Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  “Is it wise to have offered so much money for the information about whoever nailed the tree? It will make people crazy. People will kill for it.”

  “Dodge said something like that.”

  “Well, maybe you should listen to him. He’s no fool.”

  “If they find who did it, the money will be well spent.” He wheezed at her in exasperation.

  “Blood money brings blood.”

  He wished she would not use that word. Blood. Alicia knew him better than anyone. Mackenzie sipped at his coffee. He had tried to quit drinking it, because it gave him headaches at the base of his skull. But Mackenzie had been drinking coffee for too long to think of how he might live any other way. He liked the ceremony—the daily measuring of beans, the way the coffee grinder motored across the counter as if it meant to hurl itself off the edge.

  “With that much cash at stake,” he said, “at least they’ll know I cared enough to make the offer.”

  Alicia looked away, not agreeing but not wanting to fight, either. “I still can’t quite believe that James Pfeiffer has passed away. To think that’s he’s already been gone several days.”

  “How time flies when you’re dead.” Mackenzie rustled the paper, turning the pages, still unable to focus.

  “Why say a thing like that? I hope to God no one overhears you when you get into one of your moods.”

  Mackenzie grunted. Just then he felt angry at Pfeiffer for dying. He didn’t care how little sense that made. He was angry the same way he had been angry with himself when the tree fell on him. It was clumsy to die. Clumsiness had cost him his leg. In his heart, Mackenzie had no sympathy for Pfeiffer, just as he had none for himself. And he was angry to be keeping yet another secret from Alicia. It was never so simple as just being able to forget them. Hoarding these secrets required concentration. If he let his attention slip, even for a moment, the secrets might reappear into the light of day and there would be no way to answer for them. It wouldn’t matter if she agreed that spiking the tree was the best thing to do. It was simply wrong.

  Mackenzie had never heard a bad word spoken about Alicia. People trusted her to bank their money, look after their pets when they were in the hospital and check in on their houses. Mackenzie could hardly believe the number and assortment of keys on Alicia’s key ring. She had keys to half the homes in Abenaki Junction. It seemed to Mackenzie that Alicia had spent her entire life in the service of other people. She was their confidante and caretaker. She knew almost every secret in the town. Few changes occurred without Alicia’s being consulted. The town had forged an emotional dependence on Alicia that Mackenzie felt sure could never be replaced by someone else.

  That, thought Mackenzie, is genuine power. Then he thought about his own power in the town. It seemed more heavy-handed. More obvious. More the way of a man. And he knew his way bought him enemies, while her methods never brought a ripple to the surface of the calm she carried with her. “Can Coltrane be trusted?” he asked her suddenly.

  “Trusted? Well, good Lord, yes. Your father trusted him, and as far as I know your father trusted almost no one. Why are you asking that? Are you thinking that he might have spiked the tree?”

  Mackenzie grunted. It worried him that he did not have anything on Coltrane, the way he did on most people. After the tree-spiking, it seemed more as if Coltrane had something on him. This was a new sensation for Mackenzie, heavy and sharp in his stomach, as if he had swallowed a piece of glass. He had a bad feeling that Coltrane was going to play a larger role in his life than he had ever wanted him to. Mackenzie drank more coffee and felt pain like a fist clenching around his brain.

  Alicia laughed at him. “You trust Coltrane more than you trust yourself.”

  Mackenzie tried to get himself annoyed, but he realized she was right. He looked at her while she absentmindedly picked at her sweater. Mackenzie thought how similar she looked to when he first realized he loved her, back in their college days, sitting just as she was now and picking at the white chenille patch on his dark-blue varsity lacrosse sweater. But her absentmindedness was only a veil. Alicia always knew more than she seemed to know. It was the only thing about her that Mackenzie had never truly figured out. He felt fortunate that morning. If Alicia believed Coltrane was trustworthy, then he believed it too. He began to feel that his plan would work out. The small discomforts of his life seemed far away.

  Alicia looked up at him and smiled.

  He smiled back and looked away, embarrassed for a moment at how clearly she could see the desire in his face.

