Deadline by Gerry Boyle Page B

the edge of the crowd of kids and old men and focused the camera on the ladder. Five rungs from the top of it, a fireman named Honey Rancourt was leaning out, trying to hang a big plywood candy cane onto the top of the light pole. I shot as he leaned out, just before he missed and grabbed back at the ladder, cursing. The annual cursing of the Christmas decorations. A New England ritual.
    When I’d first come to town, it had amazed me that these kinds of things really happened. In the suburbs of Jersey, where I grew up, they didn’t get the town together to hang Christmas decorations. Christmas decorations were something that just appeared at the mall. Around Halloween.
    So when the town brought out the fire truck to hang the plywood candy canes, it was like it was the prototype of the cliché. But nobody saw it that way, with the big-city cynicism that comes from being too hip or cool. For Androscoggin, hanging the candy canes was likeputting up the tree at Rockefeller Center. With Honey Rancourt, your master of ceremonies.
    I moved back through the kids to where the fire chief, a calm, wise sort of guy named Will Dubois, was standing by the cab of the truck. Dubois was a nice guy. Very sure of himself and his place in the community.
    â€œYou’re the cameraman now?” he said, standing there in his big rubber boots.
    â€œDon’t have much choice.”
    â€œShame,” Dubois said, like he meant it.
    â€œHard to believe,” I said.
    â€œYeah.”
    Dubois ran a hand through his hair and watched as the ladder swung across the street. He had handsome white hair, like a fireman in a cigarette ad.
    â€œWhat do you think could have happened? You’ve been to a few of these things,” I said.
    Dubois watched Honey on the ladder. Another candy cane went up.
    â€œI’ve given up trying to figure out some of the stuff that goes on around here,” he said, over the idling diesel. “There are some of these things where you just never know. I don’t know that this will be one of ’em, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Not at all.”
    An older man came up and spat tobacco juice on the street. He grinned at me and poked Dubois in the ribs. His face had liver spots on it and his hat said A & A AUTO PARTS , with a picture of a wrecker truck.
    â€œWhat’s Honey’s real name?” I asked Dubois.
    â€œClarence,” he said. “But if you put that in the paper, nobody will know who you’re talking about. Been Honey since he was in grade school.”
    â€œAnd useless as tits on a nun,” the old man said. “What are you doin’? Taking pictures of these bums?”
    I walked. It was only 3:30, but the sun dropped behind the mountains early and the buildings on Main Street made a chilly shaded canyon that was turning my feet cold. I walked up toward the municipal building, past Ducharme’s Department Store, where they had plastic canes full of green and red candy piled in a shopping cart outside the front door. Two gray-haired women were looking at the canes and one woman held one up and shook it. I smiled and they smiled back and I kept walking, thinking I’d seen one of them in one of Arthur’s pictures. The Daughters of Isabella? Beano at the elderly housing?
    I was thinking about it when a police cruiser hissed by fast, blue lights on.
    By the time I turned the corner at the municipal building, up the block, the cruiser was parked by another one, and two cops were leaning into the backseat. As I got closer, I could see somebody in the backseat, thrashing. Then I could hear the guy’s muffled bellowing as one of the cops, Vigue, reached in and yanked him out by the neck and shoulders and dropped him headfirst on the pavement.
    The guy was thirty, maybe thirty-five, with a beard and long dark hair tied in a ponytail. He had on black biker’s boots, and he tried to kick Vigue and the other cop, LeMaire, J., as they dragged him