Sneak Peek
Here are two crucial chapters from "Just East of Nowhere."
Chapter 1 starts the storyline for Dan Winters, the principal figure in the novel.
Chapter 23 kicks off Part II of the book, which focuses on Griff Kimball, another of the novel's major figures.
Chapter 1
THE GREYHOUND SHUDDERED to a stop at Perry Corner, air brakes groaning and hissing.
The driver watched as he carried his pack down the aisle.
“Anything underneath?”
“Nope.”
“Have a good one.”
“You too.”
The bus lumbered away, trailing dust and the smell of diesel. It was seven miles to Eastport. If there had been a cab, he would have gladly paid, but of course there wasn’t, not in a place as remote as Perry, so he slung the pack onto his shoulders and trudged back to the turnoff for Route 190.
He considered walking, just to keep his back to the oncoming cars, but that would take the better part of two hours. He heard a car, turned, stuck his thumb out. He could see both driver and passenger looking him over. The car passed. Had it sped up, or was that just him?
A second vehicle approached, slowed, passed, and then a third, as he stood there, thumb extended, smiling benignly. When the last was gone, he turned and started ambling, counting off ten telephone poles before he pivoted and tried again.
He had made it halfway to the Passamaquoddy Reservation before a car finally pulled over. He dropped his pack in the back of the rusting Ford Taurus and settled in next to the driver, a man in his mid-forties with disheveled salt-and-pepper hair and a gut that rolled his faded Red Sox T-shirt down over the waist of his jeans.
“It’s Dan, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Peter McKinney. Remember me?”
He did, all too well. McKinney was one of Eastport’s biggest gossips, asking prying questions and dispensing lewd tittle-tattle along with endless bits of small-town flotsam and jetsam from behind the counter of a convenience store that was a regular stop for the town’s nighttime car-cruising crowd.
“Used to work at Stanhope’s?”
“Still do. Not much changes around here.”
“I guess not.”
“Haven’t seen you in ages.”
“I haven’t been back in ages.”
“You had some trouble. With Griff Kimball. Gave him quite a thumping.”
Dan stared straight ahead.
“I was minding my own business until he started being a fucking jerk, showing off for his asshole friend Sonny Beal and that loser Jimmy Emery.”
The road looped up over the nub of a hill and down through Pleasant Point, the Passamaquoddy Tribe’s reservation, where squat brick homes sat like Monopoly houses on narrow lots. The wind-stirred sea was a flecked and fretted gray under low-hanging clouds. On the rocky beach, a boy was tossing a Frisbee for his dog, and he watched as the mutt chased after it.
“They sent you away somewhere.”
The dog leapt and caught the Frisbee in his mouth, then bounded joyfully around the boy, refusing to give it up.
“But I guess you’re out now.”
“I broke out.”
McKinney’s head jerked toward him.
“You’re shitting me.”
He shifted his own gaze from the herring weirs dotting the cause-way shoreline and looked pointedly out over the bay.
“I’m heading to Canada. I need somebody to take me across. You
got a boat?”
“Nope.”
“Know anyone who does? I got four hundred bucks. You get half, as a finder’s fee. But I gotta go tonight.”
“Jesus Christ. They’ll be looking for you.”
“They won’t take me alive.” He glanced pointedly toward his pack.
“So, can you hook me up with somebody?”
McKinney’s eyes darted to him and then back to the road. He gave a quick shake of his head.
“Can’t help you there. I’ll drop you in town, anywhere you want. But if you get caught, we never had this conversation, okay?”
They had started down the long straight stretch toward Quoddy Village, an outlying residential cluster built to house workers for a massive tidal power project, whose abandonment in the mid-1930s was a grievance that old-timers still nursed against the federal government.
“Actually, I’m at Bates now.”
“Bates?”
“Bates College.”
“So you’re not on the run?”
“No. I’ve been out for a while.”
“Damn, you had me. Hook, line, and sinker.” McKinney forced a laugh. “Good one. So I guess you’ve really turned yourself around.”
