The Colorado Kid Read online

  Helen Hafner grimaced. “Jude fell out of his treehouse and broke his arm last week. Didn’t he holler! Scared me bout to death!”

  The two old men looked at each other…then laughed. They sobered quickly, looking ashamed, and Vince offered his sympathies, but it wouldn’t do for Helen.

  “Men can laugh,” she told Stephanie with a tired, sardonic smile. “They all fell out of treehouses and broke their arms when they were boys, and they all remember what little pirates they were. What they don’t remember is Ma gettin up in the middle of the night to give em their aspirin tablets. I’ll bring you the check.” She shuffled off in a pair of sneakers with rundown backs.

  “She’s a good soul,” Dave said, having the grace to look slightly shamefaced.

  “Yes, she is,” Vince said, “and if we got the rough side of her tongue we probably deserved it. Meanwhile, here’s the deal on this lunch, Steffi. I dunno what three lobster rolls, one lobster dinner with steamers, and four iced teas cost down there in Boston, but that feature writer must have forgot that up here we’re livin at what an economist might call ‘the source of supply’ and so he dropped a hundred bucks on the table. If Helen brings us a check that says any more than fifty-five, I’ll smile and kiss a pig. With me so far?”

  “Yes, sure,” Stephanie said.

  “Now the way this works for that fella from the Globe is that he scratches Lunch, Gray Gull, Moose-Lookit Island and Unexplained Mysteries Series in his little Boston Globe expense book while he’s ridin back to the mainland on the ferry, and if he’s honest he writes one hundred bucks and if he’s got a smidge of larceny in his soul, he writes a hundred and twenty and takes his girl to the movies on the extra. Got that?”

  “Yes,” Stephanie said, and looked at him with reproachful eyes as she drank the rest of her iced tea. “I think you’re very cynical.”

  “No, if I was very cynical, I would have said a hundred and thirty, and for sure.” This made Dave snort laughter. “In any case, he left a hundred, and that’s at least thirty-five dollars too much, even with a twenty percent tip added in. So I took his money. When Helen brings the check, I’ll sign it, because the Islander runs a tab here.”

  “And you’ll tip more than twenty percent, I hope,” Stephanie said, “given her situation at home.”

  “That’s just where you’re wrong,” Vince said.

  “I am? Why am I?”

  He looked at her patiently. “Why do you think? Because I’m cheap? Yankee-tight?”

  “No. I don’t believe that any more than I think black men are lazy or Frenchmen think about sex all day long.”

  “Then put your brain to work. God gave you a good one.”

  Stephanie tried, and the two men watched her do it, interested.

  “She’d see it as charity,” Stephanie finally said.

  Vince and Dave exchanged an amused glance.

  “What?” Stephanie asked.

  “Gettin a little close to lazy black men and sexy Frenchmen, ain’tcha, dear?” Dave asked, deliberately broadening his downeast accent into what was nearly a burlesque drawl. “Only now it’s the proud Yankee woman that won’t take charity.”

  Feeling that she was straying ever deeper into the sociological thickets, Stephanie said, “You mean she would take it. For her kids, if not for herself.”

  “The man who bought our lunch was from away,” Vince said. “As far as Helen Hafner’s concerned, folks from away just about got money fallin out of their…their wallets.”

  Amused at his sudden detour into delicacy on her account, Stephanie looked around, first at the patio area where they were sitting, then through the glass at the indoor seating area. And she saw an interesting thing. Many—perhaps even most—of the patrons out here in the breeze were locals, and so were most of the waitresses serving them. Inside were the summer people, the so-called “off-islanders,” and the waitresses serving them were younger. Prettier, too, and also from away. Summer help. And all at once she understood. She had been wrong to put on her sociologist’s hat. It was far simpler than that.

  “The Grey Gull waitresses share tips, don’t they?” she asked. “That’s what it is.”

  Vince pointed a finger at her like a gun and said, “Bingo.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “What I do,” he said, “is tip fifteen percent when I sign the check and put forty dollars of that Globe fella’s cash in Helen’s pocket. She gets all of that, the paper doesn’t get hurt, and what Uncle Sam don’t know don’t bother him.”

