Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  “I’m a little stuck here, gentlemen.” Dodge’s voice was low and even. His patience had worn thin. “You say you went looking for him and he ambushed you?”

  “That’s right.” Frampton’s voice was a plugged nasal hum.

  “Why wouldn’t he just let you walk by?”

  “Because he’s crazy. He’s a murderer.” It hurt Frampton to speak, each word another corkscrew twist into his hungover skull. But he had to talk. It was his fault that Hazard got away, since he’d kicked him into the ditch. The more distance and blame he put between himself and last night, the safer he would feel. “He’s Mary’s son. What else do you need to know?”

  “Shut up, Billy.” It was Barnegat.

  “You guys found him first, didn’t you?” Dodge shoved his typewriter out of the way. He would have to retype the whole report anyway once he found out the truth of what happened. “Did you ask him if he was the one who had spiked the tree?”

  “Of course we didn’t ask him.” Barnegat sat back and thumped his shoulders against the wall.

  “So how do you know it was him?”

  “Because of all that stuff he was carrying! Because he didn’t stop when you told him to!”

  “You beat the shit out of him, didn’t you?”

  “Look what he did to me!” Frampton held his hands up beside his head.

  “But only because he thought you were trying to kill him, right?” Dodge leaned forward across the desk. His face was creased with disgust. “Am I right?”

  “The way we see it …” Frampton moved as if to stand. He felt the time had come to make a speech, although he didn’t know what he would say.

  “Get out.” Dodge heaved his typewriter back to its original position.

  Barnegat stood. “What are you going to do?”

  “Go in there and find him myself if I have to.” Dodge wound a piece of paper into the typewriter. “Do you have any idea how hard that’s going to be now?”

  “I should get that ten thousand dollars.” Barnegat didn’t care if it sounded like a threat.

  “You should be going to prison for assault, Barnegat. And if Hazard presses charges, you will go.” Dodge waited calmly for Barnegat’s next move.

  Barnegat walked out into the dusty parking lot. Frampton shuffled in his footsteps.

  Dodge tried to keep typing, but he couldn’t see the keys. Instead, all he could see was an image of Wilbur Hazard cowering alone and in pain, out there somewhere in the wilderness.

  Wilbur Hazard sat cross-legged on the dirt floor of his half-completed cabin and wept. Sunlight filtering down through the trees made beams through the mason-jar window. His eyes were swollen almost shut and everything he saw was obscured in the mesh of his eyelashes. The pain in his gut was a steady thumping nausea. He knew he needed a doctor. When he ran his nervous fingers across his stomach, he could feel bulges of torn muscle deep under the skin.

  Hazard assumed that he had in fact killed Frampton last night. So in his own mind he had become what they already thought he was. He knew he couldn’t go back into town. They would be looking for him, and if they hadn’t let him talk before, there would be even less chance of that now.

  He took the Gerber knife from his belt and in his misery he stabbed it over and over into the dirt. He thought about his mother and wondered if she knew what had happened to him. He thought of all the work it had taken to persuade his foster parents to tell him who she was, and how quietly and deeply disappointed he had been to find a woman so cheerfully lost in a land inside her head. It had taken months before the mother he’d invented for himself, the woman much closer to Alicia Mackenzie—tall and beautiful and sane and respected and loving—flickered and died away and he forced the blankly smiling image of Mary the Clock into her place. Hazard wished he’d never come to Abenaki Junction. The people of the town had never let him be anything but an outsider, and the speed and violence with which they came to hunt for him seemed to Hazard like the acting out of a plan that had been set in motion long ago.

  Hazard decided he would wait for dusk, then head along the tracks to the old Booth cabin. He would allow himself to rest there until dark. Then he would sneak the last half mile into town, take his car and drive out and never come back. He kept his savings in bundles of cash in a strongbox in the garage. It would be enough to start again. He wondered how many times in a life a person could start over before he forgot who he was.