“I’m trying to be a credit to my people.”
If his acid undertone registered, the driver didn’t show it.
“That’s good. Everybody makes mistakes.”
“Yeah.” And what about you, he wanted to scream—what about your whole fucking life, your shitty rusting car, your fat-bellied slump, your nowhere job? What are you if not one huge fucking cosmic mistake?
“You must be glad to be getting back, anyway.”
“Not really.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m here because my mother died.”
“Oh, Jesus. I hadn’t heard.”
He thought of asking how a person who probably jawed with a tenth of the town each day from his post behind the convenience- store counter could miss the news that one of its 1,600 residents had died. Had his mother really been that insignificant?
“How’d it happen?”
“Car accident.”
“Where?”
“Up in Robbinston.”
McKinney shook his head, apparently to signal sympathy.
“She was from Lubec originally, right?”
Dan nodded.
“Are you going to bury her over there?”
“No. She considered Eastport her home.”
“I guess the church really took her in when she first came and made her one of them.”
“I guess.”
McKinney ran his hands through his hair and scratched the back of his neck.
“Kind of out there, aren’t they?”
Dan responded with a look he hoped signaled puzzlement.
They drove by the Family Dollar store and McKinney navigated
the Taurus around the curve and onto Washington Street.
“I mean in a holy-roller-ish way.”
“Oh.”
“You’re not one of . . .”
They passed St. Joseph’s, Eastport’s sole Catholic church.
“Can you let me off at the next corner?”
He got out onto the gravelly street and grabbed his pack from the backseat.
“Thanks for the lift.”
He closed the door before McKinney could reply.
CHAPTER 23
GRIFF STEADIED HIS hand and squeezed. Fifty feet away, the wine jug exploded in a shower of green shards. Odd, the way glass broke. Not just splitting along the fracture line where the bullet hit, but disintegrating into dozens of pieces, as if the bullet had destroyed something larger that held it all together.
He’d come every week or so to the gravel pit and practiced, and it was paying off in a growing mastery of the pistol. He had learned its secrets well enough that he could fire six shots in quick succession and regularly see four or five or even all six in the row of jugs shatter.
And yet there was something about the gun that still spooked him, a latent violence in its compact mass that was strange to contemplate. You could own it for months, for years, without anything happening. Then one day, you could aim and shoot, and everything would change, except the gun itself.
And all because of a light squeeze with your index finger, the kind of movement you could make reflexively or in your sleep.
He’d been surprised at how easy it had been to get a handgun. He’d expected the squat, bearded man sitting behind the table at the gun show to ask for his license, to tell him seventeen wasn’t old enough, that he needed his father’s permission. But he’d merely looked from under hooded eyes as Griff inspected the gun.
“That’s a good ’un. But it’s got a kick.”
He’d handed over four crisp hundreds he’d gotten from the bank, whereupon the man had reached into the pocket of his camouflage jacket and pulled out two twenties and a ten.
“You know how to shoot?”
“Not really.”
“Head out to the Rod and Gun Club any Saturday and ask for Lenny. He’ll show you.”
Instead, he’d gone to the old gravel pit near Round Pond. He’d set some jug wine bottles along a plank, marked twenty paces, flipped the safety off, squinted along the muzzle, and pulled the trigger.
The gun flew back, the heel of his thumb and the edge of the grip striking him on the forehead.
“God-fucking-damn.”
He put the pistol down and rubbed at the welt that was already forming. His fingers came away red and wet, and he pulled his T-shirt off and daubed at the cut. Once the bleeding stopped, he took the gun again, and holding it with two hands and tense arms this time, pointed at a bottle and fired.
A balloon-sized cloud of dust rose in the side of the gravel pit.
Shot by shot, he emptied the magazine, without hitting anything. He reloaded and moved closer, but even at half the distance, it took four shots before the middle bottle finally shattered.
He was at the Rod and Gun Club at ten a.m. the following Saturday.
An older man with an orange bill cap looked up from the Bangor Daily News as he walked in.
“Could someone here show me how to shoot a pistol?”
