by Paul Watkins
Coltrane rummaged in his pockets for his pack of Lucky Strikes, then lit one with a matchbook from the Loon’s Watch. The bar’s logo was a black-and-white loon with red eyes. The locals appreciated that detail, because a loon really did have red eyes, as if the devil had a hand in its creation.
Coltrane heard Dodge behind him. He turned, holding out the red bull’s-eyed cigarette pack. “You want one?”
It was not Dodge. The door to the cabin was open and a man stood halfway out.
Coltrane thought it must be Jerry Booth, the owner of the cabin, but the shadows had stolen his face, so he couldn’t be sure. Coltrane stood up, composing an apology in his head for making himself comfortable in Mr. Booth’s chair. But the man was not standing like the owner of a place in which strangers have appeared. Instead, he clung to the darkness. The air around him seemed to shudder.
The man took a step toward Coltrane. The planks creaked under his feet.
“Hello?” Coltrane tried to say, but only whispered. Then the knowledge reached him in a wave of nausea. He felt dizzy and sick. It was not Booth. It was Hazard. Coltrane lunged toward the place where his shotgun stood balanced against the cabin wall. He grabbed the gun and turned to face the man.
Hazard stood almost on top of him. In his right hand he held a knife. Its blade was double-edged and longer than an outstretched hand.
Coltrane tried to raise the gun and with one vicious shove Hazard wrenched it from him. The gun flew out of Coltrane’s grasp and skittered away onto the cabin’s front lawn. He felt the sudden coldness in his empty palms.
Hazard’s foot slid forward over the rough planking.
With all the strength he had, Coltrane grabbed at Hazard’s chest, hands clawed into the rough wool of his coat. He was about to throw his head forward into the man’s nose, when suddenly the breath vanished out of his lungs and his head started spinning inside. Coltrane saw the man turn and leap out into the dark, as if the grass were not land but water, and he would disappear beneath it.
Coltrane did not know what had happened to him. His whole body was trembling. He stepped back until he was resting against the wall of the cabin. As long as I’m on my feet, he thought, it cannot be that bad. Then he looked down at the splotches of his hunting-jacket camouflage. There was a small tear in the cloth. The knife blade had cut him. He reached a finger through the tear and felt blood pouring down his stomach. Not just a trickle. It was pouring. The dizziness grew suddenly worse. Coltrane dropped to his knees. He vaguely felt the thud of wood against his joints. His body had become a whirlpool, and he had to try to spin the other way or he would die. He coughed and blood flew from his mouth, spattering the cabin boards.
Hazard felt a sickness at how easily the blade had gone in, as if behind the layer of canvas the man had been made of nothing more than sand. He sprinted across the lawn and up the steep sides of the railway embankment. He kicked through the raspberry canes that grew beside the ties. The knife was still in his hands. He swung his body up and landed on the tracks. Then he began to run, adjusting his stride to the awkward distance between the spacers and the tracks. In a strange, fragmented thought, he wondered why the tracks ahead seemed to vanish in a wall of blackness.
Something burst against his face, and suddenly his nose and teeth and jaw all felt like broken glass.
Dodge was standing on the tracks. He had seen what happened and had been running toward the cabin when he saw Hazard jump from the porch. So Dodge stayed where he was and took the revolver from its holster. An ugly calm hovered in his body as he stood waiting, the checkered grips of the gun digging deep into his palm. He saw the long knife in Hazard’s hand. He knew Coltrane would be dead. Dodge had no time to be angry. He raised his revolver, cocked back the hammer and put three rounds into Hazard at a range of fifteen feet.
Hazard’s mouth was wide open as if to scream, but he didn’t make a sound. His arms spread like bony wings. His legs swung out from under him and his head smacked hard on the ground, teeth cracking as they smashed together. The knife clattered onto the tracks.
Dodge kept the gun aimed at Hazard. Cordite smoke billowed past him. Its smell was bitter in his lungs. He waited for Hazard to move, but in the dark it was as if Hazard had vanished and all that remained of him were crumpled clothes and boots with the leather chafed to suede.
