Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  “Well.” He rolled his neck as if there were a crick in his spine. “I hope it won’t come to that. It isn’t in my nature to offer compromises, but if we can handle this like civilized people, I’m all for that.”

  “Yes.” Madeleine leaned across the table and tapped the backgammon chip in time with her words. “But what if I don’t sell? Just tell me that much.” She realized even as she said this that she might have to sell, if not to Mackenzie then to someone else. The Forest Sentinel had been so close to going under for so long now that Madeleine had forgotten what it was like to live any other way.

  “If you don’t accept my offer, then you’ll probably save me some money.” Mackenzie was staring right at her and through her.

  “That sounds like a threat.” Here it comes at last, she thought. The sweetness of the raspberries bubbled sickly and acidic into her throat.

  “Not at all. Please don’t think me so clumsy. I say you’ll save me money because your newspaper will fold. You just aren’t printing enough copies. More important, people aren’t reading it. Sure, they take it home from the pile in the supermarket. Then they use it as kindling to start their fires. Madeleine, I have to speak bluntly. It’s not just the paper. It’s you. There’s nothing for you in Abenaki Junction.”

  “It’s not true!” she snapped.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it.” He did not believe her and he let his voice show it. “But you have to know when to quit.” Mackenzie saw a tired look come into Madeleine’s eyes. All evening, it seemed to him, they had been shining and now they were suddenly dull. This was when he knew that he would get what he wanted. Not now, perhaps. But the process had begun. He jammed his thumb against the brass nipple button on the table, as if to mark the last period on what he had to say.

  When Paul arrived, Mackenzie ordered a coffee and a cigar. He knew Madeleine wouldn’t want one, so he didn’t bother to ask. The cigars were Cuban, Punch and Monte Cristos, smuggled into the country and sent to him each year by an old college acquaintance named Sal Ungaro, whose line of work kept changing and always seemed to go against the law. Mackenzie clipped the end of the cigar with a cigar cutter and then lit the cigar, rolling the end around through the match flame that Paul held out to him in order to get an even burn. Then he sat back and looked at Madeleine, the strong tobacco smoothing out his thoughts.

  Madeleine felt the quiet that had suddenly come between them. It circled and was menacing, swimming like a shark from room to room.

  Mackenzie broke the quiet. “Did you enjoy the roast beef?”

  Madeleine could feel it in a knot in her stomach. She almost never ate red meat anymore. “I thought it was a little rare, actually.”

  “Usually is.”

  “I think I should be getting home, Jonah. Thank you for dinner.”

  Mackenzie nodded slowly, puffing on the cigar. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up. My leg and all.”

  “Of course. Will you be coming back to town now?”

  “No,” Mackenzie held up his half-finished cigar. “Can’t rush one of these. Paul will drive you home. I’ll just sit here until he gets back. I’ll keep that offer open for a while.”

  “All right,” she said. “Thank you again for the dinner. I didn’t expect to enjoy myself, but I sort of did.” She shrugged. “I guess I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Well, thank you for coming,” he told her. After she had gone, Mackenzie sat in his chair and smoked the cigar down almost to his fingers. Then he walked out of the hall and stood looking at the stars.

  While the Range Rover drove through the dark, Madeleine noticed that the lights were on in the house Booker Lazarus was putting up for rent. She wondered who was new in town.

  Mackenzie’s words tumbled in her head. She knew she would not sleep tonight. She leaned over and spoke quietly in Paul’s ear. “Would you mind dropping me off at my office just here? There’s some work I need to catch up on.”

  “Yes, of course.” Paul stopped the car and let her out. He waited until she had opened the office door and turned and waved to him. Then he drove back to the lodge.

  The Forest Sentinel was in a newly built, prefabricated structure near the center of town. The walls were thin and the building reminded Madeleine of a trailer put up on a construction site. It was all she could afford for now. The office was only two rooms, busy with computers and corkboards scaled with notes. The back room had cutting boards set out along the walls and a light table for viewing photo negatives. Even when the office was quiet, everything seemed to be in constant motion, down to the speckled pattern on the carpeting.

