Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  “I’d be happy to.” Madeleine was immediately suspicious.

  “Will you meet me for dinner? I think that would be better than standing here in the dust and trying to have a conversation.”

  Madeleine stood in silence for a moment, trying to figure him out. “All right,” she said slowly.

  “I’ll pick you up from your house at six o’clock.” He didn’t smile or say good-bye. He wheeled around and walked across the mill yard to his office, leaving the business to Coltrane.

  Coltrane shrugged. “It does look like you’ll have to move, ma’am.”

  Wearily, Madeleine put down her sign. “When are you ever going to go on strike?” she asked him. “What is it going to take?”

  Before Coltrane could answer, a police car pulled up beside them. Madeleine waited for Dodge to fine her fifty dollars for the repeat offense of illegally parking her car on the logging road, and then follow her as she drove home. Just as he had done dozens of times before. In the past, she had found it hard to dislike Dodge. She wished they weren’t separated by ideals. There were times she had even imagined a future between them. But lately, with her work against the Mackenzie Company having less and less effect, she found herself becoming bitter.

  Dodge always dreaded these moments. “Please, Madeleine,” he said, getting out of the car. “You’re going to have to leave.”

  She looked at the car and the lights bolted to the roof and then at Dodge’s uniform, at the black gun belt at his waist, and suddenly she was furious with him. It was the residue of all the times she had swallowed her anger because he had just been doing his job. The law sheltered Mackenzie’s interests like a huge iron umbrella, obediently held in place by Dodge. Now, when she thought of it that way, she found herself unable to hold back her rage. “I’m not going anywhere. Not this time.”

  Dodge sighed and scratched at the corner of his eye. “Why not, when every other time you went home?”

  “Because this is different. This is the Algonquin that he’s shipping out truckload by truckload. Doesn’t it make you sick? You’d be lying if you said it didn’t.”

  “Madeleine, please.” He raised his hands a few inches and let them fall again to his sides. “You are blocking a place of business.”

  “Jesus!” she screamed and threw the sign to the ground, breaking it. “All right, go ahead and arrest me!”

  “Please don’t make me do that.” He saw the loggers watching him. He knew they couldn’t hear what he was saying above the noise of the forklift trucks. But they could guess. As soon as he caught their eyes, they turned away.

  “If you don’t want to do it, why don’t you just go away?”

  Dodge had never heard so much anger in her voice. “You’re under arrest,” he said, and heard his own anger like barbs on each word he spoke. She had no right to make life so difficult for him, when all he was doing was upholding the law. He took her by the arm and led her to the back door of the police car. He read her the Miranda and by the time he had finished, angry tears were running down her face. But even in the middle of his anger, he kept thinking back to a time one winter when he had driven her home from picketing Mackenzie’s mill and she had invited him in for some soup. He recalled that she had been wearing red mittens. They kept her from fastening the safety belt. He had to reach across and do it for her. The smell of her body so close went through him like electricity. Then later, at the house, he remembered watching her bend over the stove to taste the soup with a wooden spoon, holding back her hair with one hand. That was when I fell in love with you, he thought. He rested his hand on her head to stop her banging it on the door frame as she climbed into the back of the car.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this.” Madeleine’s fingers locked onto the iron grille that separated the front seat from the back. “You’re letting Mackenzie get away with this. You of all people, Marcus Dodge.”

  “Why me of all people?” He pulled the car out onto the road.

  “Because you’re smart enough to see what’s going on.”

  Suddenly he swerved the car onto the grassy verge, jammed it into park and twisted around to face her. “What do you think I am? Your goddamned punching bag, just because I wear a uniform?”

  “You know,” she said, her voice slick with disgust, “I used to like you. I don’t know why, but I did.”

  For a moment, Dodge seemed to be frozen. Then the muscles in his jaw clenched and unclenched. He swung open the door and got out and started walking down the road.

  Madeleine opened her own door, climbed out and stood beside the car, watching the tiny plumes of dust kicked up by Dodge’s boots on the road. “Where are you going?”

  He didn’t answer. He was muttering to himself in words she couldn’t understand.

