Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  Hazard lay spreadeagled on the tracks. His consciousness kept ducking into black. He had been shot once in the side of his neck. Another bullet had smashed his cheekbone and exited just under his ear. The third slug had struck him in the left shoulder joint, and he could no longer feel his left arm. Now his heart beat with a strange metallic clanging like hammer strikes inside a fifty-gallon drum. He could not keep his head clear for long enough to know exactly where he was or to realize that he was dying.

  When he had reached the Booths’ cabin that evening, he’d broken in and lain down on a sagging mattress in a room at the back of the house. Moving through the woods had tired him out. After a few minutes, he’d found enough strength to roll over. The next thing he knew, the two men were on the porch and he had no idea where the daylight had gone. He knew he had to get out of the house or he felt sure he would be caught. He had stabbed Victor Coltrane in what he thought was self-defense. Now he played and replayed the scene in his mind, as if in a fever dream.

  A large black bear was walking down the tracks. The fur on the bear’s back was shiny and caught a pale silver-blue light, even though there was no moon. The bear crossed over the iron railway bridge, the Narrow River slipping by below. It stopped and raised its head to the breeze, wet nostrils twitching. The bear smelled Hazard’s blood. It lost the scent and turned and caught the scent again. Then the bear began to move toward the smell. A moment later it saw the shape of Hazard’s body lying in the middle of the tracks. The bear skidded down the gravel embankment to avoid coming at the thing head-on, in case it was not dead. It thrashed through the raspberry bushes that grew thick at the base of the embankment, and then worked its way slowly up until it came to the body. With its nose an inch from Hazard’s face, it took in the scent of the man’s cooled sweat and blood. The bear rolled Hazard over, shredding his jacket until it reached flesh. Then the bear opened its mouth very slowly and clamped down on Hazard’s head.

  Hazard smelled the bear’s breath. It was musty and foul and clammy warm on his half-open eyes, which he could not close. The truth of what was happening to him flashed briefly in front of him, but he could not bring himself to believe it.

  The bear bit down on Hazard’s temples and his bullet-broken cheek. Then it began to drag him down the tracks.

  Hazard felt the pressure on his head, but the force of it seemed to come from inside his skull, not outside. Saliva ran over his face. Rail ties slid underneath him, bruising his chest. The toes of his boots dragged through the gravel.

  The bear dragged Hazard fifty feet and then dropped him. It hooked its paw under Hazard’s chest and heaved him up. The man found himself sitting in a slumped-over position. His hands lay useless on the ground in front of him. The bitter, sugary smell of creosoted rail ties reached into him and branched off through his lungs.

  One of the rails made a sound like cracking ice. The bear started. From the distance came the rumble of a train.

  Hazard did not hear the train. He wondered if perhaps he was still lying on that sagging mattress in the cabin and this was all the jabber of a nightmare. The train’s whistle sounded as it passed through Abenaki Junction. It rode with four engines and fifty-five wagons, carrying fuel and liquid nitrogen and boxcars of farm machinery.

  The bear stood and followed the whistle’s echo across the lake, turning its head slowly as the sound spread out through the trees. The rumble of engines was clearer now. A steady, rising roar. The first gold blast from the train’s forward light showed through the trees. The ground beneath the rails began to shake.

  The bear loped away down the embankment. Then it stopped. As the beam grew stronger and the earthquake of the train came closer, the bear turned again and ran from the sound and the light.

  Hazard’s head felt strangely clear. He knew it was the train and that he was on the tracks. The pinging of the rails was almost constant now. He raised his head, rolling his neck to the side away from the bullet wound, and he could see the great eye of the forward light. He felt the rushing wind. The light surrounded him. The beam burned out his sight. The noise hammered through him. Hazard stared at the train with a lopsided glance and howled out the last of his breath.

  The lead engine roared around a bend in the tracks. Alain Labouchere, the driver, did not even have time to blow his whistle at what he thought looked like a wounded deer. He ducked his head away from the window, its ironplated grille segmenting his view like the eye of an insect. Labouchere felt a thump as the train slammed into and through the obstacle. Then he was past it. The rails were smooth again, and bright.

