Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  Gabriel could tell the man wanted to leave. It was only five in the morning, and the first brass blades of sunlight were stabbing through the trees. But that was when Booker Lazarus had told him to show up if he wanted to catch Mott. Even at five, he had arrived only just in time, running across the tracks toward the depot building and waving his arms like a madman.

  Mott stared for a second, judging him. Then he cut the Putt-Putt’s engine. “You want that job? How bad do you want it?” He continued to stare, gathering the details of Gabriel’s face. He had been given complete control over the hiring of his replacement. Mott guessed that this was because the comptroller in St. Johns couldn’t be bothered to come down here and do the job himself.

  “Well, I want the job pretty badly,” Gabriel said. He knew he was being judged and that once this man had made up his mind, there would be no way to change it. So Gabriel spoke carefully, like someone trying to guess a secret password.

  “A lot of people want it.” Mott didn’t recognize the face, which was good, since he couldn’t think of anyone in town who deserved his job. Ever since the order came to retire, Mott had been leaving earlier and earlier each morning and coming out of the woods at dark to avoid anyone trying to find him. He knew someone must have tipped this man off. Probably that old fathead Booker Lazarus, he thought. “It’s long hours,” he said. “The pay is pretty much shit.”

  “I figured it would be.”

  “I’m retiring. The railroad’s making me retire, now that I’m sixty-five. Sixty-five,” Mott said again, as if amazed to have grown old so fast.

  “Yes, sir.” Gabriel was beginning to understand the old man’s hostility. “I imagine you must want to be sure about who takes over the job.”

  “Damn right!” Mott’s eyes opened wide. “It’s not just any old job.”

  “I’ll tell you what, sir …”

  “Mott.” He did not reach out his hand to shake.

  “You could take me out and if you don’t like the way I work, you can just take me back again. Or I’ll walk back. And I’ll be on my way. You don’t have to sign me up. Just see how I do.”

  Mott chewed at the inside of his mouth, worried that he might be falling for some kind of trick. But if it was a trick, he couldn’t see how it worked. A smile crept into the corner of Mott’s mouth. He tried to wipe it away with his knuckles as if it were a crumb of food. “I guess I could do that. Nothing to lose by it, I guess.” He started the motor again. “Get in!” he shouted to Gabriel over the rattle and hum of the Putt-Putt. “There’s just about room for two!”

  They motored out of town. Inside the Putt-Putt, Gabriel smelled gasoline and cigarettes. Soon they had passed the last shacks of old railway storage sheds, the roofs fallen in and fuzzy green with rot. They watched the pines shuffle past, half-deaf from the rapid-fire flatulence of the motor.

  The Putt-Putt was a small, diesel-powered cross between a car and a go-cart, designed to fit on the rails of a train track. It had first been manufactured in the 1950s by the Bradford Supply Company in Augusta, Georgia. Very few of them remained. Trucks had taken their place, made with retractable wheels that converted the truck from road to rail use at the flip of a switch. A pin could be fitted into the steering column so that the truck would only run in a straight line, which kept it on the rails. Mott had seen these trucks as they motored past on official business. They were painted yellow, and looked like giant hornets as they barreled down the tracks. He wasn’t jealous about not having one. Instead, he considered it part of his job to wrestle with the temperamental Putt-Putt.

  For eighteen years, Benny Mott had been riding up and down the tracks five days a week, checking for rail-tie spikes that had come loose or for wooden spreaders that were disintegrating. Sometimes a trainman would call in and say he had hit a moose. Then Mott would go out in the Putt-Putt and either cut up the moose to feed himself over the winter or dump a bag of quicklime on the carcass if it had been dead too long. The animal would disappear under a cloud of the white-dust and in two weeks there would be nothing left except bones and fur. Sometimes he rode back into Abenaki Junction with one giant bloody moose flank sticking out of either Putt-Putt door. There wasn’t room for much in the Putt-Putt. With the hammers and draw pinchers for removing nails, and spare nails, and spray-paint cans for marking up the ruined tracks, Mott could barely fit his body into the cab.

