Burning Meredith Read online

  She would be crabby when she got home, depressed by the prospect of spending Sunday cleaning up this shabby house and then answering the phones all week at Blake Realty. She hated her job, but somebody, she often reminded Naughton, had to bring some cash into their lives. Tammy would give him the silent treatment while she put away the clothes. This suited him fine, since he was nearly comatose after an afternoon of beer and pot.

  He had never given a thought to marriage before he got Tammy pregnant in the back seat of his brother’s old Chevy Malibu, and would not have thought of it then, except that her mother had proved totally unreasonable on the subject of abortion, and Tammy threw a screaming fit at the prospect of becoming a single mom. So Naughton was stuck with being the dirty bastard who ruined Tammy’s life by siring the most beautiful granddaughter in the world.

  His uncle George had promised him a job in his plumbing shop as soon as he graduated from high school, so Naughton was repeating twelfth grade, which even the second time around seemed like a heavy lift. He was not stupid, but poorly coordinated and dyslexic. His Uncle George had felt sorry for the kid growing up without a father, but got disgusted when Brad started blowing his chances in school. Because Brad was handsome and personable, he got none of the sympathy of people with more obvious handicaps. His uncle had begun to see his problems as nothing more than tricky malingering.

  All the Gamers had nicknames, Jason learned, usually derived from their names with a little slur thrown in. He quickly became Undie. Brad Naughton was Naughtie, Ed Cronin was Crow-Bait. There was one boy whose name was Les Newton; Crow-Bait, in a burst of inspiration, suggested he be called Snootie and he seemed to love it, probably because nobody before had seen anything about him to justify such an arrogant name.

  Most of them were the younger brothers or sons of men who were barely staying afloat, often got loans called or vehicles repossessed, and had stormy marriages or a series of angry girlfriends. Might as well chill, Undie’s new friends told each other, because adulthood was nothing to look forward to.

  ‘Hell, getting a driver’s license doesn’t solve anything,’ Snootie said once. ‘You just have to pay off your own car loans.’

  ‘And get nagged to death by women for the rest of your life,’ Naughtie said.

  But Snootie cheered everybody up the day he brought the pills in the handy slide-out box. ‘Oxycodone,’ he said. ‘My brother’s an orderly in the hospital. He managed to grab these when nobody was looking.’ He had given them to Snootie in return for a favor Snootie didn’t want to talk about.

  ‘I thought Oxy was just for pain,’ Naughtie said.

  ‘It is. But my brother says if you grind them down to powder and snort a little, they’ll give you a high.’ He’d brought a plate and a water glass. He mashed the pills by pressing down hard on the glass and turning it. When he had a fine white powder, he cut a straw in two and sniffed, carefully. Nothing. He sniffed again and said, ‘Oh. Ah. Yeah.’

  They all had a sniff or two, and soon they were talking fast and doing a lot of crazy giggling.

  By the time they left the loft that day, they agreed that adulthood might have certain advantages. Easier to fill a prescription, for one thing. From then on, the Gamers were on a full-time hunt for more adult pleasures and an easy-going druggist.

  THREE

  For Alice Adams, the story of the Meredith Mountain fire really started back in May the previous year, when a looming fiscal crisis led the Clark’s Fort School’s board to offer its longest-serving teachers a buyout.

  ‘You bet I’m going to take it,’ she told her sister. ‘It’s too good to refuse.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Betsy said.

  ‘What, you don’t think thirty-two years of teaching English to eighth-graders is enough to pay for a get-out-of-jail card?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Betsy said, ‘I just don’t think getting rid of all our most experienced teachers at once is very good policy.’

  ‘Well, the expenses keep going up every year, and the legislature’s too craven to raise taxes, so this was the only way they could find to save the building fund.’

  ‘I know.’ Betsy sighed. She still had three girls in school, so for her the issue was personal. ‘At least it’s good for you. Although fifty-four seems pretty young to retire. What will you do with yourself?’

  ‘Have some fun for a change,’ Alice said. ‘Maybe take one of those nature hikes in Costa Rica. Learn to paint. Read Proust?’