  “It’s the way America does business,” Dave said solemnly.

  “And do you know what I like?” Vince Teague said, turning his face up into the sun. When he squinted his eyes closed against its brilliance, what seemed like a thousand wrinkles sprang into existence on his skin. They did not make him look his age, but they did make him look eighty.

  “No, what?” Stephanie asked, amused.

  “I like the way the money goes around and around, like clothes in a drier. I like watching it. And this time when the machine finally stops turning, the money finishes up here on Moosie where folks actually need it. Also, just to make it perfect, that city fellow did pay for our lunch, and he walked away with nones.”

  “Ran, actually,” Dave said. “Had to make that boat, don’tcha know. Made me think of that Edna St. Vincent Millay poem. ‘We were very tired, we were very merry, we went back and forth all night on the ferry.’ That’s not exactly it, but it’s close.”

  “He wasn’t very merry, but he’ll be good and tired by the time he gets to his next stop,” Vince said. “I think he mentioned Madawaska. Maybe he’ll find some unexplained mysteries there. Why anyone’d want to live in such a place, for instance. Dave, help me out.”

  Stephanie believed there was a kind of telepathy between the two old men, rough but real. She’d seen several examples of it since coming to Moose-Lookit Island almost three months ago, and she saw another example of it now. Their waitress was returning, check in hand. Dave’s back was to her, but Vince saw her coming and the younger man knew exactly what the Islander’s editor wanted. Dave reached into his back pocket, removed his wallet, removed two bills, folded them between his fingers, and passed them across the table. Helen arrived a moment later. Vince took the check from her with one gnarled hand. With the other he slipped the bills into the skirt pocket of her uniform.

  “Thank you, darlin,” he said.

  “You sure you don’t want dessert?” she asked. “There’s Mac’s chocolate cherry cake. It’s not on the menu, but we’ve still got some.”

  “I’ll pass. Steffi?”

  She shook her head. So—with some regret—did Dave Bowie.

  Helen favored (if that was the word) Vincent Teague with a look of dour judgment. “You could use fattening up, Vince.”

  “Jack Sprat and his wife, that’s me n Dave,” Vince said brightly.

  “Ayuh.” Helen glanced at Stephanie, and one of her tired eyes closed in a brief wink of surprising good humor. “You picked a pair, Missy,” she said.

  “They’re all right,” Stephanie said.

  “Sure, and after this you’ll probably go straight to the New York Times,” Helen said. She picked up the plates, added, “I’ll be back for the rest of the ridding-up,” and sailed away.

  “When she finds that forty dollars in her pocket,” Stephanie said, “will she know who put it there?” She looked again at the patio, where perhaps two dozen customers were drinking coffee, iced tea, afternoon beers, or eating off-the-menu chocolate cherry cake. Not all looked capable of slipping forty dollars in cash into a waitress’s pocket, but some of them did.

  “Probably she will,” Vince said, “but tell me something, Steffi.”

  “I will if I can.”

  “If she didn’t know, would that make it illegal tender?”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “I think you do,” he said. “Come on, let’s get back to the paper. News won’t wait.”

&nbs
p; 2

  Here was the thing Stephanie loved best about The Weekly Islander, the thing that still charmed her after three months spent mostly writing ads: on a clear afternoon you could walk six steps from your desk and have a gorgeous view of the Maine coast. All you had to do was walk onto the shaded deck that overlooked the reach and ran the length of the newspaper’s barnlike building. It was true that the air smelled of fish and seaweed, but everything on Moose-Look smelled that way. You got used to it, Stephanie had discovered, and then a beautiful thing happened—after your nose dismissed that smell, it went and found it all over again, and the second time around, you fell in love with it.

