Smugglers Notch

by Joseph Koenig

  Which reminds me, do you ever see my friend Lieutenant Lawrence St. Germain of the Cabot County sheriff’s? Except I hear he is not a lieutenant any more, or even a pig, but instead is just working at a sugar shack down to Peacham collecting the sap from the trees. I think this is a better line of work for him, as he is such a big sap himself. If you should bump into him, you might tell him I said so.

  A couple other things to tell the big sap are that one of these days I will be out of here and I do not mean in 20 years. (With your help Mel, it won’t have to be even 20 weeks.) And when I am on the outside we have some unfinished business between us, him and me. Tell him I apologize and am sorry for killing his friend, the little pig, when I meant to be killing him instead. I mean this from the bottom of my heart.

  Other than what I have already written you about I do not have much more griping to do. As I said before what I hate most about this place is the lack of nookie and you can be sure that is the first thing I will look into when I am a free man again. I have been thinking a lot about girls in the time I have to myself (as what else is there to think about?) and have developed some interesting ideas on how to get them and make time with them as I did with that Rebecca bitch who I swear had the hots for my body but was playing hard to get. I only wish you were there to see it.

  Well, enough about me for now as I am sure I have talked your ear off to the point where you must be rubbing your eyes. I am looking forward to your visit one of these Sundays so we can make plans for my getting the fuck out of this insane asylum before something awful happens to me. (Don’t worry, I do not mean that I am about to turn queer.) Pay the man what he asks for delivering this and tip him good too, as his nephew (although he is a baby stabber and worse) is one of my few buddies in the joint and I could not have got this letter to you without his help. If the prison censors ever saw what I was writing they would black out so much that all you would see is the following:

  Love,

  Your brother Paulie

  Paul A. Conklin #996213

  Drawer F

  East Shaftsbury, Vt. 05154

  9

  ANNIE CROUCHED IN THE shadow of the Subaru, strapping on her new Michigan snowshoes. She stamped them against the hard ground till they felt almost comfortable and stepped over the track left by Larry’s Bearpaws. The Michigans, narrower and with a stubby tail, fit inside like a tennis racket brought up in a fisherman’s net. Annie lifted her foot and studied the webbed imprint, then took off after him.

  Two days of light rain followed by an Alberta Clipper had left the snow dry and crusted, and she tailed St. Germain easily into the trees. Where the pines descended into a hardwood stand she was slowed by the thickening underbrush. Not far ahead she could see him at a towering maple, examining it like a safecracker at a reinforced door. “What do we do with it now that it’s ours?” she called out. “Drag it home?”

  Startled, he turned around, didn’t take his eyes off her until she was standing beside him. “You might,” he said. “But the way I’ve been doing it all my life is more like this.” A wicker backpack slid from his shoulders and he rummaged inside. He came out with a hand drill and placed the bit at eye level against the gnarled bark, slowly turned the crank. The drill bored into the wood, but then slipped out, leaving a yellow scratch half a foot long.

  “Damn.” He let himself smile with embarrassment. “I must be out of practice.” He clenched the tip of his thumb between his teeth and pulled his hand out of his glove, put the drill against the trunk again and spun the crank. When he had gouged a hole three inches deep he moved around the maple and dug another and another one after that.

  “Look here,” he said, pointing to clear blobs of liquid oozing from the holes. “Sap’s starting to rise already.” He scraped away the snow till he had uncovered green tubing that snaked through the sugar bush like the plan of an English garden. Brass taps dangled from short lengths of plastic, feeding into the main line, and he picked up one and pressed it to the tree. “Get my hammer, will you?”

  Annie removed a scarred mallet from the wicker pack, and St. Germain used it to pound the taps firmly into the holes. “If these aren’t in tight enough, the sap’ll drip down the trunk and what the beetles don’t want’ll be wasted,” he said.

  “This is sort of fun, know it?”

  “Nothing’s fun for four bucks an hour.” St. Germain smiled anyway. “For me, the fun went out of this when they quit using buckets to collect the sap and a team and a sledge to haul them out of the woods.”

