Текст книги "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Drunken Fireworks
Statement given by Mr Alden McCausland
Castle County Police Department
Statement taken by Police Chief Andrew Clutterbuck
Arresting Officer Ardelle Benoit also present
11:15 AM–1:20 PM
July 5, 2015
Yes, you could say Ma n me did a good deal of drinking and lounging around out to camp after Daddy died. No law against it, is there? If you don’t get behind the wheel, that is, and we never did. We could afford it, too, because by then we were what you might call the idle rich. Never would have expected that, Dad being a carpenter all his life. Called himself a ‘skilled carpenter,’ and Ma always added, ‘Barely skilled n mostly distilled.’ That was her little joke.
Ma worked down to Royce Flowers over on Castle Street, but only full-time in November and December – a dab hand at those Christmas wreaths, she was, and not bad when it came to funeral arrangements, either. She did Dad’s, you know. Had a nice yellow ribbon on it that said HOW WE LOVED THEE. Almost biblical, don’t you think? People cried when they saw it, even ones Dad owed money to.
When I got out of high school I went to work at Sonny’s Garage, balancing wheels, doing oil changes, and fixing flats. Back in the old days I also used to pump gas, but accourse now that’s all DIY. I also sold some pot, might as well admit it. Haven’t done it for years, so I guess you can’t charge me on that, but in the eighties that was a pretty good cash-and-carry business, especially in these parts. Always had enough jingle to go out steppin on Friday or Saturday night. I enjoy the company of women, but have stayed away from the altar, at least so far. I guess if I have any ambitions, one would be to see the Grand Canyon, and another would be to stay what they call a lifelong bachelor. Less problems that way. Besides, I got to keep an eye on Ma. You know what they say, a boy’s best friend is his—
I will get to the point, Ardelle, but if you want it, you have to let me tell it my own way. If anyone should have a little sympathy for tellin the whole story, it’s you. When we was in school together, you wouldn’t shut up. Tongue hung in the middle and running at both ends, Mrs Fitch used to say. Remember her? Fourth grade. What a card she was! Remember the time you put gum in the toe of her shoe? Ha!
Where was I? Camp, right? Out on Lake Abenaki.
Ain’t nothing but a three-room cabin with a lick of beach and a old dock. Daddy bought it in ninety-one, I think it was, when he run into a little dividend from some job. That wasn’t enough for the down payment, but when I added in the income from my herbal remedies, we was able to swing it. The place is pretty skeevy, though, I’m willing to admit that. Ma called it the Mosquito Bowl, and we never fixed it up worth a tin shit, but Daddy kep to the payments pretty regular. When he missed, Ma n me chipped in. She bitched about giving away her flower money, but never too hard; she liked going out there from the first, bugs and leaky roof and all. We’d sit out on the deck and have a picnic lunch and watch the world go by. Even then she wouldn’t say no to a six-pack or bottle of coffee brandy, although in those days she kep her drinking mostly to the weekends.
The place was all paid off around the turn of the century, and why not? It was on the town side of the lake – the west side – and you both know what it’s like over there, all reedy and shallow, with plenty of puckerbrush. The east side is nicer, with them big houses the summer people have to have, and I imagine they looked acrost at the slums on our side, all shacks and cabins and trailer homes, and told themselves it was a shame how the locals had to live, without so much as a tennis court to their names. They could think whatever they wanted. Far as we were concerned, we were as good as anybody. Daddy’d fish a little off the end of our dock, and Ma would cook what he caught on the woodstove, and after oh-one (maybe it was oh-two), we had the runnin water and no longer had to trot to the outhouse in the middle of the night. Good as anybody.
We thought there’d be a little more money for fixin up once the place was paid off, but there never seemed to be; the way it disappeared was a mystery, because back then there was plenty of bank loans for people who wanted to build and Daddy was workin regular. When he died of a heart attack while on a job in Harlow, in oh-two that was, Ma n me thought we was pretty well skint. ‘We’ll get by, though,’ she said, ‘and if it was whores he was spendin the extra on, I don’t want to know.’ But she said we’d have to sell the place on Abenaki, if we could find someone crazy enough to buy it.
‘We’ll get showing it next spring,’ she said, ‘before the blackflies hatch out. That okay with you, Alden?’
I said it was, and even went to work sprucin it up. Got as far as new shingles and replacing the worst of the rotted boards on the dock, and that was when we had our first stroke of luck.
