Bad Little Falls

by Paul Doiron

  He fiddled with the radio and brought up a fuzzy station playing rock and roll from across the New Brunswick border. So much for conversation.

  I removed my gloves and warmed my hands over the air vents. At first my fingers were numb; then they began to throb. I rubbed the palms against my cheeks and nose. I made funny faces to loosen the tight skin.

  “Hotel California” was playing on the radio. Sprague tapped a beat to the music with his hands on the steering wheel, but more out of impatience than from a sense of rhythm.

  “How long have you and Doris lived out here?” I asked.

  “What do you mean—in the sticks?”

  “In Township Nineteen.”

  “Too long.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but he didn’t seem inclined to clarify the statement. “You two saved that man’s life.”

  He made a snorting sound. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “Had you ever seen him before?”

  His face had a lime-green cast from the dashboard lights. “Which one?”

  “Either one.”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what they were doing out here?”

  “Selling drugs. You saw that bag of money.”

  “But why were they out here in the Heath, of all places?” I asked.

  “I’m not a drug dealer. I don’t know why they do anything.”

  Devoe and Tomahawk moved past our vehicles, heading down the logging road. We turned our heads to follow them. I couldn’t tell if the dog had found a scent trail or was just ecstatic to be doing what she’d been bred and trained to do.

  “A dog can’t find someone in weather like this,” Sprague said confidently. “You won’t find his body until springtime.”

  “They find people buried by avalanches.”

  “Not in weather like this.”

  We heard a garbled shout outside. I saw Rivard stick his head up from the car. He began walking quickly through the snow toward Devoe’s position. I grabbed the door handle and hopped out.

  At the edge of Rivard’s dancing flashlight beam, Cody Devoe crouched in front of a roadside tree. He was down on his knees, holding Tomahawk around the neck. The German shepherd was straining toward a snowdrift piled against a leafless hardwood.

  “What have you got?” Rivard asked.

  “Something dead.”

  Rivard knelt over the drift and began sweeping snow away with his gloved hands. Soon we saw matted brown hair, a human head nodding forward, as if a man had fallen asleep against the ash trunk. Rivard brushed the impacted snow off the forehead and shoulders. He gripped the head by the forelock and tilted the tattooed face up at us. The young man’s mouth was open and a blue tongue was thrust between the teeth. The eyes were glassy, sightless.

  Ben Sprague came huffing and puffing along behind us. “Is he dead?” the plow driver asked.

  Rivard removed a glove and pressed a couple of fingers beneath the man’s jawbone. “No pulse.”

  I glanced back through the wind-whipped snow. “He didn’t make it very far.”

  Rivard wiped the snow off his hands and bent to retrieve his glove. “He must have left the car after his friend went for help. He sat down under the tree to get out of the wind, and that was all she wrote.”

  “Do you need a shovel to dig him out?” asked Sprague. “I have one in the truck.”

  “We don’t know what went down here,” I said. “For all we know, there’s a bullet hole in the middle of Cates’s chest.”

  “Mike’s right,” said Devoe.

  “I know he is,” said Rivard sourly. “Use my radio to call Dispatch. Tell them to wake up the medical examiner. Make sure he brings his snowshoes.”

  FEBRUARY 14

  I was in the hospital last year.

  We was having a Barbie Q in the backyard, and Prester was drinking beer. Ma had wheeled Tammi down the ramp and around the side of the house up onto the little hill. Tammi was wearing a cowboy hat Dad brought her from Texas because he was still trying to get back together with Ma even though they are divorced. There were no mosquitoes and the sun was warm before it went down behind the roof.

  Ma hadn’t met Randle yet, so everybody was happy.

  We was eating hamburgers and hot dogs. Prester had an apron that said on it MR. GOOD LOOKIN’ IS COOKIN’. I remember he called himself the Iron Chef and did some kung fu moves with the grill fork and the paddle thing you use to flip a burger. Kee-yaa!

  Ma said something about how I needed to go out for a sport at school because she wanted me to be a student-athlete. The reason I needed glasses, she said, was because I was always reading comic books and Stephen King and writing in my NOTEBOOK.

