by Paul Doiron
“I’m the one who testified for the prosecution!”
“It don’t matter,” she said. “Billy did what he did, and now he has too much time to think on things. I don’t want him obsessing over the past. It’s unhealthful. He can’t change it anyhow, and I need him to start writing letters to his kids and not getting into fights that add years to his sentence or other stupid shit like that. Just tell him whatever he wants to hear so he can start living for today again.” She removed a dirty Kleenex from her skirt pocket and rubbed my nose with it. “You’ve got grease all over your face.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Will you promise to go down there tomorrow? I know you filled out that visitor application, because I made you do it at dinner that time.”
She had put the sheet of paper in front of me at her kitchen table and refused to serve any of us until I’d completed the form.
“Aimee,” I said.
“Promise me you’ll go see him,” she said. “It’s more important than cutting firewood or any of this other shit. You’re his only real friend in the world, Mike.”
“What about his army buddies?” Billy had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The band of brothers? Don’t get me started on those misfits. Will you go see Billy tomorrow or won’t you? I need you to promise.”
The chestnut-sided warbler started up again in a rosebush across the yard.
“I promise,” I said.
“Good, because I’m late for work. Can you stay and watch the rug rats until my sister gets here?”
I looked past her into the monster’s lair. I had close to zero experience caring for small children. Even baby-sitting the Cronklets for fifteen minutes was a frightening prospect. “What do I do?”
“Just listen,” she said. “If they’re crying and fighting, everything’s OK. But if it goes quiet all of a sudden, then you know all hell has broken loose.”
* * *
The text arrived a few minutes before Aimee’s sister did. I had taken up my post in the doorway of the living room, holding the sleeping eighteen-month-old in my arms, terrified she would wake up while two of the kids threw Legos at each other or put them in their mouths. There was one Cronklet missing, I realized. The question was whether to hunt that one down or risk having the other two choke to death on pieces of plastic due to my negligence.
Like many parents, the Cronks viewed child care as a rudimentary human skill, while to me it seemed like managing a sophisticated series of no-win situations. When the two children on the floor in front of me suddenly rushed off in different directions, one toward a kitchen full of sharp knives, another down a darkened basement stairwell, I found myself paralyzed with indecision.
My cell phone vibrated in my jeans pocket and I managed to fish it out without waking the little girl. It was a text from Kathy: I killed a guy. It sucks. Thanks for your concern.
When I was just out of the academy and Kathy was my field-training officer, she used to call me “Grasshopper,” after the old Kung Fu television show. It was the nickname the blind Shaolin monk gave to his naive young student. Even when I was no longer one of her district wardens, it had remained Kathy’s pet name for me. Its absence here affected me even more than the sarcasm in the text itself.
The Maine State Prison was located twenty minutes from the Gammons’ horse farm and not much farther from the hilltop where Kathy lived at the edge of a rolling field of blueberries. My promise to Aimee had committed me to revisiting at least one landmark from my past. I was still trying to decide about the others when Aimee’s sister burst through the door and rescued me from a house that had grown alarmingly quiet.
9
I spent the rest of that day reattaching the gutter and taking down a dead spruce that was threatening the Cronks’ roof. I used a chain saw to split the tree into lengths I could drag into the bushes. It was a white spruce: a species Mainers call “cat spruce” because the crushed needles have the ammonia odor of cat piss. Aimee wouldn’t want to put these fast-burning, smelly logs into her woodstove, not unless she was trying to clear the house of unwanted guests.
By the time I was done, I was coated in perspiration and sawdust. I’d applied a layer of bug repellent to every inch of exposed skin but had managed to sweat away the powerful chemicals, so my neck and ears were swollen with bites from the blackflies that follow you everywhere in the woods in May. I drank a gallon of rusty-tasting water from the hose, packed up my tools, and headed to Day’s General Store for a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee.