  “I mean it’s fun just being out early in the morning …” She watched as he made sure the taps were secure and then wielded the drill against another tree. “A sledge and a what?”

  “You heard me. How else are you going to get several hundred buckets out of the woods in one trip? This way won’t ever make the picture on a bank calendar, but I have to admit it’s lots quicker than using horses. These tubes empty into bulk tanks we haul down to the sugar house in a truck.”

  Annie walked up to the tree he was working on. “It doesn’t seem like you’re getting much,” she said. “Hardly enough to put over a single pancake.”

  “The sap doesn’t really start to run till we have nights where the temperature stays below freezing followed by warm afternoons. Weatherman’s predicting a thaw for the weekend. That’s why Old Man Norton wants me to check the tubes and put the taps in quick.”

  “I like this, I like it here in the woods with you.” She took off a mitten and dipped her finger in the sap and touched it to her lips. “Phoo, this stuff hardly tastes like maple syrup at all.”

  St. Germain laughed at her. “My God, Ann, don’t they teach you flatlanders anything at UVM? Syrup doesn’t come out of a tree, sap does. If you get one gallon of maple syrup for every forty gallons of sap, you’re doing fine. It’s why the stuff goes for ten dollars to the quart in the tourist traps.”

  “Where did you learn so much about maple syrup?”

  “Family secret, passed down from generation to generation since St. Germains still lived up to the Laurentian Mountains.” He started to laugh again. “In caves, probably.”

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell me? I’m family, too—” She caught herself, waiting for his reprimand, but he didn’t miss a beat with the mallet.

  “There’s not a lot to learn. This is not exactly a high-tech occupation, you know. Norton rents six sugar bushes and for the past couple of weeks we’ve been out patching the gravity lines that bring the sap to the tanks.”

  “How do you know if the sap is any good? Couldn’t you be wasting your time?”

  “Every few years there is a lousy run. But this sap is light, with a high sugar content, which means a short, sweet run.” He checked the taps and dragged the pack to the next tree. “Norton’s laid in fifteen cords of softwood slabs for boiling down the sap. Hemlock and spruce for a hot fire, a flashy fire, which you want if you’re going to produce the finest-grade syrup.”

  Annie stood close behind him. “You seem so … so relaxed, like when we first met.” As he picked up the drill again, she snatched it away and wrapped her arms around his neck. “It must be contagious,” she sighed.

  “These trees aren’t my worry,” he said. “If the thaw never comes or the tubes rot out, I’m not going to lose any sleep. Four-dollar jobs are not in short supply.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Since you left the sheriff’s department it’s like ten tons have been lifted off your back and you don’t even know it.”

  “You’d be surprised what I know.” St. Germain broke free of her embrace, put the drill to the tree and turned the crank. “It’s a sensation that … well, if I haven’t said anything it’s ’cause I can’t make up my mind yet whether it agrees with me. Sometimes I feel like a diver who’s come up too quick for air.”

  She handed him the mallet. “I never should have mentioned it.”

  “Why not?” he said. “I do feel less tense now that I’m a civilian again, if that cou
nts for anything. But hell, Annie, I’m not thirty-one years old yet and I can’t make a career of hiding in the woods.” He hammered lightly at a tap, then pulled it out of the tree and inspected it and replaced it with one from the pack. “I mean I could, I suppose. But what kind of life would we have to look forward to?”

  “A longer one than we had before.”

  He seemed to be thinking it over. “If we didn’t starve, or die of cabin fever.”

  “Are you ready for a full-time job again?”

  He shrugged. “Not right now, while I’m still enjoying myself. But don’t get the idea I’m not trying to figure out what comes after I get tired of pretending I’m some sort of rustic.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “There are so many things you can do, important things, if you set your mind to them.”

  He put down the hammer and looked back at her. “Still miss the city, do you?”

  “No … not the way you mean.”

  “Then what are you getting at?”