  ‘Oh, hey, read Proust, that does sound like a hoot. Listen, you’ll talk to Jamie about where to put that money, won’t you? Remember how fast our investment club folded.’ Jamie was her husband, the wizard banker, trusted Mr Fixit and often-shushed counselor to the entire Campbell clan.

  Alice took Betsy’s last piece of advice seriously, and on a Monday four months later, as the cracked bell at Central School sounded clearly across town, she congratulated herself on that decision and several others she’d made since her retirement in May.

  Investing money was a lot less fun than she’d expected, but luckily her brother-in-law turned out to be shrewder than she’d thought, so a second career wasn’t going to be necessary. Hiking boots still hurt her insteps, and a lifetime in the classroom had not conditioned her for rough terrain – she knew now that she was not going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. Also that she had a talent for enjoying the art of several eras but no ability to create it. And Marcel Proust’s temps were going to remain perdu if it was up to her to find them.

  Gardening didn’t take up all the slack, even in summer. So some days, as Betsy had predicted, early retirement felt a lot like being unemployed. After thirty-two years of catching kids passing crib notes, you didn’t just stop on a dime. Shouldn’t there be a twelve-step plan for this transition? She pictured herself sitting in a circle of anxious retirees, confessing, ‘My name is Alice, and I’m a teacher.’

  She was drinking the second coffee she now had plenty of time for when her nephew Stuart, oblivious to any uncertainties but his own, tapped on her back door and walked in without waiting for an answer.

  All her sister’s kids came in that way. They lived four blocks uphill from her on the same street, and had grown up treating her house like a pit stop on their way downtown. Like all small towns, Clark’s Fort generated a steady stream of gossip too juicy to enjoy alone, and the Campbell kids stopped in often to share the skinny. Alice kept a full cookie jar and welcomed the interruptions.

  ‘Hey, Stuart,’ Alice said. She pointed at the pot. ‘Want a cup?’

  ‘Sure.’ He got a mug out of the cupboard and sat down next to her at the kitchen table. Her sister’s oldest child, he was red-haired and freckled, with a gap between his front teeth that made his smile look slightly sappy. Actually, he was clever, and usually the sunniest of the Campbell siblings. Today he looked as if he thought there might be bears in the pantry. Understandably – he had graduated from college in June and was still trolling for work.

  ‘So,’ Alice said, ‘you’re back from the three-state job search.’

  ‘You heard, huh? I got one job offer – washing dishes at the Wicked Steer in Jackson Hole.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘So I came back and took the job at the Clark’s Fort Guardian. Just now, ten minutes ago. I start tomorrow.’

  ‘Did you talk him into paying a living wage?’

  ‘Thought you said you knew Mort Weatherby. But Mom says I can stay at home and she’ll feed me till I find something better.’

  Alice sighed. ‘I went to school with Mort Weatherby and he’s never changed. He asked a friend of mine to the senior prom, and tried to get her to buy her own corsage.’

  ‘Mom told me that same story.’ But today, fresh from his humbling job search, Stuart explained his rationale. ‘OK, the starting pay is miserable. But it’s the kind of work I want to do, in Montana where I want to live. And it’ll give me a résume. In a year or two, I can use that to get a decent job at a bigger paper.’

  ‘Sounds
like a plan,’ Alice said, and kept the rest of what she thought to herself: Since all your alternatives are even worse.

  And as the aspen leaves along her street turned gold and snow powdered the peaks of the mountains, she enjoyed the times when Stuart stopped by to describe what he began to call ‘my promising journalism career.’

  Promises and a pittance were all he got – extreme frugality kept the Guardian alive while bigger papers folded. Stuart swept the floor and took out the trash, made deliveries and answered the phone. At first, photography offered his best chance to gain a little status; Mort’s other survival tactic was finding a good, clear picture of a Clark’s Fort resident for the front page every week. Relatives bought extra copies of those issues, and kept his circulation high enough for decent advertising rates. The paper owned a good digital camera and Mort told Stuart to use it if he saw a local doing anything interesting.

