A sign loomed ahead: WHITNEY HIGH SCHOOL. HOME OF THE WARRIORS.
It was a boxy two-story brick structure indistinguishable from a hundred school buildings around the state, except that the cars and trucks in the parking lot looked harder used than the vehicles kids drove in southern Maine. There were also a dozen or so snowmobiles parked in a line on the banked wall of ice. No teenagers had ever ridden Arctic Cats to my alma mater. It was yet another sign of the cultural rift between the suburban and rural parts of the state.
Schools always reminded me of Sarah, who’d been a teacher before she moved to D.C. If she had carried our baby to term, he or she would be two months old now, I realized. After Sarah miscarried, the doctor offered to tell us the sex of the fetus, but Sarah said she didn’t want to know. She’d said it would make her too sad.
I’d wanted to know.
Rivard turned off the engine and hopped out of the truck without waiting for me. I followed him inside, down the greenly lit hall to the vice principal’s office. From my best guess, Whitney High School must have received its last renovation during the Eisenhower administration. The tan lockers and scuffed linoleum floors would have looked at home on the set of the movie Grease.
The vice principal was a wiry young guy with a ponytail and round little glasses. His outfit-tweed jacket, blue jeans, open-throated hemp shirt-reminded me of a hippie teacher I’d had in elementary school in the backwoods of western Maine. Rivard introduced him to me as a Mr. Mandelbaum.
“I have to tell you I am very uncomfortable with this situation,” he said. His forehead was furrowed, his eyes wary.
Rivard had turned his sunglasses around so they faced the back of his head, the way baseball players do. “We just want to ask him a few questions.”
“If this is some sort of interrogation, I need to call Barney’s parents. I won’t allow you to question him without their consent. The children here have rights.”
“You’re blowing this way out of proportion,” said Rivard. “We just think Beal can help us out with some information about a case we’re investigating. It’s a routine inquiry. All we want is five minutes.”
I was fairly certain that my sergeant was misleading the vice principal. He’d told me he suspected Barney Beal of theft and drug dealing. The earlier discomfort I’d felt about this school visit returned as an itchy sensation along my torso.
Mandelbaum readjusted his glasses on his nose. “If any of your questions seem at all accusatory, I will cancel the interview. Understood?”
Rivard curled his lips like someone attempting a smile for a portrait photographer. “So where’s Mr. Beal at the moment?”
“In America Two.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Social studies,” Mandelbaum explained. “If you wait right here, I’ll go get him.”
The vice principal carefully closed the door behind him as he left the office.
“You told Mandelbaum you weren’t going to interrogate the kid,” I said.
“Just let me handle this, will you?”
A moment later, the vice principal returned, followed by the Incredible Hulk’s twin brother. “These wardens have a few questions for you, Barney,” Mandelbaum said. “You don’t have to answer anything that makes you uncomfortable.”
Barney Beal had a brown flattop and painful-looking acne. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt bearing the Teutonic logo of a heavy-metal band that had been popular in the rest of the country three decades ago. His eyes remained blank as he shambled into the room. Without waiting for directions, he took a seat in one of the three chairs arranged before the vice principal’s desk, extended his legs, and folded his thick, pimpled arms across his chest. He had some sort of biblical verse tattooed on his forearm: Ezek. 23:30. How old did you have to be to get inked these days? I wondered.
Rivard stepped forward, so that he practically loomed over the boy. “I’m Sergeant Rivard and this is Warden Bowditch.”
The invocation of my name caused the boy to turn in his chair and look me flat in the eyes. His pupils were tiny black dots.
“I’d appreciate your looking at me when I talk to you,” Rivard said.
The kid paused just long enough to make the point that he was doing so because it suited him and not because it was a command.
The itching I was feeling started to burn. The Scared Straight approach had its uses, I supposed, but as a rule, I didn’t believe in humiliating children, even gargantuan ones.
Standing beside me, Mandelbaum shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then back again. He could sense that, despite my sergeant’s earlier assurances, something here wasn’t on the up-and-up. He lowered his head, trying to catch the kid’s almost catatonic gaze. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call your folks, Barney?”
“No, suh.”
“We’ve had some break-ins over at Bog Pond,” Rivard said. “You know where that is?”
It was a lake in Township Nineteen, not far from Doc Larrabee’s house, I realized.
“Yes, suh,” said Barney Beal.
“You ever go snowmobiling over that way with your friends?” Rivard asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“We have witnesses who said they saw you riding your sled on the pond last Friday night. You and your friends.”
“That sounds like an accusation,” said Mandelbaum.
“It ain’t illegal to go sleddin’,” Beal said.
“But it is illegal to break into someone’s cabin to steal the satellite TV chips,” Rivard said. “We know it was you who broke into those camps, Beal.”
Mandelbaum held up both of his narrow hands. “That’s enough! Don’t answer any more questions, Barney.”
“We’re talking about a Class D felony, Mr. Mandelbaum. That’s punishable by a year in jail.”
“In which case, Barney should have an attorney present, as well as his parents.” The vice principal turned to the boy. “I apologize for bringing you in here. I never should have agreed to this conversation.”
Beal raised his chin. “Can I go now?”
“Yes,” I said, scratching the itchy place over my heart. “You can go back to class.”
Beal lurched to his feet so abruptly, he kicked the chair over.
The boy reached down with his long arm and lifted it as it were made of balsa wood. He set the chair delicately into place. I made a note to myself, in case I ever encountered him again, that this teenager was as strong as the Hulk.
“We’ll be watching you, Beal,” Rivard said. “You won’t know it, but we will.”
