men exchanged glances.

"How do I get there?" I asked.

The grocer put the food into a paper bag, counted out my change. "You go north on this coast road here till you hit Route One. Take a right and that'll take you toward Machias. The Gateway is about seven miles up, on the left. You can't miss it—big green sign."

I gathered the paper bag into my left arm, held the baby in my right. The man with the handlebar mustache moved toward the door and opened it for me. When he did, the bell tinkled again. The sound startled me.

The horizon had swallowed the sun. The dry, bitter air slapped my face. My boots squeaked in the snow as I hurried to the car. Behind me, from the top of the steps, in the cold silence of the night, I could hear voices, now familiar, casual and well-meaning in their way.

"She's alone with the baby."

"Left the father."

"Maybe."

"Maybe."

You could tell she was in trouble the minute she walked in the door there. She had a gray scarf wound all round her face, 'n' those sunglasses, 'n' I know she meant to hide herself, but the fact is, she looked so unusual, don't you know, with those dark glasses when it was already sundown outside, that you had to look at her. You understand what I'm sayin'? It was like she was tryin' to hide but drawin' attention to herself instead, if you follow me. 'Specially when she wouldn't take the glasses off inside; then you knew she had a problem. And the way she held the baby. Real close, like she might lose it, or it might be took away from her. And then later, the scarf fell back down off of her head, 'n' you could see, 'n' I thought right away that she'd been in a car accident. It was slick as spit outside—had been all afternoon. Not all of the roads had been plowed yet, 'specially the coast road, 'n' so I figured she was going to tell us she'd been in an accident, except that the bruises didn't look exactly
fresh,
don't you know, I mean to say
recently
fresh. And then there was the fact that she'd tried to hide them. You don't try to hide bruises from a car accident. At least in my experience you don't. And I've had a little bit of experience. I expect you know that I'm the town's only officer of the law, apart from when I'm authorized to deputize someone else. Me 'n' my wife, we run the store, but when there's trouble, I'm supposed to sort it out. And if I can't sort it out, I call over to Machias, and they send a car. And I'll tell you something: I hardly ever see a face looks that bad. Not to say we don't have our fair share of altercations. We got some fellas here get to drinkin' 'n' go off their heads, 'n' I seen a few black eyes, even a broken arm here and there, but this was different. Her lower lip, on the right side, was swollen 'n' black, 'n' she had a bump, big as a lemon, at the edge of her cheekbone the color of a raspberry, 'n' I suspect if she'd taken off those glasses we'd a seen a coupla humdinger shiners, and Muriel, who saw her in the morning, and Julia, they say it was bad. This was important, don't you know, what we saw that day, we had to say so at the trial. I think Julia might of said, right there when she walked in, was she all right, and she said, fine, but you could see she wasn't. Dizzy, she was. And it seems to me she had a limp. I thought there was something wrong with her right leg. So I was standin' there, puttin' in the groceries, thinkin' to myself. She in't askin' for help. She says she's from New York. We don't get many people from New York 'tall up here.

So me and Willis and Julia are all three of us lookin' at each other on the sly like, 'n' then she's gone. Just like that.

I can tell you I've pondered many times if I did the right thing that night. I could of quizzed her, you know. Got her to tell me what was goin' on. But I doubt she'd a told me. Or anyone. She was on the run, if you want to look at it like that. And we knew she was probably goin' to be safe at the Gateway, though I didn't like to send her and the baby out in such cold. It was goin' to be brutal that night, they were sayin' minus sixty with the wind chill, so I called up to Muriel to tell her someone was on their way. And then Muriel put her onto Julia the next day, and I think we all figured Julia, she was keepin' an eye on things, had the situation under control, as if you could control a situation like this. But we talked about it later, after she left. We were interested; I won't say we weren't.

She was skin and bones, like them New York models is, undernourished, 'n' I'll tell you something else. You're goin' to think this is strange, but I had the feeling she was pretty. You wouldn't think I'd say that, now would you. But she was. You could see, even with the dark glasses 'n' that hurt lip, she was meant to be a little bit of a looker. She had red hair; alive it was, I've said it since: not orange, like you sometimes see, but red-gold, real pretty, the color of polished cherrywood. Yup. Cherrywood. And a lot of it, fallin' all around her face, framin' it. (Course, I'm partial to redheads. My wife used to be a redhead once; she had pretty hair too, all pinned up at the back of her head. But that's gone now.) It was like ... let me try to explain this to you. You see a beautiful ancient statue in a picture book, and the statue has been ruined. An arm is gone, or the side of the face has been chipped away. But you know, lookin' at the statue, that once it was perfeet and special. You know what I'm sayin'? That's how you felt when you looked at her, that something special had been damaged or broken. The baby had that hair too. You could see it in the fringe, outside her cap, 'n' later, of course. Have you seen her yet?

