Free Deadline by Gerry Boyle Page B

construction industry and this judge who was on the take, but I didn’t actually write it. I was what they called a contributing reporter, doing groundwork as part of the investigative team and getting my name at the end of the story in agate. The reporter who did the writing later won a Pulitzer for his work on the Mafia. He accepted it and packed his family off to Miami to work for the Herald . Rhode Island was a small state, and a lot of people didn’t like him.
    But I had never felt that I was in any danger back then, meeting construction-company sources in shopping malls and rousting Mafia types in their offices. Nobody went after reporters, and besides, I was twenty-four and I wasn’t afraid of anything.
    In eleven years, I’d changed.
    Over the years, I’d gotten the late-night phone calls, the notes nailed to the door of the apartment. Bad grammar. Atrocious spelling. Threats of violence and a sad commentary on the state of public education. But even then, I’d had the protection of being one ofmillions. I could disappear into the crowd, hide behind the big security guards who stood in the Times lobby. In Androscoggin, there was no place to hide.
    It was morning and I stayed in bed and thought about things. The Journal . Roxanne in bed. God, she was voracious in a single-minded, almost athletic sort of way. After the self-doubting neurotics I’d been with, it was almost baffling. Could she really be that well-adjusted?
    She had left while it was still dark, a figure in a skirt and white blouse, bending over me with shoes in her hand. She’d said she’d call me, and then there was the faint whir of the Subaru motor and the sound of gravel and leaves crunching in the driveway.
    Exit, stage left.
    Her assessment of Arthur was interesting. That he was polite and nice. With Roxanne, there were no snide remarks about his clothes, his hair. Ridiculing wouldn’t have accomplished much, she’d probably say. And if you didn’t make fun of his clothes, there wasn’t much more to say.
    Arthur was very private. He never talked about himself, his family. He’d never given me a clue of what he did when he wasn’t shooting pictures for the paper. I hadn’t seen a television or even a radio in his studio. Maybe photography was his life. His photography. The Knights of Columbus bowling champs. The Garden Club and the Androscoggin High School basketball team.
    The phone rang once and stopped, jarring me loose from the bed. I stood in front of the window for a second, naked from the night before. Outside, it was cloudy and raw and looked cold enough to snow. I grabbed my robe, picked up two empty Molson bottles from the floor, and went to the kitchen to make breakfast.
    I was out of the house at 8:30. The Volvo started hard, and I sat for a minute to let it warm up. It was a car that taught you Nordic discipline. A good student, I waited for the temperature gauge to inch past the line next to “C” and started downtown through the back streets.
    Lawns were covered with a film of frosted oak leaves and a light tentative snow was beginning to fall. I drove down streets lined with old Victorian houses, the town’s showplaces of the last century. Some were faded but intact. Others had been chopped into apartments, the intricate detail yanked off as it rotted. The doctors and lawyers and lumber and paper barons were gone, and another era had come to a not-so-graceful end.
    The new money did not build mansions. The new money was mill money, and it was earned at sixteen dollars an hour, time and a half on weekends and holidays. It built ranch houses on slabs with oversize garages for ski boats and snowmobiles and new four-wheel-drive pickups. It bought security and luxury that hadn’t even been dreamed of by earlier generations. It was hard-earned union money, and sometimes I wondered how long it would last.
    At the west end of town, I cut in on a convoy of pulp