  On clear afternoons (like this one near the end of August), every house and dock and fishing-boat over there on the Tinnock side of the reach stood out brilliantly; she could read the sunoco on the side of a diesel pump and the LeeLee Bett on the hull of some haddock-jockey’s breadwinner, beached for its turn-of-the-season scraping and painting. She could see a boy in shorts and a cut-off Patriots jersey fishing from the trash-littered shingle below Preston’s Bar, and a thousand winks of sun glittering off the tin flashing of a hundred village roofs. And, between Tinnock Village (which was actually a good-sized town) and Moose-Lookit Island, the sun shone on the bluest water she had ever seen. On days like this, she wondered how she would ever go back to the Midwest, or if she even could. And on days when the fog rolled in and the entire mainland world seemed to be cancelled and the rueful cry of the foghorn came and went like the voice of some ancient beast…why, then she wondered the same thing.

  You want to be careful, Steffi, Dave had told her one day when he came on her, sitting out there on the deck with her yellow pad on her lap and a half-finished Arts ’N Things column scrawled there in her big backhand strokes. Island living has a way of creeping into your blood, and once it gets there it’s like malaria. It doesn’t leave easily.

  Now, after turning on the lights (the sun had begun going the other way and the long room had begun to darken), she sat down at her desk and found her trusty legal pad with a new Arts ’N Things column on the top page. This one was pretty much interchangeable with any of half a dozen others she had so far turned in, but she looked at it with undeniable affection just the same. It was hers, after all, her work, writing she was getting paid for, and she had no doubt that people all over the Islander’s circulation area—which was quite large—actually read it.

  Vince sat down behind his own desk with a small but audible grunt. It was followed by a crackling sound as he twisted first to the left and then to the right. He called this “settling his spine.” Dave told him that he would someday paralyze himself from the neck down while “settling his spine,” but Vince seemed singularly unworried by the possibility. Now he turned on his computer while his managing editor sat on the corner of his desk, produced a toothpick, and began using it to rummage in his upper plate.

  “What’s it going to be?” Dave asked while Vince waited for his computer to boot up. “Fire? Flood? Earthquake? Or the revolt of the multitudes?”

  “I thought I’d start with Ellen Dunwoodie snapping off the fire hydrant on Beach Lane when the parking brake on her car let go. Then, once I’m properly warmed up, I thought I’d move on to a rewrite of my library editorial,” Vince said, and cracked his knuckles.

  Dave glanced over at Stephanie from his perch on the corner of Vince’s desk. “First the back, then the knuckles,” he said. “If he could learn how to play ‘Dry Bones’ on his ribcage, we could get him on American Idol.”

  “Always a critic,” Vince said amiably, waiting for his machine to boot up. “You know, Steff, there’s something perverse about this. Here am I, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.”

  “I don’t believe yellow legal pads had been invented in Victorian times,” Stephanie said. She shuffled through the papers on her desk. When she had come to Moose-Look and The Weekly Islander in June, they had given her the smallest desk in the place—little more than a grade-schooler’s desk, really—away in the corner. In mid-July she had been promoted to a bigger one in the middle of the room. This pleased her, but the increased desk-space also afforded more area for things to get lost in. Now she hunted around until she found a bright pink circular. “Do either of you know what organization profits from the Annual End-Of-Summer Gernerd Farms Hayride, Picnic, and Dance, this year featuring Little Jonna Jaye and the Straw Hill Boys?”

  “That organization would be Sam Gernerd, his wife, their five kids, and their various creditors,” Vince said, and his machine beeped. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Steff, you’ve done a swell job on that little column of yours.”

  “Yes, you have,” Dave agreed. “We’ve gotten two dozen letters, I guess, and the only bad one was from Mrs. Edina Steen the Downeast Grammar Queen, and she’s completely mad.”

  “Nuttier than a fruitcake,” Vince agreed.

  Stephanie smiled, wondering at how rare it was once you graduated from childhood—this feeling of perfect and uncomplicated happiness. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you both.” And then: “Can I ask you something? Straight up?”

  Vince swiveled his chair around and looked at her. “Anything under the sun, if it’ll keep me away from Mrs. Dunwoodie and the fire hydrant,” he said.