  As long as he kept the tracks in good repair, no one minded what he did when he was out in the Putt-Putt. Some days, he would park the Putt-Putt out on the tracks beyond the town, careful to have filed a Track Occupancy Permit with the main office in St. Johns, and sit by the rails picking berries or writing a letter to his brother, who was a halibut fisherman in Alaska. Mott had a recurring dream: that the Canadians changed their train schedule and didn’t let him know. In the dream, he met an eighty-car freight train coming toward him around a corner at sixty miles an hour. It was driven by the man who had been working the train for as long as Mott had been working the rails. His name was Alain Labouchere. They had waved and smiled to each other almost every day for eighteen years, but they had never met.

  Sometimes Mott would take a break from his work and walk into the woods to sit on a soft bed of pine needles. He liked to read novels. He listened to books on tape on a Walkman. He read the newspaper. He studied encyclopedias of plants and wandered through the forest identifying species. Mott knew the peace of the North Woods. He thought of other people, ones who found happiness in jobs in which they were left alone as long as the job got done. He knew their vast contentment, untroubled by cravings for fame, or the blood-boiling Great Causes of the world. He knew these people, like himself, were the watchers and the thoughtful ones. They had learned not to be in the race.

  But Mott was tired now. His body had begun to creak. He had worked long enough to earn himself a pension that, with the wages he’d made as a hunting and fishing guide in the fall and winter months, would allow him to retire. It was a sacred thing, this handing down of the job, and he wanted Gabriel to know that.

  Gabriel sat awkwardly in a too-small orange raincoat Mott had lent him. He squinted through the scratched Plexiglas of the Putt-Putt’s windshield like an old man peering through cataracts. He wanted to get a closer look at Mott, as if to see what he himself might become if he remained in this job as long as Mott. But they were sitting too close together, so Gabriel settled for a flicker of his eye across Mott’s creviced skin.

  Mott had already decided to give Gabriel the job, but he did not want to say so yet. He made the decision because it seemed right to give this post to a stranger, just as he had been a stranger to the town when he had arrived eighteen years before. There was so much to learn, and the best way to learn it all was from scratch.

  Since no one had ever taken over from him before, Mott did not know what to say. At first, he had wanted to tell Gabriel everything, more than just the routine skills of track maintainance and bridge inspection and the filling out of Track Occupancy Permits. He wanted to share each reflex of his body that knew the lay of the tracks and what to look for in the clouds to tell the weather and the wind and how he had once caught sight of a bird that maybe was an eagle but he swore looked more like a man with wings. Mott had seen some things in these woods that he could not explain and because they were not explainable, he had kept them to himself. All of it would soon belong to Gabriel, in the same way it had belonged to no one but Mott until now.

  Mott stopped himself from saying all of this. It occurred to him that maybe this special knowledge wasn’t meant to be shared. Then the pleasure of Gabriel’s life, and the calm and the peace of the woods, would be his own and not borrowed from Mott. Mott decided he would teach only the bare minimum to Gabriel. Enough to keep him safe and do the job.

  Trees stooped over the tracks, as if to get a better look at the new man in the Putt-Putt. Silver lakes winked through the barricades of pine. As they rounded each curve in the track, voices in Mott’s head babbled like a guide rushi
ng through a tour, giving the names of these lakes, names he himself had given because they had no other. He pointed out half-hidden paths that led to patches of treeless ground where raspberries lit up in the sun like Christmas ornaments, and where the almost-black blueberries were so fat they made their branches sag.

  Mott was desperate to tell. He’d never had such trouble keeping quiet. It seemed to him to be the only time in his life when he’d ever had anything truly worthwhile to share. Years before, he had tried to share what he knew, going down to the Loon’s Watch and telling about how he had followed a moose trail to a secret lake and seen the cloven moose prints in the mud at the edge of the water. Or how he’d seen a bear rolling in the blueberries, the pads of his paws smudged purple with the juice. Or how twenty loons had appeared from the flat stillness of a lake in total silence and just as silently disappeared again. He would see a dullness in the eyes of people who heard him tell his stories. They had seen these things themselves, or things like them, and it had left them unimpressed. To them, these pictures carried no weight. But they had impressed Mott deeply, and they were all that he had to offer, so in time he began to grow quiet. People left him alone, and he would go and sit in silence with Lazarus on his porch, watching the man drain another bottle of sticky Manischewitz wine.

