Crying for the moon, p.21
Crying for the Moon, page 21
“Well, like I said, it’s a bit of a standoff, isn’t it? But I would ask you, Miss Brennan, to remember your lover, Mr. Browne, and what happened to Mr. Browne when he attempted to do harm to one of my clients.”
“Now it’s you threatening me.” Maureen stood up. “I think you are anyway, but I’m that confused now I don’t know what to be at. I’m just going to go home and think about it.”
“Well, don’t take too long. None of us have any guarantees.”
“You are, you are threatening me.”
“It’s just today; that’s all we’ve got, Miss Brennan.”
“Oh, are you one too?”
“One—one what?”
“You know.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“An alcoholic.”
“No, I am not.”
“Oh, ’cause they’re always talking about just having the one day.”
“I’m merely suggesting that Mr. Browne would probably not have been aware when he woke up that fateful morning that the end of that seemingly ordinary day would find him bound and gagged and dead in the trunk of his own car. If he only knew that was his last day on this earth, who knows what he might have done differently.”
“Yea, I’m going.” Maureen was moving fast toward the door.
“Well, be my guest,” Cramm said, standing up and going to open the door for her. “I will contact you in the morning.”
“How do you know where I’m going to be?”
“Oh, I’ll know. Don’t you worry your fluffy little head about that.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
MAUREEN, HOLD ON . . .”
It was Deucey, calling out to her from across Duckworth Street just as she stepped out of Cramm’s office. Maureen’s first instinct was to run. Deucey was one of them, after all. But as her eyes darted back and forth along the street, she realized that unless she wanted to duck back into the office she’d just escaped, she’d have to face the Deuce.
“Hey, Deuce,” Maureen threw out as casually as she could muster. “Whaddya at?”
Deuce was deking in and out between traffic as he crossed the street to her.
“What are you at, Mo-Reen?” Deuce said when he got close to her.
The way he stood so close to her and said her name made Maureen wonder if he was being sexual or threatening or a bit of both.
Probably both, Maureen’s mind started in. Sex, always a threat, always highly dangerous, pregnancy, shame, violence, finding yourself in the thrall of some rotten, vicious fella who’d just as soon pound the piss out of ya as look at ya.
Okay, okay, I get it, Maureen told her mind to quiet it, but her mind was set on going through all the possible threats that sex could hold for a young Catholic girl in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the year of our Lord, Anno Domini nineteen hundred and seventy.
All this time, Deuce had been talking. “. . . I’m worried about Jack. Poor Jack is just unlucky, like you, Maureen. He got no luck. He starts something, then things go all to hell on him, and he always ends up in a mess.”
“Like me?” Maureen said, horrified. “I’m not unlucky.” She couldn’t believe that Deucey thought she was unlucky. Oh God, the idea that people thought she was unlucky filled Maureen with the deepest feelings of anxiety and despair. If people went around saying out loud she was unlucky, jumpins, that pretty well proved that she was unlucky. And not just unlucky, but too stunned to even know she was unlucky.
She had to get Deucey to take it back, to say that he was wrong about the whole unlucky remark.
“And what mess, Deuce? I’m not in a mess.”
“Jesus, Maureen, get a grip, girl. You’re drowning in mess.”
“Hmm, nothing I can’t handle. I mean to say, Deuce”—Maureen was frantic now to make him take back what he said—“I’m good at mess. I’ve always been good at mess. It’s when things are tidy, that’s what kills me. When things are just going along all good like, that’s when it all falls abroad for me. I’m not unlucky; I’m making a choice. I just choose . . . chaos. It’s a choice I’m making. It’s just how I am.” Maureen was trying with every fibre of her being to get Deucey to go along with her and take back the terrible curse of unluckiness he’d placed on her head by saying it out loud. But no matter what she said, she couldn’t get Deucey to reverse that horrible judgment of unluckiness. Maureen’s mind cut in with, The best you can hope for now is to stop him from saying anything else, anything worse. Maureen knew that if Deucey said anything else bad about her, like she was doomed or born under a bad star or any of that other shit, it would probably kill her. Deucey’s voice pulled Maureen out of her head.
“Look, Jack, he’s a bit—”
“Nuts,” Maureen said.