Dodge ran to where Coltrane lay, scrabbling down the gravel embankment, hacking the skin from his palms so they looked as if he had run his hand down a cheese-grater. He dove into the blackness that had sunk down on the cabin.
Coltrane was still on his knees. He kept his hands pressed to the wound. It was difficult to breathe. He thought it would be easier if he could just stand, but he felt too frightened to move. His head was filled with a jumbled desperation to be well again. Not to need help. Not to go to the hospital. Voices in his mind were trying to tell him, in hopeful sputtering broadcasts, that he would need only a few stitches. He would not be sent to the vaporized land of general anesthesia. But the rest of him knew he was at the mercy of whoever would help him, and if no one helped him he would die. Several times, a heaving groan pushed out from deep inside him. It was a sound he did not even know he could make. It did not come from the pain. It came from his great disappointment. The slow, downward glance of knowing that this was the end. I’m like that bear, he thought. The one I should never have killed. I’m paying for that now. It wasn’t enough to be sorry.
“Clara,” he said. He wanted to talk to her. In his confusion, Coltrane felt as if the distance would not stop his voice from reaching her. “Clara, I’m hurt.” He struggled to his feet. It was the hardest, bravest thing he’d ever done. He clenched the skin around his wound and felt only tiredness where he expected to feel pain. He wished there would be pain instead of this dragging fatigue.
A shape lunged from the night. Coltrane wheezed in terror. He thought it was Hazard, come back to finish him off. Coltrane knelt crooked like a hunchback, arm raised in an offering to the blade.
But it was only Dodge, who took Coltrane in his arms and made him sit against the cabin wall. Dodge talked to him and held up fingers, trying to make Coltrane say how many there were, to see if he had drifted into shock. It all seemed impossibly childish to Coltrane. Dodge slapped him in the face. The pop of Dodge’s palm boxing his ear spread a fuzzy sensation across Coltrane’s cheeks and spider-crawled over his head.
Dodge prized away Coltrane’s bloody clawed hand and undid his shirt. He took Coltrane’s Zippo lighter, struck it and used its flame to see by. Dodge could tell from the tiny bright-red bubbles appearing around the gash that it was a sucking chest wound. He had to cover the hole or Coltrane would drown in his own blood. Dodge ran into the cabin.
Coltrane was trapped in the whirlpool. He could not fight it. The vortex had hold of his heart. He held up the whites of his palms in surrender to the dark angels that seemed to cluster around him.
Dodge reappeared on the porch with a roll of plastic wrap, some electrical tape and a flashlight. He set up the flashlight, whose beam glanced off the rafters of the porch and enclosed them like the dome of a bell jar. Then he laid Coltrane down and bared the man’s chest. He set the plastic wrap over the wound. The candy-apple red bubbles pressed up against the clear plastic. He took the roll of black electrical tape and taped the plastic wrap to Coltrane’s chest. He knew that Coltrane was going into shock and would die soon if help could not be found.
It was two miles down the tracks to Abenaki Junction. Dodge knew he could not carry Coltrane that far. It was half a mile across the lake, but they had no boat. Dodge did not want to leave Coltrane here. The shock and the night cold would kill him. Then he had an idea and ran around to the back of the house. A canoe was propped against the wall. Under it were paddles and square flotation cushions. He dragged the canoe fifty feet to the water’s edge. It slid across the lawn with a gentle whispering sound. He reached the lake. Water rushed into his boots. Then he ran back to the cabin, hooked his hands under Coltran
e’s armpits and hauled him down to the canoe. Coltrane’s heels dragged through the grass, leaving a phosphorescent trail through the dew.
“I’m going to put you in the canoe, Victor. We’re going to make you a little chair out of these cushions. Are you listening to me now? Am I getting through to you, Victor?”
Coltrane wasn’t listening. He coughed blood into his hand and looked at it. He kept floating in and out of his body, like playing hopscotch in slow motion. One second he was being dragged down to the beach and the next he seemed to be gliding far above the Booths’ cabin, where he could see the railroad tracks running through the forest like a river. Then Coltrane tumbled back into his body. He looked out across Pogansett Lake. It was a darkly ruffled plain, which he knew they would never cross before he died. The idea no longer frightened him. It was just a fact.
