Deadline

1

They laid Arthur on a green canvas tarp, so close to the crowd that a few people tried to back away but couldn’t because the people at the rear were still pushing forward to see. Nobody could move so we just had to stand there in the cold night and stare down at Arthur and his head that was at a funny angle and his wet hair that was starting to freeze to his forehead and his hands that were gray-blue with darker gray fingernails. We all stood there with our hands in our pockets and nobody said anything except an old guy from mill security who was in uniform but looked like he’d spent a few hours drinking at the Legion.

Eh, Christ, he said, pronouncing it the French way, Crist.

We all stood there and wished something would happen but there was some screw-up with the hearse being blocked by a fireman’s pickup so we had to wait, like people gathered around somebody who had collapsed in the street. There was nothing you could say so we stared dumbly at Arthur—at his glasses that were still on his face but perched crooked, at the bare patch of hairy white ankle that showed because his socks had fallen down.

He really didn’t look bad, considering.

Come on, move it back, somebody said behind me, and I turned to see firemen in boots and raincoats with ANDROSCOGGIN FD stenciled on the backs. They were pushing a stretcher through the crowd and behind them was Steve Theriault from the funeral home, bald and chubby and carrying a light green sheet. The four of them pushed through and raised the stretcher to waist height, then stood eyeing Arthur and huffing steamy breath into the night air. Two of the firemen hunched over and picked Arthur up by the legs and the other two, including Theriault, got him by the armpits. One of them grunted.

I guess that’s why they call it dead weight.

After they got him up and on, they straightened Arthur on the stretcher and put the sheet over his face, just like on television. His feet still stuck out, also just like on television, but they didn’t cover them. They just plowed back into the crowd, which parted and then followed as if the whole thing were some strange public funeral procession, held under the glare of the lights.

I brought up the rear, scanning the crowd as it dissolved among the cars and pickups like fans leaving a football game.

Come on, I said. Where’s a cop when you need one?

The cop turned out to be Lieutenant Vigue who, by the time I got to him, was all worked up—not by the tragedy of Arthur’s death, but by the traffic snarl it was causing where the mill road met the highway.

Vigue was standing in the road, waving a flashlight and motioning like one of those people who direct jets on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Half the town had stopped to see Arthur pulled from the water, and now their cars and trucks were streaming back onto the highway while Vigue held back the log trucks that waited in a long dieseling line, their air brakes hissing impatiently, drivers commiserating into the mikes of their CBs.

Hey, Lieutenant, I said. What’s happening?

You know what we know, Vigue said.

What’s that?

Vigue looked at me sideways, tense and irritable in the flashing glare of the strobe lights.

Not much. It’s Arthur. He was in the river. He’s dead.

Who found him?

He looked at me sideways again.

You in a hurry or what?

I shrugged. He pulled the clip mike off his jacket collar and held it up.

Nine-one, nine-three.

His radio chirped something unintelligible.

You got the names, times on this one?

Another chirp.

"Bring it down here, will ya? New York Times is here."

Chirp again.

The last of the viewing audience pulled out of the mill road and high above us the trucks began to move through. They roared and rumbled and spouted plumes of exhaust smoke, like huge mechanical dragons. We stood by Vigue’s idling cruiser and waited. He lit a cigarette, his face taut and handsome in the flicker of the lighter’s flame.

So what do you think happened? I said.

Who the hell knows? he said.

Where’s the autopsy?

Augusta.

State guys in on it?

Only on paper. Unless it turns out to be something.

Like what?

Not suicide. Not accidental. Five bullet holes in the back. Something like that. But don’t get your hopes up.

Even without that it’s strange, I said.

Vigue waved a balky truck through.

That so?

Don’t you think so? I mean, how’d he get here? Out here in the middle of nowhere. Mill people don’t even come down here. He didn’t drive. You see him walking all the way down here? In the cold? What’s he gonna do? Go for a swim?

Wouldn’t be a long swim, Vigue said. Friggin’ ice water sucks the life right out of you, Mister Man. Only good thing is they don’t smell when you pull ’em out of the water.

Nothing like a silver lining, I said.

Yup.

We stood for a minute as the cars wound their way up to the main road above us. A police cruiser came down the access road, driven hard and fast the way cops like to drive. It pulled up and stopped and a patrolman got out, leaving the motor running. Cops like to do that, too.