  Madeleine sat at her desk and picked up a blue pencil. Then she began editing a piece she had written the day before about the interdependence between pine and white birch trees, and asking loggers to reseed areas with both species instead of just with pines. She had been working a few minutes when she heard a knock on the door.

  Through the rippled glass door, she saw the pink smudge of a face.

  “It’s open,” Madeleine called out. She wondered who it could be this time of night. Most people went to bed early in Abenaki Junction.

  The door opened. It was Alicia. She closed the door quickly behind her. She looked a little pale. “I’ve been thinking about you this evening. Asking myself how things went with you and Jonah.”

  At first, Madeleine didn’t answer. She couldn’t understand why Alicia was here. Why she hadn’t even said hello and why she didn’t just ask her husband about the evening when he came home. But Madeleine trusted Alicia, even if she didn’t understand the meaning of her visit. “He said I was a thorn in his side.”

  Alicia nodded. “You’re supposed to be a thorn in his side, Madeleine. The fact that he says it is proof that you’re doing your job.” She walked over to the desk. “May I sit down?”

  Madeleine waved her hand at the chair on the other side of the desk.

  “He’d kill me if he found out I was here.”

  Madeleine understood the risk Alicia took in coming. If Mackenzie knew, he would be furious. Her gaze traveled to the glass door, as if expecting to see Mackenzie’s face materialize.

  “He wants to shut you down, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.” It crossed her mind that Alicia might be working with Mackenzie, but she knew that Alicia would never do something so underhanded. It wasn’t in her nature.

  “He means to do it.” Alicia stared at Madeleine, as if trying to say more with her eyes than with her words.

  Madeleine tapped her pencil on the desk, beating out a rhythm in her head while she debated whether to say what she was thinking. “I feel strange saying this to you about your husband, but I kept waiting for him to threaten me. That’s what I would have expected from him. I mean, he has this reputation of being so ruthless. It only made sense that he would have threatened me. But he didn’t. He was actually kind of charming.”

  “He is whatever he needs to be to get the job done. If threatening you would have worked, you would have been threatened. But think about it. What puts you most off balance? The fact that he’s nice to you. Even if you aren’t going to sell the paper, at least he made you consider it.”

  “How do you know I considered it?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Madeleine puffed her cheeks. “It was a fortune he offered me.”

  “A fortune to you or a fortune to him?”

  Madeleine shrugged. “You already know the answer to that. You seem to have a better idea than I do about how this stuff works. All I do is write the paper. I never really was much good at business.”

  “Well, you have to be able to do both.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Madeleine sat back. “Why should I believe you?”

  Alicia sighed and nodded. It was a fair question. “I’m not trying to help you so that I can help him. It’s not like that at all. He’s still my husband and I still love him. I’m just trying to stop this from turning into a war. I’ve lived through too many alre
ady. All those other logging companies that Jonah shut down one after the other. That went on for years. I just don’t think I could stand to live through it again. And the other reason I’m here now is that I respect the work you’re doing. I know it isn’t easy. I know how much of an uphill struggle it’s been. I wish I didn’t have to come here in the middle of the night to say this, but now seems to be the right time. I just wanted to tell you to be careful.”

  “The truth is, I’m scared of him. You look in his face and you see he could do anything.”

  Alicia leaned across and tapped her fingernails gently on the desk. “But so could you, and I think he knows that.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I didn’t come here to tell you what to do. But I won’t stand by and watch him bully you, Madeleine. Just be careful. He feels threatened by you, in a way that he never was before. And when he is threatened, he is dangerous.” Alicia had said what she came to say. “I have to get home.” She left without saying good-bye.

  It was only then that Madeleine realized she was shaking. In her mind, all the civility and gentleness of the evening had inverted into something hideous and brutal. She told herself she should be happy. The tortoise was winning the race. But at that moment, all she felt was alone and frightened about what would happen next.