Ma got a call from an insurance company down in Portland, and found out why there never seemed to be any extra money even after the cabin and the two acres it stood on was paid off. It wasn’t whores; Dad’d been putting the extra into life insurance. Maybe he had what you call a premonition. Stranger things happen in the world every day, like rains of frogs or the two-headed cat I seen at the Castle County Fair – gave me nightmares, it did – or that Loch Ness Monster. Whatever it was, we had seventy-five thousand dollars that we never expected just drop out of the sky and into our Key Bank account.
That was Stroke of Luck Number One. Two years after that call, two years almost to the day, here come Stroke of Luck Number Two. Ma was in the habit of buying a five-dollar scratch-off ticket once a week after she got her groceries at Normie’s SuperShop. For years she’d been doin that and never won more than twenty dollars. Then one day in oh-four she matched 27 below to 27 above on a Big Maine Millions scratcher, and holy Christ on a bike, she seen that match was worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. ‘I thought I was going to pee my pants,’ she said. They put her pitcher in the window of the SuperShop. You might remember that, it was there for two months, at least.
A cool quarter million! More like a hundred and twenty thousand after all the taxes was paid, but still. We invested it in Sunny Oil, because Ma said oil was always gonna be a good investment, at least until it was gone, and we’d be gone by the time it was. I had to agree with that, and it turned out fine. Those were go-go years in the stock market, as you may remember, and that’s when we commenced our life of leisure.
It’s also when we got down to serious drinking. Some of it we done at the house in town, but not that much. You know how neighbors love to gossip. It wasn’t until we were mostly shifted out to the Mosquito Bowl that we really went to work on it. Ma quit the flower shop for good in oh-nine, and I said toodleoo to patchin tires and replacin mufflers a year or so later. After that we didn’t have much reason to live in town, at least until cold weather; no furnace out to the lake, you know. By twenty-twelve, when our trouble with those dagos across the lake started, we’d roll on out there a week or two before Memorial Day and stay until Thanksgiving or so.
Ma put on some weight – a hundred and fifty pounds, give or take – and I guess a lot of that was down to the coffee brandy, they don’t call it fat ass in a glass for nothin. But she said she was never the Miss America type to begin with, or even Miss Maine. ‘I’m a cuddly kind of gal,’ she liked to say. What Doc Stone liked to say, at least until she stopped goin to him, was that she was going to be a dying-young kind of gal if she didn’t quit drinkin the Allen’s.
‘You’re a heart attack waiting to happen, Hallie,’ he said. ‘Or cirrhosis. You’ve already got Type Two diabetes, isn’t that enough for you? I can give it to you in words of one syllable. You need to dry out, and then you need AA.’
‘Whew!’ Ma said when she got back. ‘After a scoldin like that, I need a drink. What about you, Alden?’
I said I could use one, so we took our lawn chairs out to the end of the dock, as we most often did, and got royally schnockered while we watched the sun go down. Good as anyone, and better than many. And look here: somethin’s gonna kill everyone, am I not right? Doctors have a way of forgettin that, but Ma knew.
‘The macrobiotic sonofabitch is probably right,’ she said as we tottered back to the cabin – along about ten, this was, and both of us bit to shit in spite of the DEET we’d slathered ourselves with. ‘But at least when I go, I’ll know I lived. And I don’t smoke, everybody knows that’s the worst. Not smoking should keep me going for awhile, but what about you, Alden? What are you going to do after I die and the money runs out?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I sure would like to see the Grand Canyon.’
She laughed and tossed an elbow in my ribs and said, ‘That’s my boy. You’ll never get a stomach ulcer with that attitude. Now let’s get some sleep.’ Which we did, waking up around ten the next day and starting to medicate our hangovers along about noon with Muddy Rudders. I didn’t worry as much about Ma as the doc did; I figured she was havin too much fun to die. As it happened, she outlived Doc Stone, who got killed one night by a drunk driver on Pigeon Bridge. You could call that irony or tragedy or just the way life goes. Me, I ain’t no philosopher. I was just glad the doc didn’t have his family with him. And I hope his insurance was paid up.
All right, that’s the background. Here’s where we get down to business.
The Massimos. And that fuckin trumpet, pardon my francais.
I call it the Fourth of July Arms Race, and although it didn’t really get up and runnin until twenty-thirteen, it really started the year before. The Massimos had the place directly across from us, a big white house with pillars and a lawn runnin down to their beach, which was pure white sand instead of gravel like ours. That place must have had a dozen rooms. Twenty or more if you count in the guest cottage. They called it Twelve Pines Camp, on account of the fir trees that was around the main house and kind of closed it in.
