Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  Hazard’s head snapped back as he ran. As his dark eyes caught the light, they looked like pools of mercury.

  Dodge was gaining on Hazard. He reached out his hand toward Hazard’s hair. He imagined its stringiness in the grip of his hand. Hazard rushed ahead suddenly. He moved even faster, as if all his running until then had been at a casual pace.

  Dodge couldn’t keep up. His lungs seemed filled with sand. He knew his strength was leaving him. His face was scratched by the pine branches. Pine sap stuck to his hands from fending off trees like a football player fending off tackles. Dodge felt the heaviness of his limbs as he lost speed. Then he stopped and bent over, gasping and angry with himself for having taken off his gun belt. Over the thunder of his breathing, he heard Hazard’s footsteps fading away into the darkness of the Algonquin. More than darkness. It was like the inside of a sealed coffin.

  Dodge hiked out of the woods, stumbling against tree trunks. When he reached the lane that ran between Coltrane’s fields, he turned to look at the Algonquin ridge. It was like a tidal wave of ink rising silently above him and about to drown the valley in darkness. He pitied Hazard being in there now. The Algonquin had swallowed him up. Dodge walked back to Coltrane’s farmyard. The breeze-shifted corn muttered on either side of him. Coltrane’s two dogs barked at his heels until he was close to his car. The curtain of nightfall billowed behind him, and against all the scoffing reason in his head, Dodge could not help quickening his pace.

  He sat quietly for a moment in the car, which he had parked at the end of the road. He would have to go in after Hazard, but first he was going to find Coltrane at the Loon’s Watch and ask for his help. Coltrane knew these woods better than anyone. As Dodge pulled out onto the road, he looked back over his shoulder. The valley had become a lake of blindness. The only sign of life was a light in Coltrane’s house, a floating cube of amber in the dark.

  CHAPTER 6

  When Mackenzie stopped at Madeleine’s house to pick her up for dinner, he shut down his last nagging feelings of affection. In his mind now was the clamp-jawed coldness he had once felt years before, when he had finished off a deer that he had hit with his car. It was lying in the road, bloody at the mouth and staring at him in the bleached glare of the car headlights. He thought he must have looked a bit like this himself that time he crawled out of the woods. Mackenzie had taken an old entrenching shovel from the trunk of his car, kept there for digging himself out of the snow. He killed the deer with three hard swings of the sharp edge of the shovel, splitting its skull. He then dragged the animal to the ditch and rolled it in. It was a distasteful job, but it had to be done. He felt that way again now. He hoped it would be quick. He hoped to keep the fighting clean.

  “We are thorns in each other’s sides, aren’t we?” he asked Madeleine, once he’d pulled the Range Rover out onto the road.

  Madeleine studied his sun-crumpled face, the coarse hair and the way the white shirt dug like a garrote into his creased neck. She had never seen him this close before and was unable to recall when she had last felt so uncomfortable. She knew this had to be one of his schemes, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To the Woodcutter’s Lodge.” Mackenzie kept his eyes on the slick black road ahead.

  “I could have walked, you know. It’s only at the edge of town.” She thought how every word that passed between her and Mackenzie became a calculated move. She hated herself for being this way around him, but Mackenzie himself was the archduke of calculation.

  “Well, I thought we might do things in style for once. Besides”—he rapped a knuckle against his artificial leg—“I’m not as fast on my feet as I used to be.”

  “I thought that the lodge had officially closed down. I mean I thought it was just a meeting hall now.”

  “It would have closed down if it weren’t for me.”

  “It smells so funny in there.” The place always had a musty reek of wood fire and tobacco and leather and brass polish and the sweat of men.

  “It’s a man’s club. At least it used to be. All women think men’s clubs smell funny. To men, it’s a comfortable smell.”

  And you want me to feel as uncomfortable as possible, she thought. “Why did you ask to have this dinner?”

  “I came to offer you an olive branch.” Mackenzie smiled. He had choreographed the whole evening, which would end, perfectly and on time, with closing down the Forest Sentinel.

  Mackenzie leaned into the steering wheel as he twisted it arm over arm into the parking lot of the Woodcutter’s Lodge. As he climbed out of the Range Rover, he looked at the huge door of the lodge and wondered how many hundreds of times he had walked through it. He had been coming here all his life, brought by his father to the annual meetings of the logging company heads. He recalled the massive fires in the fieldstone fireplaces at either end of the hall and the harsh tobacco smoke and the knuckle-bunching handshakes of the logger barons. Now its main room was used for dances and flea markets. But the back part of the building was reserved for the members-only Loggers’ Club, and there was only one member now and that was Mackenzie. The caretaker, an old Welshman named Paul, kept this part of the hall locked up until Mackenzie called. Crowded onto its walls were the paintings and smoke-blackened prize antler racks that had once been spread across the entire hall. The paintings were of presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Grant. The Washington portrait was painted by Gilbert Stuart. The most famous thing about the Loggers’ Club had been that if a call ever came through to speak with one of its members, Paul would say the member was at the club, but could not be reached just then. Not for any reason, not for bribes or favors or threats. This used to mean, for the shadowy and secret-living members of the club, that they always had an alibi. Sometimes it was even called the Alibi Club. But it had been years since the last time Paul had given an alibi. To Mackenzie, the club was more the vapor of ghosts than anything real, a place where he had two whole legs again and could drink all night and never be hungover in the morning. His youth was locked somewhere inside these walls. He felt the slight melancholy of memories he could not share because they would not be understood except by his old friends who had come and gone from here. Now they stared out through the fading photographs of old club-member reunions. One day, he thought, I will be in there as well.