  CHAPTER 8

  Martha, the police switchboard operator, unlocked the gun cabinet at the station. She kept the key on a string around her neck, along with a crucifix with tiny rubies in the eyes of the Jesus. She ran her finger along the rank of polished gunstocks until she found what she was looking for. “You said the twelve-gauge, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Dodge. He had always been formal with Martha, treating her like a woman much older than himself, even though she was only thirty-five. He pulled two cases of OO shotgun shells from his desk and spilled the cartridges out across his blotter. He began filling his pockets with the copper-ended tubes, hearing the faint rattle of the pellets inside. As Martha walked over to him, carrying the heavy shotgun, Dodge noticed that whenever this two-hundred-and-fifty-pound woman moved forward, she seemed to move sideways as well. Dodge had seen the ten-year shelf-life spongy cakes that Martha ate on her coffee breaks every half hour, and did not feel sorry for the woman as much as he felt sorry for her heart. He imagined the two as separate beings, one trapped inside the other. Dodge knew her heart would give out soon, pop like a cranberry-colored balloon, and then all of Martha would deflate and slide under her desk. Too many cream-filled cupcakes had been eaten. Too much bologna folded into fleshy pink envelopes and swallowed nearly whole.

  Mott called her a Happy Stack of Woman. He said that without her to hold the place down, Abenaki Junction would drift away over the hills into Canada.

  For a while, Coltrane had taken it on himself to act as her fitness counselor, even though he did no exercise himself. He said she should walk to work every day. She laughed in his face. He wrote her a list of nutritious foods as she sucked the filling out of a Twinkie right before his eyes.

  Martha sat back down at her desk. “I swear if you just waited a bit, Hazard would come back to his momma’s house.” She folded her hands over her stomach. “He can’t live out there in the Algonquin.”

  “I don’t know about that, Martha.” Dodge set a yellow-and-black box of shotgun shells on his desk and began feeding the shells into his pump shotgun. “People can live out there if they know how.”

  “He’ll come out.” Martha tugged open one of her desk drawers. It was filled with individually wrapped Yankee Doodle chocolate cakes. She snatched one, tore off the wrapping with her teeth, and spat it into the garbage can at her feet. Then she crammed the cake into her mouth.

  “I should go,” Dodge said. Coltrane was waiting for him outside. Dodge felt sure they would find no trace of Hazard. They would walk all day and get nothing but tired.

  “That poor woman, Mary.” Martha spoke with her mouth full. “All she’s been through.”

  “I don’t think she knows what she’s been through, Martha.” Dodge pulled on his heavy canvas hunting coat, dappled with green and brown splotches of camouflage. He tucked the shotgun under his arm and started to walk out.

  “You don’t know for sure about Mary,” Martha shouted after him. “Nobody does.”

  Outside, Coltrane was no longer thinking about Mary. He was praying that they would not find Wilbur Hazard. Besides the fact that Hazard was innocent, Coltrane remembered the first time he had looked Hazard in the eye. It was once when Hazard appeared from his kitchen at the Four Seasons. He had stared at the customers as if someone had called him out there for a fight. Coltrane recalled he had looked down at his western omelet and been scared that this man had cooked his food. Since that day, he knew that if insanity did live in their family, its danger was with Hazard and not with Mary. Coltrane had seen it in Hazard’s eyes—
cold and sparkling and vicious. As he and Dodge headed out into the woods, Coltrane tried to hide an uneasy creeping sensation that tracked along his spine. It was instinct, telling him to turn back—the warning lights of danger blinking red behind his eyes. But he didn’t trust his instincts, and he walked on into the wilderness.

  Both men carried Savage shotguns and .357 revolvers. Across their shoulders they had slung canteens. Their pockets were filled with sandwiches and bullets. The men passed the tattered yellow strips of police tape, looped from tree to tree around the place where Pfeiffer had died. Printed on the tape in black letters was POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.

