by Paul Watkins
When he told his father that he thought he might be in love with Mary, his father raised his hand as if to strike him, wide-eyed outrage on his face. “She’s out of her goddamned mind!” his father had yelled. “And there isn’t anyone who can save her from that. Not you or anyone. Now you can pour your feelings and your loyalty into that woman and it will never be enough because she don’t even know what you’re doing. Is that what you want, boy? A fight you can’t win?” His father walked to the stone mantelpiece, on which he kept a crystal decanter of scotch. He poured some into a tumbler and handed it to Mackenzie. “I see things clearly and I know you don’t right now. Here.” The amber liquid rocked in the heavy glass. “Put a fire in your heart.”
For Mackenzie, this offering was the rarest and most sought-after gesture that could come from his father. It was the offer of comradeship. The bridging of the gulf between them. But it was only there if Mackenzie accepted the glass, and accepted that his father was right. There could be no hesitation, and the offer might never come again. Not in his father’s lifetime. He was that kind of man.
Mackenzie had gone out with Mary later that night, thinking he would make a break with her but not knowing how it could be done. He ended up making love to her on a blanket thrown across the scattered sawdust of the Mackenzie mill’s cutting-room floor, the smell of oil and pine sap in the air. She never spoke the whole time. It seemed to him she never closed her eyes. They blazed at him with the same puzzle of emotion that made up the riddles of her speech.
She was seventeen then, and he was twenty-one. Mackenzie’s father would have killed him if he’d known.
When Mary left town shortly after her eighteenth birthday to attend a special school in Portland, Mackenzie thought he would never see her again. She had little reason to stay. Too many others had driven away to the south, been swallowed up in the trees that crowded down to the road. They simply disappeared. But when Mary returned six months later, carrying her infant son and refusing to name the father, Mackenzie watched Abenaki Junction turn into an echo chamber. Rumors traveled like wind through laundry hung out to dry, through open windows and across the shingled rooftops.
Mackenzie’s fear that the child was theirs began in him like the drawn-out ringing echo of struck crystal and never lessened in intensity. He didn’t dare to ask, telling himself that if the child did belong to both of them, Mary would let him know. But he didn’t believe it. What Mary did and didn’t do followed no corridor of logic that anyone else could hope to understand.
Mary’s insanity began to seem obvious to Mackenzie. Or perhaps, he thought, I am just seeing it the way others always have. It was as if a spell had finally been broken, and what had made them separate from parents and friends now drove them apart from each other. The possibility of staying together was suddenly both unthinkable and absurdly out of reach. But the worry never left him that the child could be his, too. No amount of distance could change that. He never told a soul about it, not even his wife, Alicia, whom he married three years later. Mackenzie often thought about the strange hand he had been dealt, with no child from his marriage and the possibility of a child that would never know its father’s name.
What might have been a tolerated life for Mary the Clock—the shack she lived in, the food she bought more for the color of its packaging than for what was inside, the out-of-season clothes she wore—was not tolerated in her young son. Abenaki Junction lost patience with her eccentricity. The boy was taken away at the age of nine months and put in foster care, while Mackenzie stood by feeling sick and helpless and a coward.
Mary began to wander the streets again, just as she had done with her crayons a decade before. The crayons never reappeared. Instead, she took to wearing her Big Ben clock. People said it seemed to be there to replace the tiny heartbeat of her son. It served as proof of insanity to those who had judged her an unfit mother.
Twenty years later, Mary’s son had come back. Now his name was Wilbur Hazard. He arrived almost penniless, wearing a glossy black leather jacket and thin-soled, shiny-buckled shoes, walking with a shuffle that made him seem always on the verge of stumbling. People said he wouldn’t last a week. A year and then two years later, they were still saying it. In time, he put away the leather jacket. The shoes wore out on the grit-strewn sidewalks and he replaced them with the heavy boots that the local men wore. And like the local men, he wedged a baseball cap onto his head and kept it there. He was blending in. Soon the only mysterious thing about him became the reason for his being there. Having learned about his past, by all the reasoning of every gossiped word in town, he should have moved on. But he stayed. Wilbur Hazard made few acquaintances and no friends at all. It was as if he and his mother had barricaded themselves into a private other world. He fixed up Mary’s house, and with money from his job as a cook at the Four Seasons diner, he bought her new clothes. He earned the two of them an almost respectable but stony silent place among the comfortably sane of Abenaki Junction.