Have you met Mary yet? Well, I've seen her a few times since ... well, you know. And I can tell you right now, she don't look the same as she did last winter when she came to us. But you take my word for it, 'n' you write this down when you do this article of yours. Mary Amesbury was a looker.

Not that it ever did her any good. 'Cept with Jack. And that's another story, in't it.

You have to talk to Jack. You talk to him right, he'll tell you some things. Maybe. He's close, our Jack.

Willis will talk to you. Willis will talk to anyone. I only mean that Willis likes to talk, and he was there. He lives in a pink trailer you might of seen just south of town, with his kids and his wife, Jeannine. And speakin' of Jeannine, I'll tell you something confidential. You don't repeat this now, or put this in your article there, but you're probably goin' to hear this around, so I'll tell you now, about Willis. It's said of Willis—that is to say
in connection
with Willis, the way whenever anybody ever talks about Julia they always say how Billy went from the cold afore he went from the drownin'—that Willis's wife, Jeannine, has three ... that is to say ... well, breasts. They say that the third one, a little bit of a thing, is located on the right side, up in the hollow where the shoulder meets the collarbone. I've never seen it, of course, 'n' I don't actually know anyone who has, but I do believe it's true, although I would never bother Willis about it. And Jeannine is as good a mother as they come. Everybody says so, 'n' so I wouldn't want nothin' bad said about Jeannine. It's from inbreeding, tell you the truth, but don't you go repeatin' this in your article there. This is private town business, not for the world. Just an aside, don't you know.

Now, you asked me about the town. You come to the right place. I guess you could say I'm a little bit of the town historian, but I 'spect you know that already, which is why you're here.

I was born here, lived here all my life, like Julia and Jack and Willis. Muriel, she come over from Bangor when she got married. Her husband left her—that's another story—'n' she stayed. We're a fishin' town, you've seen that, lobster mostly, clams and mussels and crabs when the season's on. The main business in town is the co-op on the wharf there. We ship down to Boston. There's some blueberry farms too, just inland; they ship all over the country in August. But the lobsterin' is what we're all about. Me, I inherited the store from my father, never any question about what I was goin' to do. But Willis and Jack, now, they're lobstermen. And Julia's Billy was, afore he died. They're a different breed, you know, not your average Joe. Independent is a nice way to put it. They can be a cussed lot. It's in the blood, lobsterin', handed down from father to son, the way minin' is in a town, because that's the only way to make a livin' here. Don't get me wrong. This is a good place to live, in its way. Can't imagine livin' down where you come from. But it makes you hard, stayin' here. You got to be hard, or you won't survive.

Now, the lobstermen, most of 'em, they'll haul their boats just afore Christmas, 'n' they won't put their pots back in till the end of March or so. Willis, for example, he drives a truck for a haulage company in January and February. Then in March he'll start gettin' his gear in shape. Some of the men, though, they don't pull their boats till January. Jack don't, usually. Well, he's got a difficult home situation, don't he? His wife, Rebecca, had what we call the blues real bad. Some of the women, they get them in the winter. It's a dreary thing—they can't stand the water when it's gray for days on end, and they start to go a bit melancholy on you, cryin' all the time, or they cut off all their hair, till it gets spring, and then they're OK. But Rebecca, she was melancholy summer or winter, a trial to Jack, though if you want to know the truth, maybe he's not the sort of man she ought to have married. Jack keeps to himself, he does, pretty quiet. Maybe a bit disappointed in life too, if you want to know. He had himself two years at the University of Maine, don't you know, more'n twenty years ago that was, on a track scholarship, but his father got both his arms broke on a shrimp boat and the family run out of money, so Jack come home to take care of his father. He took over the lobsterin' and married Rebecca. He did his best with the kids. He's got two, nineteen and fifteen their ages are, I think; decent kids. The boy, he's in Boston at school there now. Northeastern, I think it is. Jack's puttin' him through.