  CHAPTER 7

  Dodge burst into the Loon’s Watch bar. The local pair of barstool residents turned to look at him—Frampton and Barnegat, both bleary-eyed from alcohol. Dodge scanned the room until he saw Coltrane sitting in the corner. Then he walked across, as calmly as he could so as not to draw attention.

  Coltrane’s table had a video game built into it. There was only one video table at the Loon’s Watch, and Coltrane claimed it whenever he walked in. The surface of this table was a plastic screen, scratched into opaqueness by beer mugs. Underneath, the video game acted itself out in awkward microdot spasms. It was an old game, the late-seventies graphics clumsy. The sound effects were tiny grunts and squeaks. On a level below the table was a slot for putting money in and red buttons for firing at the aliens.

  “I found him,” said Dodge. His cheeks were burnished from the cold.

  Coltrane wasn’t listening. He had wiped the beer sweat from the tabletop and stuck a quarter into the video game. He jabbed at the red FIRE button, killing aliens for three minutes until they shot him down with their grunting, squeaking spaceships. At last, Coltrane looked up at Dodge, radish-faced from the effort. “I can’t do this stupid game.”

  Dodge sat down. “I think I found our guy,” he said again.

  Coltrane had pulled another quarter from his pocket. He was about to fight the aliens again, as if to kill them off forever, but Dodge’s words snapped him out of it. “What did you just say?”

  “It’s like we thought. Wilbur Hazard.” Dodge lowered his voice. Barnegat and his friend had fallen silent, both doing their best to listen in.

  “How come you’re so sure?” Coltrane stood. He wished he could tell Dodge the truth, but the job at the mill was the only one he’d ever had. He was five years from retirement. He could not bring himself to throw all that away. Still, he hated himself for being a coward. If there had been no one else in this bar but him, Coltrane would have taken his mug and smashed it through the table screen onto the grunting aliens in their Day-Glo spaceships.

  “We need to start now,” Dodge said.

  “We?” Coltrane’s voice rose on the word. “Oh, no. This isn’t my job.”

  “I need your help, Victor. Won’t you help me?”

  Billy Frampton’s large eyes seemed to swivel like radar dishes toward where the two men sat.

  “Sit down a minute, Marcus,” Coltrane told him. “We need to talk more.”

  “We have to go now.” Dodge’s whisper hissed across the table. “Please, Victor. I need your help.”

  “Let me go tell Mackenzie, at least.”

  They were facing each other now. The video-game table flashed beneath them.

  “All right,” said Dodge. “I’ll meet you at the station in fifteen minutes.” He walked out quickly and the sound of the police car’s engine rumbled through the walls of the bar.

  Coltrane realized that Barnegat and Frampton were staring at him. Barnegat was a worker at the mill and resented Coltrane’s promotion to foreman. He wore a black wool watch cap all year round and sported a stubby mustache, the same color as the cap. He’d grown the mustache because he had been slashed in the face during a knife fight and his upper lip had never healed. Billy Frampton, half-dead and mean, had been retired from logging for almost a decade. He had the sad eyes of a bloodhound and a way of sucking at his teeth whenever he got ready to speak. He wore a dirty toupee that sometimes stayed in his hard hat when he took the hat off his head. Frampton lived in an old shop on the main street. He put curtains in the windows so people couldn’t see into his living room, but sometimes he drew them back to let in the light and sat in his rocking chair, watching people watching him.

  Suddenly Coltrane had the strange feeling that everything around him had become two-dimensional. But the wilderness outside had three dimensions now. Soon he would be going out there, against every instinct in his body. And then it would be too late forever to tell Dodge that he knew who had spiked the tree. Coltrane walked out of the bar. He kept his eye on the two men, wanting them to know that they were being watched.

  By the time Coltrane left the room, sweat was running down Frampton’s face. “Goddamn that man,” he said. “He can make you think you done something wrong even when you’re just sitting there sucking in air.” Frampton blinked his eyes very hard when he talked, as if whatever he said was a constant source of amazement to him.