“You see, Victor?” Dodge set up the floating cushions at the bow, and slapped them like someone fluffing up a pillow. He talked to fill the quiet, as if silence itself would bring death skulking from its hiding place. “I’m making you a chair. Make you comfy for the ride. Can you hear me, Victor?”
Coltrane wanted to speak with Dodge, but whatever strength he had left was not enough to bring the words to his mouth.
Tiny waves patted the shore. They were clotted with dead leaves, which painted Dodge’s boots as he shoved the canoe into knee-deep water. He then climbed aboard, grabbed the paddle and dug it into the crow-black lake. As he swung the paddle up and over, he sent a spattering of water across Coltrane’s face. They moved slowly out toward the distant lights of Abenaki Junction, which lay like a cluster of fallen and still-burning meteors among the trees on the far shore. Wind blew off the mountain and into their faces. Sweat trickled down the trench of Dodge’s spine. With no moon visible, the stars seemed brighter than he had ever seen them before. He could see the silver smoke trail of the Milky Way from one end of the horizon to the other. Even with the pain from the constant shoveling of water to push them forward, Dodge felt amazement out there on the lake.
“You still with me, Victor?” Dodge asked.
“Yes.” Coltrane’s dried-out mouth opened and closed, as if to drink the droplets that had splashed across his face.
“You stay awake now.”
This time, Coltrane only managed to snuffle. He felt more pain in his chest than before. Earlier, the hurt seemed to come from everywhere at once, fanning out through his body like ripples across a pond. But now the wound was calling to him, sending out hard thumping messages through his chest. Then a thought appeared that woke Coltrane from his numbness. “Did he get away?”
“No.” Dodge hadn’t thought of Hazard since he set out across the lake. After half an hour of paddling, it seemed to him that he could feel each band of tendon, each thread of muscle outlined with pain. He looked up at the moon, just as a chevron of Canada geese passed before it. He heard their distant honking. It reminded him of a story he had read as a child, of a woman who traveled out among the stars, sitting in a chair towed by geese. The illustration showed the same silverplating of moonlight on her face and hair that Dodge saw now on the smooth backs of the geese. He used to send himself to sleep at night imagining himself in the chair and hearing the thrum of beating wings as the geese raised him up through the dark, cloudless sky. It seemed like such a miracle. As the geese passed into the dark over Pogansett Lake, Dodge realized that Coltrane needed the same kind of miracle, something that appeared so out of reach that even to dream of it seemed foolish.
They were close to the town now. Dodge began shouting for help. His voice carried on the lake, amplified among the ranks of pine.
After a few minutes, flashlight beams began to clip across the water. They found Dodge’s canoe and clung to it.
He went blind in the glare, but kept paddling toward the harsh silver that splashed at his eyes.
Coltrane had no idea where this light was coming from. He wondered if it might be the angels and he was already dead. The pain had stopped. He could no longer feel the grip of the plastic wrap at every rise and fall of his chest. It wasn’t so bad, this business of being dead. He felt only curious about what would happen next.
The bow of the canoe ground against the sand and suddenly people were everywhere. Dodge heard familiar voices, but for now he couldn’t place them. He was still too blinded by the glare to see. They dragged the canoe up onto land. Faces zoomed in close out of the night and questions popped in his ears. Dodge did not answer. He was too tired and confused. Strong hands helped him from the boat and walked him over to a picnic table which in daytime had a view of the lake. Dodge realized he had come ashore at the edge of the municipal park, just across the road from the house of Mary the Clock. Dodge looked at the man who was leading him. It was Twitch. He was wearing his paramedic jacket. He asked Dodge what had happened, so Dodge told him.
An ambulance bumped over the curb of the parking lot and drove across the grass to where Coltrane had been laid beside the canoe. Twitch opened Coltrane’s shirt. Under the glossy film of plastic wrap, Coltrane’s blood was a puddle of neon cherry.
Talking. Everyone seemed to be talking. In each voice was the high-pitched jabber of panic. Wind blew off the lake and slapped waves on the pale sand. Loons grieved out on the water. Children ran past him toward the flashing lights.