A camp! Sonny Jesus, that place was a mansion. And yes, they had a tennis court. Also badminton and a place on the side for throwin hoss-shoes. They’d come out near the end of June, and stay until Labor Day, and then close the sonofabitch up. A place that size, and they let it stand empty nine months out of every twelve. I couldn’t believe it. Ma could, though. She said we were ‘accident rich,’ but the Massimos were real rich.
‘Only those are ill-gotten gains, Alden,’ she said, ‘and I’m not talking about no quarter-acre pot patch, either. Everyone knows Paul Massimo is CONNECTED.’ She always said it just like that, in big capital letters.
Supposedly the money came from Massimo Construction. I looked it up on the Internet, and it appeared as legal as could be, but they were Italian, and Massimo Construction was based in Providence, Rhode Island, and you’re cops, you can connect the dots. As Ma always used to say, when you put two and two together, you never get five.
They used all of the rooms in the big white house when they were there, I’ll say that much. And the ones in the ‘guest cottage,’ as well. Ma used to look across the water and toast them with her Sombrero or Muddy Rudder and say Massimos came cheaper by the dozen.
They knew how to have fun, I’ll give em that. There were cookouts, and water tag, and teenage kids drivin those Jet Skis around – they must have had half a dozen of those babies, in colors so bright they’d burn your eyes if you looked at em too long. In the evenins they’d play touch football, usually enough Massimos to make two regulation teams of eleven each, and then, when it got too dark to see the ball, they’d sing. You could tell by the way they yelled out their songs, often in Italian, that they enjoyed a drink or three themselves.
One of em had a trumpet, and he’d blow it along with the songs, just wah-wah-wah, enough to make your eyes water. ‘Dizzy Gillespie he ain’t,’ Ma said. ‘Someone ought to dip that trumpet in olive oil and stick it up his ass. He could fart out “God Bless America.”’
Along about eleven, he’d blow ‘Taps,’ and that’d be it for the night. Not sure any of the neighbors would have complained even if the singing and that trumpet had gone on until three in the morning, not when most folks on our side of the lake believed he was the real-life Tony Soprano.
Come the Fourth of July that year – this is oh-twelve I’m talkin about – I had some sparklers, two or three packets of Black Cat firecrackers, and a couple of cherry bombs. I bought em from Pop Anderson at Anderson’s Cheery Flea Mart on the road to Oxford. That ain’t tattlin, neither. Not unless you’re bone-stupid, and I know neither of you is. Hell, everyone knew you could get firecrackers at the Cheery Flea. But little stuff was all Johnny’d sell, because back then fireworks was against the law.
Anyway, all those Massimos was runnin around across the lake, playin football and tennis and givin each other swimsuit wedgies, the little ones paddlin around the shore, the bigger ones divin off their float. Me n Ma was out at the end of the dock in our lawn chairs, feelin no pain, with our patriotic supplies laid out beside us. As dusk came down, I give her a sparkler, lit it, then lit mine off’n hers. We waved them around in the gloamin, and pretty soon the little ones over there on the other side seen em and started clamorin for their own. The two older Massimo boys handed em out, and they waved em back at us. Their sparklers was bigger n longer-lastin than ours, and the heads had been treated with some sort of chemical that made them go all different colors, while ours was only yellow-white.
The dago with the trumpet blew – wah-wah – as if to say, ‘This is what real sparklers look like.’
‘That’s okay,’ Ma said. ‘Their sparklers may be bigger, but let’s shoot some firecrackers and see how they like that.’
We lit em one by one and then tossed em so they’d bang and flash before they hit the lake. The kids over there at Twelve Pines seen that, and started clamorin again. So some of the Massimo men went in the house and come back with a carton. It was full of firecrackers. Pretty soon the bigger kids was lightin em off a pack at a time. They must have had a couple hundred packs in all, and they went off like machine-gun fire, which made ours seem pretty tame.
Waah-waah, went the trumpet, as if to say, ‘Try again.’
‘Well, sugar-tit,’ Ma said. ‘Give me one of those cherry bumpers you been holdin back, Alden.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but you be careful, Ma. You’ve had a few, and you might still like to see all your fingers tomorrow morning.’
‘Just give one over and don’t be smart,’ she said. ‘I didn’t fall off a hayrick yesterday, and I don’t like the sound of that trumpet. I bet they don’t have any of these, because Pop don’t sell to flatlanders. He sees their license plates and claims he’s all out.’