  You’ll develop more if you use your muscles, said Ma. You’re too scrawny, Lucas.

  I’m the littlest kid in my class. I could maybe be a jockey if someone would teach me how to ride a horse.

  Prester said, What about wrestling? That’s a sport for little fellers. What do you say, Luke Skywalker, you want me to teach you how to wrestle?

  Wrestling is gay, I said. I don’t want to touch some kid’s boner.

  Lucas! Ma said.

  Prester got down on all fours and said, Come on. Kneel down beside me and grab my arm.

  I didn’t have no choice. Prester got me all arranged. I didn’t really want to squeeze his belly, but that’s part of wrestling, I guess. He had a weird sour smell leaking through his skin from the beer.

  Who’s going to count to three? Prester asked.

  I will, said Tammi. Then she went, One, two, three! wicked quick.

  The next thing I knew, Prester was sitting on top of me, belching beer breath in my face. I was gulping for air because he’d knocked the wind out of me.

  Two outta three, he said.

  This time he made me get down on all fours.

  Don’t hurt him, Prester, Ma said.

  I didn’t want to wrestle, so I figured I would just go limp. When Tammi said, One, two, three, Prester just picked me up like I was a doll and flopped me completely over—wham!—against my shoulder blades. Snap! went the bone. Everyone heard it!

  Ma went mental after that. She made me wiggle my fingers and toes. You could have broken his neck, she told Prester. You could have paralyzed him!

  He was sobbing like a baby. He cupped his hand and held it up to his face because he was embarrassed to be crying. Ma made us all pile into the van and drive into Machias.

  Prester held my hand and slobbered all over it. Will you forgive me, Lucas? Please, please, please, forgive me!

  Later I got my REVENGE—I sprinkled Tammi’s laxative all over his cold pizza.

  Prester had the runs for a week.

  Ha!

  11

  Shortly before dawn, Rivard sent me back to the house on the snowmobile because my cheeks were turning white. The wind had begun to die and the snow was lightening to flurries, but even so, I had trouble finding my way. In the minutes since Ben Sprague’s plow had cleared a passage for the trucks, the drifts had thoroughly reclaimed the logging road. In the east, there was a wash of color against the jagged horizon, a brushstroke of gray along the bottom of a black canvas.

  I’d expected to find Kendrick’s dog team tied up outside the Spragues’ house. Instead, I discovered a white Ford Interceptor. On its door was a silver star against a black badge; on its fenders were the words WASHINGTON COUNTY SHERIFF PATROL. The rockers were spackled with salt brine. Because of Maine’s perpetually corrosive weather, our abundant potholes and frost heaves, the life expectancy of most new cars was little more than a decade. Less than that for police vehicles.

  A balding blond man with broad shoulders and windburned cheeks greeted me at the door. His name was Corbett, and he was the chief deputy at the Washington County Sheriff’s Department. We’d met several times over the previous weeks as part of my orientation. He wore blue jeans tucked into L.L.Bean boots and a black fleece emblazoned with the sheriff’s department logo on the breast.

&
nbsp; “You look like a Popsicle.” Corbett had a resonant baritone that made me think he’d missed out on having a lucrative career in radio.

  “I feel like a Popsicle.”

  “I can’t believe you spent the night out there. I live just up the road, and it took me forever to get out of my driveway.”

  I heard a door open and slam shut down the hall. “Is Kendrick here?”

  Corbett offered me a quizzical look. “You mean Professor Kendrick from the university?”

  “Rivard told him to wait here and direct search units to our location in the Heath.”

  “He wasn’t here when I arrived, and Doris never mentioned him.”

  That seemed strange. Why would Kendrick have taken off before the first police cruiser arrived? “How’s Mrs. Sprague doing? She seemed in a bad way before.”

  “She’s had a rough time of things since their son’s accident. The Spragues are good people—Ben and I are in Rotary—but what happened to Joey has really tested their faith. Is Ben on his way back here?”