  “I … tell me some more about the syrup. Tell me why it costs so much.”

  “There’s a variety of reasons,” he said. “The law of supply and demand, the current taste for sweet things. But the most important is that the sugar maples are dying all over and no one seems to know why.” He pounded the tap into place and checked the tube for leaks. “The trees in this sugar bush are half a century old, came up right after the hurricane of 1938 tore down whole forests. They should be at maximum production now, but Norton tells me he’s getting half the sap he did five years ago.”

  He looked over his shoulder again. “Why are you so interested all of a sudden in—”

  “Go on.”

  “Some of these trees, you could say they’re in critical condition. That’s why we don’t tap them all. Taking the sap puts stress on a maple just like drawing blood does to a person. I read somewhere that in the last six or seven years Quebec’s lost two million tap holes. The scientists don’t know if it’s overproduction, bugs, brutal winters, or what. Acid rain’s what I think.”

  “So you wouldn’t have a future in this even if you could buy the woods for yourself?”

  “No way. A few more years and, short of a miracle, the industry’s going belly up.”

  “Well,” she said, “I hope you’ll be looking for work that pays more than four dollars an hour, lots more.”

  “Ann, it’s such a nice day, must we—”

  “… Because we’re going to need it. In about three quarters of a year, we’re going to need more money than you ever thought about.”

  “Money for what?” he said. “And why precisely—Do we have some huge bill coming due then?”

  “No,” Annie said. “I am.”

  “You’re … you mean with a baby?” He struck the tap off center, bending it, then knocked it out of the tree and swiveled around to see her nodding, glowing. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “I didn’t know before. I only went to the doctor yesterday.” She was trying not to laugh. “Poor Larry, do you feel taken advantage of?”

  “By you, Ann?” He kissed her. “Or the baby?”

  “Take your pick,” she said, “seeing as how you were hardly consulted.”

  “If anyone’s been taken advantage of, it’s you, letting me drag you around in the cold.” He paused to let a smile take over from his look of astonishment, then pulled off his other glove and took her cheeks in his hands. “You shouldn’t be tromping through the wilderness in your condition,” he said suddenly. “Let’s go back to the cabin. I can finish here later.”

  “Don’t be silly. I don’t have to start taking it easy for months.” She let him kiss her again, then moved away. “Before this goes any further, we have a number of things to get straight between us.”

  “Is that a proposal? Because if it is, I accept.” He didn’t let her answer. “Now that that’s settled, you’ve got no more claim to that alimony you say you’d never ask for.”

  “Nothing’s settled.” She studied his smile, decided it was real. “I wouldn’t ask ’cause you can’t get blood from a turnip, or whatever. And no way am I marrying a man who goes off to work every morning on snowshoes. You said it’s going to be a short sap run. When will you start looking for a real job?”

  He was gazing back through the trees, longingly, so that she thought he had lost interest, but the smile seemed a permanent part of him. “Well, how about that?” he said like a sportscaster calling a line drive over the wall. “A baby.”

  Twin serpents coiled around a herald staff glared menacingly from a silver badge. Two more clung to a patch on a dark brown sleeve. St. Germain shuffled around in his stocking feet, showing off a tight seat and thighs. “Think you can find any more to let out?”

  “If I’d have known you were going back to basic brown, I wouldn’t have let you burn up your lieutenant’s uniform,” Annie said, “just sewn these patches over your stripes.”

  The trouser legs brushed against the floor as his entire body seemed to sag. “Stand up straight,” she ordered. She took two pins from her mouth and pushed them through a fold of cloth. “… Except this is nicer looking, tapered, much more striking. You really look smart in it.”

  “Knock it off, Ann. I know how I look, like a night watchman you wouldn’t trust to carry a gun.” He hiked the pants higher on his hips. “Be glad it’s only for six months. The management trainee program at Stowe starts the first Monday after Labor Day. I’m lucky they found this for me, to tide us over.”

  “An ambulance driver.” She made a face and hid it behind a sneeze. “It’s not exactly what I had in mind when I said you needed something to keep you out of the woods.”