His name tag said LEMAIRE, J., and Vigue looked at him and then nodded toward me, just barely.

How’s the mild-mannered reporter tonight? LeMaire, J. asked.

Just wonderful.

What can we do you for?

I asked for names. LeMaire, J. told me a trucker from Quebec, a chip hauler, called it in. There was some confusion because the trucker, one Yves Martin, forty-six, of St. Agathe, called it in en français. He’d been flagged down by two kids, boys in their teens, who were wandering through the mill yards, probably looking for something to break or steal, when one saw something in the water where the river cuts through the mill canal.

That was Arthur? I said.

You saw him, didn’t you? Vigue said.

I had my notebook out.

For the record. Official, you know? You ID’d him as Arthur Bertin.

Two-thirty-five Carolina, Androscoggin, LeMaire, J. said, reading off a tiny yellow coil-bound pad. DOB six twenty-six forty-six.

I scribbled. My hands were stiff from the cold.

Any sign of foul play?

Not at the present time, Vigue said, his voice slipping lower, more serious. No sign of anything except a dead body. You have to wait for the results of the autopsy. So it’s under investigation. Pretty much. I can tell you we won’t have much to move on until the cause of death is determined.

But what do you think now?

What do I think? Vigue said.

Yeah, I said, stuffing my pen hand in my pocket. It was an old trick: The pen goes in the pocket; the source tends to relax.

What do you think? I continued. On the face of it, you know? Preliminary or whatever.

Hey, preliminary, it looks like a guy drowned. He’s in the water and he’s dead. But preliminary is preliminary. It isn’t the final ruling.

You mean accidental drowning? Accidental?

Under investigation. That’s what I mean. When the autopsy comes in we’ll know more.

But Lieutenant, you know how you were saying the cold, how it sucks the life right out of you—

That was off the record.

Okay. Off the record. Between us. If somebody got thrown or pushed in the water, or whatever. You know you wouldn’t be able to find a way up that concrete wall. You saw the wall. What I’m saying is, the guy would drown but it wouldn’t be an accident. Right?

Vigue lit another cigarette with the lighter from his breast pocket. The lighter was green plastic. It glowed under his face and then went out and then he looked at me.

Friggin’ A, he said. I thought this guy was supposed to be a friend of yours. What’s the matter? Drowning ain’t good enough for you? Ain’t front-page? Gotta be a homicide?

Doesn’t have to be anything. Just has to be true.

Well, here’s what’s true: Arthur Bertin is in the water. He’s dead. We don’t know what happened, but we’ll find out. Maybe.

I wrote in my notebook.

And they say cops are cold bastards, Vigue said.

We’re all cold bastards tonight, I said.

In the glow of the cigarette, I saw him smile.

2

I woke up the next morning with a vague, nagging pain in the back of my head that reminded me I’d had too many beers too fast the night before.

I’d come home straight from the river, pulling into the Food Stop at the bottom of the hill to buy a six-pack of Ballantine Ale in sixteen-ounce cans. The girl behind the counter, a kid with a mane of bleached-out mannequin’s hair, had been watching a cop movie on the television and had kept her eye on the screen as she took my five-dollar bill and handed me change. I’d gone out the door in a hail of gunfire, and had driven up Oxford Street to the big yellow house that, with its rotting trim and faded paint, was a last slap at the Victorians who built this town, and on up to my place on the second floor. My parka and notebooks and pens and wallet had gone on the kitchen counter. I’d sunk into the big chair and, with the beer and the cabled-in news of much more dramatic tragedies on the television, did a pretty good job of blotting Arthur and Vigue out of my mind.

But now it was time.

I got out of bed and went to the window in the living room and looked out on a slate-blue sky behind bare brittle oaks. It was clear and cold, the kind of late November day that is neither winter nor fall, but something drier, more pure. Through the trees, above the roofs, I could see the steam plume from the mill, bent sharply to the east like a billowing white pennant on a wizard’s castle. The blast of cold air from Canada would keep the wizard’s laboratory stench from settling on Androscoggin, sending it downriver instead.

In Androscoggin, the air would be sharp and clean. Fit for a tourist, not that many tourists would breathe it.

