Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  Living alone with a pushover dog, in a trailer ten miles from the nearest crossroads and half an hour from the nearest cop, and everyone in town knows where the damned Gook is staying. Fish and Wildlife has had that trailer parked back in the puckerbrush for twenty years now, that’s where the circuit-riders live when they’re in the field doing research. Walking around the woods with a bull’s-eye painted on my back.

  Would any of the dealers even sell her a shotgun? In the Old South, white gun dealers wouldn’t sell to a black man, wouldn’t even let him in the shop no matter what color money he was carrying.

  Okay, that’s just paranoid, seeing rednecks everywhere, like I’m walking around with black skin in Mississippi. Carlsson didn’t say anything racist, just dropped a mug of coffee and looked funny. That truck stop bitch didn’t look like the brightest penny in the till, either. When your brain has a hard time holding a single thought, you ain’t got much use for shades of gray. Everything turns black or white. I’m doing it, too. This weather is getting to me.

  She concentrated on the driving. Should boycott the fucking truck stop, never buy gas or smokes there again. Not that they’d notice the loss. But the next gas pump was twenty miles in the wrong direction. How much pain was a principle worth to her? How many hours did that bitch work, and what schedule?

  That was Mom’s way. When you’re small and brown and poor and powerless, it doesn’t pay to run head-on into problems. Slide sideways, go around, evade, kick ’em in the ass when they aren’t looking.

  Just like she slid around the Dad question. From all she’d tell me about Dad, I might as well have been a virgin birth. But if confrontation and attitude are genetic, I must have gotten them from him. Damn sure Mom wouldn’t have confronted a mouse.

  Trees loomed up through the murk, daytime turned to dusk gray and faint with blowing snow, and she watched for the so-called “schoolmarm” pine that warned of her fire-road turnoff. Schoolmarm. Sexist pig logger language, a white pine that forked into a crotch before it made a decent saw log, the old-time loggers said it looked like a young school teacher on her back in a hayloft with her legs up in the air. That’s what they thought about, after four months of winter out in their pigsty logging camps with the nearest woman fifty miles away. Animals.

  There it was, what she called the slingshot tree. Tie a set of bungee cords to each fork and lob a rock clear out to the navy base. Fire Road 47B, home sweet slum-away-from-home. She slowed down some more and eased over the slight snowbank left by the county plow since morning. Right about now, Bitch would have picked up the distinctive noise of a car downshifting to turn in, it didn’t matter which car, she’d be wagging her tail and headed for the door. That dog was an absolute slut for attention. Probably a deprived puppyhood or something. Susan had picked her out at the Humane Society shelter in Naskeag Falls.

  Susan eased her car to a stop on the ruts next to the white wall of the trailer, backed and turned to park headed out, and shut off the engine. No barking? By this point, Bitch would be bouncing around at the door, happy happy happy dog because she heard a person coming. Person meant ear ruffle and head tussle and mock growls and roll over on the back for a joyous squirming rub from chin to belly. A retarded mix of Brittany spaniel and God Only Knows, Bitch lived for people. Any people, friend or foe. Attention slut.

  Susan tucked beans and jerky into the pockets of her parka, grabbed the cigarettes and beer with one hand, and climbed out, no shopping bag, had to keep one hand free for the trailer door. Still no sound from Bitch. Lights glowed through the windows—every window. She didn’t remember leaving them on. No other car sat in the dooryard, no tracks marked the fresh snow, so Rick Bouchard hadn’t stopped in to apologize for that bastard Carlsson.

  She stomped up the steps and opened the door, braced against an explosion of black and white fur, and found silence. No dog. The door opened right between the so-called living room and miniscule kitchen of the trailer, so she turned to the kitchen and saw smears of red on the yellow vinyl floor and red letters on the avocado enamel of the refrigerator.

  GOOK BITCH GO HOME.

  She checked off details. Dripping letters, dripping period at the end. Smears of red, hand-print but looked like a glove, no loops and whorls of fingerprints or anything. Susan moved in a kind of no-space, emotions dead or never born, taking in details. Red like blood.