Mackenzie had not spoken more than a few words to Mary in years, and had never spoken to Hazard at all. Mackenzie tried not to stare at the young man when the two of them passed on the street. He waited for some jolt of recognition, a ghost of his own younger self in the man’s face, or the stare that confirmed what he feared. Mackenzie knew exactly what would happen to him in this town if it turned out to be true about Hazard and if the truth ever became public knowledge. He knew how people thought. They would fasten the story to him like a limpet and it would undo every fragment of respect they had for him. This was Mackenzie’s oldest nightmare, rising from the deep water of his memory but never quite reaching the surface.
Mary stood at the wire-mesh gates, penned in by the floodlights’ glare. She shook the heavy lock and chain that secured the gate. Her mouth formed words, but Mackenzie, cloaked in the dark of his office, could not hear what she was saying. He waited until the small and tottering figure vanished into the night. Then he took up the nail, fetched a hammer, got in his car and drove out to the woods.
With the first hammer blow against the bridge nail, Mackenzie recoiled at the noise. He stood very still in the darkness, trying to hear above the sound of his own heavy breathing. He switched on a flashlight and hammered at the nail until its head was flat with the bark. Then he pinched a fingerful of dirt, spat in it and rubbed the mud over the steel to camouflage it. As he rubbed, he saw the nailhead turning red-brown. He had picked up the soil stained with Pfeiffer’s blood. Mackenzie took out a handkerchief, wiped his hands clean, and slipped a long rat-tail file into the cut made by Pfeiffer’s chain saw. He slid the file in until it reached the nail. Then he filed a short jagged rip into the shaft.
Finally he stood back, sweat sticking his shirt to his chest. He shined the flashlight on the place where the nailhead lay embedded in the tree trunk. He could barely see it. He turned to leave, and shuddered. It was too quiet here. Quiet the way it would be now at the house of James Pfeiffer, with the silence that filled all houses of the dead.
Marcus Dodge stood in a meat freezer at the Fresh Time Supermarket, looking at the corpse of James Pfeiffer. The freezer was the only place where Pfeiffer’s body could be stored for now. The nearest mortuary was a hundred miles to the south in Skowhegan, and it was too late to drive that far. The Pfeiffer family had been notified, but an autopsy would have to be performed before the remains could be released for burial. Dodge felt the unraveling of his heart in search of sympathy, but this dead thing already looked so different from the way Pfeiffer had been in his life that Dodge couldn’t tell whether he ought to feel ashamed to cry or ashamed not to.
A sliver of condensation rose from Pfeiffer’s barely parted lips. It occurred to Dodge that there might still be some life in the body, but he quickly put that aside. Dodge had hardly known Pfeiffer. He had only one clear recollection of the boy, from sometime earlier in the year, when the snow was still on the ground. Dodge had been sitting with Coltrane in the Four Seasons diner. The sound of laughter across the
room distracted Dodge. He focused past Coltrane’s shoulder to the source. It was Pfeiffer, laughing either at his own joke or at someone else’s. He sat at a table full of other loggers, broad shoulders in faded shirts. Pfeiffer rocked back and opened his mouth as he laughed, showing his strong white teeth. Dodge’s mind had made an unexpected Polaroid of that moment, and stored it away in his brain.
Twitch Duvall stood next to Dodge in the freezer. He wore a thing like a shower cap, required for all employees who went into the frozen-meat section. Twitch tried to make Dodge wear a shower cap, but Dodge took the puffy pale-green thing and popped it onto the head of a cardboard cutout of a woman advertising oven cleaner.