  As Madeleine walked up to the door of the hall, she paused to wait for Mackenzie, whose stiff-legged shuffle slowed him down. She felt the muscles tighten around her temples. The windowless door carried no sign, but the push-plate and handle were shining more like gold than brass. It was only in the last ten years that the club had allowed women to enter the dining room. Before that, they had been made to wait in the foyer. It was Alicia who had forced Mackenzie to change the rule, and it had taken her five years before he finally gave way.

  Paul came to the door. Age had made his eyes watery and bowed his back and crooked his once-strong hands. He wore a plain blue double-breasted suit with gold buttons, each stamped with the emblem of an ax splitting a log. He took Mackenzie’s coat and then Madeleine’s, laying them across his arm as he walked them into the foyer.

  “Good evening, Paul,” she said and watched the faintest smile appear on his face. She wondered what had led him to this place, what he had left behind, and why he was content to live in such loneliness, the caretaker of a club with a membership of one.

  They walked across the black-and-white parquet floor, footsteps echoing, to a room whose walls were duck-egg blue. In the corner stood a table with a backgammon board inlaid into the wood. Ivory counter pieces were stacked on either side. Several current newspapers were laid out on a large table at the back of the room. Mackenzie picked two chairs close together beneath the portrait of U. S. Grant. He settled in the body-polished leather as if his imprint had long ago been set into its burgundy hide. The horsehair stuffing rustled. His artificial leg stuck out stiffly in front of him, until he hooked his hand under the knee an
d bent it into a sitting position. Then Mackenzie pressed a brass button bolted to the table next to him. There was no sound that either of them could hear, but a moment later, Paul appeared. He stopped a few paces short of where they sat. Mackenzie ordered two Tanqueray and tonics. “Paul’s specialty,” he explained. “Along with the occasional dangerous margarita. You don’t mind trying it, do you?”

  “It’s your club.” She looked around, marveling at the way Mackenzie could continue this tradition purely for himself. The newspapers that Paul must have known would never be read. The way each surface had been polished. The way drinks were kept in stock. The clunking tick of the 1750-dated Thomas Lister grandfather clock in the corner. And Paul himself, who had kept up Woodcutter’s Lodge in all capacities, from reshingling the roof to baking single soufflés in its giant ovens, for as long as Madeleine had been alive. Now, face-to-face with every exclusive and wasteful thing she took pleasure in despising about Mackenzie, Madeleine could not bring herself to loathe him altogether. There was something charming about this bizarre evening out. Mackenzie was the last of his breed and he knew it, but just as clearly he knew he could not change and he would live out these rituals until his old heart surrendered to time.

  When the drinks arrived, they were half gin and half tonic, served in tall condensation-beaded glasses. Mackenzie let the taste of juniper berries roll across his tongue and down his throat. He watched Madeleine take her first sip, wince at its strength and place the glass back on the table.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked. He wanted her to like the place. Bringing Madeleine here was his way of showing he admired her, even if she was the enemy.

  “Everything’s fine.” Madeleine breathed in the concentrated smell of men. Generations of men. Not the locker-room smell of old sweat, but the dry, honeyed reek of cigars and port and gin and roast beef and cream and coffee and the creaking hide of these chairs, left over from the days when there had been a kind of aristocracy in Abenaki Junction. She had wanted to be angry at Mackenzie, but the old man was impeccably polite. He was famous for his courtesy, particularly to women, even at the moments of his most ruthless hostility. There was no talk of business. He hadn’t played the trick of bulldozing through her with strong opinions and a loud voice. She could have fought well against that. But the way this man moved seemed to have no shape or direction. So she found herself wondering whether Mackenzie was in fact naïve, or whether he was making her dance like a puppet, politely giving way and making her advance until she no longer knew where she was.

  The quiet of this room surrounded her. Madeleine sat under the stern gaze of the statesmen, who looked at her as much as to say, “What the hell are you doing here?” She found herself listening not to the noise but to the lack of it—the rustle of horsehair stuffing and of matches being struck as Mackenzie lit himself a cigarette. This half silence—it was peculiar to men. If this had been a club for women only, she thought, the quiet would be different.

  Paul called them almost in a whisper to the dining room. Then he served them roast beef and boiled new potatoes with string beans. They drank 1968 Haut-Médoc from large crystal glasses. The table at which they sat was long and dark, weighed down with huge silver beakers of water and candleholders and platters of grapes, apples and pears. In the candlelight, these looked more like painted fruit than anything that could ever be tasted. All of the silver was engraved with the log-and-ax crest of the club. The idea of this long table, the only one at which dinner had been served, was that a person could come to the club and never have to worry about eating alone. Mackenzie had always admired this unspoken law, this table that had been built inside the room because it was too big to be brought in from outside. You did not complain here. You did not burden others with your problems. You did not swear and you did not exclude anyone from the conversation. You never ridiculed another member of the club. That was why, in all the years when he had dined elbow to elbow with mill owners who were at war with one another, he had never seen an argument.