For the first time, the faintest trace of a smile appeared on the boy’s pimply face.
“Yes, suh,” he said on his way out the door.
Mandelbaum waited until the boy was out of earshot before laying into us. “You lied to me,” he said. “You came in here and you lied. You told me Barney wasn’t a suspect in any crimes.”
“Those weren’t the exact words we used,” Rivard said. “What I said was, we wanted him to help us out with some information.”
“That’s-sophistry! You have no right to bully my students. These are good kids here. Yes, some of them have some problems. There’s poverty and addiction. But just because Barney Beal comes from a broken family-just because he has a tattoo-doesn’t mean you can treat him like a thug. Not without evidence.”
“How long have you worked here, Mr. Mandelbaum?” Rivard asked.
“This is my second year. Why?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So because I’m not a Maine native, I’m a second-class citizen who will never understand this place?”
“Basically, yes.”
“We apologize for the intrusion, Mr. Mandelbaum.” I pulled my gloves from my coat pockets. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready to hit the road, Sergeant.”
I could feel Rivard’s eyes boring into my back as I left the room.
I’d never missed Kathy Frost so much in my life.
When I was in high school, I was the straightest of straight arrows. All my teachers adored me, and the football coach made me a team captain despite my limitations as a tight end and linebacker.
The only serious trouble I ever got into was a single fistfight. After school one day, I came across a kid who looked almost exactly like Barney Beal bullying a nerdy freshman, and I ordered him to knock it off. When the bully told me where I could shove my advice, I coldcocked him in the nose. Our fight was long and vicious, and by the time the phys ed coach pulled us apart, we both needed stitches.
Afterward, the vice principal had confronted me in her plush office, not so much with anger as with hurt and disbelief. It was as if I had broken her heart in some way. I was such a great kid, she said. Out of what dark place had this violence suddenly come?
“I don’t know,” I said, lying.
The truth was that rage was twisted into my genetic code. It was my father’s enduring birthright. Every day I fought to deny the existence of my simmering anger, to push it back inside my dark heart.
At the hospital, my mother looked at my fierce eyes and wounded jaw with horror, fearful that I had begun some lycanthropic transformation. Her greatest worry was that I was destined to become a bloodthirsty creature like her ex-husband. After the divorce, she did everything she could to keep me away from my dad. She’d moved us from the North Woods to the Portland suburbs. She discouraged me from talking to him on the phone. She even frowned on my own hunting and fishing pursuits, worried I was becoming increasingly like my old man.
My mother now spent her winters in Naples, Florida, and we spoke less and less. My choice of a dangerous profession had seemingly confirmed her worst fears, and I think she fully expected that some night the telephone would ring and it would be Colonel Harkavy, telling her that I had been shot in the head by a Down East poacher. It was better not to think of me in that case, to pretend her doomed son no longer existed, to protect herself from future grief.
I waited for Rivard in the frigid parking lot, literally blowing off steam. Every shimmer of breath was visible in the air for several seconds before being swept away on the breeze. If anything, the sky looked even more ominous than when we’d arrived, but perhaps it was just my miserable mood.
My sergeant didn’t speak until we were on the road again. “You could have backed me up in there.”
“Mandelbaum was right. You lied to him.”
“The guy’s living in a dream world. Beal is the one who robbed those cabins. Him and his buddies. Did you see his pupils? They were microscopic. The kid was high on Oxy or God knows what.”
“If you’re so sure he’s robbing cabins to buy drugs,” I said, “you should turn your evidence over to the sheriff’s office or the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency. It’s their job to investigate that shit, not ours.”
Rivard kept his eyes on the road, but he rolled his head around on his neck as if it were crimped. “I was trying to send that punk a message.”
“I think you failed, Marc.”
He turned his head, and once again I was confronted by my distorted reflection in his sunglasses. The anger I saw in my features stopped me cold. I felt like Henry Jekyll looking into the face of his other self.
“You’ve got a lot to learn,” Rivard said.
“So you keep telling me.”
He flicked on the windshield wipers.
I’d been so consumed with my grievances that I hadn’t noticed it was beginning to snow.
FEBRUARY 13
They sent us home early on account of the snow. Erick says there’s a big blizzard coming. The Storm of the Century, he says.
On the bus I kept thinking about the White Owl, wondering if she’d come to my window like she did the last time it snowed.
The bus came around the corner and I saw Randle’s new car in front of the house and I got a sick feeling in my stomach like I ate too much peanut brittle.
Ma’s van was there, too-but she don’t usually get home till after
2. That’s when her shift ends.
Randle’s always got some new car. This one’s a black Grand Am.
After the bus left, I wondered if Randle and Prester shot a coyote like they said they was going to. I wondered if they had it in the backseat.
All I did was look in the window!
Suddenly Randle came out the door, yelling F this and F that and telling me to get away from the car. His face was all weird and scary from his new tattoo.
He HIT me!
Right in the side of the head. I fell over and everything! My whole backpack spilled onto the ground. When I touched my head, there was BLOOD!
Ma came out screaming. Don’t touch him! Leave him alone!
She ain’t afraid of Randle. She gave him a shove, but he just pushed her into a snowbank. Then he called her the C word.
If you touch my son again, I’m gonna kill you! Ma said. I never seen her so mad.
F you, Jamie, Randle said. Come on, Prester.
Uncle P didn’t even try to help us up or anything. He just did what Randle told him to do, same as always.
Randle peeled rubber all the way up the road.
Ma helped me pick up my stuff. I’ll never let him hurt you again, Lucas, she told me.
I heard that one before.
She knew what I was thinking. I mean it this time, she said.