Twitch’s breath was visible in the stale damp air. “Now, you just make damn sure nobody hears that you’re keeping this guy in my supermarket.” Twitch edged over to the body. He pattered his fingers on the bib of his starched and bloodstained apron. The raggedness of Pfeiffer’s wounds had no visible effect on Duvall, as if the sight of supermarket butchery had long ago numbed him to this.
Dodge made no comment about Pfeiffer. He kept his feelings to himself. He knelt down next to the corpse, which lay stretched across two pallets, six inches off the wet concrete floor. For a while, the still-warm body had steamed in the steel-walled room, but Pfeiffer was cold now, and felt clammy to the touch in the way only refrigerated meat can feel. Dodge noticed the whiteness of the dead man’s finger-nails, and how black the dirt seemed under their tips. It made him clench his own hands into fists and jam them deep into his pockets, as if the paleness of death might be contagious. He walked over to a side of beef and sat down on it. The dull white armorplating of fat across the carcass was tattooed with blue USDA stamps. Dodge smoothed his hands across his face, feeling the skull beneath the skin.
“Are you all right, Marcus?” Twitch sat down next to him on the carcass. The bones creaked under his weight.
“Just give me a minute,” said Dodge.
Twitch stood and opened the freezer door. Condensation billowed across the floor. “Well, I don’t see as why you got to stare at that body anymore, anyways. It ain’t nothing now.” He walked out into the musty stockroom and the door clunked shut behind him.
Dodge took out his notebook and began to write. His report on the accident was due first thing tomorrow. He had only written three words when the door swung open again. Dodge sighed and looked up, ready to tell Twitch to leave him alone a while longer. But it wasn’t Twitch. It was Madeleine. “Oh!” said Dodge, unable to hide his surprise. He stood up from his beef-carcass seat.
Madeleine walked into the room. Heat seeped like smoke from her clothes, as if her whole body were smoldering. “I’m doing a story on the accident,” she told him. Her voice was too loud in the cramped space of the freezer.
“I know,” Dodge answered quietly. The cold was getting to him, seeping through each layer of his clothes, but now he felt sweat on his forehead. Sometimes it made him nervous to be stuck alone with Madeleine, even if he longed for her company. He found conversation with her difficult. Not because he had nothing to say. It was because of all the things he wanted to tell her but did not dare. He was afraid the words would slip out, and he would look worse than a fool.
She looked down at the body for a few seconds. Her eyes slowly narrowed and she pressed her lips together.
Dodge could tell she was holding her breath. He had done the same when he first walked in. But now all the smells of the meat locker had soaked into his lungs and he could not tell one scent of death from another.
Madeleine turned to him. “So what do you think? Are the Pfeiffers going to sue Mackenzie? Is Mackenzie going to settle out of court?”
None of this had occurred to Dodge yet. In time it would, but not now, when the body was just growing cold. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that at times like this,” he said.
Madeleine knew it was inappropriate, but she couldn’t help herself. She never could. If she thought something, she almost always said it without thinking of the consequences. “I’m sorry,” she said, and genuinely did regret the remarks. But even as she apologized, she knew she would say the same thing again if she had the moment to live over. “Has anybody checked the chain saw? Was it working all right?”
“I’ll get to it.” Just now, Dodge could not look her in the eye. He looked past her to Pfeiffer’s body. He had seen plenty of corpses, but mostly they were old people. People about whom you could say “They had a good run” and not think that their passing was a tragedy. But about a death like this he could find no words of consolation. There was nothing to do but feel sick about the waste.
“You’re really casual about this, aren’t you?” Just then, Madeleine felt no reverence for the dead. There was too much that she wanted to know. Suspicions crowded her head. “Are you even going to have an investigation? Or has Mackenzie taken care of that, too?” She knew Dodge was the last person who could be bullied into something by Mackenzie, but she wanted to make Dodge angry. She wanted to punch a hole through his calm, and at the same time, she wished she could find that same calm in herself.
