Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  In the house, she helped Mary into bed and then sat down beside her. She took a brush from the bedside table and ran it gently through Mary’s hair. Mary bent forward, and Madeleine brushed the hair down the length of her back, smoothing it with her hands after each brush stroke. Mary never made a sound. Madeleine set down the brush and gently eased Mary back until her head was resting on the pillow, then tucked in the sheets around her. Mary gripped the covers to her throat. Madeleine sat beside her until at last Mary’s eyes closed. Then she went downstairs and fell asleep at the kitchen table, her head on the red-and-white checked tablecloth.

  Jonah Mackenzie stood outside in the shadows. He had watched, still as a heron, barely breathing, as the two women made their slow way down the road and into Mary’s house. He had left Alicia sleeping and gone outside to find Mary. Mackenzie didn’t know what he would do when he found her. He had hesitated when he at last caught sight of her. It was only a second’s hesitation, but then another figure had appeared, some ghoulish thing in white he recognized as Madeleine. So he followed them, footsteps hidden in the breeze. He wished he could have reached Mary first. He wanted to show that he still cared for her, even if this care was drawn from guilt. But now Madeleine had taken away even that small chance. To Mackenzie, she had become a lightning rod for everything that was not right in his life. He swore that he would pay her back for all her small injustices to him. And people won’t soon forget it, he thought. What I do to her will echo through this town for generations.

  Gabriel checked the cache that Swain had left behind. It contained several thousand ten-inch bridge spike nails, some copper-headed hammers, gloves, paint cans, a grease gun, tubes of grease, a bolt cutter, packets of graphite powder compound, a heavy knife and some tubes of wood glue. There was no note from Swain. No last wishing of good luck. But that was Swain’s way. Gabriel was impatient to begin his work, but he knew better than to start before his cover was complete. First, he had to learn the job from Mott, and make sure that his presence in the town no longer drew stares from the locals. He had to structure his new identity around him like a cocoon, until the place where his old self ended and his new self began became lost, even in his own mind. Patience, he told himself. You did not come so far so carefully to commit suicide at the last moment. Swain had warned him that the temptation would be there to rush in before he was ready. That was the mark of an amateur. But every day he waited, huge swaths were being cut through the Algonquin. It took every fragment of discipline that Gabriel owned to wait just a little longer before unleashing himself on the Mackenzie Company.

  For the first few days, Mott and Gabriel spent their time close to town. It was the last week of the blackfly season, before the tiny, vicious insects sank back into the swampy ground and stagnant ponds of the Algonquin. Mott taught Gabriel how to inspect the rails, to mark all places where the tracks would need repair by spraying the ties with pink fluorescent paint. Gabriel learned how to hammer rail spikes into the wooden ties, and how to drive the temperamental Putt-Putt. Mott taught him to write up all repair reports as soon as he arrived back in town and then send them to St. Johns first thing the following day. Gabriel learned to keep an eye on his watch, making sure to bring the Putt-Putt back to town before the VIA train was due. Mott explained to him that this was a little like Cinderella getting home from the ball before midnight, except that in this case if Cinderella arrived late she would find herself on the wrong end of a freight train. Mott found this hilarious. He had been saving up the joke for years. Soon Gabriel no longer noticed the rustle of his blaze-orange vest, how it seemed to glow in rainy weather and the way its brightness jabbed at the corners of his eyes whenever he raised an arm or bent down to inspect a rail.

  The Abenaki Junction station house had been converted to Mott’s repair shop. The building’s shuttered windows gave nothing away from the outside. Inside, Mott had created a museum of strangely shaped rocks and animal skulls, moose antlers and wood carvings done by himself on afternoons spent sitting by one of the several bodies of water named Mott Lake. When it came to naming them, he couldn’t help himself. Gabriel walked in amazement through the musty waiting room with its church-pew benches and frosted-glass ticket window. TICKETS it read, the word twined with ivy carved into the pane. On every surface were antlers, black and white loon feathers, eagle feathers. In the corner was an old musket Mott had found in a deserted cabin. It was the museum of Mott’s life. Gabriel began to see not only what Mott had learned, but also why it was that he stayed silent. He realized the great gift that Mott was making to him, and the only gift Gabriel had to offer in return was not to ask for explanations. Mott cleared out his stuff from the old station house on a Sunday morning when the sky was Carolina blue. He had no idea where he was going to put all his possessions. He would have given them to Gabriel, if Gabriel had asked. Gabriel helped with the packing, gentle with the artifacts, some of which belonged more to their coatings of dust than to what they had been in life.