I gave her one and lit it with my Bic. The fuse sparked and she threw it high in the air. It went with a flash bright enough to hurt our eyes, and the bang echoed all the way down the lake. I lit the other one and flung it like Roger Clemens. Bang!
‘There,’ Ma says. ‘Now they know who’s boss.’
But then Paul Massimo and his two oldest sons walked down to the end of their dock. One of em – big handsome young fella in a rugby shirt – had that goddam trumpet in a kind of holster thing on his belt. They waved to us, and then the old man handed each of the boys somethin. They held the somethins out so he could light the fuses. They flang em out over the lake, and … holy God! Not bang but boom! Two booms, loud as dynamite, and big white flashes.
‘Those ain’t cherry bombs,’ I said. ‘Them are M-80s.’
‘Where’d they get those?’ Ma asked. ‘Pop don’t sell those.’
We looked at each other, and didn’t even have to say it: Rhode Island. You could probably get anything in Rhode Island. At least if your name was Massimo, you could.
The old man handed each of them another, and lit them up. Then he lit one of his own. Three booms, loud enough to scare every fish in Abenaki up to the north end, I have no doubt. Then Paul waved to us, and the fella with the trumpet drew it out of its holster like a six-gun and blew three long blasts: Waaaah … waaaah … waaaah. As if to say, ‘Sorry about that, you poor-ass Yankees, better luck next year.’
Wasn’t nothin we could do about it, neither. We had another pack of Black Cats, but they would have sounded pretty lackluster after those M-80s. And over on the other side, that pack of dagos was applaudin and cheerin, the girls jumpin up n down in their bikini suits. Pretty soon they started singing ‘God Bless America.’
Ma looked at me, and I looked at Ma. She shook her head and I shook mine. Then she said, ‘Next year.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Next year.’
She held up her glass – we were drinking Bucket Lucks that night, as I recall – and I raised mine. We drank to victory in oh-thirteen. And that was how the Fourth of July Arms Race began. Mostly I think it was that fucking trumpet.
Pardon my francais.
The followin June, I went to Pop Anderson and explained my situation; told him how I felt the honor of us on the west side of the lake had to be upheld.
‘Well, Alden,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what shootin off a bunch of gunpowder has to do with honor, but business is business, and if you come back in a week or so, I might have somethin for you.’
I did just that. He took me into his office and put a box on his desk. Had a bunch of Chinese characters on it. ‘This is stuff I ordinarily don’t sell,’ he said, ‘but me and your ma goes all the way back to grammar school together, where she spelled me by the woodstove and helped me learn my times tables. I got you some big bangers they call M-120s, and there’s not much bigger in the loud noise department unless you want to start tossin sticks of dynamite. And then there’s a dozen of these.’ He brought out a cylinder sitting on top of a red stick.
‘That looks like a bottle rocket,’ I said, ‘only bigger.’
‘Ayuh, you could call this the deluxe model,’ he said. ‘They’re called Chinese Peonies. They shoot twice as high, then make a hell of a flash – some red, some purple, some yella. You stick em in a Coke or beer bottle, just like with ordinary bottle rockets, but you want to stand well back, because the fuses are going to fizz sparks all over the place when they lift off. Keep a towel handy so you don’t start any brushfires.’
‘Well that’s great,’ I said. ‘They won’t be blowin no trumpet when they see those.’
‘I’ll sell you the whole box for thirty bucks,’ Pop said. ‘I know that’s dear, but I’ve also thrown in some Black Cats and a few Twizzlers. You can stick those in chunks of wood and send them off floatin. Awful pretty, they are.’
‘Say nummore,’ I told him. ‘It’d be cheap at twice the price.’
‘Alden,’ he said, ‘you never want to talk that way to a fella in my line of work.’
I took em back to camp, and Ma was so excited she wanted to set off one of the M-120s and one of the Chinese Peonies right away. I didn’t often put my foot down with Ma – she was apt to bite it right off your ankle – but I did that time. ‘Give those Massimos half a chance and they’ll come up with something better,’ I said.
She thought it over, then kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘You know, for a boy who barely finished high school, you’ve got a head on your shoulders, Alden.’
So here come the Glorious Fourth of oh-thirteen. The whole Massimo clan was gathered over at Twelve Pines like usual, must’ve been two dozen or more, and me’n Ma was out on the end of our dock in our lawn chairs. We had our box of goodies set down between us, along with a good-size pitcher of Orange Driver.
