Brightboy was squatting with his back to Shaky. He looked over his shoulder, but didn’t try to get up. Shaky could see his right hand moving in the bushes.
‘Hey,’ said Brightboy in reply. His hand kept searching. Shaky knew that it had found what it was seeking when he saw Brightboy smile. Glass flashed in the sunlight as Brightboy withdrew his hand. He started to rise, but Shaky was too quick for him. Some might have called him a cripple behind his back, but he was far from it. His left foot was forward, his right moving in a strong arc to join and then pass it. The toe of his boot caught Brightboy in the side of the head. Brightboy gave a single yelp and fell sideways. The empty bottle of Old Crow fell from his hand and rolled across the ground. Shaky aimed a second kick at Brightboy, just to be sure, and because he wanted to. He had never liked Brightboy. Jude hadn’t cared much for him either, even if his personal code of ethics forbade him from turning his back on him. Jude’s attitude toward Brightboy was proof positive to Shaky that his late friend had not been without flaw.
This time, Shaky landed a glancing blow to Brightboy’s chin. Brightboy started to crawl away, and Shaky finished him off with a toe to the groin from behind. Brightboy stopped moving and lay on the ground, cupping himself with his hands as he moaned softly.
The previous night’s breeze was no more, and the day was still. Shaky began to search Brightboy’s possessions. It took him only a minute to find Jude’s old canvas bag. Jude had used it to transport what he called his ‘essentials’: wipes, toothbrush, comb and whatever book he happened to be reading at the time. It was small enough to carry easily, and big enough to take any treasures he might scavenge along the way, while he left his main pack in a locker at Amistad. Brightboy must have swept Jude’s valuables into it before he left the basement.
Shaky sank down against the Dumpster. The sight of the bag, the feel of it in his hands, brought home to him with renewed clarity that Jude was gone. Shaky started to cry. Brightboy looked up at him from the ground. His eyes were glazed, and he was bleeding from the mouth.
‘You took this from him,’ said Shaky. ‘You took it from him while his body was still warm.’
‘His body weren’t warm,’ said Brightboy. ‘It was cold as shit.’
He tried to sit up, but his balls still hurt. He lay down again, rocking with pain, but managed to keep talking.
‘Anyway, Jude would have wanted me to have it. He couldn’t take it with him. If he could’ve talked, he’d have told me so.’
God, Shaky hated Brightboy. He wished that he’d kicked him hard enough to drive his balls up into his throat and choke him.
‘Even if he’d given this to you, you wouldn’t have deserved to have it,’ Shaky told him.
Inside the bag he found the last of Jude’s money – $43, still wrapped in the same rubber band – and Jude’s toothpaste and comb. The wipes were gone. Strangely, the book Jude had been reading at the time of his death, an architectural history of early churches in England, was also among the books stolen by Brightboy. Jude had ordered it specially, Shaky remembered. The people at Longfellow Books had found a paperback copy for him, and refused to accept payment for it. Jude had picked it up days before he died, just after returning from his most recent trip north. Shaky had put it down to another manifestation of Jude’s magpie intellect, but his friend had been different about this book. He hadn’t wanted to discuss it with Shaky, just as he hadn’t wanted to tell him exactly where he’d gone when he’d left Portland those final two times.
‘Bangor?’ Shaky had pressed him.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Your daughter still up there, you think?’
‘No, I believe she went … someplace else.’
‘You find her?’
‘Not yet.’
Jude had begun to mark the pages as he read. Shaky flicked through them, and some bus tickets fell out. He tried to grab them, but at that moment the wind came up again from out of nowhere and snatched the tickets away. It blew them into some briars, and Shaky tore the skin on his right hand trying to retrieve them. He almost gave up, but he hadn’t come this far to let anything slide that might help the detective. He knelt down and reached into the bush, ignoring the pain and the damage to his coat.
‘Damn you,’ he whispered. ‘Damn bushes.’
‘No,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Damn you, you fuck.’
The sunlight caught the bottle of Old Crow again. This time it didn’t roll away, but shattered against Shaky’s skull.
Shaky came back to consciousness as the paramedic tended his wounds. Later he would learn that a driver had come into the lot to turn, and spotted him lying on the ground. The driver had believed him dead.
‘We’ll need to get you stitched up,’ said the paramedic.
He and his colleague wore blue plastic gloves that were stained with Shaky’s blood. Shaky tried to rise but they held him down.
‘You stay there. We got you.’
Shaky felt something in his right hand. He looked and saw the bus tickets crumpled in his fist. Carefully he put them in the pocket of his coat, and felt his fingers brush against the piece of paper with the detective’s number on it.