  “You’re ready to work on your own now,” said Mott. “I’ll stop by sometimes to see how you’re doing.”

  Gabriel closed the truck’s gate. It made a hollow boom as the latch clicked. Gabriel was sad to lose the old man’s company, even though he knew it would be safer that way.

  Mott had no experience with good-byes. He just nodded and drove away. Something weighed on his mind. There had been one more reason he agreed to retire. He knew he could have made a stink and stayed on two more years, but there had been rumors, which he was starting to see come true, that the Mackenzie Company was going to cut down the entire Algonquin Wilderness. As first, such a thing seemed impossible to Mott, but he forced himself to realize that with enough time and enough men to work the chain saws, it could be done. And worse, he wouldn’t be able to do anything except stand by and watch it happen, because there was bound to be some contract somewhere that gave Mackenzie the right. Mott couldn’t bear to see that happen. He hoped Gabriel wouldn’t have to watch the Algonquin reduced to a tundra of stumps and plowed ground, which he had seen Mackenzie do before to stretches of wilderness that once had seemed impenetrable. That was another reason he had chosen a stranger: it would hurt less never to have known the place at all.

  It reminded Gabriel of his childhood to be woken every morning at five when the house shook and the springs of his saddle-backed bed vibrated as fully loaded logging trucks began to rumble past on their way up to Quebec. Strips of red tape were tied to trunks that hung out over the end of the truck. As each one passed, a spray of dust and pine needles blew up against the porch. Until then, the night was so quiet in Abenaki Junction that sometimes Gabriel would wake and think that he had gone deaf. It was as if everyone had slipped away, as the Abenaki Indians had done more than a century before, without sound and leaving no trace, and knowing they’d never return.

  At five-thirty, dressed in soft but heavy canvas clothing, Gabriel would set out from the old red house. He ate breakfast at the Four Seasons, alongside the telephone-line repairman and the loggers. By six-thirty he was out in the Putt-Putt, passing through the steel cage of the McClintock railroad bridge that marked the beginning of the wilderness. Every thousand yards, Gabriel would stop the Putt-Putt and walk back over the track, checking for damage. He carried the spray cans in the pockets of his jacket. The ball bearings rattled inside them as he walked.

  At noontime, when he heard the Mackenzie Company horn, like the bellowing of cattle through the woods, he would sit down and pull his sandwiches from their waxed-paper wrapping. He sat on a rail in front of the Putt-Putt, smelling the bitterness of creosoted wood growing warm in the sun. Or he walked some narrow path to the edge of a lake, took off his boots and waded out into the water. He munched on his sandwiches and wiggled his toes in the pale sand.

  Chain saws buzzed in the distance. Gabriel could hear their motors powering down as the logger stood back to let the tree fall. It was not until he reached a high point on the track that he could see the clear-cut forest i
n the thick green of the Algonquin. Each time, when he saw how much land had already been cleared, his stomach toppled and sank.

  When a few days had passed, Gabriel knew it was time to begin. It was as if he had been waiting for some signal, some clear order. Now he realized that the order would never come if he did not give it himself. There was no different feeling in his bones. That was the strangeness of it. He felt only the vague and distant vertigo of how much work remained in front of him. It was the time that he most wished he had a partner, someone with whom he could bluff his way out of fear. He missed the company of a woman. He had been without it for a long time, but he knew that starting any kind of intimate relationship now was the worst thing he could do. He could live in the cocoon of his lie, but only if the people around him stayed distant.

