Bloodline Read Free Page B

half-dozen words, he had towed it and me down the road and into his barn.
    â€œYou a mechanic?” I remember asking, as I had stood beside the woodstove and watched as Varney had poked at the Volvo’s innards.
    â€œNope,” he’d said. “It’s your regulator. It’s junk. You know you really shouldn’t even have this thing on the road.”
    Varney wasn’t a mechanic. He wasn’t a woodsman. He wasn’t a farmer or a hunter or a retired soldier. He was all of these things and none of them. And whenever you thought you had him pegged, he did something that threw you off again. Like telling you, over a couple of Budweisers, that he really could have stayed in Thailand because the Buddhists were in harmony with their world. Like the American Indians. Or saying, as he worked on his tractor or his truck, that he’d been rereading Thoreau’s The Maine Woods the night before and decided that he, Varney, had been born a hundred and fifty years too late. Or the time he’d told me, in uncharacteristic seriousness, that I should get married and have children because it was the most joyous thing a man could do on this Earth.
    â€œBones, there’s nothing lonelier than a lonely old man,” he’d said.
    So what did Bones contribute to this relationship? It had taken me a while to figure that out. I was from New York, and other places like it. I was a newsman, which meant I didn’t know how to actually do anything. I’d never fired a gun. I’d never been in Vietnam. Until I’d come to Prosperity, I’d never even run a chain saw. I lived in a run-down house owned by a New York artist.
    But I could talk about Thoreau, which Varney couldn’t do at the auto parts store. I knew the basics about Buddhism, and even a couple of Buddhists. I was respectful of Mary and asked about their two married daughters, Susan and Jen, who lived in North Carolina and Maryland and were married to an Air Force pilot and a State Department something or other. When the college girls jogged by, I didn’t leer at their backsides.
    Much.
    And I was a good listener. A listener by trade.
    So dessert was a small dish of homemade coffee ice cream. As we finished up, Mary Varney said she was going into Unity to get some more jar lids. Clair said he was going to start hauling in some firewood he’d bucked up on the edge of the woods last winter and left to dry. I offered to help and Clair said, no, he was just going to putter around. I said I had work to do too, that I was going to be doing another magazine story.
    â€œMore gardening, I hope,” Mary said, her back to me as she put the dishes in the dishwasher. “I really enjoyed that one on the irises.”
    â€œNo. No more gardening. This time it’s something I know even less about. Kids.”
    Clair looked incredulous.
    â€œYeah. Kids,” I said, getting up from the table. “Kids who have kids. Fifteen-year-old mothers. What it’s like to be fourteen and have two children.”
    â€œWhere do you go to do that?” Mary asked.
    â€œIt’s supposed to be about kids out in the country,” I said. I sorted my words carefully so that they wouldn’t offend two people who had grown up in the town of Prosperity, and after seeing the world for twenty years, had come right back.
    â€œKids who live in rural Maine but face a lot of the same problems that poor kids see in the city,” I said.
    Both Varneys looked skeptical.
    â€œI have to talk to the magazine people again,” I said. “I’m still not exactly clear on what they want.”
    Or whether I still had the nerve.
    Because this was going to take some. Getting these kids to talk to me. Their mothers. Their fathers. Their boyfriends. Sitting in their trailers, drinking black coffee and breathing cigarette smoke. People rattling through the door and looking at you like you’d just landed from another planet and