Pretty soon Paul Massimo come out to the end of his dock with his own box of goodies, which was a bit bigger than ours, but that didn’t concern me. It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight, you know, but the size of the fight in the dog. His two grown boys was with him. They waved, and we waved back. Dusk commenced, and me n Ma started shooting off Black Cats, not one by one this time but by the pack. The little kids did the same over on their side, and when they got tired of that, they lit up their big sparklers and waved em around. The son with the trumpet blew a couple of times, kind of tunin up.
A bunch of the younger ones heard it and come out on the Twelve Pines dock, and after some talk, Paul and his grown boys handed each of em a big gray ball that I recognized as M-80s. Sound carries across the lake real well, especially when there’s no breeze, and I could hear Paul tellin the little ones to be careful and demonstratin how they was to chuck em out into the lake. Then Massimo lit em up.
Three of the kids threw high, wide, n handsome like they were s’posed to, but the youngest – couldn’t have been more than seven – wound up like Nolan-friggin-Ryan and chucked his right onto the dock between his feet. It bounced and would’ve blown his nose off if Paul hadn’t yanked him back. Some of the women screamed, but Massimo and his boys just about fell down laughin. I judge they might have had more than a few shots. Wine, most likely, because that’s what those dagos like to drink.
‘All right,’ Ma said, ‘enough friggin around. Let’s show em up before that tall one starts honkin his goddam horn.’
So I took out a couple of the M-120s, which were black and looked like the bombs you sometimes see in those old-time cartoons, the ones the villain uses to blow up railroad tracks and gold mines and such.
‘You be careful, Ma,’ I said. ‘Hold onto something like this too long and you’d lose more than just your fingers.’
‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she said. ‘Let’s show those spaghettieaters.’
So I lit em, and we threw em, and ka-pow! One after the other! Enough to rattle windows all the way to Waterford, I should judge. Mr Hornblower froze with his trumpet halfway to his lips. Some of the little kids started to cry. All the women ran down to the beach to see what was goin on, if it was terrorists or what.
‘That’s got em!’ Ma said, and she toasted to young Mr Hornblower, standin over there with his trumpet in his hand and his thumb up his ass. Not really, you know, but in a manner of speakin.
Paul Massimo and his two sons walked back to the end of the dock, and there they huddled like a bunch of baseball players when the bases are loaded. Then they all walked up to the house together. I thought they was finished, and Ma was sure of it. So we lit up our Twizzlers, just to celebrate. I’d cut squares of Styrofoam from some packin material I found in the swill bucket out back of the cabin, and we stuck em in those and pushed em out into the water. By then it was that deep purple time that comes just before full dark, awful gorgeous, with the wishin star up there in the sky and all the others ready to peep out. Neither day nor night, and always the prettiest time there is, that’s what I think. And them Twizzlers – they was a lot more than pretty. They was beautiful, floatin out there all red and green, waxin and wanin like candle flames, and reflectin on the water.
It was quiet again, too, so quiet you could hear the thumps of the fireworks show gettin started over Bridgeton way, plus frogs startin to croak again along the shoreline. The frogs thought all the noise n ruckus was over for the night. Little did they know, because just then Paul and his two grown boys come back down to their dock and looked across at us. Paul had somethin in his hand almost as big as a softball, and the grown boy without the trumpet – which made him the smarter of the two, in my opinion – lit him up. Massimo didn’t waste time but slang it underhand, high above the water, and before I could tell Ma to cover her ears, it went off. Holy Jesus, the flash seemed to blot out the whole sky, and the blast was as loud as an artillery shell. This time it wasn’t just the Massimo women and girls who came to see, but damn near everybody on the lake. And although half of em probably pissed their pants when that fucker went off, they were applaudin! Do you believe that?
Ma n me looked at each other because we knew what was comin next, and it surely did: Captain Hornblower raised his fuckin trumpet and blew it at us, one long blast: Waaaaah!
All the Massimos laughed and applauded some more, and so did everybody else on both sides of the water. It was humiliatin. You can understand that, can’t you, Andy? Ardelle? We’d been outexploded by a bunch of Eye-Tie flatlanders from Rhode Island. Not that I don’t like a plate of spaghetti myself from time to time, but every day? Get out!
‘All right, fine,’ Ma said, squarin her shoulders. ‘Maybe they can outbang us, but we got those Chinese Peonies. Let’s see how they like those.’ But I could see on her face that she felt they might best us there, too.