They didn’t come to Androscoggin, the tourists. They did go by it, pounding down Route 2 as fast as the weather and the pulp trucks would allow. Some were headed west, people from places like Fredericton and Woodstock in New Brunswick, making a dash for the White Mountains, which began cropping up thirty miles outside of town. Since the McDonald’s had gone in across from the Route 2 Exxon, there had been no real reason for anyone to turn off the wide two-lane highway. They did slow down, but it was usually only long enough to gawk at the mill, wonder how people could live with that awful smell, and hope New Hampshire was nothing like this. When tourists did make the loop through downtown, their foreign cars and new Blazers bristling with skis, their Suburbans pulling travel trailers, you knew that it was because of a wrong turn or a leaking water pump or some other mistake or misfortune.

In fact, the route to Androscoggin from the south was like a long series of wrong turns, all of which went against your better judgment.

The cars that flowed into the state from below, squeezing through the tollbooths at Kittery like they were entering some vast national park, kept to the coastline. Most people drove up the interstate to Portland, where they were reassured by the city skyline and the fact that you could come this far north and still see the temperature flashing on top of a bank tower. At Brunswick, they peeled off onto Route 1 and angled up the coast, dropping down the various peninsulas, from Bath to Bass Harbor, that were like fingers of civility in a place that was otherwise dark and untamed.

But to get to Androscoggin from the south, you didn’t go to Portland. I did the first time I came to town, but I was told that I had wasted a good half-hour inching along Route 302 through places like Windham and Raymond and Bridgton. The route of choice, I learned, was right up the Maine Turnpike to Auburn, off on Route 4, with its mini-malls and trailer parks, and on through the crossroads towns of Turner and Livermore. The towns and settlements between them were tired, as if it took tremendous effort to just keep going, and the effort had been ongoing for a very long time.

First-timers would be unsettled by the weight of inertia that had settled over the place and would look to the wooded hills for solace. They would watch the hills as they angled northwest on Route 108, until the Androscoggin River broke through past the village of Livermore, and the river gave the road a purpose and a route. And then the thunderclouds of steam crept over the horizon and the road bent left with the river and there was the mill, all stacks and vast woodpiles, as if all the trees in Maine had been cut down and dumped right there. There were trucks and railroad cars and miles of empty yard dotted with scattered rusting junk, and then, after all that, there was a glimpse of the town hidden behind all of it.

Androscoggin was a paper company town, as industrial as anything surrounding a Pennsylvania steel mill or an aluminum smelter in some bleak stretch of Ontario. This surprised people who had not been there, including people I knew back in the city. From their apartments in the East Village, in Fox Point in Providence, their condos inside the Beltway around D.C., they pictured a tiny town with a village green and old duffers with Down East accents sitting on the porch of the general store.

This isn’t like that, I would tell them, the few who called, the even fewer who cared. I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to explain.

Androscoggin had been built in the late nineteenth century by rich men who wanted to become richer by turning trees into paper. They made their fortunes and everyone else made a living and raised families on the tenement-lined streets that grew up around the mill like military housing. More than a hundred years later, people from Androscoggin were still enlisting for lifetime hitches in the wood room, the pulp mill, and on paper machines. They wore St. Amand Paper jackets and bought four-wheel-drive trucks and snowmobiles. Their families were fed and clothed. Some of their children enlisted, too, filling the ranks that retirement never thinned. Others went to college and never came back.

They went to live in cities and towns that did not smell like rotten cabbage, which Androscoggin did, especially on overcast days when clouds sealed the valley. On days like that, the smell was strongest, seeping everywhere, like some kind of poisonous gas. But it smelled every day, every night, a constant reminder that SAP paid the bills—that if you didn’t want to work at the SAP, most likely you’d have to go somewhere else to work for less money.

Not that a reminder was needed.

The mill was everywhere, sprawling along the river, fed by lines of wood trucks and railcars that never stopped coming. Pulpwood, cut in eight-foot lengths, was piled so high that from a distance, the stacks looked like silver-gray hills, mountains of twigs. The mill itself loomed over the town so massively that drivers—skiers, hunters, fishermen—coming toward Androscoggin on Route 2 would pull to the side of the road and stare, amazed that anything this monstrously huge could have been built so far away from everything else.

How far? Let’s just say we had the last McDonald’s for a hundred and fifty miles. The next one was in Quebec.

