A series of television commercials, ubiquitous a few years ago, portrayed a terribly embarrassing incident of some sort, memorialized by an amused, off-camera voice asking a simple question: Wanna get away? And I did.
Big cities, New York mostly, have been my venue for many years. Sophisticated protagonists, even more sophisticated villains, ironic conversation, the right club, the right restaurant, the swollen bank accounts, the suave gangsters. Police detectives with an exhaustive knowledge of Yuan dynasty porcelain.
Nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but over time, the foodie tidbits become repetitious and creativity wanes.
Learning by rote never appealed to me, writing by rote even less. I needed a change large enough to force the little brain cells into action. The Yards was, and is, the result. Was because I finished The Yards more than a year ago. Is because… well, because I can pick it up, flick through the pages, careful, of course, to preserve the jacket. I can read passages at random that confirm the creative distance traveled. Baxter is a small industrial city (population: 100,000) in the American heartland. The industry that sustained it for a century was the least glamorous I could imagine. Four meat packing plants once offered steady work to generations of Baxter’s citizens. You’d never be rich showing up at the plant every morning, but you could raise a family and be reasonably certain the children you reared would survive long enough to rear children of their own. Instead of dying at seventeen from an overdose of fentanyl.
As The Yards begins, that security has vanished. Three of the four plants that powered Baxter’s economy have closed, leaving the Yards on the eastern end of the city a post-apocalyptic mass of fallen brick, twisted metal, and ramshackle housing. Worse, the last plant in the city, Baxter Packing, will close for good within a few months. Opiates and meth-amphetamine now dominate the city’s culture, with overdose a leading cause of death. Those few children who avoid the traps that ensnare so many adolescents, who stay the course long enough to graduate high school, seem to have only one goal. To put Baxter in the rearview mirror.
Two women, thrust into this sea of dysfunction, serve as The Yards co-protagonists. Single mothers both, they struggle to provide for their young children, and to keep hope alive, the hope that their kids will be among the few to avoid the traps that await them in the city’s schools. No nannies for these children, not even professional day care, and despite very different parenting styles, their mothers are incredibly self-reliant. Git O’Rourke is a Licensed Practical Nurse who splits her working hours between a nursing home’s psychiatric unit and an elderly gangster with the wherewithal to afford home nursing. Delia Mariola is a detective on Baxter’s wildly underfunded police department. Unable to afford a Crime Scene Unit, the Baxter P.D. must rely on the State Police to process any scene more complicated than a simple burglary. They have no lab and autopsies are performed, not by a trained pathologist, but a cardiologist moonlighting as a coroner.
Both of these women’s lives are dominated by practicalities. They don’t choose between vacations in London or Rio, or fly into New Orleans just in time for Mardi Gras. Food on the table, clothes on backs, rent paid at the end of the month, car payments, electric and cable bills. There’s never enough money and they live their lives a few paychecks away from sleeping in their cars. Still, they don’t ask for pity, or indulge in self-pity. They persevere.
A quick example: predictably, after a childhood of severe neglect, Git chose the wrong husband, a bully with heavy hands. “So, yeah, I was young and soft. A little girl looking for a daddy, any daddy. But give me credit, I hardened in a hurry. Sean used his fists to enforce his ownership rights, fists and threats. That ended on the afternoon I shot him with the Glock he kept in a night table drawer. The bullet grazed his ribs, but I’d been aiming at his head and Sean knew it. He turned and fled, through the door, up the street and out of my life. Leaving the Glock and his unborn child behind.”
The police are not called, by Git or her husband. “Folk like us,” she explains, “don’t.”
Git O'Rourke just wanted to blow off some steam. She never expected to be accused of murder. The rundown town of Baxter doesn't have a lot going for it, but there's always somewhere for single mum Git O'Rourke to cut loose and forget about her life. All she wanted was to put aside worried thoughts of her daughter, Charlie, and find a handsome stranger to spend the night with. She never expected to be accused of murder. Now Git is in deep trouble. She's just woken up in a dark hotel room with a strange man she can't seem to rouse, and surrounded by money and guns. When the dead body is discovered with a bullet through its forehead, Officer Delia Mariola is one of the first on the scene. She knows the victim is connected to the mob, but something feels off - all signs point to a pick-up gone wrong. Which means that all signs point to Git.
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