The store had been one of my regular stops when I was a game warden, and it wasn’t unusual to find other wardens, state troopers, and sheriff’s deputies sitting at the lunch counter. My friend Cody Devoe once explained to me why Day’s was popular among the law-enforcement crowd. “It’s the only place around where I know the guy in the kitchen doesn’t spit in my food,” he’d said.
The screen door snapped shut behind me on its too-tight spring as I stepped inside. Day’s was always dim—the fluorescent bulbs hadn’t been dusted in years—and the first odor to hit your nose was inevitably the oily starch of the deep fryer. I hated to contemplate the last time Bill Day had changed the grease in that contraption. Ratty taxidermy mounts—stuffed raccoons and fishers—stared down at you from the shelf above the register with glass eyes. The display of dead animals was Bill Day’s idea of interior decoration.
A state trooper was alone at one end of the counter, separated by two open stools from a redneck in the corner. I had to make up my mind where to sit. I chose the stool beside the cop.
His name was Belanger. We had worked together on a few occasions, but I couldn’t say that we were well acquainted. Like many troopers, he was an impressive physical specimen: a Greek statue in a powder-blue uniform. His eyes flicked sideways as I took a seat and then returned to watching the television mounted to the wall.
I had the feeling he didn’t know who I was. “Belanger? It’s Mike Bowditch.”
He put a paper napkin to his mouth and swallowed what he’d been chewing. “Didn’t recognize you under all that hair,” he said.
I rubbed my scruffy chin with my knuckles. “Sometimes I don’t recognize myself.”
“That’s a tough break you got,” he said.
“What’s a tough break?”
“I heard you were fired.”
“Actually, I resigned. I’m guiding up around Grand Lake Stream now.”
He nodded and took a sip of water. “Enjoying it?”
“Mostly,” I said. “You know, the grass is always greener.”
He nodded again and turned back to the TV. Now that I was no longer a cop, he had nothing to say to me.
The local news station was running a segment on the diluvial rain we had received. The weatherman was standing with an umbrella in a puddle while cars drove by, splashing his pants.
I studied Bill Day’s slope-shouldered back as he flipped burgers on the grill. He was a soft guy, bigger on the bottom than the top, and his body always gave me the impression of melting even when he wasn’t standing in front of a burner.
“Afternoon, Bill!” I said.
He glanced over his shoulder, his face red and streaming, and waved a metal spatula. “Hold your horses. Hold your horses.”
Day’s wasn’t known for its customer service.
I settled back on my stool. The television anchor was introducing a new story—the volume was too low to hear anything—but there was a picture of Jimmy Gammon floating beside the newscaster’s handsome head.
“Hey, Bill,” I said. “Can you turn up the TV?”
The cook refused to look up from his grill. “Remote’s on the counter.”
I glanced along the Formica and saw the remote control beside a ketchup bottle in front of the redneck.
“Can you turn that up?” I asked.
The man had a bird’s nest beard and a drawn face from a lifetime’s worth of booze and cigarettes. He was wearing an olive green sweats
hirt, from which he had scissored the sleeves, revealing skinny arms patterned with tattoos. He peered at me from beneath the frayed brim of his baseball cap.
I pointed at the television. “Increase. The. Volume.”
With a grunt, he slid the remote down the counter, but it caromed off a napkin dispenser and landed on the floor behind me. I glared at the redneck, then hopped off the stool to retrieve it. By the time I got it aimed at the set and boosted the volume, the scene had changed to some sort of protest outside the headquarters of the Maine Warden Service in Augusta. There were a dozen or so people with signs, some bearing photos of Jimmy.
A female reporter had the microphone in the face of a fierce-looking young man with a crew cut and the shadowy suggestion of a goatee. He wore a navy suit and a striped tie, but the jacket seemed too tight; his shoulders looked ready to burst through the seams. Words along the bottom of the screen identified him as Sgt. Angelo Donato, Maine National Guard (Ret.).