  “Are you just going to leave me here?” she shouted.

  Then Dodge stopped. He bent down, picked a handful of pebbles off the road and began throwing them one by one into the trees. “You liked me?” he called back, without looking at her. When he had thrown all the pebbles, he took off his police cap and threw it on the ground. “You liked me?” He picked up the cap and jammed it on his head. The black visor was filmed with dust.

  “Yes,” she said uncertainly. “I liked you. So what?”

  “After all these years, that’s the best you can do?” He started walking toward her, but not in a threatening way. He only looked resigned, as if he knew that what he was saying did not make total sense. At least, it made sense, but only to him, and he had just realized that she would never understand. All the words he had kept bottled inside because the time never came for saying them. He had waited too long. He knew that now. And even if he had not waited, the time would never have been right. Dodge reached where she stood. He wiped the sweat off his face. “Just forget it,” he said. He moved to get inside the car.

  She held onto his arm and stopped him. “I don’t want to forget it. I want to know what you’re talking about. Why are you so angry because I said I liked you?”

  “Because.” He did not want to say what he was thinking. Somehow to have held it secret kept alive in him all the dreams he’d had of them together. But it was too late for that now. “Because I loved you,” he said slowly. “I loved you for as long as I could remember. I never did not like you. Do you understand? I loved you.” Dodge made sure she heard he was speaking in the past tense. “But I don’t anymore. You don’t have to worry.”

  She stared at him wide-eyed. “You loved me? When?”

  “All the fucking time.” Dodge sat behind the wheel and revved the engine.

  She walked around to the front-seat passenger side and climbed in. “I wish you’d mentioned it before.”

  “After you saying you liked me, I’m glad as hell I didn’t tell you anything.”

  “So why say it now?” She wanted to touch him. To run her fingertips across his face. She had to stop herself from doing it. The movement seemed so out of place. A minute before, she had hated this man. She could not understand what she was feeling.

  “Don’t you think,” asked Dodge, “that if Mackenzie was half a step outside the law, I’d put him in cuffs and throw him in the holding cell? Do you think I enjoyed arresting you? Do you think I enjoy seeing the Algonquin getting butchered? Didn’t I grow up in it just as much as you did? More, I think. But do you expect me not to uphold a law just because I don’t agree with it? The next day, someone might decide to throw a rock through your window because they don’t like something you’re doing. And if I don’t happen to mind what they did, do you expect me to do nothing about it?” Dodge knew it sounded like a speech. It was a speech. He had told her all these things a hundred times inside his head. He didn’t wait for her to answer. He knocked the car into drive and took her home. He didn’t expect her to apologize. He didn’t know what she would do, and even though his curiosity jabbed at him to look, he made no attempt to catch her eye. He felt better now. Saying what he had said to her seemed to put his daydreams of a life with
her permanently out of reach.

  Madeleine folded her arms and looked out the window, but she was thinking so hard that she saw nothing. It was the first time Dodge had spoken to her like that. She had not known he thought about these things, and she knew she had misjudged him. But she was not surprised. She often misjudged those around her. She didn’t have an instinct for understanding people, the way she understood ideas. From then on, she would see Dodge differently. She had chosen, until then, to forget that they had grown up together in this town. Both had stayed when they could have abandoned Abenaki Junction and Maine and these forests. Most people their age had already gone and they did not come back. They left it behind like a dream that made no sense. She and Dodge were closer than she had ever wanted to admit, but Madeleine had needed him to be the enemy. The man behind the uniform. Not like Mackenzie. Someone her own age. Of her own generation, who had chosen to follow the path of everything she hated. That kind of enemy. But after what Dodge had just said, Madeleine could no longer see him as the polar opposite of all that she called passion in herself. She did not have the courage to say any of this out loud. She only half understood her own thoughts about Dodge, and what she had come to realize in these past few minutes both frightened and confused her.

  Dodge dropped Madeleine off at her house. He had to get straight over to Coltrane’s farm, in case Hazard used that trail again.