  To everyone’s surprise, Stuart turned out to be a wizard at finding irresistible shots: preschoolers scared of first haircuts, birthday girls loving new dolls, a grizzled fishermen holding up a great catch. When a small ranch on the edge of town hosted a Saturday pumpkin-carving contest for kids under ten, Stuart spent the day in the pumpkin patch, and came back with so many adorable pictures they had trouble picking the six they crammed onto the front page. That week’s sales of the Guardian set an October record.

  Stuart came by Alice’s house to thank her for the help she’d given him with picture captions. She wasn’t just being polite when she said it was a pleasure. She had tried bridge, quilting and macramé, and was now considering mah-jong. Nothing seemed to compare to the zest of catching twelve-year-olds playing Pokémon Go on a smartphone hidden in a dictionary.

  So she helped him again gladly with an intramural football tournament, and learned some sports jargon to give the story more snap. Stuart got the facts straight and took a couple of action shots so good that Mort put them on the front page and sold out the print run.

  Mort’s other big asset was his hard-working assistant, Fred Farrington, who sold ads and ran the print shop. Mort got the Guardian produced by a commercial printer in Missoula, but Clark’s Fort had never seen a Kinko’s, so there was plenty of demand in town for document copies, brochures and business cards. Fred kept the Guardian’s little BizHub printing press humming. He had quit school in tenth grade to help his father work his failing ranch. Now he was so apologetic about not having a high school diploma that he did all the money-making jobs on the paper for dog’s wages.

  That left Mort free to schmooze around town, drinking morning coffee at all three cafes and covering weekly meetings of the school board and city council. He squirreled his news items on mismatched slips of paper in all his pockets, and put off turning them into stories till press time. Then Fred, already overloaded with print orders, sweat bullets trying to translate Mort’s scribbles into text. It was legendary on Main Street that Wednesday night in the Guardian office, when the paper had to go to the printer, often turned into a shouting match between the procrastinating publisher and his frazzled assistant.

  So when Fred saw that Stuart was a fast learner, he taught him how to run the printer. Like most of his generation, Stuart had digital messaging in his DNA. Learning his way around the BizHub was his idea of a delightful game. He mastered stationary and postcards with blazing speed. Fred gladly coached while Stuart put out the posters for the Harvest Ball and learned how to do wedding invitations.

  Mort had always hated collecting the ad copy for the town’s two grocery stores, so when he saw how pleased Fred was with the new apprentice’s work, he let Stuart try taking a grocery ad order. Stuart got all the prices right on the loss leaders, so Mort assigned him the groceries and the hardware store ads as well.

  Good photos and ad sales didn’t get Stuart out of his regular chores, of course; he went right on sweeping the floor and taking out the trash. Mort covered this clear breach of journalistic ethics by not giving him a title. Mort was on the masthead as Publisher and Editor, Fred as Assistant Editor. Stuart was undercover, sweeping and learning. His mother fussed that Mort was exploiting him but Jamie said, ‘New skills, Betsy – be patient!’

  Then, in the icy spring of the year, Fred Farrington took a disastrous fall off the loading dock at the back door of the Guardian building. He hurt his knee badly, was out for a week and came back to work on crutches. He couldn’t navigate Clark’s Fort’s sidewalks, which had frequent gaps and uneven patches. So Mort found an even cheaper flunky to sweep the floor and run errands, gave Stuart a fifty-cent hourly raise and got Fred to teach him how to sell ads and take print orders.

  Fred got set up in a softer chair, his sore leg propped on pillows, and managed the print shop full time. Stuart ran around town selling ads. He had never thought much about commerce before but he was motivated now, and had a disarming smile that said he was just trying to help. His sales soon caught up to, and then surpassed, what Fred’s had been. Everybody at the Guardian was happy except Fred, whose knee refused to heal.

  But in June, Fred Farrington’s son Adam graduated from law school, smart and hungry. He aced his bar exam, got hired by one of the biggest firms in Helena and began learning how to lobby the legislature. Also, at his mother’s urging, he undertook to get something done about his father’s disability claims.

