I should have followed that car. I should have overtaken it and slowed it to a stop and walked over to it and tapped on the window. If I had, Hobbes might be alive today. But what did I know then? He was not dead then. It was just a car behind me.
Was that the person who brought a shotgun to these woods a few days ago, the day Hobbes went for his walk? Given what happened as a result, others would be along, no doubt. I opened my eyes and looked into the forest, gripped the rifle and swung at the dark trees.
No men tonight. But they’d be back, yes, those shooters, they would. Some people will not go away, they are too fastened to their habits, they arrive over their own tracks, observe in the same manner, speak the same words, always their undoing. I would meet that driver again. But when I looked down under my feet I did see men: I counted them in the hole with my dog when I looked down to where he was under me, a foot under me as I stood on the slope of absent flowers, I counted as many men packed around him as might have killed him, however many that was or might turn out to be. It was an illusion, a fancy of the brain, since to be accurate those hunters were spread under the forest behind me, but more men were coming out of that forest for me tomorrow, skilled and resourceful men like the ones before, or better this time. The bullet that took his life went through Hobbes and killed a number of them, and there was room in that hole for more. That bullet was not done with its flight yet. Maybe I had not killed them enough.
There was time to fix that. The clearing around me was what the French soldiers called the space between trenches in the Great War: nomensland, what the English called no man’s land, the place you dare not go, because once you cross it you will not come back, not the same man who left.
The night froze me like a stick and shook me at the world, I was that stick being shook at the world. I looked at my hand holding the gun stock. I was the rifle. I was the bullet, the aim, what a word means when it stands on its own. That is what revenge means even if you write it down.
29
THE SNOW WAS THICK AND SAILING ON THE BREEZES. I went back to the bedroom and pulled the blankets above me, sank into them and curled up as much as I could, and the circle made its own heat, enough that soon I was able to straighten out again. The plastic I had sealed the panes with still let in enough wind to bend the candle flame and drive shadows along the wall of the bedroom, or else the light was shaking itself. But I felt so numb, as if parts of me had gone away and that I had shriveled to what could survive, and so I moved where I remembered my hands were and felt them on my chest where I had folded them.
Long past midnight, as I lay warm and still, drifting into the dark, I saw something come for me out of it.
* * *
The wolves who jumped from the bus were running silently at me through the trees, their clear eyes fixed on the cabin, these two white drops of fur with blue sights aiming their leaps and strides, how they glided through the stripped rich birch so fast I would only know they passed if my ear were trained to the ground or I saw the snow move at their paws. They flitted through the entire early winter towards me, running in a pair or splitting around trees and fields to gather again into one pace and with one aim. They had covered miles already, loosed from their life in the bus, that last tattered outpost they sojourned in before the wilderness, and as they approached they trained upon me those blue, unwavering eyes.
They knew me now.
PART THREE
November 3rd–5th
30
I WOKE SLOWLY, UNSURE OF THE DAY OR TIME OR WHERE I was until I saw objects I recognized and knew myself to be in the bedroom. The light looked different, the way some days are different right from the start: it must have been the snow reflected into the window from outside, the space around me luminous and hardly made of objects at all.
I heard a voice beside me, a human voice formed around words other than my own thoughts, and I turned my head to the shortwave radio, still warmed up to a Canada station from the night before. I lay under the blankets and listened. True enough, snow showers for today, but later something ominous, a story told in numbers from Quebec and north of there, the temperatures ahead of and behind a much colder front, a hard line drifting south with wind and steadier snow and then a numbing cold.
The announcer stated that it was Friday, the morning of the third, the first weekend then of what was to be the real winter—a day, two at most until the weather came upon these woods with its wide brush of paint, in a single pass the season of coats.
I rose and made for the cold shirt hanging on the doorknob, pulled the pants up my legs and wended my way to the fire, shoving logs together over paper and setting a shaking match to it. The icy fog of breath rose also, wrung out of me like a spirit. As a child I’d often wondered if I was losing myself into the air on such mornings as these. I was slow today, as if catching up with myself or waiting for my senses to come along, and I felt pain where I went to sleep with none.
I pierced a slice of bread with the long fork and held it against the flames, and afterwards wandered around the house sipping mouthfuls of hot tea around the toast. My mind was as blank as the land outside, though I had thoughts of the writing on the poster and of how far things had come in a few days after a lifetime of relatively nothing. I thought of Hobbes, my first weekend without him.
With little to place my eyes on while I drank, I picked out the Shakespeare list from between the books and went down to D. Strange, I could remember writing these particular words, the smell in the room when I wrote them, what I saw when I wrote them, the feeling in my hand as I scratched out the letters, what I was wearing and how small and safe the world was, the warm fire, my father’s gentle assurance that books mattered, that reading them mattered more. Now that the world had gone to hell and was never coming back, that memory seemed all the more important. Everything was in the books, look at all the books, a life’s worth, those living walls around me.