  Mott thought maybe someday in the future, after Gabriel had been working awhile, the two of them would meet and talk about the wilderness. But for now it seemed to Mott as if this one act of silence was the noblest thing he’d ever do, and his choice was clear and right.

  James Pfeiffer’s memorial service was exactly as Mackenzie had imagined. The family drove up from Rhode Island, along with a truckload of huge and cold-eyed fishermen, who seemed to be looking for an excuse to slaughter everyone in Abenaki Junction by way of retribution. The whole town turned out. The crustless sandwiches had the dry and pasty texture that Mackenzie had come to associate with all funerals. There was a great sameness to these occasions, with never anything to say that could reach through the veils of grief and touch the people mourning. The Pfeiffers stayed quarantined inside their misery. As he sat in the church and heard brave words from the line of dark-suited friends, Mackenzie felt impatient to get on with his own life.

  Pfeiffer had been buried on the coast the day before. It was a private gathering at a place called Monhegan Bluffs, on Block Island. Now his grave had earth piled on it in the shape of an upturned rowboat, with a white wooden cross at the head. This would be replaced in a few days by an engraved black tombstone. Mackenzie had ordered it himself.

  Mackenzie felt a muffled heaviness surround him as he spoke from his stock of benevolent phrases about this young man he had rarely seen, apart from every Friday at the lunchtime handing out of paychecks. Afterward, Mackenzie moved from one cluster of people to another on his way out of the Abenaki Junction Methodist Church, walking as quickly as he could without appearing impolite, shaking hands and looking down at his shoes because he had run out of words.

  Later, in a back room of the church, Mackenzie met with Mr. and Mrs. Pfeiffer. The man was named Joseph and he never did catch the wife’s name. Joseph Pfeiffer was thin and sunburned, with hollow cheeks and a look of seriousness, which, Mackenzie could see from the wrinkles on his face, was always there and not just because of the funeral. Mrs. Pfeiffer’s blank expression told Mackenzie that the shock of her son’s death had not yet reached her. She was drifting through a gray and hovering uncertainty, while her body prepared for the truth to sink in.

  He had already told them how sorry he was. There was nothing more to say. Mackenzie felt himself choking. He wanted to run out of the room and vanish into the woods and be alone. But he had one thing left to do. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out an envelope. In it was five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. “The insurance should kick in within a few weeks,” he said. “Your son was fully covered. Everyone who works for me is covered.”

  Joseph Pfeiffer nodded.

  Mackenzie continued, “Here’s a little something extra.” He set the envelope down. Of course, he wanted to say, it can’t take the place … He couldn’t even finish the thought. He knew what he was doing with this money. The envelope sat there on a table. Take it, he thought. Take the damn money.

  “We don’t need it,” said Joseph Pfeiffer. He looked at Mackenzie with his watery blue eyes. He knew what that money was.

  Suddenly Mrs. Pfeiffer seemed to wake from her trance. Her eyes were clear and focused. She picked up the money and put it in the pocket of her coat. She said nothing.

  And then Mackenzie knew that she had granted him no easing of his guilt, which the money was supposed to bring. She was just taking the money and letting him know that nothing had changed because of his donation.

  “I really am sorry,” he said, almost indignantly, as if all that they had been thinking had in fact been said out loud. “I know what a waste it is!” He had never felt so powerless before. And suddenly tears were running down Mackenzie’s face. They caught him by surprise. “I can’t undo what’s done! Don’t you think I would if I could?” And he would have done, if there had been a way, because sitting there in the presence of these two people whose lives were now shattered beyond repair, Mackenzie saw the point at which his endless struggle for the company turned to gibberish. In a while, he would go back to the struggle, and it would be no less important when he did. But for now, the weight of the Pfeiffers’ grief had tipped the scales of what was most sacred to Mackenzie, and he could do nothing about it. These moments of revelation came rarely to Mackenzie, and when they did he had no idea how to use them. They were like strange offerings, whose meaning he could barely grasp. The only thing he knew how to do was let them pass, like the skull-cleaving pain of a migraine.