  ‘Fred’s too shy to insist his work comp claim get elevated to permanent disability,’ she told her son. ‘Mort’s never going to exert himself because the present arrangement suits him just fine. So why did I work two jobs all these years to pay for that shiny new law degree, if you can’t tie a can to that old slave-driver’s tail and get your father some help?’

  Besides wanting to escape the lash of his mother’s tongue, Adam saw that a nice personal-injury settlement would burnish his new shingle. He talked to his colleagues in the law firm, and then to Fred’s doctors. Then he talked to Mort, pointing out that the liability claim he was building against the Guardian was large and likely to keep growing, since the paper was clearly at fault for the lack of a railing on that loading dock that the owner had failed to de-ice.

  When he had to, Mort could move. He got the doctors to sign the necessary affidavits, and by mid-July Fred was due to retire with full disability benefits and a nice bonus from the paper.

  Alice was mulching late-summer roses when her nephew trotted up to her back door, looking agitated. ‘Out here, Stuart,’ she called. When he stood by her mulch barrel, she said, ‘Why aren’t you at work?’

  ‘Been working for hours. This is my lunch hour.’ He was chewing gum very fast. ‘Just hit a little speed bump in my promising journalism career.’

  ‘The old skinflint fired you? Why?’

  Stuart shook his head. ‘Not fired.’

  ‘Well … good! So … why are you upset?’

  ‘Not upset exactly. Just scared shitless but also happy.’

  ‘Wow. You fell in love?’

  He laughed. ‘No. Mort just offered me Fred Farrington’s job. Assistant Editor.’

  ‘Oh. Well … that’s wonderful. Isn’t it? Except—’ She stopped because she was on the brink of saying something discouraging.

  ‘Go ahead, say it.’ He looked about ready to gag.

  ‘Well, I know you’re very clever, but—’

  ‘But it’s a little soon, isn’t it? I’m too young and inexperienced to take on Fred Farrington’s job. Right?’

  ‘It’s just … you’re always saying Fred’s the one who does all the hard jobs on the paper and makes most of the money.’

  ‘He does. But I know most of his tech jobs now and I can learn the rest, that’s not what—’ He sat down abruptly on her front step and scrubbed his face with his hands. ‘Mort says if I take it, and keep selling ads and printing flyers, he’ll do most of the reporting. Sven Lundquist can take the pictures—’

  ‘But that’s your specialty.’

  ‘I know. I’ll find a way to take some of that back before long. Sven can report on the spo
rts teams and help in the print shop, and Mort’s found a high school girl to write up all the school events. He thinks if we all pull together we can make it work.’

  ‘Pull together – that sounds friendly. Is friendly old Mort going to give you a raise in pay?’

  Stuart resettled his baseball cap and batted his eyes in a bemused way. ‘He started out pretty low but I held out a while and now we’re up to almost double what I’ve been making.’

  ‘Doub— Mort went for almost double, really? Whee.’ She did some quick math. ‘In Clark’s Fort, double what you’ve been making is almost enough to live on.’

  ‘Come on,’ Stuart said. ‘I’m a simple guy – double will be plenty.’

  ‘But … training staff, maintaining the machines, ordering supplies—’

  ‘Mort says repairs and maintenance are in the budget and he’ll still do the budget. And he’ll order supplies till I get a feel for it. I’m not here because of any of that.’

  ‘Oh.’ She let the statement hang in the air a while before she said, ‘But you are here for something?’

  ‘Well …’ He gave her the skinned-knee look he used to get his way when he was little. ‘Training staff. I don’t mean to be snobby or anything, but I’m the only one working on that rag that can write a decent sentence.’

  ‘Including the publisher. You’re just waking up to this?’

  ‘I knew it before but it wasn’t my concern.’

  ‘But now it is?’

  ‘Yes. My name’s going to be on the masthead now. I don’t plan to pass my entire career at the Clark’s Fort Guardian. But a couple of years of being listed as assistant editor of a paper full of bonehead errors … is that going to get me a job on a bigger paper?’

  ‘Probably not. But you’ve been winning writing contests and spelling bees since fourth grade. So you can fix it.’