Androscoggin was an outpost, the big town for a dozen or so poverty-stricken hamlets where a few people scratched out a living, working in the woods, maybe doing a few weeks in the dowel mill in Dixfield at four bucks an hour. When those jobs ran out, there was bartering truck parts, or fixing some out-of-stater’s camp, which didn’t pay much, but did put beer on the table. And there was always the State, two or three hundred bucks a month from AFDC.

Against this backdrop of hangover to hangover existence, the mill smelled pretty good.

But it wouldn’t smell much today, I thought, watching the plume against the blue sky. It would be a good day in Androscoggin. It would be a good day for an autopsy.

By eight-thirty, the Pine Tree had thinned out a little. There were three Canadian chip-truck drivers at the counter, having cigarettes and coffee and eggs before they headed back up through Coburn Gore and home to Quebec. Their loads were dumped at the mill and their rigs were parked out back. I’d noticed the names on the cab doors: Guy Laurent et Fils, Yves Martin et Fils, Marcel Nadeau et Fils.

I wondered what their daughters did.

The three drivers were hunched over their plates and when I sat down next to one of them, I could hear short bursts of French and then a few words in English: That son of a bitch.

The waitress, the new one named Stacy or Tracy, put a white cup down in front of me and poured coffee without asking or even looking at me. I was looking at her fingernails, which were painted a dark maroon, when a hand touched me lightly on the shoulder.

Hey, Jackson, Vern said quietly. How’s it going?

Okay, I guess. How ’bout you?

Can’t complain. You go down there last night?

Oh yeah.

Bad?

Bad enough, I guess. Arthur on the ground and fifty people staring at him.

Circus, huh?

Yup, I said.

Stacy or Tracy put a cup down in front of Vern. Her lipstick was dark maroon, too. I opened the plastic container of half-and-half and poured it in my coffee. The spoon had a piece of something on it but I picked it off and stirred the coffee, then took a sip. Vern asked one of the Canadians for the sugar, in French. Le sucre. He slid it over and Vern said, "Merci."

Thank you, Mr. Berlitz.

So what the hell happened? Vern said to me.

They don’t know. There’s supposed to be an autopsy today sometime. They get a cause of death and then they decide where to go from there. That’s what Vigue said, anyway.

That’s it?

I don’t know. I guess so. They didn’t seem too worked up about it. Probably figured Arthur was a little screwy. Probably jumped in. Hard to tell what they’re thinking. Going by the book, I guess.

Why would Arthur jump in the river?

The canal, you mean.

Whatever. The water.

I shrugged. Sipped. The coffee wasn’t hot enough.

Friggin’ Keystone cops, Vern said. Don’t want to leave McDonald’s. Get their uniforms dirty.

He took a sip of coffee and scowled.

Just ’cause the guy wasn’t a friggin’ lawyer or a doctor or some bigwig, they don’t give a shit.

I don’t know about that, I said. Maybe they just need a little time. I don’t know. I always thought Vigue was pretty straight. Not stupid anyway.

Ah, they’re all the same.

I didn’t say anything.

So what do you think happened? Vern said.

I thought for a second.

I don’t know. I really don’t. What do you think? I don’t know what he’d be doing down there at all. You know? How would he even get there? Walk?

He have his camera?

I didn’t see one last night.

Maybe they ought to drag that section of the canal there, you know? Check with the taxi people, see if he got dropped off someplace around there.

In the middle of nowhere?

Well, he wouldn’t walk down there, half a mile from anything in the friggin’ cold. So he had to get a ride somehow.

Maybe you ought to head up the investigation, I said.

Who’d do sports?

"I’ll rewrite the Sun. That’s what you do, anyway, isn’t it?"

Beats leaving your desk, Vern said. Speaking of which, Jackson. You know we’re gonna have to find somebody to do film?

Ah, yes, the wake is over. You been in the office yet?

Just for a sec. Martin’s there. I think he wants a briefing.

Oh, Jesus. Just what I need. He didn’t say that, did he?

No, he was just sort of wandering around. Had his column in his hand, doing the old Martin shuffle.

You ought to show more respect for the editor emeritus.

Ah, I’m only kidding. We’ll all be old and useless someday.

You’re halfway there already, I said.

Watch it. I’ll quit and you’ll be covering sixth-grade basketball and taking the pictures.