  Mrs. Pfeiffer stood. “Thank you,” she said, and as she walked out of the room, she rested her hand for a brief moment on Mackenzie’s shoulder.

  Mackenzie’s head hung down, as if the strength had been drained from his body, siphoned through the woman’s fingertips.

  The Pfeiffers walked into the main room of the church.

  After a moment, Mackenzie stood and walked out the back door into the parking lot. He made his way to the Range Rover and climbed inside. He jerked his tie loose so he could breathe again, then pulled out onto the road, past the black funeral-procession cars and the drivers in dark suits, all of them dramatically overweight, leaning on the hoods and smoking cigarettes.

  As the Range Rover pulled off the paved road and onto the dirt track that led to the mill, Mackenzie could see three eighteen-wheeler flatbed trucks waiting at the gates. They were due to pick up lumber and bring it down to Portland for sale. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted. The mill was short-staffed that afternoon because of the service, but not enough to stop a few trucks being loaded. He cut alongside them, taking the Range Rover across the patch of grass that separated the mill fence and the road. Chicory flowers became tangled in the bumper and the radiator grille. Mackenzie looked up at the drivers, who leaned out of the cabs of their trucks, eyebrows raised with curiosity.

  Madeleine stood at the gates, blocking the trucks from entering. She held up a sign that said, in stenciled black letters spray-painted onto a white board, STOP CLEAR-CUTTING THE WILDERNESS.

  Mackenzie stamped on the brakes, trenching the grass with his tires. He picked up his car phone and tapped in the number for the police station; then he sat back with the receiver hooked under his chin while he undid his seat belt. “Is that you, Marcus?”

  “Yes, Jonah.” Dodge’s voice was tolerant and precise.

  “Look, we have a problem here at the mill.”

  “What kind of problem?” There was the sound of paper rustling.

  “Madeleine’s here again with one of her billboards.”

  The paper stopped rustling. “Oh.” Dodge’s voice sounded suddenly tired.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.” Mackenzie pitied Dodge just then. “I have three l
ogging trucks that need to be loaded and sent down to Portland by sunset. Someone’s going to have to come out here and move her.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes,” Dodge said and hung up.

  Mackenzie put down the phone and climbed out of the car. He walked toward Madeleine, swishing his feet through the tall grass.

  Madeleine always seemed to make her signs too heavy. She was straining to hold this one up. No one had asked her to move. The mill workers were so used to her protests by now that they just tried to carry on around her as best they could. Mackenzie had never pressed charges, because that was what she wanted him to do. He just waited until she got tired and walked home. She had a paper to run, after all.

  Mackenzie ignored Madeleine, who watched him closely as he went past. Stop this, he wanted to tell her. You’re that child I used to know. The one with the Donald Duck barrette in her hair. It was so much easier to be angry at her when she was not around. Then she became abstract to Mackenzie. Something to be disposed of. But here, in front of her, he was reminded of the past they had in common in this town, which dulled his best war instincts. “Coltrane!” he shouted into the shadows of the mill house.

  Coltrane came jogging out.

  “Do you have the lumber ready to load?” Mackenzie plucked the carnation from his buttonhole and threw it in the ditch. He felt uneasy to be so smartly dressed in front of Coltrane. His best funeral clothes.

  “It’s ready.” Coltrane looked uncertainly over at Madeleine. He hoped Mackenzie wouldn’t see the cooler of water that he had brought out to Madeleine half an hour earlier.

  “Tell those truckers to drive in,” said Mackenzie. “Start the loading.”

  “What about Madeleine?” Coltrane asked quietly. He felt awkward to be talking about her as if she weren’t standing right next to them.

  Mackenzie turned to Madeleine. Today you went too far, he thought. Today was the end of James Pfeiffer and today is the beginning of the end of your little newspaper. “Why don’t we talk this over?” he asked her.