I set up a dozen beer n soda cans on the end of our dock, and slipped one of the Peonies into each one. The Massimo menfolk over on the other side stood watchin us, then the one who didn’t think he could play the trumpet run back to the house for fresh ammunition.
Meanwhile I ran my lighter along the fuses, neat as you please, and the Chinese Peonies took off one after the other, with nary a malfunction. Awful pretty they were, even though they didn’t last long. All the colors of the rainbow, just like Pop promised. There were oohs and ahhs – some from the Massimos, I’ll give em that – and then the young man who ran away come back from his errand with another box.
Turned out it was full of fireworks that were like our Chinese Peonies, only bigger. Each one had its own little cardboard launchin pad. We could see, because by then there was lights on at the end of the Massimo dock, kind of shaped like torches, only electric. Paul lit those rockets and up they went, makin golden starbursts in the sky that was twice as big and bright as ours. They twinkled and made cracklin machine-gun noises when they came down. Everybody applauded even more, and accourse me n Ma had to do the same, or we’d be thought of as poor sports. And the trumpet blew: waaaaaaah-waaaaaaah-waaaaaaah.
Later on, after we’d shot off all our shit, Ma went stompin around the kitchen in her nightgown and tartan slippers, steam practically shootin out of her ears. ‘Where’d they get armaments like that?’ she asked, but it was what you call a retropical question, and she didn’t give me time to answer. ‘From his hoodlum friends back in Rhode Island, that’s where. Because he’s CONNECTED. And he’s one of those people who’s got to win at everything! You can tell just lookin at him!’
Sorta like you, Ma, I thought, but did not say. Sometimes silence really is golden, and never more than when your Ma’s loaded on Allen’s coffee brandy and madder than a wet hen.
‘And I hate that friggin trumpet. Hate it with a purple passion.’
I could agree with her there, and did.
She grabbed me by the arm, sloppin her last drink of the night all down the front of my shirt. ‘Next year!’ she said. ‘We’re going to show them who’s boss next year! Promise me we’ll shut up that trumpet in fourteen, Alden.’
I promised to try – that was the best I could do. Paul Massimo had all his resources in Rhode Island, and what did I have? Pop Anderson, owner of a side o’ the road flea market next to the discount sneaker store.
Still, I went to him the next day, and explained what had happened. He listened, and did me the courtesy of not laughin, although his mouth twitched a few times. I’m willin to sniculate that it did have its funny side – at least until last night it did – but not s’much when you had Hallie McCausland breathin down your neck.
‘Yes, I can see how that would get your ma’s goat,’ Pop said. ‘She was always a heller when someone tried to get the best of her. But for Christ’s sake, Alden, it’s only fireworks. When she sobers up she’ll see that.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, not wantin to add that Ma never really sobered up anymore, just went from tiddly to crocked to asleep to hungover and then back to tiddly again. Not that I was much better. ‘It ain’t s’much the fireworks as it is that trumpet, you see. If she could shut up that fuckin trumpet on the Fourth of July, I think she’d be satisfied.’
‘Well, I can’t help you,’ Pop said. ‘There’s plenty of bigger fireworks out there for sale, but I won’t truck in them. I don’t want to lose my vendor’s license, for one thing. And I don’t want to see no one get hurt, that’s another. Drunks shootin explosives is always a recipe for disaster. But if you’re really determined, you ought to take a ride up to Indian Island and talk to a fella there. Great big Penobscot named Howard Gamache. Biggest goddam Indian in Maine, maybe in the whole world. Rides a Harley-Davidson and has feathers tattooed on his cheeks. He’s what you might call connected.’
Somebody connected! That’s exactly what we needed! I thanked Pop, and wrote the name Howard Gamache in my notebook, and next April I took a ride up to Penobscot County with five hundred dollars cash in the glovebox of my truck.
I found Mr Gamache sittin at the bar of the Harvest Hotel in Oldtown, and he was as big as advertised – six foot eight, I’d guess, and would weigh around three fifty. He listened to my tale of woe, and after I’d bought him a pitcher of Bud, which he drank down in less than ten minutes, he said, ‘Well, Mr McCausland, let’s you and me take a little jaunt up the road to my wigwam and discuss this in more detail.’
He was ridin a Harley Softail, which is a mighty big sled, but when he was on it, that thing looked like one of the little bikes the clowns ride in the circus. Butt cheeks hung right down to the saddlebags, they did. His wigwam turned out to be a nice little two-story ranch with a pool out back for the kiddies, of which he had a passel.