  “He’s plowing the road again. Rivard wants to keep it clear so the medical examiner can get down into the Heath.” I was curious to learn more about the Spragues’ son and his obscure accident, but my brain felt as numb as the rest of me. “So let me get this straight: You weren’t here when the EMTs left?”

  “No, but I passed them on the road. I asked if they needed an escort to Machias, but they said no.” He glanced at his watch, which he wore with the face on the inside of his wrist. “They should be at Down East Community Hospital by now. I haven’t heard how Prester’s doing.”

  “I hope he wakes up, just so we can get the story of what really happened.”

  “I’m not sure it’s such a mystery,” said Corbett. “Ben and Doris were always reporting seeing suspicious vehicles going by here, heading into the woods. Ben would get really worked up. I even did some of my own patrols down there, but I only scared up a young couple having sex.”

  “So you think maybe Cates had a regular place he was doing deals out in the Heath?”

  Corbett shrugged his wide shoulders. “It’s certainly off the beaten track. I go deer hunting down there every November and always get turned around a few times before I find my way out. It’s a scary place. I’m surprised you guys found the body at all.”

  “We figured he wouldn’t be far from the car. And we had a well-trained dog helping us.” I described the scene to him—the car, the bag of money, the loaded Glock, and then the startled expression on the corpse’s rimed face. “Cates didn’t look to me like a guy who had passed out in a snowbank. I’ll be curious to hear the coroner’s report.”

  “The sheriff will want to speak with you about it. Randall Cates was on her personal most-wanted list.”

  The longtime Washington County sheriff was a woman, one of only handful of female sheriffs in the state of Maine. Her name was Roberta Rhine. My professional experience working with sheriffs had thus far been hit-and-miss. The chief law-enforcement officer of Somerset County, where my father had committed his crimes, hated my guts, but back on the midcoast, I’d established a cordial relationship with Dudley Baker, the Knox County sheriff.

  “Well, she can cross him off her list now,” I said, rubbing my tired eyes. “What about the other one—Sewall?”

  “Prester?” Corbett grinned and shook his head. “He’s one of our favorite people over to the jail. We’ve had him in for just about everything—drunk and disorderly, B and E, check kiting, receiving stolen property. Nothing violent, though. A lot of these guys like Cates enjoy having a sidekick to tell them what big-time gangsters they are. Prester’s actually a nice guy when he sobers up, which is almost never. It’s probably all the antifreeze in his system that kept him alive out there.”

  I remembered how Sewall had skulked around the McDonald’s, a small guy trying not to draw attention to himself. “Does his sister work at the McDonald’s in Machias?”

  “Jamie? Yeah.”

  “I was actually in there this morning and noticed her.”

  “She’s easy to notice,” Corbett said with the sort of smile that didn’t belong on the face of a married man.

  “Prester and Randall were there, too. They were giving her some grief, and she ended up taking food out to their car.”

  “You’ll want to put that in your report.”

  Standing in the Spragues’ entryway, I found myself leaning against a wall for support. I had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, and I still had to shovel out my Jeep and drive back to my trailer.

  “I should say something to Mrs. Sprague,” I said.

  “You’re probably better off just hitting the road,” said Corbett. “The poor woman seems pretty shaken up. When I told her I needed to get an official statement from her, she asked if she could clean Joey’s room first.”

  “I need to give her back her snowmobile keys.”

  “You can leave them with me.”

  I shrugged and handed him the keys.

  * * *

  Ben Sprague had plowed a lane past my Jeep, pushing snow up against the tops of the windows. I had to use my cupped hand to scoop out a hole deep enough to get the tailgate open. From there, it was all shovel work. Beneath my layers of polypro, wool, and Gore-Tex, I began to perspire heavily.

  Every once in a while, I took a break from my labors, leaned on the shovel, and looked around me at the dawning world. The last clouds that made up the rear guard of the storm were marching away to the northeast. The blizzard was off to punish Nova Scotia next. The wind came up and rustled the loose strips of paper hanging from the birches. Two silent crows bounced along on gusts overhead.