  A long wail came from the distance. It spread through the trees and the trees echoed back until the whole forest took up this wail and held it, trembling and ringing as if the Algonquin were one vast struck crystal. Then at last the sound began to fade. It was the Canadian VIA train on its way from Montreal to St. Johns. They heard the thunder of its wagons crossing the iron bridge that ran across the Narrows of Pogansett Lake. Sometimes these trains were sixty cars long, pulled by four engines and showing on their doors dozens of railroad company names—Southern, Santa Fe, Solid Gold, Railbox, Canadian National, Ashley, Drew and Northern, the Chessie System, Missouri Pacific, the blue and white of the Bangor and Aroostock Line and the far-from-home banana-yellow cars of the Appalachicola Northern. They shook the ground, made the tracks too hot to touch, and flattened into shiny postage stamps the coins that children placed upon the rails. Then the sound was gone, leaving only the murmur of wind through the tops of the pines.

  Dodge and Coltrane walked in silence, sometimes following the trampled broadness of human trails and at others the narrow, branch-crossed paths of deer. Then they came to a stand of white birch. Old bark peeled in scrolls from the trunks. It was like moving in a maze. The thin white birch trees seemed to shift in the corners of their eyes.

  “Footprints!” Dodge called back.

  Coltrane came running, heart beating faster now. He reached where Dodge was standing and looked down. The earth was damp from a stream trickling out of the rocks and dead leaves. In the mud was the print of a lug-soled boot. The print was fresh, too new even to have been made last night by Barnegat or Frampton.

  Coltrane crouched down and set his hand in the mud. He dabbed his fingers in the neat boot print and blurred it. “It guess it must be him,” he said. “There’s no one else here now.”

  Dodge raised his head and looked around. Then suddenly his expression changed, as if something were there, circling them, but he could not see it.

  “What?” Coltrane yanked his gun out of its holster. He pulled the hammer back. “For Christ’s sake, what?” Then suddenly he knew what it was about the place. “This is where we stopped to rest when we carried Gil Kobick down the mountain. After he got attacked by that bear.” Coltrane lowered the gun.

  “Yes it is,” said Dodge. His voice was a murmur. “When Kobick went hunting up on Seneca Ridge. Who was that man who went with him?”

  “That was Harry Crowe,” said Coltrane. “That Irish guy who used to be in the IRA in the twenties. Guy used to go hunting with some old English service revolver and a rifle. Liked to get in close with that revolver. Said he liked to blur the line between the hunter and the hunted. And Gil Kobick, that clumsy, crooked little money-lending man, had been pestering Harry Crowe to go hunting with him for years. And then finally Crowe agreed. He’d seen the bear earlier in the summer, eating some berries on the ridge.”

  “I remember when they went into the woods,” said Dodge. “Crowe was wearing an old trenchcoat. The one he said he used to wear in Ireland. And there was Kobick with all his spiffy new gear. His boots not even scuffed. They went in on the train tracks and then cut up the side of the hill.”

  “Yes,” said Coltrane, “and that’s where Crowe told Kobick he would loop around the other side of the crest and they would meet on the summit. So it meant Kobick was supposed to hang back a little as he made the shorter climb. But that man Kobick …”

  “That stupid dead man.” Dodge remembered the smell of his blood, heavy and metallic.

  “He goes racing up the hill to get that bear first and then take the credit for himself. And that was when Crowe said he heard a sound that he mistook for Kobick falling into the bushes. Kind of a thrashing sound. Then he heard that roar and after that …”

  “Screaming.” Dodge’s voice was faint and distant. He remembered lying with Coltrane and Crowe on the muddy ground beside this stream, too tired to carry Kobick any farther. And Kobick’s body lay there beside them, his stomach open and the ribs all smashed like a flimsy packing crate.

  “That screaming,” echoed Coltrane. “Crowe pulled out his revolver and dumped his rifle in the bushes, and then he sees the bear standing on top of Kobick. And its ears are all chewed off from being in some old fight. And it’s pinning Kobick’s arms to the ground and tearing off his scalp. Crowe shoots off some rounds to scare it away, but that bear wasn’t afraid.”

  “That poor dead man.” Dodge remembered washing Kobick’s blood from his hands at the same stream where he stood now. He remembered how the blood had stuck to his skin and how he scraped it away with his fingernails in the painfully cold water.