  More red by the sink, puddle on the floor. Smears, thin smears in the sink, washing up. She knew she ought to feel scared, feel horror, at least feel curious, but instead she just turned and walked like some kind of ’50s B-movie zombie through the living room, red spots and splashes on the patterned cheapie carpet, almost blended in with the orange and brown and gold of the yarn. Bedroom. Dark pink lump in the middle of her bed, meat, something out of the butcher’s cooler at the supermarket, four legs, lamb-sized. Another note, more red smears on white hardboard, her map board, finger-sized letters.

  WE CLEANED AND SKINNED YOUR DINNER FOR YOU.

  Not lamb-sized, dog-sized. Bitch. Bitch wasn’t at the door because Bitch was here. Dead.

  Susan turned and staggered through the living room and out the door to vomit into the snow.

  o0o

  “Dr. Tranh, do you have any enemies?”

  Susan hugged herself, chilled inside the goose-down parka inside the front seat of the sheriff’s cruiser with engine idling and heater on full blast. Her teeth chattered. She stared out the windshield at her trailer, the DIF&W’s trailer, still seeing right through the walls to the mess inside. The sun was shining now, snow had lasted just long enough to wipe out any tracks. Maine weather had joined the conspiracy.

  Enemies? Stupid question. She lit another cigarette. Apparently the deputy didn’t mind her smoking. Her hands shook.

  “That wasn’t fucking friends in there.”

  The cop shook his head, agreeing. He seemed like a nice guy, youngish, soft voice, sympathetic, twisted sideways to look at her straight on from as much of a polite distance as he could get while sharing the front seat of a Crown Victoria. None of that ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ Joe Friday hard-boiled gruffness. How the hell did he get a job as a cop? She pulled her thoughts together, dumped the street kid, and switched on the Doctor Tranh vocabulary, her face to a hostile world.

  “No, I can’t give you a name.”

  She took another drag on her cigarette, trying to pay attention to the hot harsh bite of the smoke rather than remembering . . . . “I had an argument with a guy named Dennis Carlsson this morning, over at the Coffee Pot in Winter Cove.”

  The deputy shook his head again, this time disagreeing. “Carlsson doesn’t have much use for people, white, black, yellow, or green. But he wouldn’t hurt an animal. Saw him once, had to put down a deer hit by a truck out on the Federal Road, critter was hurt too bad to save. Tore Carlsson up.”

  Testimonial. But then, Carlsson was a local. Native, Us versus Them, and she was one of Them. That Gook Bitch.

  “A woman over at Tracy’s just called me a Gook. She said I killed her brother.”

  The cop closed his eyes, shook his head a third time, body-language ambiguous on this one. He took a deep breath and let it out.

  “That would be Dottie Whitcomb. Yeah, her twin Donnie was killed in ’Nam.”

  His fingers toyed with the clipboard in his lap. “I’ll have a talk with her. Have a talk with her boss. Look, everyone knows Donnie got the brains for both of them. Dottie isn’t playing with a full deck. She loses that job, she’ll never find another. And she has two kids. You want, I’ll file a written complaint. But I’d wish you wouldn’t. And I can guarantee she’ll get an earful. Ol’ Dick Tracy is my uncle.”

  Sunrise County looks out for its own, even the fucking retards. Besides, the woman couldn’t have done this. That blood looked too fresh.

  Us versus Them. She didn’t need to add even a single drop to her Them-ness quotient. And if the woman actually was retarded, double-ringing the jerky might have been an honest mistake. “If
you think that earful is going to work, I’ll let it drop.”

  He nodded thanks. “Look, I’d like you to think hard about any enemies you’ve made, anyone at all with serious reason to hate or fear you.” He grimaced. “That scene inside, those words, they don’t make sense to me. Sunrise County doesn’t have much racial hate. Not that we’re saints, don’t get me wrong, but we just don’t have enough yellow or brown or black people around for most folks to even think about race at all. Usually takes contact and some kind of fear to build up a serious level of hate.”

  Yeah, and the Naskeags count as honorary whites for this. ’Cause they’ve got Power.

  She thought for a minute. “I’m running a study on bald eagles. There’s a new federal law, Endangered Species Act. Some people see that as Washington stomping in and throwing its weight around. I’ve had arguments with Rick Bouchard about Native Americans and eagle feathers. You know him, the game warden?”