  I’d wondered if my tires had sharp-enough studs to claw their way up that hill, but I had no problem getting back on the road.

  As I crested the hill, I thought about the snowmobiler who’d played chicken with my Jeep the night before. Who was he? A neighbor of the Spragues out for a midnight ride? Or the man Cates and Sewall had met down in the swamp? I’d need to make a mention of his phosphorescent green sled and snowsuit in my report. I wondered what make and model of snowmobile Barney Beal rode. According to Rivard, the big kid was a drug addict who frequented this area.

  I never knew you could sprain muscles shivering, but I was sore in places I rarely had cause to contemplate. As my cheeks and extremities began to warm, they started to throb rhythmically. I touched the tip of my nose. There was a trace of frostbite, but at least I wasn’t going to lose it. If Prester Sewall survived the week, he was going to have a mug like the Phantom of the Opera’s.

  God, what a couple of days: from a frozen zebra to two frozen drug dealers.

  If you ask police officers what they like best about the job, nine out of ten will probably tell you it’s the surprises. Going on patrol, you honestly never know what you’re going to encounter next: despicable crimes; bloody accidents; cries of despair and rage; displays of the most jaw-dropping perversity; lies so bald-faced, you don’t know whether to laugh or vomit; self-destroying bouts of intoxication; every form of abuse and neglect known to man; but also acts of heroism from the most unexpected quarters; generosity, too; and those simple good deeds that are so important and yet so undervalued in this fucked-up world.

  Everywhere, every night: the human comedy showing for your viewing pleasure.

  * * *

  By the time I got home, dawn had broken and patches of blue showed between the clouds. A titmouse was calling emphatically from the big beech behind the trailer. Peer! Peer! The swaying treetops made moving blue shadows on the snow.

  The electric heater had failed again, and no amount of messing with the fuse box was enough to restart it. I’d need to call my landlord in Lubec. In the meantime, I boiled some water on the propane stove and used a hand towel to clean the sweat from my body. It was the least satisfying bath of my life. I’d considered taking a nap before driving into Machias, but with the temperature inside the trailer hovering around the freezing mark, I worried I
might never awaken. I shaved, put on my olive-drab uniform, and resigned myself to the fact that this was going to be one of those thirty-six-hour days all wardens experience from time to time.

  I dialed the Washington County jail and asked the receptionist if I could speak with Sheriff Rhine.

  “The sheriff is having a breakfast meeting with the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, but she said it would be OK for you go over there.”

  “Where’s the meeting?” I pictured coffee and bagels in the district attorney’s office.

  “The usual place—McDonald’s.”

  What else should I have expected? A disquieting feeling came over me as I recalled Jamie Sewall’s smiling face. Had anyone notified her of her brother’s condition? What if I found her behind the counter?

  The plows had barely made a dent in the snowpack. At best, they’d shaved a few inches off the top, sprayed some ineffectual salt brine down to melt the slick spots, and scattered pebbles, which now rattled around my truck’s chassis. The sun had finally emerged from wherever it had been hiding to pour sterile light down on the blinding roadsides. The morning was as white as a laboratory.

  When I entered the McDonald’s, I looked for Jamie Sewall, but she was nowhere to be seen, except inside the frame of her Employee of the Month portrait. I exhaled—out of relief or disappointment, I wasn’t sure.

  I saw Sheriff Rhine at a back booth, sitting with her face to the door, across from a man whose stiff posture and bristly haircut suggested he too worked in law enforcement. The sheriff had a long, handsome face with the profile of a cigar-store Indian, dyed black hair gathered in a ponytail, and strong-looking hands. She wore a navy suit over a light blue roll-neck sweater. Even seated, she appeared to be a tall woman. She caught my gaze and held it, as if she wanted me to approach.

  Her companion was in his mid-forties and anonymous-looking in the way of some law-enforcement officers: dressed in a black ski jacket over a black cotton sweater, sandy hair clipped short.

  As I neared the table, I heard him raise his voice.

  “All we want is some goddamn cooperation, Roberta,” he said. “We’re on the same team here.”