Page 1 of By Any Means

1

LAURIE

On paper, Lawrence Tulley was notorious.

Laurie’s face, thankfully, was not.

He could go where he pleased—or where his editor was pleased he go. And where Sam Sullivan “Steamship” Warren apparently wanted him was rural, cold-as-balls Downeast Maine.

Laurie pulled his cap farther over his brow—no use making an impression, anyway—and swung down from third class, putting heavy boots onto the platform that was all this rural freight station boasted.

No. He was mistaken. There was a bench, too. But nobody around, not even a ticket office.

As the whistle blew, he turned and raised a hand to the train constable. The man ignored him and even gave a snooty little shake of his head. Nothing the pointy-hat bastard could do about Laurie, though. He had an annual pass for just about every line east of the Mississippi.

Meeting the station platform was a path made from wagon-wheel ruts frozen in mud. One way trailed off northeast, over rolling winter fields, into stacked hills of evergreens. The other way went south, parallel to the tracks, toward whichever tiny one-road town was closest to the station.

Feeling contrary, Laurie went north.

A little while later and past two more wyes, he stood freezing in company of a herd of speckled granite boulders, surrounded by a crimson-thatch field. Snow streaked the thatch like a watercolor glaze.

He blew out a breath. Blueberry fields. Barrens, they were called. He hadn’t known they would be quite so red.

He hitched up his blue jeans and bent to sit on a boulder, waggling his feet in their boots so that blood trickled back into his toes. Damp, early-spring chill seeped into his ass through denim and cotton long johns. Cotton was miserable to pick and miserable to wear, but a laborer wouldn’t have had the means for fine wool underwear.

He crossed one leg over the other and pulled out his paper-wrapped bacon sandwich: courtesy of the chef on the last leg of the Boston & Maine. It was the last remnant of a meal for which, at the cost of a whole dollar, he was certainly invoicing Sam.

Laurie had a train stop, a name, and a fruit. Columbia freight, ME. Charles E. Wright. Blueberries.

And a descriptor—sort of. Dead brother.

Telegrams were expensive. It seemed like a last-minute request, even for Sam. And what a detour. As though one could just pop by Downeast Maine—even if it was sort of on his way home from his previous assignment. (Nova Scotia, mink fur farms, and it was gonna be a gruesome article. He could still smell the little animals’ fear. His own vomit.)

According to reviews, columnist Lawrence Tulley of The Rational Appeal was possessed of an iron stomach. He had a “deft hand” with “hard-nosed, unvarnished description” of atrocities and moral wrongs. Their words, not his. A viscera-strewn factory floor didn’t need much description. It spoke for itself.

He stared down at the sandwich. The iron stomach, too. Usually.

But to investigate a blueberry farm? What would Sam come up with next?

Every inch of type held the hope of getting the readership’s blood going enough for them to put pen to paper. Sam loved nothing so much as being buried under “Letters to the Editor,” praise and critique alike, for along with fervor and notoriety of course came subscriptions, hand over fist, and with them, advertisement buys. Laurie himself was a syndicalist and preferred letters sent to legislators, protest in the streets, strikes and pickets and negotiation. He’d take what made the boss happy, though. Any magazine, however socialist—which the Appeal was, down to pulp—needed subscribers. More subscribers meant more eyeballs.

But these were rolling hills, for chrissakes, with evergreens sloping down to make the field’s edge. Red and green and snow, like a three-months-too-late Christmas card.

Laurie chewed.

In a few months, the field would be beautiful, fuzzy-green with crop, fresh with summer breeze. It would also be filled with day laborers—immigrants, migrant workers, children—laws be damned. Child labor was endemic. But Sam knew that. Laurie had covered it before, down south, and to little declaim.

Labor trafficking? he thought.

Probably not. He’d been warned off so much as touching that last year. Roosevelt’s fucking feds, who had some kind of overarching, cross-border sting op; Sam had looked mad enough to pull his mustache clean off.

So, why did he want Laurie poking around Maine, of all places?

Sam wasn’t always forthcoming with the whole intent of his investigative assignments, especially these more far-flung ones. Said he preferred Laurie take a reading of his own before he steered the course. He had his sources to protect, more likely. After five years of writing for his front page, salaried and practically beholden, Laurie nevertheless knew there wouldn’t be much direction. He’d figure it out.

He crumpled the wax paper and chucked it like a baseball. The wind caught it, veered it right, and off it went, end over end across the crimson thatch. He wondered if it even mattered what he wrote. As long as it had his name upon it, it’d sell. Sam knew that, too.

He reached down and plucked a frozen, withered blueberry from its bush, one that even the birds had left behind, and pushed it between his fingers and then his teeth.