“Jimmy Gammon was a hero,” he was saying. “What happened to him over there in Afghanistan I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. He had his share of problems, no doubt about it, but no way did he want to kill himself. Jimmy was one of the happiest guys I ever met. Those cops’ stories just don’t add up. And you know they’re going to get off with a slap on the wrist.” He stepped back and shouted “Justice for Jimmy!” to the people behind him.
The camera cut back to the studio, where the anchor began a new story: Domestic violence reports were up in Maine. I muted the sound and set the remote on the counter. Belanger arose from his stool and towered over me. He didn’t have the most expressive face in the world, but I sensed that the story about Jimmy Gammon had gotten to him. After a moment, his features hardened again into the stony expression he wore while on duty. He adjusted the chin strap on his blue Smokey the Bear–style hat. Then he reached into his wallet for a ten-dollar bill to leave beside his empty plate on the counter.
“Have a good day,” he said to me, as if I were a driver he’d just handed a ticket.
After the trooper left, I swiveled around on my stool to address the redneck on my right. The front of his sweatshirt proclaimed his manly virtues: WOMEN WANT ME. FISH FEAR ME.
“What’s your problem?” I said.
He used his thumbnail to remove a piece of gristle from between his front teeth. “Huh?”
“The remote control. You couldn’t have just handed it to me?”
There was no white in his eyes at all, only pink. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
“Should I?”
The man flared his nostrils. “You pinched me for night hunting last year. You and that other warden had that robot set up by the side of the road, and you entrapped me into taking a shot at it, when I was just driving home, minding my own business. I got a five-hundred-dollar fine and lost my hunting license for a year on account of you.”
The memory came back to me as if illuminated by a magnesium flash. I’d been working night hunters with Cody Devoe. Poachers began to get itchy in September, with legal deer season so close. They started driving into fields of goldenrod, illuminating the edges of the trees, hoping to jacklight a buck. Wardens know where to wait for poachers by following tire tracks in the weeds. Cody and I been hiding in the puckerbrush, using a remote control to manipulate a mechanical decoy shaped like a deer. With the push of a button, we could move its extremely realistic head.
This loser had been half in the bag when he’d come cruising past. He’d stopped, backed up, and then stuck a .22 rifle out the window to take a shot at Robby the Robo-Deer. He’d missed the decoy by a country mile. When Cody and I had sprung from the bushes, shouting “Police!” he had stomped on the gas, running his Chevrolet Monte Carlo off the logging road and into a stump.
“We also arrested you for operating under the influence, I seem to recall.”
He slid off the stool and stood face-to-face with me. His breath stank of coffee, cigarettes, and incipient gum disease. “I heard you ain’t a warden no more.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t kick your ass.”
“We’ll have to see about that some time.” He lowered his voice an octave to sound menacing.
“Why wait?”
“I know where you live, asshole.”
The local scofflaws had all heard that I’d left the Warden Service, but they probably didn’t know that I’d moved out of my rented cabin. I was hardly going to give this one driving directions to Moosehorn Lodge.
“Bring some beer when you come over,” I said.
After he left, I found myself alone at the lunch counter. Bill Day wiped a dishrag over his red skull, trying to soak up some of the beaded sweat. “What’ll you have?”
“Cheeseburger deluxe. And some coffee.”
While Bill filled my cup, I leaned my elbows on the edge of the counter and reflected on the two conversations I’d just had. The trooper had been frosty with me because I was no longer a law-enforcement officer. The poacher had been pissed because, in his twisted thinking, I would always be a game warden.
A man just couldn’t win.
The fry cook gave me a baffled expression. “What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing,” I said.
10
The next morning, I made an early start for the Midcoast. The drive to the Maine State Prison in Warren usually took a solid three hours, longer in the rain. Aimee had told me that Billy was being housed in the Medium Custody Unit and had “contact visit status,” meaning that he was permitted walk-in visits with anyone who had filled out the required form, as I had, and received prior approval.