  The next day, Gabriel ate his breakfast as usual at the Four Seasons. It was easy to tell which of the customers had jobs that kept them outside. They were the ones squinting uncertainly through the windows at the low clouds hanging over Abenaki Junction. The clouds were crystalline bright, which meant rain. The outside workers had brought their foul-weather gear with them, oily blaze-orange raincoats made by Grundig, most so beaten up that the pop snaps had ripped out and the edges of the coats hung in tatters. Gabriel was using rain gear that had been left behind by Mott in the station house. The signal orange had faded to pink. The cloth had been stitched and patched and now even the patches were peeling off, but Gabriel felt more comfortable in it than anything new. It drew less attention to himself.

  A few people nodded good morning to him and he nodded back. The waitress knew his name and what he always ate. She poured him his coffee without being asked. Gabriel had lost the tightening of his stomach whenever he walked into the place. At first he had turned heads, as people tried to size him up, but now, as familiarity sank in, they no longer bothered. A few people knew he had taken over from Mott, and asked him how he liked the job. Gabriel was surprised at how little they pried into his business, and they seemed grateful that he did not pry into theirs. They smiled at him as if they knew he meant to stay and now was worth their committing him to memory.

  Gabriel was not hungry that morning. He ordered his food out of habit more than appetite. After breakfast, he walked quickly to the station and wrote his report from the day before. He filled out a Track Occupancy Permit and signaled it through. When the permit received clearance, he walked out to the Putt-Putt carrying a green duffel bag. He had gone to the cache the night before and taken what he needed—a hundred nails, some glue, the bolt cutter, a hammer and the knife. As he set out into the Algonquin, the tracks looked wide and empty and the town was still gray with sleep. Gabriel felt the trees close over his head like huge clasping hands. Two miles in, he stopped the Putt-Putt and checked his watch. He had five hours before the noon train was due from the north. He took off his orange raincoat and threw it on the Putt-Putt’s seat. The Naugahyde cover was crisscrossed with strips of silver repair tape. He walked down a hiker’s path until it intersected with a new logging road, which ran deep into the Algonquin. Logging operations had already begun here, and the forest was falling all along this road. Gabriel knew that by midmorning a nearly constant line of trucks would be moving up and down it, raising white dust. Mackenzie was eating the Algonquin from the inside out, as if to show as little cutting as possible to the people of Abenaki Junction until it was too late to protest.

  Having left the tracks, Gabriel knew that if someone caught him now, he would never be able to hide the duffel bag, or to explain away its contents. There was nothing to do but get on with the job. He had done enough work of this type over the past year, and his mind was not clouded by fear, but he had never worked alone before, and this new feeling was strange and cold, like walking through patches of fog.

  Rain found its way through the trees. The duffel was heavy and drew sweat from him in the humid air. Its thin canvas strap dug into his shoulder and he had to keep switching sides. Chain saws had started up in the distance. He was so used to the sound now that he barely noticed it except to gauge the distance of the loggers. When the wind changed direction, he could hear each creak, rustle and thump of the trees falling, and the howling of the chain saws as they sank into another trunk. The breeze was always playing tricks. The woods rustled with the rain. In the gloomy light, the colors were deep and slick like new paint. The only animals he saw were a couple of black-streaked, rust-colored chipmunks. They scuttled about on the path and vanished under fallen leaves when he came close. Red squirrels squawked and chuntered at him from above the path.

  Gabriel moved parallel to the road, two hundred feet into the trees so that he would not be seen by passing trucks and his footprints would not show in the gravel, which had been darkened by the rain. The strip of road was like a constant patch of blindness in the corner of his left eye.

  As he skirted past an area of clear-cut ground, he saw someone standing out in the middle of the devastated area. It was a woman. She was facing him, holding what looked like a pair of binoculars. Gabriel ducked down and waited for some sign that he might have been spotted. But she seemed to take no notice. He could see that now. Out there by herself. He didn’t recognize her. A stupid place to go birdwatching, thought Gabriel. After a while, the woman walked back to the logging road, climbed into a red Volkswagen and drove away.