There were four words, though the list might have been compiled over two days and not one because of the different inks, blue and black, for the first one and last three: Disponge, to squeeze out, and after a space, the next three in black: distraction, a troop of isolated soldiers; discase, to undress; declined, meaning fallen. It was nothing but a coincidence that the words from that section seemed to fall happily on the subject of the day, that the morning seemed intent on disponging all the available snow from the sky and sprinkling it upon the yard, the barn, the flowerbeds, the woodpile, and the porch around the door of the cabin, as if I had been writing for times ahead and not practicing a language long dead.
Claire was still on my mind, lay there freshly upon my other thoughts now that I had seen her yesterday, and twice for that matter, or three times if my thoughts counted, and I wondered if she lived in Fort Kent now. Strange that you can sleep with someone and a few months later not know the first thing about them, never mind years.
Whatever my intention, it was as yet a haze, but I warmed up the truck, poured hot tea into a thermos, and with a book of verse, a list slipped inside it, along with the rifle and the telescopic sight, I headed along a set of tracks on the road east that would eventually bring me to her town if I kept driving, and soon was, churning my way easily through the thin white linen of a countryside featureless except where birds poked out pools of water. I was unsure of my plans for the day, why I was driving with a rifle and to what end, and felt much less sure when I saw a man standing solitary in the middle of nowhere, a man who appeared to raise his arm is if ordering back a tide.
31
HE STOOD ON THE ROAD ABOUT A MILE AHEAD, A DOT in the glazed powder. I watched him through the glass and slowed, but it was still only a matter of seconds before I reached him and whatever he had to say to me.
This is no flat country, except in one place where the paved road to Fort Kent evens out over a couple of miles, and in the normal course of events if you are out on a journey and happen to see someone walking you have time to prepare a conversation if you have a mi
nd for one, or a salute if it is to be a passing without words. Any questions are proper and thoughtful and answered in kind.
Yes, closer now, and there he was for definite. He appeared to face in my direction as he saw my truck approach. I lowered the window with my left hand as I slowed, wondering what sort of conversation was to be had today, but I did not really have time to come to terms with what he might be doing out here in the middle of nowhere. My decision to take a drive was sudden, and even a random talk might demonstrate that, why I was driving, where I was going. Now in the last fifty yards the windshield wipers pushed aside the spray of washer fluid and he stood clearer, a man in a police jacket, his free hand on a waist holster, a revolver. I saw the other hand rise again and unfurl to an arm: this fellow wanted me to stop.
32
HE STEPPED ASIDE AFTER I PULLED UP AND THE BRAKES squealed in the thin air, appeared to be someone ill at ease in himself or annoyed in general: even his skin looked like a large raincoat thrown hastily across him. The evidence suggested he did not like doing this, being here, and his voice rang on the sharp side of friendly:
You haven’t seen anything up there, have you?
I fingered the key, and as the engine died the silence crowded around my first words to him:
Seen what then?
I wrapped my forearms around the steering wheel and leaned down to the window at the same time as he leaned in. His face was a cloud of breath.
Shots, suspicious activity, he said. A few miles around you up there. Anything?
I said, Plenty of hunters wandering about, so you get the shots coming across the woods.
He nodded when I said that, as if he had expected an answer such as I gave.
But nothing else, I said, apart from the winter coming in general. It’s mostly quiet.
His hand still rested on the holster, though he made a show of draping the fingers over his belt in a relaxed manner. I did not know specifically what he was looking for because I had no television and no way of knowing what they knew and if any of what they knew had pointed them here.
Is that right, he said. He was chewing something, gum most likely, and his eyes covered the truck cabin like a sheet blowing this way and that on a line. I waited for him to finish. He had probably spent twenty minutes and more standing before I appeared on the horizon and he wanted to make some conversation out of it, seeing as the next driver might still be a town away. Nevertheless I decided that my best words at this point should be stuffed with plenty of nothing else to say between them.
Can you contact us if you hear anything out of the ordinary? We’ve had reports.
I will.
He looked up and saw me watching him.
And you have a book, he said.
I looked down to the sonnets on my lap, the list of Shakespeare words folded inside.
In case I have a few minutes in the café between errands, I said.
What’s it about, he said.
It’s a book of sonnets. Poetry that is.
He pursed his mouth. What’s your favorite poem then?
At that second the wind blew in a burst of snow, a few flakes, and dusted the seat with them. His question was thoughtful and not one that could be answered lightly, even if the circumstances, as they did now, required it, since people who ask questions for a living or out of habit take offense when those questions are left unanswered.
I like them all, it depends.
On what?
On what the day brings.
I decided it was time to go or for him to ask me to get out of the truck. I turned the key and the engine ran. He glanced at the seat again and coughed.
It occurred to me that he might ask to search the car and would find the Enfield and sight I’d hidden behind the seat. An impulse had me place them there instead of on the seat as usual, lucky for me.