“Yea, well, not nuts exactly, but you know, he gets carried away sometimes and—”
“Yea, he’s a fuckin’ murderer and a kidnapper and nuts.”
“He’s not,” Deucey said. “He’s a real good guy, Maureen. He’d do anything for ya. And he didn’t kill Bo.” Deuce corrected himself quickly: “I mean, he didn’t mean to kill Bo. I mean, if he did kill Bo—which we really got no proof that he did—he was just doing to Bo what Bo did to me. He had me in the back of that Renault for almost two days. Tied up like a pig. And every now and then, he’d open up the trunk and give me a drink of water and tell me he’d let me out of there as soon as I agreed to tell the boys that we had to take him on as a full partner. And if I didn’t, I could stay there in that trunk until I rotted. And if I ever told anyone what happened to me, he would destroy DAFT, tear down the entire organization, bit by fuckin’ bit. And he had enough information to do that, too.”
Maureen hadn’t really thought it through before, Deucey being tied up in the dark in that airless trunk. Poor Deucey. When he was talking about what had happened, his eyes looked like they had that time in Butter Pot Park. “How’d you get out?” Maureen asked quietly.
“I finally told him I’d do what he wanted. I’d tell the boys to make him a partner. To tell you the truth, Maureen, I probably would’ve said anything at that point just to get out of that goddamn trunk.”
Maureen and Deucey stood silently looking at each other. Maureen felt herself swept under by a wave of pity for Deucey and herself—but she couldn’t afford to go there.
“But you went ahead and told anyway?”
“What?” Deucey said.
“You went ahead and told Jack what happened to you.”
“Yea.” Deucey looked at her blankly. “Yea, yea, that’s right. I told Jack, and Jack had wanted to pay him back—but not kill him. Geez, anybody’d do the same thing. And realistically, Maureen, if you look at it, we—Jack saved your life.”
Maureen’s mouth fell open. She didn’t know what to say to that. Deucey, of course, took her silence for agreement and started to hold forth on his ridiculous theory.
“I’m not saying you owe Jack your life or anything like that, but in ancient cultures, say the Chinese or Native cultures, well if someone saves your life, then you owe them your life.”
“Deuce, normal up. That’s just something you heard on The Lone Ranger or somethin’ when you were a youngster . . . Anyway, he didn’t save my life; he took Bo’s.”
“Fuck Bo,” Deucey said. Maureen was surprised at the hatred in his voice. “He was a prick. I know that and you certainly know that, and Maureen”—Deucey looked directly in Maureen’s eyes with what she assumed he thought passed for sincerity—“all we need you to do is get up on the stand and say that, say the truth.”
“Yea, I know. Your lawyer already threatened me about it. And I’m telling you what I already told him: I’m not doing it.” Maureen could see that standing up for herself and saying that she wasn’t going to get up on the stand and talk about all the beatings and the misery of her life with Bo was just hardening Deucey’s resolve. His face was setting against her.
What Maureen really felt like doing was bursting into tears. Because it wasn’t fair. When was everyone going to get off her back and stop pushing her around? The more she felt like bursting into tears, the more she was determined not to, and the more she resolved not to do what Deucey and Cramm had asked of her. No, she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t go on the stand and say that she tried to poison Bo. Nobody had any proof. Nobody knew, except her and George—and Bo. But Bo was dead, and if George was a problem, well . . . Maureen stopped herself from going down that ridiculous road. She just wasn’t going to do it, and she didn’t care what they did to her. She couldn’t trust them anyway. They had a deal in place, and she had kept her part of the bargain, but they reneged on theirs. They were just going to fuck her over, but one thing was certain: she was definitely not going to cry. She hated girls who always cried, cried to get their own way, cried to get out of trouble, cried to make everyone feel sorry for them. She felt nothing but contempt for them. It was so easy, it was so cheap . . . But then, before she could do anything to stop it, there she was, standing on Duckworth Street, dissolving into tears, sniffling and bawling.