  “And Crowe stands right up to that bear,” said Coltrane, “the way nobody but Harry Crowe could have done, and he shoots that bear right in the face. And there’s blood and spit flying out of its mouth and its jaw goes snap! Like a whipcrack from the bullet. And then Crowe was out of bullets. So he didn’t have a choice but to stand there and stare the bear down. And you remember what Crowe said? He said even shot half to death that bear seemed more alive than he did. It sniffed the air with its ragged, bloody nose, like it was getting Crowe’s scent and would come back for him later. And then it ran away. Then Crowe goes running down the side of the mountain. Left Kobick where he lay. Took him two hours to get off that mountain and then he found us.”

  “And we had to go clambering up this hill in the pitch dark. By the time we got there, he was already dead. But after what that bear did to him, Kobick was better off gone.” Dodge saw again the empty eye sockets. The teeth exposed and twisted in different directions.

  “Do you remember when we dug his grave?” Coltrane tapped Dodge on the arm. “And Reverend Barnes comes out and tells us we can’t do it. But then he gets a look at Kobick and he goes and gets a shovel and helps us dig.”

  Dodge lowered himself down, knees cracking, and washed his hands in the stream as if they were covered in blood again. “Remember how hard we looked for that bear afterward? And how we spent so much time thinking about that bear, we just ended up giving it that name: No Ears. As if it was one of us.”

  “I wonder if it died.”

  “Oh,” said Dodge, the cold clamping down on his fingers, “I bet its bones are out here someplace.”

  “It could be alive,” Coltrane said. “A bear is tough to kill.”

  “Let’s not stay here anymore, Victor. Let’s keep moving.”

  They pushed on through the woods, but feeling different now. They stayed closer together and often looked back down the trail as it closed up after them. They put out their guns and kept their fingers straight beside the trigger guards. Neither spoke of being afraid, but now they were hunting Hazard the same as if he’d been that bear.

  More prints studded the wet ground around another spring. They scooped some water up to drink, just as they knew Hazard had done.

  Earlier, Coltrane’s head had been crowded with daydreams, as if his mind had fled from the forest and left the rest of him behind. But now that he had seen the footprints, he’d felt his senses sharpen. The Algonquin had hundreds of sounds and Coltrane heard all of them at once. Each shading of green and brown reached his eyes. Each branch zoomed into perfect focus. Coltrane smelled the still, cool air in the hollows. He thought about how easy it was to hide in the woods. Shadows dappled you into invisibility. You stayed still until each sound and smell became familiar, and
the birds started singing again. You gathered the silence around you, becoming a part of the forest.

  Late in the afternoon, they came to a new logging road that had been built into the Algonquin. The road had appeared suddenly. The glaring gravel stretched out of sight in both directions. Dodge knelt down and tried to make out any new footprints with the same lug-sole print as the one they had found earlier. They found no more prints, so they crossed the logging road and continued toward the railroad tracks.

  When they reached the tracks, it was almost sunset. The rails were shiny where the train’s wheels ran regularly across them. The rest was dull and orange with rust. On each creosoted wooden tie was a steel shoe, holding the rail to the ground. The shoes were stamped with the mark of the Lundie patent, with the date 1971. It was too late to walk back through the woods, so Coltrane and Dodge decided they would head along the tracks and into town. Later, they would drive to Coltrane’s farm and pick up the patrol car they had left at the trail-head.

  Seeing that no one was home at the Booths’ cabin, the two men stopped there to rest and eat their sandwiches. Dodge spotted two Adirondack chairs tucked under the porch. They pulled out the chairs, set their guns against the cabin wall and sat looking across the lake. The sky turned purple with the closing in of night.

  Coltrane tried to hide his relief at not finding Hazard. But he felt sure they had been close. At some muddy twist in the trail, Hazard had been there, had seen them walking by.

  “Maybe we should call Skowhegan tomorrow. Get some more help.” Dodge kneaded the joints of his toes.

  “We don’t need help,” Coltrane said, a sandwich bunched in his fist. “Just promise me we aren’t going to hurt him.”

  “Not if we don’t have to,” Dodge replied. He got up and walked off into the bushes to take a piss.