  “I’m glad to see you reading the Forest Sentinel,” she said. “At least now you’ll know what they’re talking about.”

  “I was reading it”—he folded the paper and let it drop to the floor—“because this is the final issue.”

  Alicia’s eyebrows bobbed with surprise. “How do you mean?”

  “I’m working on a little plan.”

  “When are you not? But what exactly do you mean, Jonah?” She knew even as she asked the question that if he had not told her outright, he would not tell her at all. Once he had decided to be secretive about something, no amount of badgering could prize it out of him, and he enjoyed watching all attempts fail.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” he told her. “I’m just waiting for the right moment to spring the trap.”

  “Don’t for God’s sake bully her, Jonah. That’s one thing you can’t do with Madeleine. It would backfire in your face.”

  “I think that now might be a good time for her to move on.”

  “Good for you, maybe.”

  “She’s to blame for Pfeiffer’s death as much as if she hammered the nail in herself.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Jonah, and you know it.”

  “Sooner or later, people will see it that way.” I just bet ten thousand dollars on it, he thought.

  “Be fair, Jonah. That’s all I’m asking. She’s not like the people you’re used to dealing with. You can’t just go in and trade body blows with her until one of you drops dead. It’s precisely where you think you’re strongest that you’ll find out you’re not.” Alicia sensed that he was digging in again, so she changed the subject. “Pfeiffer’s funeral is coming up,” Alicia said. “You’ll have to say something.”

  “I’ll tell them what they want to hear. Nobody ever remembers what gets said at a time like that anyway.”

  “As long as you mean what you say, that will be enough. You must take care of that family. Be good to them.”

  “I will,” he said. “I love you.” Mackenzie spoke without thinking whether Alicia would want to hear that now. He thought of what she’d said about Madeleine and the Pfeiffers. He loved her for her purity of vision, but he knew he could not hold to it himself. She has that luxury, Mackenzie told himself, of being able to say what should happen in a perfect world. She never had to learn to fight dirty, the way I did. He knew how much Alicia would despise what had been done. God, he thought, it’s hard to keep the fighting clean.

  CHAPTER 5

  As Dodge drove his patrol car down the long dirt road to Coltrane’s farm, the horrible daydream passed through his head that he might already be too late. He felt sure that whoever had spiked that tree would have come across Coltrane’s property. If Coltrane had stumbled onto the intruder, he might have gotten himself killed. And his wife, Clara, too. He stamped on the accelerator, sending grit and pebbles ricocheting off his muffler pipe. The tall grass in the ditches was spotted with purple chicory flowers and black-eyed Susans. Their colors were so bright they made him dizzy.

  At the end of the valley, he could see Coltrane’s faded red barn. The grain silo was stooping to one side, as if trying to get a peek down the chimney of Coltrane’s house. The farm had fallen partly into disrepair since Coltrane took on the job of company foreman. Before that, he had managed to keep some crops going. Now all he had was a cornfield.

  On most occasions, Dodge liked coming out here. It was a peaceful valley and he never went away
from Coltrane’s without some pie or a dozen eggs or a bottle of the maple syrup that Coltrane boiled down every spring. He thought about blueberry pie, the berries picked off the mountainside by Coltrane’s wife. He knew the way she used her thumb to brush the berries into her palm and the red-speckled enamel bowl in which she brought them home. Clara took a pleasure in the simplicity of her life, while people in town stormed through their days in a fury of conflict and control. From living so close to the land all this time, the Coltranes had realized something that could not be put into words. You could tell it just by looking at them. It was a kind of innocence, but one which came only after years of quiet reflection. Maybe that was it, Dodge thought. The Coltranes just took time to think. Dodge drove into the black-muddy farmyard and cut his engine. Worry sent the blood thumping in his temples. The barn towered above him, shaving the late-afternoon sun from the roof of Coltrane’s house. “Please don’t let them be dead,” he said to himself.

  Coltrane’s two dogs, Tucker and Bugs, apricot-colored muddles of collie and shepherd, came running from the shadow of the barn and barked until they recognized him. They sniffed his hand and smudged their wet noses up against his palm, tails wagging furiously. Then they wandered back into the shade and flopped down in the straw-covered dirt.