  Four hours later, Clara Coltrane heard a sound out in the cornfield. She was sitting at the bare-wood kitchen table. The rising sunlight slipped across the walls. She had only just arrived back from the hospital and she was still in shock. Twitch had said he would probably survive. She alternated between convincing herself that if Twitch said this it had to be the truth and not believing anything but the worst.

  At first she thought the noise came from the dogs. They were always play-fighting roughly enough to draw a yelp now and then. But this sound was different. There was a shrillness to it. Something wrong in the way it trailed off. Clara waited for another sound, but there was only the breeze, which shuffled through the dust and scattered straw in the barnyard as if it were looking for something.

  Clara pulled on Victor’s ratty wool vest with the old Indianhead nickel buttons, and walked outside. She called to the dogs. When a minute had gone by and no dogs came, she walked down the dirt road that ran between the fields. She glanced toward the trees, where turkey vultures always circled in the summertime.

  A huge shape was climbing the slope toward the canopy of trees. At first, Clara thought it was a man, but the shape was too big. Too dark. It seemed to be more than one thing. Two things joined together. Clara squinted and saw now that it was a bear, a huge bear, and in its clamped-shut jaws was one of the dogs. It was Bugs. She could tell from the white-tipped tail. The bear had Bugs by the neck. The dog’s head lolled down and its legs trailed on the ground. Clara could tell the dog’s neck was broken.

  She let out a long shout. The noise trailed across the field. She knew that bear. Knew from its gnarled ears that this was the same animal that had killed Gil Kobick, the bear people thought was long since dead.

  The animal heard her shout and turned. The dog’s head swung toward Clara. Its muzzle was crushed and bloody. Then the bear turned again and was gone, merging with the shadows of the trees.

  Clara ran back to the house, kicked open the screen door and grabbed Victor’s Springfield rifle from its two-pronged iron cradle over the fireplace. Then she ran back out the door. The rifle felt heavy in her fine-boned hands. The bear was gone, but she still fired off a round to chase it away. The concussion left a far-off ringing in her ears and bruised her shoulder. The valley’s echo met her with slamming applause. She fired another round and then another, and the valley’s thundering ovation did not stop. When all of the bullets were gone and the bright, smoking cartridges lay ejected at her feet, Clara lowered the rifle and stared through the disappearing cordite smoke at the trees. They seemed impenetrable to her, as if the copper-jacketed bullets had just bounced off the solid wall of their trunks.

  Then suddenly Clara remembered the other dog, Tucker. Her eyes raced along the rows of corn until she found the broken stalks where the bear had rushed out. As she followed in the bear’s path, the corn arched over her. What she found was like a chamber. A space knocked flat and floored with trampled stalks. The walls of this chamber were painted with blood. The floor was paved with fur and gray-white sticks of bone jutting from meat, and here was a white band of tendon and here the bloody mouth and staved-in jaw of something dead. It was Tucker. Clara turned in slow circles in the room of gore. She smelled the vomit reek of the animal’s opened stomach. It was her father who had taught her about the power of a bear’s jaws, how if a bear was big enough to get its jaws around a man’s head, that man was finished. Cl
ara dropped to her knees and dug in the crumbly earth with her hands and with the rifle butt until she had a shallow grave for the dog. Then she buried the animal where she found it. She pressed the soil down with her hands. The imprints of her fingers were like wings on the dark earth.

  CHAPTER 9

  That morning, Dodge returned by himself to the tracks. Mist was knee-deep in the tall grass. At first, he could not find Hazard’s body. Then he remembered the train. He took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair, preparing himself for what he was about to see.

  Blood lay in shiny buttons on the creosoted wood. Dodge walked up the track and down again, but there was no sign of Hazard. He paused and looked up at the ivory boil of clouds. Far in the sky, he saw a huge bald eagle gliding from one cloud into another, higher than any bird he had ever seen before. Just as he lowered his gaze, he saw Hazard.