  She paused and the deputy nodded. “But that isn’t personal, you know? Not something I’ve done? I work for the state, not Washington. Really, all I do is wander around on Fish and Wildlife time, counting birds. I spend most days alone freezing in a blind out on some empty tidal flat or island, counting birds through the binoculars or spotting scope. I don’t know more than five or ten people in the entire county.”

  He sighed. “You’re right, that doesn’t sound like hate or fear material.” Then he took another deep breath. “One question, I know it’s ugly as hell. I hope you won’t be too offended. But it might help us narrow down suspects. That note. Ethnic differences, and who’d be likely to know about them. The way they killed your dog. Do Vietnamese actually eat dog?”

  Her stomach surged against the calming of her cigarette. Lucky she’d already puked everything she had. Twice. She sat for a minute, breathing carefully and fighting down the chills.

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to Vietnam.”

  V

  The snow squall shook his truck and smeared streaky white across his windshield. Dennis muttered under his breath, damning the Weather Service’s forecast of clear skies for a couple of days. Bunch of Portland egghead assholes, safely away from the fog and giant swirling tides of Fundy. Sunrise County sat in Nova Scotia’s hip pocket and lived under the fist of a whole different weather god. The Maritimes always had served as a magnet for any stray storms that wanted to come out and play.

  Curses out of the way, he concentrated on the faint trace of the road ahead, the faint greasy road slithering under his tires with rocks and ditches and tree trunks waiting hidden in the gray blur to either side. He thought about stopping and switching into four-wheel drive, but that would just encourage him to drive faster. Wouldn’t help his brakes a bit.

  Besides, 4WD just meant you were further into the snowbank when you got stuck. Prudence said to keep it in reserve, for backing out again. No, winter said to just slow down. Tough tactic for the average red-blooded American hot-rodder to swallow, but it remained the best way to drive on snow and ice.

  Hard tactics and average red-blooded Americans. He didn’t have a clue how to deal with Ms. Tranh. Doctor Tranh to you, no kind of average American. Maine was a little weak on ethnic diversity, ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths white, like Ivory soap.

  Until he went into the army, about the only brown faces Dennis ever saw were Naskeags and the Mexican migrant workers raking blueberries each August. Naskeags were as Yankee as he was, maybe more so, and he never even spoke with the Mexicans. Or Guatemalans, or whatever. Any second language in school was French for the Acadians and Quebecois, not Spanish.

  Oh, there’d been some blacks in college, mostly jocks imported for the football and basketball teams. They’d lived beyond a kind of invisible wall maintained from both sides, not overt segregation but a lack of cultural connection. He’d maybe spoken two words with one of them. No preparation for the modern all-color army and a whole land of brown-skinned maybe-enemies.

  Couldn’t trust any of them, even the so-called “allies.” Us versus Them. Viets were Gooks in Army lingo, with a shitload of baggage manufactured in the jungles and paddies of Southeast Asia. And her face came straight out of a firefight. He twitched, just remembering that glance at Shirly’s.

  So he was a racist. Fuck it. Fuck her, if she thought he couldn’t tell a bald eagle from an osprey.

  He shook his head and concentrated on driving, testing the brakes with a gentle tap. The rear end of the truck wanted to swap places with the front, and he slowed down some more.

  The wind shook his truck again and swirling snow blanked the road into a whiteout. He couldn’t tell if this was fresh stuff coming down or just a ground blizzard kicked up from the drifts and down from the shadowy hints of spruce trees to each side. Not that it mattered. He down-shifted to a crawl, aiming at the center of the brighter white in front of him.

  Maine winter—some people hated it, feared it, fled south with the geese each fall. He loved winter, the snow and ice and skies so blue you could drown in them, brilliant light against deep mysterious shadows, deeper night silences in the calms when even Jake didn’t stir up on his generator tower, silences so pure you could hear the Northern Lights humming in the sky. Life stripped down to the essentials. Winter held sharp clear dazzling beauty like fine crystal. Like diamonds.

  Deadly diamonds, if you got careless. But Carlssons came from the northland, the Viking land, and knew how to live with snow and ice and cold that would freeze your spit before it reached the ground. A great-uncle of his had sailed north of Greenland on the Bowdoin with MacMillan, another had crewed Cook’s expedition. Dennis still had a caribou parka and sealskin pants and boots from that one, locked up in a cedar chest and waiting for another chance at ninety north.