  “And me away from doing invoices,” Dave said. “Although I can’t go home until they’re finished.”

  “Don’t you make that paperwork your boss!” Vince said. “How many times have I told you?”

  “Easy for you to say,” Dave returned. “You haven’t looked inside the Islander checkbook in ten years, I don’t think, let alone carried it around.”

  Stephanie was determined not to let them be sidetracked—or to let them sidetrack her—into this old squabble. “Quit it, both of you.”

  They looked at her, surprised into silence.

  “Dave, you pretty much told that Mr. Hanratty from the Globe that you and Vince have been working together on the Islander for forty years—”

  “Ayuh—”

  “—and you started it up in 1948, Vince.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “’Twas The Weekly Shopper and Trading Post until the summer of ’48, just a free handout in the various island markets and the bigger stores on the mainland. I was young and bullheaded and awful lucky. That was when they had the big fires over in Tinnock and Hancock. Those fires…they didn’t make the paper, I won’t say that—although there were those who did at the time—but they give it a good runnin start, sure. It wasn’t until 1956 that I had as many ads as I did in the summer of ’48.”

  “So you guys have been on the job for over fifty years, and in all that time you’ve never come across a real unexplained mystery? Can that be true?”

  Dave Bowie looked shocked. “We never said that!”

  “Gorry, you were there!” Vince declared, equally scandalized.

  For a moment they managed to hold these expressions, but when Stephanie McCann only continued to look from one to the other, prim as the schoolmarm in a John Ford Western, they couldn’t go on. First Vince Teague’s mouth began to quiver at one corner, and then Dave Bowie’s eye began to twitch. They might still have been all right, but then they made the mistake of looking right at each other and a moment later they were laughing like the world’s oldest pair of kids.

  3

  “You were the one who told him about the Pretty Lisa,” Dave said to Vince when he had gotten hold of himself again. The Pretty Lisa Cabot was a fishing boat that had washed up on the shore of neighboring Smack Island in the nineteen-twenties with one dead crewman sprawled over the forward hold and the other five men gone. “How many times do you think Hanratty heard that one, up n down this part of the coast?”

  “Oh, I dunno, how many places do you judge he stopped before he got here, dear?” Vince countered,
and a moment later the two men were off again, bellowing laughter, Vince slapping has bony knee while Dave whacked the side of one plump thigh.

  Stephanie watched them, frowning—not angry, not amused herself (well…a little), just trying to understand the source of their howling good humor. She herself had thought the story of the Pretty Lisa Cabot good enough for at least one in a series of eight articles on, ta-da, Unexplained Mysteries of New England, but she was neither stupid nor insensitive; she’d been perfectly aware that Mr. Hanratty hadn’t thought it was good enough. And yes, she’d known from his face that he’d heard it before in his Globe-funded wanderings up and down the coast between Boston and Moose-Look, and probably more than once.

  Vince and Dave nodded when she advanced this idea. “Ayup,” Dave said. “Hanratty may be from away, but that doesn’t make him lazy or stupid. The mystery of the Pretty Lisa—the solution to which almost certainly has to do with gun-happy bootleggers running hooch down from Canada, although no one will ever know for sure—has been around for years. It’s been written up in half a dozen books, not to mention both Yankee and Downeast magazines. And, say, Vince, didn’t the Globe—?”

  Vince was nodding. “Maybe. Seven, maybe nine years ago. Sunday supplement piece. Although it might have been the Providence Journal. I’m sure it was the Portland Sunday Telegram that did the piece on the Mormons that showed up over in Freeport and tried to sink a mine in the Desert of Maine…”

  “And the 1951 Coast Lights get a big play in the newspapers almost every Halloween,” Dave added cheerfully. “Not to mention the UFO websites.”

  “And a woman wrote a book last year on the poisonin’s at that church picnic in Tashmore,” Vince finished up. This was the last ‘unexplained mystery’ they had hauled out for the Globe reporter over lunch. This was just before Hanratty had decided he could make the one-thirty ferry, and in a way Stephanie guessed she now didn’t blame him.