  Dodge stood in the silence of the barnyard, slowly wiping his dog-sniffed hand on his shirt. He did not trust the quiet. He pulled the revolver from his belt and glanced at the cylinder to see if it was loaded. The dull gray of bullets nested in the shiny blue-black steel. “Hello?” called Dodge. His voice seemed to sink into the dust and bleached planks of the farmhouse. His imagination swam with blood.

  Just then, there was a movement in the barn. Dodge raised the revolver and cocked the hammer, not caring who it was who walked out of the shadows, as long as he had the person in the fat sights of his gun.

  Coltrane appeared. He wore faded canvas work clothes. His many pockets were always filled with wrenches and screwdrivers and bits of leftover sandwiches. The sun had rubbed itself into his skin, so that even in winter his cheeks were the cheerful red of McIntosh apples.

  Dodge lowered his arm, uncocked the hammer and set the gun back in his belt. He breathed deeply. The sour barnyard smell filled his lungs.

  Coltrane nodded hello. “Who’d you think it was going to be?”

  “I thought …” He did not want to say what he had thought. “I came to tell you I found a bridge nail hammered into that tree, Victor.”

  So Mackenzie did the job himself, thought Coltrane. He wanted to tell Dodge the truth, but he was afraid of Mackenzie, so he said nothing and felt sick.

  “I know you said you had seen Wilbur Hazard cutting across your land and going up into the trees lately …”

  “Oh, I don’t suppose it’s him,” said Coltrane. Out of nervousness, he began emptying his pockets, inspecting bits of crumpled paper and coins and putting them away again.

  “But we should check. I’ll be back later to see if he comes by again.”

  Coltrane looked behind him, as if he’d heard a voice from somewhere else. “Last murder here was over seventy years ago.”

  “When Dabney Hanks came home from being overseas a year, fighting in World War One.” Dodge knew the story by heart.

  The fact was they both knew the story, but still took pleasure in the telling. It wasn’t so much the importance of the story as it was two men reminding each other of what they shared. And the laughter or the knowing looks that came of it were like secret handshakes in a brotherhood. It was a thing that anchored them to Abenaki Junction and the land around it. To understand the story of Dabney Hanks and the reasons it continued to echo through the town was to understand the town itself, what its people feared and what made them proud, and why the death of James Pfeiffer had sent a tremor through them which would never disappear, and would soon be a legend of its own.

  “Dabney comes home,” Coltrane continued, “and finds his wife gives birth to a son that wasn’t theirs.”

  Dodge nodded. “So he goes right over to the man he knows is the father.”

  “That was Andy Truitt.” Coltrane raised a finger.

  “And he shoots him with the same rifle that he’s been using to pick off Germans over in France.” Dodge nailed the story shut, and both men stood frowning for a few seconds afterward, as the memory receded into the darkness of their minds.

  Coltrane started walking back toward the screened front door of his house. He was desperate to lead the subject away from Pfeiffer and the spiked tree. I can hardly stand to keep quiet about it, he thought, but I know I can’t look Marcus Dodge in the face and lie and be believed. “Now, would you like a nice piece of Clara’s blueberry pie?” he asked hopefully. “The berries were on the bush but three hours ago.”

  Dodge saw again the gentle rolling of the berries between Clara’s fingers as they fell into the bowl. He saw the faint purple stain on her fingertips. Ten minutes later, he was finishing his second piece of pie. The full force of the summer seemed stored in each fragile berry.

  The three of them sat at the kitchen table, Clara with flour still on her apron and dusted across her hands and in her hair. She’d had three sons and three daughters, all of them grown now and moved away. Her body had given with the work, so that the angle of her bones was gentler in the curving of her skin. She kept her hair long and braided and the gray in the braids was silver shiny and did not hold the brittleness of age. Often she raised her fingers to her mouth, as if embarrassed at how time had creased her lips.