  The gatehouse showed as a ghostly darkness on his left. He eased the truck to a stop, climbed down to open the garage, and then up again to back in and park. Four inches of fresh snow covered the pavement since he’d pulled out this morning. Still clear and sunny in Portland, most likely, off in the other Maine. The snow would have wiped out those bear tracks, no evidence to show to “Aunt” Jean if Rick went and carried out his threat.

  Silver dancing spirit bears. Naskeag “aunts.” Dennis winced at the thought. He wasn’t afraid of natural bears or winter. He knew enough to fear Bear as a Naskeag spirit, to fear Aunt Jean as a Spirit Hunter.

  And he knew enough to fear whatever came from the sea to kill two security guards over at the Navy base. Spetsnaz playing tag, or something else. He pulled Dad’s old M-1 down from its hiding place above the garage door, field-stripped it on the workbench, and cleaned off the grease that guarded it inside and out against salt air. Checked the bore, checked the sights, lubed and then clicked the familiar parts back together. Loaded up three clips with fresh cartridges and shoved one down into the action. Round in the chamber, safety on. Then, more precaution, he strapped on the Webley and tucked spare ammo clips into parka pockets, the mottled white over-parka of winter camouflage from Uncle Ray’s service in the Aleutians.

  Methodical, double-checking, triple-checking, working down the mental list step by step as if he was getting ready to move out on patrol again. Habits. Habits could save your ass, but they sure looked funny when they resurfaced half a world away from where they mattered. He laughed at himself, shook his head, and slapped a strip of tape over the rifle’s muzzle, over the “National Match” star, to keep snow out of the bore. He didn’t really need that—the old Garand would take snow and rain and sand and mud and keep on kicking, not like those damned M-16s that would foul and jam if you looked at them crosswise.

  ‘Course, family legend said that the ancient trapdoor Springfield would jam if you fired twenty or thirty of the old black powder cartridges the army issued. Each one left a serious mess behind, not to mention the cloud of smoke that marked your position for the enemy. Hell of a note when you have to field-strip and clean your weapon in the middle of a firefight. Same legend said that was part of why Cus
ter and the Seventh Cav bought the farm.

  Bad equipment and stupid, arrogant command. Like the Prophet said, there is nothing new under the sun. Dennis shook his head and snugged his parka hood around his face. And tested the straps on his GI foot before lacing on his snowshoes. Details.

  M-1 slung across his back, frozen deer carcass on the battered old wood toboggan, long enough tote strap to keep it clear of his snowshoe heels, Dennis felt ready for Ghost Point. Rick had gutted and quartered the doe before it froze, so Cassidy and Pete lost out on the good stuff, the liver and rest of the paunch.

  He locked up and tested the doors, then headed out into the wind-whipped snow, still damn near whiteout and stinging crystals on his cheeks and eyelids. Dennis grinned to himself. Primordial man against the storm, dragging his prey back to the cave. Primordial man should have brought snow goggles, but he’d forgotten. Or trusted the Weather Service, just as serious an error in judgment. Winter survival could ride on such minor things.

  His safety line began right at the gate post, blue nylon pot-warp strung from tree to tree through the most sheltered heart of the Point, a guide he could follow blind if he had to. He let it slide through his left hand as he slogged along, freeing the slack from crusted snow and underbrush as he went, raising the wrapped coils on tree trunks where snow built up in drifts in the lee of brush or glacier-piled stones. Gusts and lulls tugged him from side to side, almost as if he sailed over the slow waves of the snow, and the steady pace warmed him just short of sweating.

  That was one of those old Carlsson rules—never sweat in winter. Wet clothing will kill you. Slow, methodical, saving energy, attention to each step and the next and the next because tangling and breaking a snowshoe could mean death, spraining an ankle could mean death, breaking through crust into one of the small frog-ponds dotting the point could mean death. Take your time and you’ll get there faster than if you rush. Dennis grinned again, under the rime of snow and ice building on his beard—facing the chance of death brought life into clear focus. Only good thing ’Nam had taught him.