  Madeleine watched through the lace curtains as the police car drove away. She had often been told that Dodge would make a good companion for her. That was the difficulty with being a single woman in a town as small as Abenaki Junction. Everybody had something to tell her about the way her life was supposed to be going. Mostly they were kind words. Sometimes the kind people were too kind, ready to say what they knew she wanted to hear. She found this a comfort at first. Then one day in the bread aisle of the Fresh Time Supermarket, Alicia Mackenzie bumped her shopping cart into Madeleine’s. She had been trying to avoid two boys who were using the aisle as a runway for their skateboards. In the conversation that followed, Alicia said something Madeleine would never forget: “You’d better make sure you don’t fall so deeply in love with some idea that there’s nothing left over for the people around you. I’ve done that myself enough times.”

  Madeleine knew that Alicia had not come cheaply by this knowledge. She could see it in Alicia’s strained and permanent squint. Over the years, she had taken on the weatherbeaten look that many women in town carried around their eyes and tight-lipped mouths, the same winter-punished look that was on the houses where they lived. It was not enough to stop Alicia from being pretty, but enough that people who saw her thought she must once have been truly beautiful. Alicia had made her a gift of this knowledge that had cost perhaps years off her life in anger and confusion, even though she never let it show in public.

  Madeleine let the curtain fall. She turned away from the window and was met with the static-charged emptiness of her house. She always had a feeling of helplessness when Dodge drove her home. She had to keep reminding herself that each article, each arrest stockpiled against Mackenzie. She was afraid that if she even thought about giving up, it would already be too late. It’s like the fable of the tortoise and the hare, she thought. I am the tortoise. I will win in the end.

  It was twilight. Dodge walked down the dusty road that bordered Coltrane’s chest-high crop of corn. The woods rose up in front of him. His instincts told him to turn back. The dark hollows of the Algonquin called out a warning, which Dodge could not hear or see but which he felt like a vibration in his bones.

  He stopped at Coltrane’s house to ask for directions.

  “Look, why don’t you just come in for dinner instead?” Coltrane asked him. He set his hand on Dodge’s shoulder, to guide the man inside.

  “Can’t do it, Victor. But thank you, anyway.” Dodge smelled the warm, dry sweetness of baking bread.

  Coltrane’s hand slipped from Dodge’s shoulder. He aimed a finger at the deer trail that Hazard followed on his way into the woods. “Don’t stay out there long.”

  The ridge of the hill had sunk into darkness before Dodge reached the trees. This ridge marked the border of the Algonquin. Beyond it, everything was wilderness. Even local hunters, who had been tramping through those woods all their lives, sometimes got lost in its thickets. Ever since childhood, he had tried never to go in there alone. In his dreams, he had watched the Abenaki Indians move from shadow to shadow in silence so complete it seemed to him he had gone deaf. Their faces, war-painted half yellow, half black in a vertical division of their features, appeared and disappeared among the shimmering birch leaves. Sometimes he had followed them, unable to stop himself, moving as if hypnotized into the depths of the woods.

  Dodge hiked the steep, brown-needled ground to an outcrop of rock that let him see out over the valley. He settled himself down on the dry pine needles, resting his back against a tree. Red squirrels chuntered in the branches. From here the sound of wind blowing across the lake was deeper, as if the mountains beyond them had come alive and were breathing from the granite vaults of their lungs. Sounds of Coltrane’s tractor reached him over the purplish tops of the cornfield. The faded red paint of Coltrane’s barn looked bloody in the sunlight. He wished Coltrane were up here with him now. The two of them could stop each other’s imagination from bubbling over into nightmare.

  Dodge’s gun belt was digging into him, so he took it off and laid it at his feet. The buckle was shiny silver. He didn’t want Hazard catching sight of any metal winking in the sun. He sprinkled pine needles on the belt, which reminded him of sprinkling rosemary into a stew. He wondered how it would be to question Hazard. He felt uneasy about the man. Hazard always seemed to be heading someplace in a hurry, with his long and loping stride. Always on the dark side of the street, always almost out of sight down some alley or halfway through some door. Dodge had never seen Hazard smile. All that Hazard’s face seemed to show was a failing containment of rage.

