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.
When Verna was called on to speak, Maureen got out of herself and into the meeting. She could hear Verna’s story about how far down her boozing had taken her, how she lost everything, her house, her youngsters, and how, finally, she even lost herself, and how she didn’t care, not even then, and how she figured she was born an alcoholic, because when she was little, long before she’d started drinking, she’d felt so cut off from everybody else, so different. Verna said that she was so grateful for the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, because not only did it get her off the booze, but it showed her a way to live, and it meant that she was alone no more. She said that the God of her understanding was definitely not the God she’d been terrified by at Presentation Convent. The God of her understanding just stood for Good Orderly Direction. She said she’d read this in the Daily Reflections but that she wanted to share it, and she read out from a book, “Still a child, she cries for the moon, but the moon, it seems, won’t have her.” That’s how she’d spent her life, she said: uselessly crying for the moon.
But how else are you supposed to get the moon? Maureen thought.
The next fella that spoke was from somewhere up the Southern Shore. The crowd from the Southern Shore all had a way of talking that Maureen found captivating, and buddy was no different. He said that all the time that he’d been drinking, his life had been like a boat that was out on the wide sea, but it was a boat that had no charts or radar or navigation of any kind aboard, and because he had never learned to navigate by the stars, he was all the time lost, lost out on an ocean of trouble. He said that getting in the program had been like getting on a big boat with a crew of people on board with charts and radar, and he was even learning to use the stars to set his course so that in real bad times, when he couldn’t see the charts or there was something wrong with the navigation equipment, he could always depend on himself.
Verna and buddy seemed to be talking directly to Maureen. It was like someone had come in and told them all about her, how she’d always felt like she was all by herself, out on a dark spit of land with the wind roaring and the rain spilling down while everybody else was warm and cozy in a room together, dry and happy, and it was Christmas and Easter and all the High Holy Days of Obligation all glommed into one glorious, adorable family get-together. Every day, Maureen felt so lost and she never knew which way to go, and even when she did decide on a direction, it always led to disaster. On top of that, for as long as she could remember, Maureen had known that everything she felt was the wrong thing to feel, and she never knew what to feel or what to do or even what to think, and she’d often find herself thinking when she was faced with a problem, What would a real little girl do? How would a real little girl feel? Because although Maureen fought savagely to be seen as a grown-up, whenever she thought of herself, she saw a lost little girl, a little girl who didn’t have access to that wonderfully clear map that everybody else used to navigate through ordinary days.
The last one they asked to speak was Dicey. Maureen had been praying that Dicey wouldn’t, but she said her name, her real Patsy Anne name, and said she’d only been sober for six days and that she’d always known that she drank too much, but she didn’t think she was an alcoholic until she found out she was pregnant. Maureen gasped and looked at Dicey, who looked down and continued, “. . . and so I was so sick from being pregnant that I didn’t want to drink, and I wasn’t going to drink, but it ended up all I did was drink. I just stayed on it steady from stars in the sky morning till stars in the sky night. I don’t remember where I was, I can hardly remember where I went, and I just slept wherever sleep overtook me, and when I finally went home, I was so sick, I was as sick as eight dogs. I decided right then I was never going to drink again. That was a Monday, and by Friday, I was right back on it. That week, I knew I was going to die if I kept drinking, but if I didn’t drink, I knew I would just as soon be dead anyway, and to tell you the truth, at that point I didn’t care. And then I found out that the baby’s father was dead.” She paused, almost looked over at Maureen but didn’t. “I’ve been coming to a meeting every day for the last six days and I haven’t had a drink.”
Maureen was afraid to look at Dicey. “And then I found out that the baby’s father was dead.” Who was the baby’s dead father? Maureen looked at Dicey, but she wouldn’t look back. Something about the way Dicey wouldn’t look at her made Maureen feel half-sick and scared. She had to get the fuck out of this meeting. She stood up to go, but Dicey reached out and took her hand, and Maureen had to sit back down. She sat there and didn’t say anything and finally Dicey whispered, “I’m so sorry, Reenie.”
“Sorry for what, Dice? Shure I don’t care that you’re pregnant. I mean I care, of course, but, you know”—she pointed at herself—“I was in the same boat.” From the way Dicey was holding her hand and avoiding looking at her, Maureen felt she’d better keep talking. “The dad, the father, buddy who you’re having the baby for, is dead?” A creeping sense of dread settled in the pit of Maureen’s stomach, but still she went on: “Who is it, Dice? Or is that a bad question to ask, ’cause you know . . .” Maureen realized that her volume control button had drifted up and she wasn’t whispering anymore. Someone in the front was sharing about how when he first came into the program, they’d said there was always hope from the ocean but there was no hope from the grave, and though he still was lost on an ocean of trouble, the grave was where he’d been headed if he kept on drinking the way he’d been drinking. Maureen could hear him but she couldn’t stop talking. Dicey was trying to shush Maureen, but she was afraid that if she stopped talking, she wouldn’t be able to breathe. She knew, as much as she didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t believe it. It was unbelievable.
“You and Bo?” she managed to croak out. Dicey just nodded her head silently. Maureen was so shocked. How could she not have known? How could she have been such a fool? A kind of dry sobbing overtook Maureen. There were no tears, just gasps and hiccups. It was like she’d used up her daily dose of tears and now she was a desert.
Dicey finally looked at Maureen and said, “I don’t want this baby. I’d rather die than have it.”
Maureen couldn’t stop the dry weeping, which, without the water, really hurt. Her lungs were burning and she was hiccuping hard.
“I never told anyone. I’m living with Sam and her boyfriend. I never even told them,” Dicey said.
“What are you going to do?” Maureen choked out.
“Bo was gonna give me some money so I could, you know . . . go up to Montreal and take care of it. I can’t tell anyone. I don’t know what to do.” Dicey was crying too, but with real tears, big fat ones, that rolled down the middle of her face.
“Well . . . I don’t have any money, so . . .,” Maureen said lamely.
“I wasn’t askin’ you for any.”
“Oh, okay. Are you gonna be all right?” Maureen said. She felt so sorry for Dicey, but at the same time, she was so angry that Dice would have slept with Bo behind her back like that. Not that she’d ever expected anything better from anyone, but it was such a cliché.
“Why? Why’d you do it, Dice?”
“Oh, we were at it this good while. A long time before he got together with you. The last year he was with Fluff, it was just . . . I don’t know.” Dicey really did look lost for an answer.
“I don’t have anywhere to live. I’m just staying with someone, or else you know . . .,” Maureen stammered out. A part of her wanted to help, but another part wanted to beat up something, to turn over something, to put the place up on stilts, to act out so she wouldn’t have to feel so . . . hurt. She thought, I’m not so stupid as to be hurt, am I?
Dicey said, “No, I am grand with Sam and Dominic.”
“Yea, I’d be afraid if you moved in, you’d be puttin’ the makes on my boyfriend, George. You know what you’re like.” Maureen was trying to joke, but it just came out all bitter and angry.
Dicey was still crying, but Maureen was determined to not spill any more tears that day.