I filled a thermos with coffee for the road and turned the dial to a classic-rock station in Bangor. In northern Maine, the listening choices broke down into roughly four categories (not counting the broadcasts from Canada): classic rock, country, Christian, and right-wing yelling. You only had to listen to the radio for ten minutes to guess that Maine was the whitest state in the nation.
I decided to take the northern route, skirting Elizabeth Morse’s extensive land holdings, by driving from Topsfield to Lincoln and then south along Interstate 95 through Bangor. It was a slippery ride. A wet white fog rose like steam from the asphalt, and the logging trucks, barreling down the highway at eighty miles per hour, threw behind them blinding curtains of water.
By the time I finally saw the Camden Hills, the knuckles in my hands were sore from gripping the steering wheel. I passed a series of familiar landmarks: the lobster pound at Lincolnville Beach, the terminal where the Islesboro ferry docked, the road up the side of Mount Battie. Everything looked just as I remembered it, and yet something seemed profoundly different.
Not much had changed in Camden’s picture-perfect downtown. Some of the boutiques and restaurants had been replaced by other boutiques and restaurants, and the nonfunctional smokestack at the mill-turned-condo complex still needed a fresh coat of paint. The same schooners were docked in the harbor, their masts rising into the mist. I had always been prone to nostalgia, but I hadn’t expected to feel such an overwhelming sense of homecoming.
I resisted the urge to take the turn that would have brought me to the rolling farm country where the Gammons lived. I had no idea what I would have said to them anyway. Jimmy’s parents had been generous and caring people. They had recognized that their son, for all his intelligence and good cheer, had trouble making close friends. They had hopes for me that I had probably dashed. The Gammons couldn’t have known that, for complicated reasons of my own, I wasn’t interested in forming close relationships when I was twenty-four. A stubborn desire to inflict loneliness on myself had kept me from forming a meaningful bond with Jimmy Gammon.
Leaving Camden for the considerably less picturesque quarry land to the south, I realized it wasn’t the Midcoast that had changed. It was me.
* * *
The road to the prison led me through the western reaches of the city of Rockland. A century earlier, miners had dug deep pits into the fields a
nd forests to excavate limestone. There was still a working cement factory—an enormous industrial complex with smoking chimneys you could see from miles out to sea—in the middle of this pockmarked landscape. Dump trucks still carried smashed stone out of the gravel pits, but most of the old quarries had been abandoned. Decades of rain had filled the man-made chasms with water. And over the years, people had thrown trash into these deep, dark lakes—not just bags of dirty diapers and chicken bones but also broken refrigerators and derelict cars. The city itself used one of the quarries for its municipal dump.
The Old County Road threaded its way between the flooded pits. Occasionally, a vehicle would crash through the guardrails and plummet hundreds of feet into the black water below. Sometimes the driver would even survive. A sulfurous odor hung over the quarry land. Rounding one of the many sharp corners, it was as if you’d just missed seeing the devil disappear in a puff of smoke.
I passed through the pretty Colonial-era town of Thomaston and crossed the tidal St. George River into Warren. The river was high from the week of rain we’d received, but I could tell that the alewives were running because of the huge flocks of birds perched on rocks and in trees along the shore. In the spring, schools of sea-run fish return to the lakes and streams where they were spawned to reenact their primeval mating rituals. Most die before they can reproduce. Snake-necked cormorants dive for them. Ospreys plunge from the sky with talons outstretched to carry them back to their nests. Lobstermen net the fish by the truckload to use as bait. But still the alewives return.
So I wasn’t the only fool coming home.
I’d visited the Maine State Prison a few times while I was stationed in the area. It was an enormous cream-colored fortress, hidden from the major roads by thick stands of oaks and pines, but visible at night from a distance by the ocher glow that radiated into the sky above the brightly illuminated buildings. Nearer to the jail, the trees had been cleared so that the guards in the towers would have a clean shot at any fugitive who managed to get past the razor wire.