I shook my head.

So he’s got the latest installment of ‘Yesteryears’? I said.

His blast from the past, coming at ya.

Better read than any of your meandering drivel.

Vern nodded solemnly.

Yessir, we sell out up at the Sunset Home.

Stacy or Tracy bustled by and shamed me, subliminally, into getting to work. I asked Vern if we still needed prints made for the paper that week. He said he had an entire basketball section to finish and, as far as he knew, all the pictures were still in negatives in Arthur’s darkroom at home. We didn’t have anybody who was really good at processing film or making prints.

You never did any of that in your checkered career as a journalist? I asked Vern.

Any of what?

Photos. Processing film.

Hell, no, Vern said. "Papers I worked for, we took our film down to Photomat. None of this New York Times shit. You big boys were sending people to El Salvador, I was hitching a ride on the JV bus. You’re writing one story a week, I’m cranking out four a day."

I thought you always worked for weeklies.

Weeklies, dailies. All small potatoes.

"Pa-day-duhs, you mean. You sound like a flatlander."

I am, Jackson, I am, Vern said, taking a swallow of coffee. A flatlander lost in the Maine wilderness.

A Mormon among the Apaches.

That’s right. A missionary out there with the heathen unwashed.

He smiled.

He was a weird guy, you know? Vern said.

Arthur?

Yeah. Don’t you think? So friggin’ solitary, you know what I’m saying? In two and a half years, I don’t think I ever saw him talking to anybody as, I don’t know, as an equal. You know? It was always whoever would tolerate him. Cops. Firemen.

Us.

Yeah, Vern said.

People who were getting paid anyway, I said.

Right. If it was part of the job. Did you ever have him over to your place for dinner?

No. Maybe I should have.

And talk about what? Vern said, holding his cup out for more coffee. "What it was like at the New York Times?"

Maybe he would have liked that.

Maybe. But I don’t think he could take much head-on conversation. A heart-to-heart over a few beers. Up close and personal.

But you know right away, I said. You come to a place and you look around and you see that nobody has anything to do with the guy. And these are people who have known him their whole lives.

So you figure there’s a reason.

Didn’t you?

I guess, Vern said. You back off, sort of.

Unless you’re some kind of social worker.

And I’m not, Vern said. And you’re not either.

Stacy or Tracy came by with the coffeepot and I shook my head, no.

Where were you right before you came here? To this paper? I asked Vern.

In the dairy country of Wisconsin, he said. "Working for a weekly. With my nose buried in the want ads in the back of Editor and Publisher."

Did they have somebody like Arthur at your paper out there?

Typesetter named Alice Neilson. Lived with her cat. Had pictures of the old thing all over her desk. She could set type like a son of a bitch, though. What about New York?

Are you kidding? I said. "New York is full of them. The Times, too."

All the lonely people, Vern half-sang.

You got it, I said.

Vern left, walking up the block to LaVerdiere’s drugstore to get the Boston Globe, his daily ritual. I let Stacy or Tracy give me a fresh cup of coffee and sat and felt a little guilty about Arthur—that I didn’t feel anything that resembled grief.

I felt bad, but it wasn’t grief. It was just feeling bad, sort of lousy, as if something had gone wrong. A big mistake in a story. The car breaking down. A guy you know drowns.

Hey, what can you do?

I’d known Arthur since I’d come to town, what, seven months ago. I’d seen him every day—every day I’d been at the paper anyway. He’d come into the office in his thrift-store plaid pants with his hair all greasy and his lenses and camera bodies all clacking together in the Army surplus ammo pouch he used for a camera bag. If I was on the phone, he’d wait, lurking out front in the big room, checking the basket for the prints we’d already published. He’d wipe the grease-pencil marks off them and, if I said it was okay, he’d sell the pictures to the mothers of the basketball players, the fire department, the Ladies’ Aid, the officers of the Grange. When I’d come to the paper, the new guy from New York, he’d asked me if it was okay if he kept doing it and I’d said, Sure, as long as it wasn’t something we needed for the files.

Arthur had always asked if things were all right. He’d walk in quietly, the way he did, almost infiltrating the office like a terrorist or something, and suddenly there’d be a print on my desk and Arthur standing there, waiting for me to say the picture was fine or good or even great, which his pictures never were. They were adequate for a small