Coltrane was placed on a stretcher, strapped to it with orange nylon straps, and carried to the ambulance by five times as many people as were needed to hold the man’s weight. Lazarus was there, holding the IV bottle.
Dodge could not see Coltrane’s face. He was lost in the crowd.
The ambulance spun its wheels on the grass. It roared into the street, ear-drilling sirens sounding through town, rising and falling. The children ran after it, until the ambulance gained speed and left them behind, coughing from the exhaust.
Dodge had no idea where they were taking Coltrane. There was no place in town that could handle such an injury. Part of Dodge wanted to get away from the noise, but the rest of him thought he should stay. He told himself there must be more to do, bringing order to the chaos of the crowd. As a policeman, he should be helping. But the chaos belonged to itself and was unstoppable. For a while longer, Dodge just sat there, his sweat growing cold and pasting his shirt to his back with the clamminess of raw meat. No one came to talk to him. They still hovered around the canoe, as if afraid to leave the place.
Dodge got up and walked. He was going to tell Clara what had happened. It was several miles to their house, but he was too dazed to think of anything but walking there. He headed down Main Street. Grit crunched under his boots in the gutters, sand left over from the winter, scattered on the roads to stop people and machines from slipping on the ice. People ran past him toward the park. Some wore windbreakers over their pajamas. Their eyes were fixed on the commotion. When Dodge turned to look, he saw the sabers of flashlights, still feeling their way across the black water. It was as if they were expecting more canoes, a flotilla from the island of the dead.
Dodge moved past the Quonset-hut arcade, where teenagers played out the last of their video games before running over to the park to see what was happening. Past the Ice Cream Shack, its windows plastered with sun-bleached pictures of people holding ice-cream cones and smiling. A boy leaned across the counter and shouted at Dodge, “Where the hell did everybody go?”
Dodge didn’t answer. He just pointed, feeling like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He walked on a ways farther and then somebody called his name. He looked up and saw it was Madeleine. She stood on the porch of her house across the road. She was barefoot and had pulled on some jeans and a sweatshirt. Her hair fell in front of her eyes.
“Where are you going?” she asked him.
“To tell Clara.”
“She already knows.” Madeleine hugged herself against the chill. She walked down the rickety boards of her porch steps.
There were times Dodge had dreamed of walking up those steps, taking off his boots at the front
door and setting them by the fire-place. In the dream, he would strip as he moved up the stairs, draping the banisters with his clothes. He would slide in beside Madeleine and spoon himself into her warm and sleeping body. And even in her sleep, when she felt him there she would move closer to him, and his hand would come around under her arm and cradle the softness of her breast. And he would sleep so deeply that he was afraid he might never wake up. Dodge exhaled suddenly, snuffing out the dream.
“I’ll make us some cocoa,” she said.
It was the only peace offering she had ever made him. They sat on the porch, holding their steaming drinks and looking out into the dark.
“It’ll be hard on the town if Victor dies,” Madeleine said.
“I don’t think he’ll make it.” Dodge felt the cramp in his hands being smoothed out by the heat of the mug. “I should go,” he told her. “I’m not good company right now.”
She took the mug from him and set it on the porch beside her. “I was thinking about what you said in the car the other day. It helped to see things from your point of view. We’ve known each other for a long time. I think we’re closer than we realize.”
“I could have told you that a long time ago.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“I think you had to see it for yourself. I know you well enough to see you don’t take advice if you can help it, especially on how to live your life.”
She was looking at him.
He leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. Then he stood and walked down the steps.
“Call me if you need anything,” she said.
Dodge walked home through the streets. He didn’t know what would come of their meeting and whether he had started something or ruined everything with that one kiss. He couldn’t think about that now. At first light, he had to get out to the tracks and find Hazard’s body.
Madeleine stayed on the porch. She noticed how quiet it had become. In the night, Abenaki Junction and the Algonquin forest and Pogansett Lake all lost their boundaries and merged. Silence wandered in the streets and through the woods and up into the hills. Then the cold drove her inside.