He looked at her and shook his head. He was not angry or disgusted. He knew Madeleine well. They had grown up together. He knew what she was trying to do and how she never could sit still or keep her mouth shut when she ought to. He accepted it, just as he had been forced long ago to accept the whole impossibility of any future they might have together.
“Nothing ever gets to you, does it?” she asked.
“It’s not like that, Madeleine.” Dodge closed his notebook and slotted it into his pocket. He had to leave now. He could no longer stand the cold.
“Then how is it?” she asked. She was so frustrated at him that for once she found herself at a loss for words.
“Nothing ever gets to me in front of you.” He walked past her, resting his hand on her shoulder as he squeezed between her and a hanging side of beef. He drank in the smell of her cologne and the leather of her satchel and the faint clean smell of shampoo.
Madeleine said nothing to him as he left. To her, Dodge was the enemy. He had been ever since he became a policeman. She had to keep reminding herself that nothing would change that. As soon as he was gone, she sat down on the beef carcass where Dodge had been sitting when she walked in. She stared at the body of James Pfeiffer and after a minute she began to cry.
Even in the cool air, Dodge felt heat wrap around him. It was deep in the night. Loons wailed out on the lake. Dodge had grown up believing the Abenaki Indian legend—that the noise of the loons was really the voices of the dead calling to their loved ones from the spirit world. The sound made better sense in legend than in truth. Dodge walked away down the road. He moved with the unconscious rhythm of a long-distance runner, as if he could keep going for the rest of his life and never tire, drawing footprint rings around the world. He kept thinking of James Pfeiffer. The great fragility of flesh. The swindle of dying too young. But in that freezer room, with everything around him dead except that woman, Dodge had never felt so close to life.
CHAPTER 3
Twenty miles to the north, Adam Gabriel was moving through the forest. He walked alone through the trackless thickets of pine, past nameless lakes and shimmering groves of white birch. He was thinking about what he planned to do in the days ahead, and how he stood a chance of being killed. It was not fear that reached him now, but loneliness. To keep himself company, he sang:
“Get out the way for old man Tucker,
He’s too late to get his supper.
Supper’s over and breakfast’s cooking,
Old man Tucker just stand there looking.”
The song did not cheer him up, the way it had done when he was a child and he had shouted the first line when he walked home through these woods after a day of fishing or climbing Seneca Mountain. It was a song that all his friends used to know, and if one person heard another singing it, they would join in. He remembered his relief when someone in the distance would sing out th
e rest of the song. He wondered where those friends were now, and whether he would be fighting against them in the days to come.
Gabriel sang until the words made no sense to him anymore. After three days in the woods, he needed to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was his own. He needed the rhythm of the words to keep himself moving, because hunger had made him weak. It had pushed his senses beyond the confines of his body. It seemed to him that he could feel the stones and branches in his path before he touched them. His canteen, which he had filled from a stream that morning, was almost empty now.
Gabriel was tall and strong without looking muscular. His hair, which he combed straight back on his head, was dark brown with threads of coppery-red bleached in by the sun. His lips were full and chapped and sometimes he ran his tongue over them to moisten the dried skin. His heavy canvas shirt and trousers were dirty from living in the woods. Mud and pine needles had lodged in the laces of his boots.
Returning here alone and after so much time had brought his life full circle. Everything he had done and what he had become all boiled down to these past few days, from the time he had set out into the wilderness from the side of a highway in Canada, smuggling himself across the border. He knew about the sale of the Algonquin and had watched from a distance as environmental groups petitioned against it. He read their well-tuned arguments. He watched them fail and move on to other sales of wilderness land, just as they had many times before. When the Algonquin sale went through, he decided he would have to come here himself and put things right once and for all. Gabriel’s family had been gone from Abenaki Junction for many years, ever since his father was fired as foreman of the Mackenzie Company for complaining about the clear-cutting. But Gabriel still knew Jonah Mackenzie well enough to understand that no amount of reasoning would change the old man’s mind about clear-cutting the wilderness. Other methods were required. The more he thought about this, the more extreme his plans became.