“It’s not that I don’t want to, Deuce,” she said, “but see, it’s just that I’m afraid.” She thought she’d try appealing to his own self-interest. “Not for myself, but for your crowd. I mean”—sniffle, sniffle—“you know what I’m like, Deuce. If I get on the stand and start telling the truth, the whole truth and all that”—she was really crying now—“well, once I start, I don’t, honest to God, know where I’m going to be able to stop. Shure I’ll start off telling ’em all about Bo and all the shit knockings he gave me and how I was in a daze half the time and didn’t know what I was doing. But then before I know what I’m saying, I’m telling them everything. All about all the makeup I stole all the time down to Woolworths, about the time I cut Mom out of all the family pictures and swore that it must’ve been Kathleen, my retarded sister, doing it, about how Jack kidnapped me and tried to make me disappear and shoved a sock in my mouth just exactly like he did to Bo . . .” She was crying so hard now that she was hiccuping. People on the street were glancing over at them to see what was going on. Deucey noticed the attention and kept trying to make her stop crying but she couldn’t. She gasped for breath and hauled her sleeve across the bottom of her nose. She knew she must look some state, tears running from her eyes, snot running from her nose, and even some kind of stuff running from the corner of her mouth. “. . . And about those Colombian telegrams I saw down to your place, and the bill of sale for that big boat.”
Deucey actually looked shocked.
Maureen said in her defence, “They were just right there on your desk . . .” She sobbed. “And I might tell them all about what Bo did to you. And it’ll all pour out in one big, awful ball of truth. But I mean to say, not so much for me, but for you and the boys, I’m just worried.” She hawked back a bunch of phlegm, wiped her eyes and kept going. “I just don’t think I’d be a very good witness. It’s not that I wouldn’t tell the truth; it’s that I’d tell too much truth—see what I mean?”
She was holding on to Deucey’s arm now. She could see he was desperate to get away from her.
“I’m not threatening you or anything like that, Deucey, promise soul to God I’m not, but I’m just so freaked out about everything that’s going on. I’m just so bugged out, I—”
“Yea, bummer,” Deucey said, finally managing to haul his arm out of her grip. “Real bummer, Maureen.”
“You know, Deuce, I don’t want to burn you guys, but I’m just . . . I don’t feel I . . .” She started in bawling and snotting again.
Deucey looked down, helpless. He was freaked right out and wanted to get away from her, but at the same time, her tears were having that magical effect on him that all those other girls’ tears had on everyone else. He looked at her with such pity and terror. He seemed willing to do anything to make her stop crying. It surprised Maureen to see that Deucey was so frightened and so moved by her crying. She always tried so hard not to cry; she’d been taught that it was weak and gutless. On Princess Street, you had to go around being a man, like the Sarge. Now she wondered if that “be a man about it” thing wasn’t just some more Princess Street bullshit. She was a girl, for God’s sake. Why did she have to go around being a man about anything? All her threats and rough talk had never made anyone look as scared as Deucey looked right now.
“I’ll do it,” Maureen said, grabbing hold to Deucey’s arm again. “I’ll get on the stand, but will I be able to control what I’m saying?”
Deucey hauled his arm free, stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do, and then took off like a scalded cat.
“I’ll talk to the boys, Maureen,” he yelled over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. We can work something out.”
“No, I’ll go to court, Deuce . . . if you really want me to.”
Deucey was practically running down Duckworth Street toward the DAFT offices. Maureen blew her nose and headed up Church Hill. She was worn out, as tired as she’d ever been. It was really hard work, this full-on crying business. She just wanted to get in out of it somewhere and get a bit of quiet and not have to answer any questions from anyone—least of all from George or the Sarge or the cops—and maybe then she could think.
When she walked past St. Thomas’s church, past the parish hall, she saw a bunch of people standing around outside. She knew there was an AA meeting going on inside and felt in her bones that she should go in. It was a nooner, and she was early. She sat down, relieved to be in out of it. She closed her eyes and felt almost safe, and as she was sitting there, for some reason, her exhausted mind started running through the seven Corporal Acts of Mercy. She found them comforting. Harbour the Harbourless—that one had always been Maureen’s favourite because it seemed to be about them, about St. John’s; they had a harbour. Ransom the Captive, Bury the Dead—but Bo was already buried . . . but would he ever really be dead? Dead to her so that she wouldn’t still have to worry about him all day, every day?
I might as well have just gone ahead and killed him anyway, she thought. I wouldn’t feel any worse.
Well, it was no fault of yours that you didn’t, was it? her mind said.