He stepped back and put both hands on his gun belt.
So if I asked you to get out of the vehicle and stand there, he pointed down beside his boots, you wouldn’t be able to recite me a couple of lines and call it your favorite poem.
I did not like his sudden tone with me.
I said, For most days I would be able, but not as a rule for all days, speaking louder above the engine hum. In any case I was not good at quoting anything beyond a few short words, not having the capacity for such feats of mind.
He separated his feet to shoulder width and shrugged. If this were a planned stop and they’d been waiting for me I was a sitting duck and would not survive a gun draw. He’d fire on me at close range as I was grappling for the rifle behind me, an awkward death. I placed my foot on the pedal and handled the gear stick into first.
We have ourselves a man of letters, he said and smiled, looked to his side, the direction I was going in.
Thank you for your cooperation.
I was being sent away. That was fortunate for me. I drove off with a wave and watched him all the way along the straight past of the road till he was a man shrunk once more to a small mark shrouded in engine smoke on the side mirror. Then I wondered why I hadn’t seen a police car, not even parked off the road where there wouldn’t even be space for one, and since under no circumstances had he walked out here, they must have dropped him off. But that made no sense either.
After the first bend I pulled over and took the rifle from the back and laid it out on the seat. I considered the situation as the truck chugged and flakes blew across the hood. If they were closing in then I must act. I could turn around and shoot him from almost anywhere, but if he had been dropped off there to do a checkpoint such a shooting would invite that much more attention as the search for him began. In any case he had certainly not killed my dog of late and so I had no quarrel with him. Still I decided to think about it some more seeing as he had moved into this part of the world: I took the rife out of the cloth and walked to the side of the truck out of sight of a passing car and farther to the bend. But now the man was not standing where I left him. That was fairly quick of him. I waited a few minutes just in case he was relieving himself, went for the book and opened it where I had a leaf inserted, a poem about love and such matters, and sat by the wheel with the rifle perched.
The wind swept up the snow a field away and rolled past a moose standing still. A large high bird curved and straightened out in the bluster, eyes steady on some creature no doubt: their eyesight burned the impurities from ordinary vision and presented them with the smallest movement, the tiniest flicker, even the intent of a snow rabbit or small owl to cover an open stretch across the white, its last run.
When I got back to the bend with the rifle inside my coat I saw two red dots pulling up over the hill a good mile off, the tail lights of a car. He had been picked up, but going in a different direction, the back roads. Then it was clear, they were setting up checkpoints at unusual places to pare down to a final point, closing in on the whereabouts of the killer. Or the point was them sticking a pin on the map of the county and hoping. I toyed with idea of a fast shot, a mile about, not out of the question, but hardly time for two shots. And there’d be no hiding two men anyway, never mind a car off a narrow road.
I left the rifle back in its cloth on the seat and set off again. In addition to the book and the weapon I had brought an index card and pencil, a kind of bait, for I had not forgotten that there was a writer in Fort Kent who had plenty to say to me evidently.
33
I DROVE THE LONG WAY AND THE ONLY WAY IN WINTER, through the towns of Fort Kent and Frenchville, then south to St. Agatha, passing the slow trucks that spread salt and ploughed the snow aside, their wipers and headlights on. The entire sky had fallen and collapsed into sludge. You could lose the place where the sun hung on a day like this except for the wind that herded the clouds from occasional patches
The weather forecasters down in Bangor always point to Caribou on the map and refer to it as “up there,” but that town is forty miles south of us, and we are also a good four hours north of Montreal. Fort Kent is the mo
st north you can live in the continental United States and be in any town: people hanging their washing in long back yards can see the televisions flickering in the living rooms of people in Saint Clair, New Brunswick. If that isn’t enough you can also speak French all day long if you want, even the English in you has run out by the time you make it this far. A small few thousand year-rounders live here, and the main street twists along a few restaurants, banks, a supermarket, building supply store, auto shop, pharmacy, a motel, and then opens out on both sides west into the wider Saint John Valley, the fields and the forest, the road following the river turn for turn, like dancers. I stopped at a station off the highway. A logging truck maneuvered in the parking area, and two men in red gear and flannel shirts held steaming coffee by the wall outside the restaurant where it was warmer, especially now that some blue had broken out briefly in the sky.
I passed them with a nod.
It’ll melt now, one of them said to me, for the day and some of tomorrow.
Expect so, I said, and entered, felt the blast of hot air and the smell of more hot coffee and fried bacon. I did not want much, some tea and a cheese sandwich. The restaurant was busy, and this morning, hours after the first snowfall, the snowboarders no doubt soon arriving, though not as many as in parts south and west, and the place would fill with noisy families, not the hard men and women who sat here today, the ones with long journeys fixed permanently in their eyes, the long-distance men.
Julius Winsome Page 7