  “Paramedic, if you please,” he said, smoothing a yellow patch on his breast pocket. “But even with the fancy title there’s not a lot of glamour to it, less when I think of how many of the other drivers would give their eyeteeth to be cops. And the only perk is that I can drive as fast as I want, go through red lights when I’m pulling someone off the mountain.”

  “Is the job all broken legs?” she asked. “Ski season is over in another four or five weeks.”

  He stepped out of the pants and handed them to her, watched her hem the legs proudly. It was amazing, he thought, what impending motherhood had accomplished after all the sorry scenes played out trying to domesticate her. “A lot of the ski lodges on Mount Mansfield operate tennis camps during the summer, and there’s no shortage of middle-age hackers who’re convinced they’ll make the Davis Cup squad if they just put out harder. From what I’ve been told it’s strictly sprained knees and coronaries till the first serious blizzard.”

  “Very exciting.”

  “Yeah,” he said dejectedly.

  She looked up from her sewing. “I’m glad it’s dull. If it wasn’t, come September you’d find an excuse for staying in this uniform.”

  “Well, there could be some excitement. Stowe ambulances are equipped with radios that are glued to the police band. I’ll be monitoring all the Cabot sheriff’s calls.”

  “Since when is that exciting?”

  “If any of the guys request a paramedic, guess who rolls. It’s hard to say how they’ll react when they see me. I’m sure none of them want to be reminded about Wally Jeffcoat.”

  She looped the thread around a finger, knotted it. “Do you?”

  “Not really,” he said unself-consciously. Annie noticed that he didn’t turn away or drop his voice. “But I can deal with it better than before.”

  “You’re finally coming around to see where it wasn’t your fault?”

  “No, just learning to accept what happened. The man in this clown suit, he might not be so noble as the sheriff’s lieutenant of last year, but I don’t know that he’s a worse human being.”

  “If John’s men can’t see it, if they make a crack, let them walk to the hospital.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Annie handed back the pants and he held them to his waist and t
hen pulled them on. “How do I look now?” he asked without checking the mirror.

  “Great, like the proverbial million dollars.”

  “Do I?”

  Annie nodded. “Would I lie?”

  “Marry me, then. It’s probably your only chance at a million. Besides, I don’t want our kid going through life with two last names and a hyphen.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’ve been thinking about it long enough. When are you going to say yes?”

  Annie thought about it some more. “The day I see you off to work in a white shirt and tie,” she said, “and a suit with nothing to read on the pockets.”

  10

  THE SNITCH, WHOSE NAME was Cleve Holmes, was a thirty-four-year-old short eyes one month out of segregation, a four-time loser with no friends in the general population, the kind of inmate who could be trusted if any of them could. He said, “From what I been able to pick up, there’s gonna be a break Thursday night. Someone’s making smoke bombs out of oily rags from the textile shop that they are gonna set off by the basketball courts to, like, divert the guards. Then they are gonna try the wall on the other side of the yard, behind the batting cage. They have some kind of ladder rigged together. It’s all I know.”

  Warden Evander Graham wanted names, the time the men planned to breach the wall.

  “I can’t tell you any of that,” Holmes said. “This is all you’re getting, ’cause it’s all I have got. You said you’d do something for me. …”

  Graham returned the short eyes to segregation. In the morning he would make a call to the superintendent of prisons requesting an emergency transfer to the medium-security Northern Vermont Facility. Holmes had earned it. If word of what he had done leaked out, he would be dead—or wish he was—within an hour of leaving his cell.

  Graham bent back the top page of his desk calendar. Thursday was the second, four days after Easter, when up to half of his guards were guaranteed to be down with the Blue Flu. But there was still a chance of avoiding an embarrassing call for assistance to the state police. Monday, when the staff was at full strength again, he would issue an alert for any unusual activity in the blocks. If he could keep troopers—and the newspapers—out of this, so much the better. For another few days he might not lose too much sleep.