Pale Kings and Princes

18

We went off the Maine Pike near Brunswick and wound along the Maine coast on Route 1 through towns like Damariscotta and Waldoboro past Rockland and Camden to Belfast.

Belfast is on the side of a hill that slants down to an active waterfront on Penobscot Bay. It was a Maine town, a lot of white houses with low foundations. Barns and carriage houses still frequent, the smell of the ocean, a stillness that was not simply of the winter but seemed to emanate from the permanent condition of quiet and slow time.

Brett’s tractor headed down the sloping main drag toward the wharf and pulled in next to a warehouse done in weathered vertical boards. The name, PENOBSCOT SEAFOOD, INC., was spelled out in white wooden letters mounted across the front. Brett got out and went in through the front door. I parked on a slant in toward the curb in front of a hardware store maybe a hundred yards up the hill and walked down toward the wharf.

The wind off the water was bad, and the footing was slippery from frozen spray. There was old snow mounded against the side of the fish warehouse and piled in dirty embankments around the parking area where five or six refrigerator trailers were parked. The smell of fish was strong and the smell, too, of coal oil that must have come from a heater in the warehouse office. I edged into the doorway of a store that advertised rainbow ice cream. It wasn’t much of a day for rainbow ice cream and there was no traffic in the doorway. The sky was low and gray and heavy and spit snow in insignificant spatters that made people put their windshield wipers on intermittently. I felt a little sick from hunger and lack of sleep and I was getting a headache because I hadn’t had coffee for nearly twenty-four hours. I was shivering. A hot shower would be good, and a stack of corn cakes with maple syrup and two cups of good coffee then into bed for twelve hours and then have dinner with Susan. It was about four hours to Susan’s condo where all of this was available and more. My feet were cold. My Avia aerobic shoes were gorgeous and comfy but were not designed for standing in doorways in the snow on the coast of Maine in the winter.

Brett came out of the fishhouse with a tall thin guy wearing a tan down vest over a red woolen shirt. Brett got into the cab of his tractor and the guy in the down vest walked over to a refrigerator trailer and waited. The tractor started up and Brett ground it into reverse. The guy in the vest gestured him back and Brett backed the truck up and locked in with the trailer. There was no lettering on the trailer. The guy in the vest came up to the tractor and stood on the running board talking for a moment through the open window with Brett. Then he stepped down and headed back into the warehouse and Brett turned the big trailer tractor up the main drag again and crawled on out of Belfast. I went to the car, got it going, and crawled along behind him. The snow was spitting a little faster as we went, fast enough for me to move the wipers from INT to LO.

Brett didn’t go home the way he came. He took Route 3 to Augusta and picked up the Maine Pike southbound. I tooled edgily along behind him. The snow was intensifying and Susan’s car, while splendid for exceeding the speed of sound on a dry highway, was harder to manage on a slick surface. The drive had so much torque that the wheels tended to spin any time you accelerated. Fortunately, Brett must have been nervous in the snow because he stayed down under sixty and I was able to slither along behind him without spinning off into a ditch.

A little after noon, Brett pulled the rig off into the parking lot of the rest stop on the turnpike south of Portland and parked it back of the restaurant. I came in after him and parked Susan’s car in close to the restaurant and locked it and put the keys in my pocket. Brett had already gone in, his head ducking into the snow that was coming harder as the day developed. I walked over to the truck. It was locked. I went around back to the trailer. It was locked. The trailer had Maine plates on it. I went back around to the driver’s side of the cab, shielded by the cab from the restaurant, and sat on the running board, and hunched my shoulders, and put my hands in my jacket pockets, and shivered.

In fifteen minutes Brett came back. He was carrying a takeout order in a Styrofoam carton. When he came around the front of the truck and saw me sitting on the running board, he stopped. He was a fat kid dressed in gray sweatpants and work boots half laced and a black and orange Wheaton High School football jacket.

“Excuse me,” he said, as if a guy sitting on the side of his truck in a Maine snowstorm was the usual stuff.

“Sure,” I said, and stood up and stepped aside.

He climbed up on the running board clumsily, carrying the takeout in one hand and swinging up by holding the outside mirror strut. Standing on the running board he fumbled the keys out of his jacket pocket and opened the cab. I took my gun off my right hip and pointed it at him and said, “Take me to Havana.”

The kid looked at me and saw the gun and his eyes widened.

He said, “Huh?”

I said, “You’re being hijacked. Get down, and give me the keys.”

“What’d you say about Havana?” he said.

“A joke, kid, just climb down and give me the keys.”

The kid climbed down slowly, holding the keys in his left hand, and the takeout in his right hand made it harder and he had to jump off the running board. He landed heavily and staggered a step and the takeout carton pulled loose from his grip and spilled into the snow. It looked like cheeseburgers again, with a side of fries.

Brett stared at me, still holding the torn-loose cover of the Styrofoam takeout and the keys. I put out my left hand. He gave me the keys.

I said, “You can go on back into the restaurant and order up some more and take your time eating it.”

“I ain’t got no more money,” he said.

I put the keys in my pants pocket, took out my wallet with my left hand, extracted a five-dollar bill with my teeth, put the wallet back in my pants pocket, took the five from my teeth and handed it to Brett.

“Go on,” I said.

He took the five and stared at me. We both had to squint to keep the snow out of our eyes.

I jerked my head toward the restaurant. “Go on,” I said again.

He nodded and turned slowly and began to walk slowly toward the restaurant.

I climbed into the truck and put the keys in the ignition and started it up. The kid was still walking with his head down, slowly and more slowly. I put the clutch in and shifted and let the clutch out and the truck lurched forward. It had been a while since I had driven a truck. Through the snow I could see that the kid had stopped and turned and was looking after me. It was hard to see and I couldn’t tell for sure. But he might have been crying.

I got the truck into some gear where we weren’t struggling and cruised south in the right lane. If this cargo was clean then there was no reason why Brett shouldn’t call the cops. In which case I was going to be doing some heavy explaining to the Maine State Police in a little while. On the other hand, why was a guy who dealt in produce picking up a load from a fish dealer in an unmarked refrigerator truck. And why hadn’t the refrigerator truck been hooked up to a power source so the refrigeration would run and the fish wouldn’t spoil. I didn’t believe that they were conserving power by letting the winter weather do the job. On the other hand, if you were importing cocaine a coastal town with a fish distribution point wouldn’t be a bad place to bring it in.

It was about four in the afternoon when I hit Route 128 north of Boston and humped the big tractor trailer off of 128 and down a ramp and through an underpass and up into the vast parking area of the Northshore Shopping Center in Peabody. I parked out of the way, partly to be inconspicuous and partly because I wasn’t too confident I could parallel-park a ten-wheeler. The snow was mixed with rain down here. I climbed down and walked over to the shopping center. I cut through Herman’s sporting goods and went into the Sears store. I bought a big pry bar and a hammer with a steel shank, a new padlock and a flashlight. Then I went back out to my truck. In ten minutes I had the lock off and I was inside. There were cases of mackerel, most of which didn’t smell that good. I pried them open and rummaged around and found under the mackerel, packed neatly in clear plastic bags, about three hundred kilos of cocaine.

No wonder no one had called the cops.