  The body was tangled in a maple tree, a dozen feet above the ground but almost at a level with the tracks because of the embankment on which they were built. Hazard appeared to be sitting, one arm slung casually across a branch. But when Dodge looked more closely, he could see the man’s body was crumpled almost beyond recognition.

  The anger that Dodge had felt toward Hazard suddenly slipped away, as if it had never been there. Whatever vengeance might have occurred to Dodge had already been exacted on Hazard’s remains.

  Dodge climbed the tree. He tried lowering Hazard’s body as gently as he could down to the ground. Then he realized that this broken man was beyond all need of gentleness, and pushed the body out. It swished through the bushes and thumped hard against the earth. The corpse was stiff and Dodge carried Hazard in the same sitting position to his car. It took him over an hour and sometimes he just dragged the body. When Dodge rested, he sat with his back to the corpse, trying not to breathe in the faint sweetness of the dead man, but he gave up and breathed it in deeply to make himself used to the smell. He tried not to see the way Hazard’s broken bones reshaped the arms and the legs into a warped reflection of what they used to be. The bullet wounds were almost lost among the scrapes and blue-black dents in the flesh.

  He finally reached the car, his path through the tall grass made wider by Hazard’s clenched body. He thought about piling Hazard into the trunk, but decided to set him in the back seat. Dodge drove quickly into town. He did not look in his rearview mirror at the grotesquely squatting corpse, whose arm reached across the seat and into the air beside Dodge’s face.

  That afternoon, Dodge received a call from the Skowhegan hospital. Coltrane would recover. Relief edged its way toward him, but he did not trust it. He did not want to kindle hope and have it be snuffed out. After filing Hazard’s death reports, Dodge went to Mary’s house.

  Mary opened the door before he pressed the buzzer. “It doesn’t work,” she told him. “The buzzer doesn’t buzz.”

  “How are you, Mary?” Dodge stared at her with hollowed-out eyes. The blood had drained from his face. He had not allowed himself the time to dread what he was about to tell her.

  She held open the door and aimed a hand into the house. “Come in.”

  “Mary, I have some bad news.” He ducked into the dark cool of the house.

  She wandered into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove. “Tea?”

  “It’s bad news, Mary. You might want to sit down.”

  “Oh, sit-down-bad-news. Yes.” She heard him but she wasn’t listening. “I sent off for a dancing class in the mail.”

  The kitchen floor was covered with black footprint cut-outs. A dance instruction book lay on the table. Mary danced over to the sink on the black footsteps.

  She never could talk in a straight line, Dodge thought. It was like flipping through the channels on a radio station. If he concentrated, Dodge could see how she jumped from one subject to another, but to do this needed the kind of concentration he normally reserved for crossword puzzles. “Mary, it’s about Wilbur.” Dodge stayed in the living room. Something about the large black footsteps across the kitchen floor made him edgy.

  “Wilbur’s gone.”

  “Yes, Mary.” Thank God, Dodge thought. Somebody already told her.

  “He’s gone, gone, gone.” She said the words in time to her dance steps around the kitchen.

  Say the word, Dodge wanted to tell her. Dead. Say it. Say the word that shows you know I killed him. Or worse, that he was still alive when he took the punch of a few hundred tons of Canadian steel going sixty miles an hour. Dodge hovered in the vast and ugly silence until he could not take it anymore.

  “He’s gone, but he’ll be back soon.” She was twirling and dancing.

  “No, Mary. Please understand.” Dodge was tangled up in his sadness. Poor, beautiful, simple-in-the-head Mary the Clock, he thought. “He’s not coming home this time.”

  “He comes home when he’s ready. That’s how he likes it.”

  Dodge nodded, giving up for now. He realized he was crying. He smudged tears on the sleeve of his jacket and looked around the room. The Christmas tree still stood in the corner. Through his blurred vision, the Christmas ornaments sent rainbows through the room.

  “Stay for tea,” Mary told him, facing out the window. Her voice had suddenly changed. A heaviness passed through it. The truth seemed to be reaching her at last, particle by particle, sifting through her blood. “He wanted to be friends.” The cheerful bounce of Mary’s voice had disappeared. She stared out the window to her garden, where a row of sunflowers stood heavy-headed under the clear sky.