She tried to think about something else, but she was too tired. She opened her eyes and looked around her. Everyone there was so old, so not groovy. A feeling crept in that she didn’t want to be there. What if she knew any of these losers? It was all bad enough; she didn’t want anyone thinking she couldn’t hold her liquor. Being a lightweight in the boozebag department was almost as low as being cheap, and as far as Maureen’s family was concerned, all those people were below contempt. It was okay to be a slut, battered woman, liar, poisoner—okay, but alcoholic? Oh gentle German Jesus. First, she’d been reduced to snotting and bawling and getting on like a girl, and now everyone was going to think she was an alcoholic. Just how low was she going to let herself go?
She could feel the blood rushing into her face as she got up and hurried toward the door. Then she spotted Dicey Doyle. She hadn’t seen Dice since the day of Bo’s funeral. Maureen put her head down and rushed for the exit, hoping Dicey hadn’t seen her. She was almost out the door when she felt a hand on her shoulder and Dicey said, “Hey, Reenie, whaddya at?”
“Not much, Dice. What are you at?” Maureen said back, trying to look relaxed.
“Is this your first meeting?” Dicey asked.
“Yea . . . I . . .”
At that moment, Verna from the last meeting passed by and said, “Hey, Maureen, good to see you back. One day at a time.”
“Yea.” Maureen turned back to Dicey, embarrassed. “See, I was here . . . before, but you know, but I’m not . . . like an alcoholic or anything. I was, you know, trying to find out what happened to Bo.” Maureen’s voice got flatter and quieter with each word. She could tell from the look on Dicey’s face that she didn’t believe her.
“Let me get you a cup of coffee. Do you want a cancer stick?” Dicey was smoking the green Export “A”s. Maureen gratefully took one of the stubby smokes out of the package, lit up and sat down in the back row. Dicey came back with the coffee, trapping Maureen before she could make her escape.
“Dice, look I know probably everybody says this, but I’m not an . . . an . . .”
“Don’t.” Dicey put up her hand. “It’s okay.” She handed Maureen a cup.
Maureen took a big gulp of the hot liquid and almost spat it right out again.
“Geez, it’s some sweet—how many sugars did you put in there?”
“Five sugars and almost half a can of Carnation. Since I’ve been getting off the booze, I’ve been craving sugar really bad, ’cause I guess there’s so much sugar in the liquor.”
“Oh . . . I’m not craving sugar,” Maureen said. “I don’t—”
As Maureen was about to go into a long explanation of how she didn’t drink, not like that anyway, the meeting started. For the first fifteen minutes, Maureen paid no attention to what was going on around her. She couldn’t really hear anything; she just sat there going over and over again in her mind everything that had happened that morning. She knew that even if she did get on the stand and do what they wanted, there was no guarantee that they’d help her find her baby. They’d already welshed on their promise of Jack going down and confessing. Something about the way Deucey had looked was playing on her mind, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Every time she tried, she just felt so sorry for him that she lost her train of thought. It was an inkling that came and disappeared before Maureen could grasp it. It wasn’t helping that, every now and again, she was overwhelmed by the thought, What in the name of God am I doing here anyway, with a bunch of boozebag losers, all going on about God or whatever? Maureen just could not go God since she had effectively left the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church when she was thirteen years old, although, just to keep the Sarge off her back, she continued to pretend to go to Sunday Mass, or bits of it anyway, at least until she’d met Dicey. She’d been forced to leave God and the Church when it became clear to her that there was no hope of redemption—not for her. She’d stolen so much makeup from Woolworths, she knew that, even if she went to confession, she had no hope of absolution, because the priest would insist that she pay back the store for all the stuff she’d robbed. She would never have that much money, and so she would never get forgiveness. And if she didn’t get forgiven, then she couldn’t get absolution. And if she couldn’t get absolution, then she couldn’t take Communion. So every Sunday, she would have to sit jarred up in the pew by herself as everyone else went up to the altar rails to receive the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. She’d have to sit there like a mook and everyone would know she was in a state of sin, so how could she go to Mass? Not going was another mortal sin. Maureen’s milk bottle, which in the Baltimore Catechism stood in for the immortal soul, was once only spotted with venial sin, but it had become coal-black. Her eternal soul was destined to burn in the heat and the darkness and stench of hell for eternity—not much to look forward to, Maureen thought.