  Gabriel pushed on until he found an area staked out with white tape. This meant it was due to be cut in the next couple of days. Over the next seven hours, Gabriel spiked a hundred trees. With the blade of a penknife, he cut a round piece from each trunk. Then he took a ten-inch nail and drove it in at knee height, where the chain saws would cut. The hammer was a welder’s hammer; the soft metal made less noise than an iron hammer, and its copper head would not draw sparks. He had also wrapped the head in a piece of cloth, so the metal would not ring when struck, a sound that carried a great distance in the woods. When the nail was almost all the way in, he took the bolt cutter from his duffle and clipped off the head of the nail so that it could not be pulled out. Then he used the point of another nail to drive it completely into the tree. After this, he replaced the circular piece of wood with a drop of glue on the inside so that the nail wouldn’t show. He picked the nail head off the ground and put it in the duffel. Finally, he sprayed a band of red paint around the trunk, to mark that the tree had been spiked.

  After every nail, he paused and listened for the drumming of a truck engine or the crunch of footsteps on the road. The rain fell harder and the woods grew misty. Puddles formed out on the gravel road. He was sweating and his arms were tired. Sometimes they cramped so badly that he dropped the hammer. When he unclenched his hands, they creaked like old hinges.

  Gabriel drove his last fifty nails into trees at shoulder height, so that the chain saws might miss the nails, but the logging saw down at the mill would strike them and be ruined. He knew that each circular logging saw cost almost $3,000 to replace. These trees were also marked with red paint. With the last of his paint, he marked trees that had not been spiked, to increase the numbers that would not be cut.

  He tore down the plastic tape that the loggers had used to mark the boundaries. The last thing Gabriel did before he headed back out to the tracks was to paint S-P-I-K-E-D in letters as large as he could make them on the trunks of trees that faced the road. This way there would be no mistake.

  He ran back toward the Putt-Putt, feeling the air cool him. When he reached the tracks, he looked to make sure they were empty. It was warmer here than in the woods. The rain beaded into rainbowed pebbles on the creosoted ties. He climbed back into the Putt-Putt and rode two miles toward town. On the way, he stopped and buried the spray-paint cans in the mossy earth beside the tracks.

  He reached the depot at noon. Ten minutes later, the VIA train roared past. Four engines. Fifty cars. The driver waved to him and blew the horn. Gabriel waved back, sweat clammy down his back. Then he sat down on the waiting bench outside and ate a peanut-butter-and-rasp
berry-jam sandwich for lunch. The raspberry seeds got stuck in his teeth.

  Back into the woods again, sleepy now from the food. For the rest of the day, Gabriel walked the tracks, marking places in need of repair. He had easily enough time to do this job. New sweat replaced the old sweat. He thought about how everything was in motion now. Gabriel wondered how long it would take the police or the logging company to catch him. It seemed only a matter of time before they did, and he knew he stood a chance of being killed or badly hurt, depending on who caught him. At the very least, he would go to prison. Then the most he could hope for was to be like Swain and make a showcase of his trial.

  Other times, he had always been sure to leave himself an escape route, but often that meant not doing as much work as needed to be done. By taking a job in Abenaki Junction, by renting an apartment and eating each day at the diner, he made his face familiar. If they ever found out who he really was, they would know long before he ever found out they were on to him. But he knew this was the only way to do more than just bother the Mackenzie Company. Bothering them would not slow them down enough or stop them altogether. He had to come back day after day into the woods and plant nails by the hundreds and thousands through the wilderness. When he started out in the west, it had been the hardest thing to do, to break the law. It took a while before he truly understood the line that he had crossed. More than just a line between doing something and just thinking about doing it. This was the line where his own safety became less important than carrying out the job. Strange, Gabriel thought, that I had to cross the line before I could see what it was.

  When he reached home, he hung his heavy leather tool belt on the coat hook on the back of the door. He put on his leather-and-canvas work gloves and fetched a pad of paper and a pencil. He took a page from the middle of the pad, to be sure it would have no fingerprints on it. Then he sat down at the wobbly kitchen table. His hands were so raw and cramped from spiking the trees that he could barely grip the pencil.