  Long shadows reached across the valley. The loggers had finished for the day and the air seemed strangely empty without the sound of chain saws. The afternoon sun was fading. As it dipped behind the ridge of a hill, all the colors suddenly changed. The cornstalks turned from emerald to the dull green of live bamboo. A chill rose from the ground.

  Down at Coltrane’s farm, a screen door clacked against its frame. Coltrane walked across the yard and got into his car. He drove up the dusty road, headlights flicking on as he approached the highway. Then he turned toward town and was gone. Dodge knew where he was headed. The same place he went every night. To the Loon’s Watch for a beer.

  It was seven o’clock. He wondered how much longer he should wait. His calves kept falling asleep. When he tried to rub the pins and needles from his skin, his nerves fizzed as if his veins were filled with seltzer. His toes felt like bees jammed into the ends of his socks, buzzing to get out. He raised himself up slowly and had to lean against the tree to avoid falling over. He heard a branch snap down the hill, and for a fragment of a second his mind told him to ignore it. He leaned slightly forward, careful not to make a sound, and saw the head of a man at the bottom of the steep slope. The man climbed the hill at an angle, first in one direction, then another, zigzagging his way up.

  It was Hazard. He walked with his head down, a black nylon rucksack on his back. It was the kind of sack that children used to carry their books to school.

  Dodge slipped around the other side of the tree. He had lost sight of Hazard, but could tell from the footsteps that he was still approaching.

  Then Hazard came into view. He stopped to pull off his navy-blue baseball cap and press the sleeve of his red-and-black checked hunting jacket against his forehead. Then he stuffed his cap back on and kept walking.

  Dodge made himself thin behind the trunk of the pine. He saw no sign of a weapon.

  Hazard was walking toward him now, up the slight incline, head still down as if to pull the weight of his rucksack from its slump against his sp
ine.

  Dodge pressed his hands against his trouser pockets to soak up the sweat that had gathered on them like a slick of oil. Then he stepped out from behind the tree. He moved so quietly that Hazard didn’t notice. Dodge raised his hands up to rest against his gun belt and remembered suddenly that it was not there.

  Hazard looked up. There had been no sound from Dodge. Instinct had jangled Hazard’s nerves. As soon as he caught sight of the man, he leaped off the ground as if his legs were loaded springs. “Jesus Christ,” Hazard shouted, “you scared the hell out of me!”

  “ ’Evening,” said Dodge.

  Hazard stepped backward, then tripped and landed on the roots of a pine that bubbled up from the ground like snakes. He jumped to his feet. “What do you want from me?”

  “It’s Marcus Dodge,” he said. Then he added, “With the police,” to show that this was business. Dodge saw the fear in Hazard’s face and his own worry began to diminish. “I’ve been looking to talk to you,” he said.

  “What do you want?” Hazard squinted at the darkening branches to see if Dodge was alone.

  “Would you mind now if I took a look in your pack?” Dodge did not step toward the man. Instead, he just held out his hand.

  “What for? I’m not doing anything.”

  Dodge saw no more need to be polite. “Just stand right where you are and take off your pack.” He watched Hazard’s features blurring in the dusk. In a couple of minutes, the colors of his clothing would vanish in the purple light.

  Hazard’s foot brushed against something on the ground. When he glanced down, he saw Dodge’s gun belt, the buckle still sprinkled with needles.

  The two men faced each other. For a second, Dodge’s confidence stumbled.

  Hazard noticed it. His lips twitched. Then he exploded into movement. He shoved past Dodge and sprinted into the forest. He just seemed to disappear.

  By the time Dodge had lunged for his gun belt, Hazard was already ten paces ahead, swerving between the trees. Dodge ran after him, his chest burning even after the first few paces. He tried to buckle the gun belt as he moved, but gave up and kept it knotted in his fist. “You stand your ground, God damn you!” he shouted at the blur in front of him. He could hear Hazard’s breathing and the stamp of his feet on the uneven ground. “What the hell’s your mother going to do without you?”