  Instead of talking business, Mackenzie ran through his reservoir of memories of Madeleine growing up in Abenaki Junction. He did not leave out the recollections of her picketing his mill, or the speeches she had made against him in community meetings. He didn’t shy away from them. It was the only way he could think of diffusing any of the anger that had fed off the silence between them for so long.

  Madeleine was surprised at how much he recalled, and how generously he brought the memories to life, speaking fondly of her even when she knew her actions had made him furious at the time. For a moment, as Paul placed a bowl of perfect raspberries in front of her, Madeleine forgot about the business of the evening, the olive branch Mackenzie had said he would be offering. She rested one of the berries on her tongue and crushed it against the roof of her mouth. The faint bittersweetness of the fruit snapped her back to a day years before when she had gone berry picking beside the railroad tracks. There were so many berries that she had filled her bucket and then had to collect them in her hat. It was on that day that she had looked down the tracks and seen a black bear rummaging through its own patch of raspberries. She saw the huge pads of its feet and the brown fur on its muzzle. The bear was only a hundred yards away, popping the berries off the bush with its tongue. Madeleine wasn’t afraid, although it went against her instincts. When the animal saw her, it also showed no fear. She watched the bear until it had eaten enough. Then it plodded off into the forest. She swallowed and the daydream disappeared.

  When the meal was over, Madeleine walked with Mackenzie back into the front room and sat at the backgammon table. Mackenzie cleared his throat, as if to choke down everything that had been said until now. “I’d like to make you an offer that at first might seem a little crazy, but if you think about it, I’m sure you’ll see that we can both benefit.” He paused to let his words sink in. “I would like to buy the Forest Sentinel.”

  “Oh, really?” Madeleine’s own laughter caught her off guard. The worst she had imagined was that Mackenzie would request some kind of interview with her in which he would be guaranteed favorable coverage in the Forest Sentinel. But this! She waited for him to smile and show that he was joking.

  “I mean to pay very well for it.” His words were measured and calm.

  “But then what would you do with it?” She held her hands open, waiting for an explanation.

  “I’d close it down.”

  Madeleine nodded slowly and quietly. At least he was being honest. She picked up one of the backgammon pieces and pressed it between her palms. “Mr. Mackenzie.”

  “Jonah.”

  “All right. Jonah. You’ve known me all my life. And you know that for years now I’ve worked toward setting up an environmental newspaper. How do you expect me just to walk away from it?”

  “I’m prepared to pay you thirty thousand dollars. All in cash. All immediately.”

  The mention of so much money jolted her nerves like caffeine. “The paper’s not worth that. Let’s not even pretend.”

  “I’m not pretending. I’m not paying for the paper. I’m paying for you to move it someplace else. That would be part of the agreement. You wouldn’t start up another paper within two hundred miles of here.” Mackenzie raised his hand as Madeleine’s mouth snapped open. “Please let me finish. This paper is worth about ten thousand dollars. Tops. That’s for everything. The rent on the building, the deposit, all the equipment. Not even ten. And I’m even happy to let you keep your equipment. You could start up another paper in a much bigger way with this money. You know that’s true. I know it must leave a bad taste in your mouth to have me buy you out. You might feel as if you are compromising your values. But it’s a compromise that can serve you much better in the long run than you are serving yourself at the moment. If you look at this realistically …” He let his words trail into silence. He had said what he had to say.

  For Madeleine, everything took on the clumsy and ponderous movements of being chased in a nightmare. “Yo
u just want me out of your hair.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, Jonah, I don’t mean to flatter myself, but what have I done to get in your hair so badly that you’d pay that kind of money to have me out? If you adopted some ecologically sound measures—sustainable yield, for example—I think my paper would actually help you, not hurt.”

  “It’s just a chance I’m not prepared to take.” Mackenzie slapped his hands wearily on the arms of his chair. “Look around. I’m all that’s left. Why should I trust anything except my own instincts? And what about you, Madeleine? What do you trust except the world of your ideals?”

  Madeleine was about to talk back, to say anything that would refute his point. But Mackenzie was right. Beyond the world of her ideals, everything was crooked with doubt.

  “You see it all,” he said, “through the world of that camera you’re always carrying around. A neatly bracketed world which you only have to see the way you want to see. You can’t just live off ideals.”

  Watch me, she wanted to say. “But what if I don’t accept?” she asked him. She waited for him to take off the gloves of his politeness. She gave him every opportunity.

  What if? he thought. He looked at Madeleine and thought, I’ll sweep you away until every trace of you is gone, the same way I’ll do to that damn forest, whether you like it or not. Tabula rasa.

  “What if I don’t accept?” Madeleine asked again, suspicious of Mackenzie’s silence and the menacing drowsiness that seemed to wash across his face while he sat there deep in thought.