  Barnegat didn’t answer. He was thinking about the $10,000 reward that Mackenzie had posted. “That Hazard boy is ten thousand dollars’ worth of fool running around in the forest,” he whispered. “Be a shame to let the bears get him first.”

  Frampton understood. He had been thinking the same thing. “I’ll meet you at the logging road in half an hour.” He reached a finger under his toupee and scratched. The furry pancake shifted as if it were alive. “We got to bring guns.” He talked too loudly. He had been raised by an uncle named Johann Kaslaka, who had been blown through a hedge by an artillery burst during the invasion of France in 1918. The blast had shattered Kaslaka’s eardrums, leaving him mostly deaf, and to compensate, Kaslaka always raised his voice when talking, as if people could hear him as faintly as he heard them. The result of this was that he caused listeners to wince at his lung-emptying shouts, turned heads in every quiet room and so confused the street dogs of Abenaki Junction that they barked at him whenever he walked past. The habit spread to Billy Frampton, who had never lost it, even though he tried.

  Barnegat set his hand on Frampton’s shoulder. “You’re too old for this, Billy.”

  Frampton stared at the hand until Barnegat took it away. “I ain’t too fucking old. I could still pop the eyes out of your head.”

  “All right, Billy,” Barnegat said slowly. “Whatever you say.” He was tired of taking orders from Frampton. The old man had nothing left but his foul mouth to exert any kind of authority. Tonight I will teach him some respect, thought Barnegat. “We head straight up the middle to the tracks.” He drew a line through a puddle of spilled beer on the bar top to mark the path they would take through the Algonquin.

  Lazarus stood in front of them now. He drummed his fingers on the counter, eyebrows raised, asking them without words if they wanted more beer.

  Frampton slid the dull gray tankard across the counter. Most nights he drank eleven beers, grimly and steadily. Tonight he had drunk only four. “Goddamnit, old man,” he snapped at Lazarus, “how come you’re always staring at me as if you’re looking for an excuse to bust open my head?”

  “Maybe I am,” said Lazarus quietly, “and maybe I found one.” Then he walked away. He sat at the end of the bar and thought about winter, just to get himself pissed off.
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  “Hunting season’s coming early this year,” said Barnegat. “I swear I’m going to tag me some meat before the sun comes up.”

  When the men tramped out into the dark, Lazarus eased himself off his stool and began to mop down the copper bar top with a chamois cloth. “Do you want another cup of coffee?” he called into the shadows of the room. The bar lights were shining in his face and Lazarus could not see anyone, but he knew a man was there.

  At first there was no reply and Lazarus breathed in to ask again, but then the man appeared suddenly, as if walking out of another dimension. It was Gabriel. He had heard everything. He set his coffee cup down on the wet copper of the bar. “What was that all about?” he asked.

  Lazarus fetched the coffeepot and poured him some more. The coffee was thick and dark like old motor oil. “They’re fixing to kill a man tonight.”

  Gabriel sipped his coffee and said nothing.

  Lazarus fetched a cup and poured out some for himself. “Sometimes I think that people in this town are never more than a dozen words away from killing each other. There’s times I look at this town and it seems like the painted backdrop of some movie, and behind it all the claims we make about being civilized don’t mean anything. The instincts are still there to make us savages. It don’t take much to bring them to the surface.”

  The bar door swung open and a woman walked in. A gust of cool night air followed her and vanished in the heat of the room. She carried a bulging leather mail satchel and a bundle of papers in her arms. She nodded at Lazarus.

  “Hello, Madeleine,” said Lazarús. He pulled at one earlobe, as if suddenly self-conscious about the condition of his bar. He began to wash glasses that were already clean.

  “I just need some coffee. I’m going to be up all night with this stuff.” Madeleine set her bundle on the countertop. The pile slid to one side, fanning the documents like a giant pack of playing cards. From the satchel, she took a small thermos and handed it over to Lazarus.