  Looking at her from the corner of his eye, Dodge wanted to tell her how beautiful she was. She seemed the kind of woman who had never heard those words from anyone. As he stared, he realized suddenly that the almost sensual rhythm he felt when he came to this valley was her doing. Victor was a part of it, but he did not create it. It streamed from this woman in the calmness of her gaze and the way she took from the land without taking more than she needed.

  “Nice to see you, Marcus,” she told Dodge as he and Coltrane walked outside. She laid her hand on his shoulder.

  Dodge smiled and said nothing. He rested his hand briefly on hers, then brought it down from his shoulder and let go and was in great confusion at how difficult the letting go had been. Dodge prayed that Coltrane had not known what he was feeling. Nothing had been said, no gaze too long, no touch that needed explanation. But it did not seem possible to Dodge that Clara had not sensed the powerful swing in Dodge’s heart. It seemed to exist in some uncalibrated energy, sparkling through the air around them.

  They were back out in the sharp light of late afternoon. Suddenly, Coltrane wheeled and faced him.

  In the moment of his wheeling, Dodge felt dread pass through him like a shadow. Fearing that Coltrane knew about his thoughts. Oh, God, here it comes, thought Dodge.

  “Pfeiffer,” Coltrane said. It was only the one word. He blurted it out, half hoping Dodge would force the truth from him.

  But Dodge only nodded. He felt lightheaded with relief that this had nothing to do with Clara.

  Coltrane waved his hand toward the ridge that separated his land from the Algonquin. “Mackenzie ought not to be cutting it down. I mean, he’s not even thinning it. He’s destroying it.”

  “I don’t know, Victor.” Dodge shrugged. “Mackenzie paid for it.”

  “But I’m saying it shouldn’t be for sale.”

  “I don’t know, Victor.” Dodge said again. Mackenzie’s clearing of the Algonquin seemed to Dodge more like a force of nature than any logging enterprise. There was nothing to do but endure it.

  Coltrane gave Dodge a crooked smile. The guilt of Coltrane’s silence was like acid in his stomach. “You come around again,” he said.

  Dodge drove away, scattering chickens, careful not to kick up gravel with his tires. Bugs and Tucker chased the car as far as the road, then stopped and drank from a puddle. As Dodge made his way back to town, he thought of the investigation. Now while others could move on with their lives, it b
ecame Dodge’s job to shuffle through the past, intruding into people’s memories like someone who wears muddy boots into a tidy house. Part of him wanted to call it an accident and let the dead man lie buried in peace. But there would be no calm in Abenaki Junction until this was solved. No calm.

  Still dazed and angry at the sight of the clear-cut land, Gabriel followed the trail that led down from the mountain. He reached Pogansett Lake and peeled off his clothes. Dried sweat was gritty on his skin. He walked through black flakes of dead leaves at the water’s edge and let himself fall into the tea-brown water. It was cool but not cold. Clutched in Gabriel’s hand was a razor. He had no mirror, so he shaved by feel, dragging the blade across his skin and following it with the tips of his fingers to see if any stubble remained. The razor was half-blunt and hurt when he shaved his upper lip. His eyes teared with the jabbing, pulling pain. It was strange to have smooth cheeks again. He ducked his head underwater and ran his fingers through his hair. Gabriel’s memories of this lake were still clear in his mind. He remembered riding out with his father in the predawn fog to go fishing. He had sat bundled in his parka, watching the V of their motorboat’s wake in the glassy water. Then, later, he had sat for hours watching the yellow and orange bobber on his fishing line, waiting for it to jerk beneath the surface. He had seen eighteen-wheeler trucks drive out across the ice in wintertime and felt his hair freeze in the wind blowing down from the north. Leg-thick icicles hung off the narrow river bridge, sometimes reaching the surface of the frozen water and forming bars like a gate across the river. He had been woken in the middle of the night by the gunfire sound of ice cracking on the lake, signaling the approach of spring. Now, as Gabriel raised his head from the brown water, he caught sight of the bony ridge of Seneca Mountain and beyond it the purple hills of Canada. Heat haze blurred the distant trees. It looked as if the mountains were smoldering.