“Go find Lenny.”
“Where’s he at?”
“Saddle up and ride to the sound of gunfire.” The man guffawed as though he’d said something truly witty, then motioned vaguely toward the back of the building. “He’s down at the range. Orange vest, red shirt.”
Lenny was a swarthy man with black hair greased back on his head. He took the pistol in his hand and lowered his arm from the elbow, like a lever.
“You got yourself a nice piece here. So what kind of shooting you aiming to do?”
“What kind?”
“What’s it for?”
“Just in case I ever need to scare somebody off, like a burglar or something. But I’d never actually shoot at anyone.”
“So it’s not for shooting?”
“Not really.”
“Well, hell, you’d better file the sight off, then.”
“Why’s that?”
“So it won’t hurt so much when somebody takes it from you and shoves it up your ass.”
His eyes held Griff’s.
“You get what I’m saying?”
“Not really.”
“First rule of guns: If you’re gonna have one, you gotta be ready to use it. Otherwise, it doesn’t do a damn bit of good. And it might just cause you some real harm.”
Three sessions with Lenny and he had the basic hang of it. Strong stance, high grasp, hard grip, front sight, smooth pull.
Then he’d practiced until he could stand fifty feet away, bring his right arm smoothly into the brace of his left, and squeeze the trigger just as sights and target came into line. He developed a mnemonic to help ingrain the fluid flow of motion in muscle memory.
Support. Sight. Squeeze.
Support. Sight. Squeeze.
“You secretive son of a bitch. So you took my advice after all,”
Sonny Beal said the first time he brought him to the gravel pit.
“I was going to get it anyway.”
“The fuck you were. So, you any good with it?”
Griff set up a half-dozen wine bottles and fired six quick shots.
His friend whistled.
“Goddamn. Question answered. That would transform a certain son of a bitch from crazy to dead in short order.”
Griff leveled the gun again, sighted it at the empty air.
“Yeah.”
“Show me how.”
So he’d demonstrated how to stand like a boxer, not a duelist, how to point the pistol and brace, how the trick was not to hesitate once you had the sights aligned but to squeeze the shot off before your hand started to tremble with the weight.
“It’s all kind of one fluid motion.”
He handed the pistol over. After three or four shots, one of the bottles exploded. Sonny shot again, and another bottle disappeared in a glitter of glass.
“Goddamn, that’s something. I gotta get one. What’d you pay for it?”
“Three-fifty.”
“Jesus. That’s a lot. But the old man’s always saying if I do the traps on the weekends, he’ll give me half of what we make those days.”
“By yourself?”
“Yeah. He’s usually pretty wrecked Saturday and Sunday mornings. But he wants them checked. He says if you don’t pull them pretty regular, somebody else will.”
“Kinda dangerous, isn’t it?”
Sonny shrugged.
“So they say. But lots of fishermen do.”
“And some of them end up dead.”
“There is that.”
“You like lobster?”
“I’m sick of it. He’s always sneaking the shorts.”
“I guess you’d kick Kate Upton out of bed for snoring.”
“She doesn’t snore. Or maybe I just get to sleep first. Aaahh—aaaahhh—aaaaahhhhhhhh—zzzzzzz.”
They laughed at the well-worn joke.
“You know what my old man says?”
“What?”
“Used to be so many lobsters you could walk the beach and fill a bucket. Free for the taking. That’s what they used to feed the prisoners down at Thomaston. They got so sick of it, they had a riot.”
“Guess you would have joined the riot. ‘Hey hey, ho ho, nightly lobster’s gotta go.’”
“I bet they’re not feeding Winters lobster.”
“No.”
“You think he’s coming back?”
“I guess.”
“Would you come back to that little shack? And that crazy tub of lard?”
“Not if I had someplace else to go. But he probably doesn’t.”
They fell silent for a minute.
Beal lined up the last of the bottles and stepped away, and with three quick shots, Griff dispatched them.
“You know, he comes after you, it’d be self-defense, clean and simple. No one in the world would blame you. Not after what he did.”