  The black footsteps seemed to shuffle across the floor. Dodge felt himself choking.

  “He’ll come back,” Mary said again. She said it like a threat. Now she turned on him and her face had become something horrible. Snakelike. Turning him to stone.

  Late that night, Mackenzie woke suddenly. He lay there for a second, the remains of sleep rising like steam from his body. Then he heard the noise that had woken him. It rose and fell away. The breeze carried it like dust, in tiny cyclones up and down the street. It was a woman’s voice, crying out one word over and over into wind. “Wilbur!” the woman called. “Wiiilbuuuur!”

  Then Mackenzie knew that it was Mary. He began to sweat. He felt the blame for Hazard’s death as much as if he’d been the one who pulled the trigger. No one blamed Dodge. Not even Mackenzie, and he wished he could blame somebody. Instead, there seemed to be a communal sense of guilt that Hazard had never been made welcome in the town. Mackenzie thought of the small kindnesses that had been withheld because Hazard was a stranger and the son of Mary the Clock. Guilt settled on Mackenzie like some kind of poisonous vapor. So now he clung to the only thread of possibility he had left—that Hazard might not have been his son after all. He forced himself to believe it. It was either that or go mad.

  “Wiiilbur!” The voice came again.

  Mackenzie walked out onto his porch. He stood listening, taunted by the noise.

  Mary wandered down the middle of the street, her voice gone hoarse from calling out her dead son’s name. She knew the town better by night than she did by day. For many years, she had lived mostly after dark. She thought of the night as a living thing that protected her. Mary had heard what people said about what happened to Wilbur, but the idea of life leaving someone completely made no sense to her.

  As she walked past Dodge’s house, she saw the man had left his laundry out on the line. She stepped into his yard, took his clothes down and folded them very neatly. Then she set the wooden pegs back in the canvas bag that hung from the weather-greened copper washing line, and set the clothes in a precise pile on his porch, where the dew would not soak them. Then she moved on, calling to Wilbur, while Dodge lay in a sleep like death, moonlight silvering his face.

  Then Mary saw Madeleine running toward her. At first, she thought it was a giant bird trying to take off. She saw a lot of things that other people didn’t see, like the ghosts of Abenaki Indians, faces yellow and black with warpaint, sliding without sound across the lake in their whit
e birchbark canoes. She once saw a bird with the face of a man, flying above Seneca Mountain. Sometimes, after people had died in the town, she saw them peering through her window. Their mouths moved as if they were speaking, but she couldn’t hear a word.

  Madeleine had been delivering a new issue of the Forest Sentinel, dropping off bundles that had come from the printer that day. It was cold outside and she had the car’s heater turned up high. She had brought coffee and doughnuts and smudged the stacks of papers with sugar-greasy fingers. She surfed back and forth along the radio dial, listening to the Quebecois cowboy music. In the past, there had always been something about the empty streets and blacked-out houses that made her feel as if she were taking part in a truly hopeless task. But each new issue made her feel more confident. Each one was a slow step forward. The tortoise and the hare. She kept the image always in her mind.

  Madeleine had finished delivering the papers when she heard Mary’s voice. She ran out into the street and stopped a few paces short of Mary. “Are you all right?” She spoke to the woman as if she were speaking to a child who had picked up a gun or a knife and didn’t know the danger she was in.

  “Looking for Wilbur,” Mary said.

  Madeleine smiled at her gently. She knew she could not leave this woman to walk through the town at night, more of a ghost than the ghost of her dead son. Madeleine took hold of Mary’s arm and began to lead her home.

  Mary did not protest. The two women walked to Mary’s house. The only sounds that passed between them were sighs, one to comfort the other. Madeleine wondered if there might be some simple way of explaining to Mary that her son was dead, some way that no one had tried yet. But if such a way existed, Madeleine didn’t know it. As they approached the front gate, Madeleine heard a noise behind her and turned. She thought she saw a shadow darting back into the night. She moved on quickly.