‘You got someone we can call?’ said the paramedic, and Shaky realized that they didn’t know he was homeless. He had laundered his clothes only a day earlier, and showered and shaved at Amistad while they were drying.
‘Yes,’ said Shaky, and despite the blow to the head he recited the detective’s cell phone number from memory before promptly losing consciousness again.
19
By the time I got to Maine Medical a doctor had picked the shards of glass out of Shaky’s scalp and stitched him up. He was woozy from the mild sedative that they’d given him but he wasn’t going to be kept in overnight. X-rays had revealed no sign of skull fracture. He’d just have a hell of a headache, and his scalp looked like it had been sewn together by Victor Frankenstein.
He silently pointed me to his possessions, which were contained in a plastic bag. The nurse told me that, before his lights went out behind the warehouse, he insisted that the medics retrieve his book. That was in the bag as well.
‘A history of early English churches?’ I said, waving it at Shaky as he lay on the gurney, his eyes heavy. ‘I have to say that I’m surprised.’
Shaky swallowed hard and gestured at the water pitcher nearby. I poured him a glass and held it to his mouth. He only dribbled a little.
‘It was a friend’s,’ he said.
‘Jude’s?’
He nodded, but it clearly made his head hurt because he winced and didn’t try to do it again.
‘Coat,’ he said.
I went through the pockets of his coat until I found the bus tickets, along with the scrap of paper containing my cell phone number. The tickets were for two Portland–Bangor round trips with Concord, and then two further onward round trips on the Cyr Bus Line that connected Bangor to Aroostook and points between, this time from Bangor to Medway in Penobscot County.
‘Where did he get the money for these tickets?’ I asked Shaky. ‘From earlier loans he called in?’
‘Guess so,’ said Shaky. ‘And bottles and cans.’
Portland’s homeless, like most people in their position, made a little money by scouring the trash for drink containers. Tuesday evenings were particularly profitable, since Wednesday was pickup day for recycling.
‘Did he say why he wanted to go to Medway?’
‘No.’
‘But it must have been something to do with his daughter?’
‘Yeah. Everything had to do with his daughter these last few weeks.’
I looked again at the tickets. The main reasons to go to Medway were hunting, fishing, snowmobiling and skiing, and I couldn’t see Jude doing any of those, whether they were in season or not. Perhaps his daughter had ended up there, but at this time of year there wasn’t a whole lot happening. The snow might eventually start melting, but a lull would follow before the summer tourists started arriving.
I flicked through the book. There was something there, something that I couldn’t quite grasp. It danced at the edge of my awareness. Maine and English churches.
Then it came to me: a tower with an ancient church, an English church.
‘Prosperous,’ I said aloud, and a nurse gave me a curious glance. ‘But what the hell would Jude be doing in Prosperous?’
It didn’t take long for the police to find Brightboy. He’d bought himself a half gallon of Caldwell Gin and found a quiet spot in Baxter Woods in which to drink it. He hadn’t even bothered to ditch the items that he’d taken from Jude’s basement. After they cuffed him and put him in the back of the car, Brightboy told them, without prompting, that he wasn’t sorry for hitting Shaky with the empty Old Crow bottle.
‘I’d have hit him with a full one,’ he said, ‘if’n I could have afforded to.’
When he was questioned at Portland PD headquarters, once he’d sobered up some, Brightboy could add little to the sum of knowledge about Jude’s death, and Shaky didn’t want to press charges over the assault, arguing that ‘Jude wouldn’t have wanted me to.’ Then again, Jude was dead, and he wasn’t the one who’d been smacked over the head with the Old Crow.
A bed was reserved for Shaky at one of the shelters, and the staff had agreed to keep an eye on him for any signs of concussion. He looked comfortable when I spoke to him about Brightboy, but an emergency shelter didn’t seem like the best place in which to try to recover from a head injury. As good fortune had it, Terrill Nix was one of the respondents to the initial assault, and between us we agreed to see if something could be done to move Shaky up the housing placement list in return for his efforts in tracking down Brightboy.
The police continued to question Brightboy about Jude, and what he might or might not have seen in the basement. Brightboy didn’t prove too helpful on that count – not out of unwillingness, but because he had seen nothing beyond Jude’s corpse and the consequent open season on his possessions. The cops could have charged Brightboy with petty theft, for the total value of the cash and items taken from the basement was less than $500, and for interfering with a possible crime scene, but in the end the decision was made just to put him back on the streets. The court and prison systems were overburdened as it was, and a spell behind bars was unlikely to impact much on Brightboy one way or another.