Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  Mackenzie sent for Coltrane. While he waited, he rolled a silver dollar back and forth over his knuckles. His eyes stayed fixed on the slowly turning coin. Except for the mechanical motion of one hand, Mackenzie remained as still as a man who has rested his foot on a landmine and knows it, realizing that the slightest movement will trigger the device. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts, setting them in one last rank of order before the explosion. Then he heard Coltrane’s boots in the hallway. “Come in and sit down,” he said.

  Coltrane was uneasy as he shut the door behind him, as if blocking an escape route he would need.

  Mackenzie let his breath trail out. “Who’s doing this to me?” he asked. “What have I done to deserve it?” He ran his hand across the dull, rough-edged steel of the tree spikes he had collected on his desk. “I have been honest, decent, kind and loyal to the people of this town.” With the knife edge of his palm, Mackenzie chopped the thought where it hovered in front of his face. “I have done nothing to make people hate me. But how can I fight an enemy who won’t show his face? I refuse to allow fifty dollars’ worth of bridge spikes to ruin an operation worth millions. In years to come, Coltrane”—Mackenzie snatched up the nails and held them like daggers in the air—“it won’t be this tree-spiking that people talk about. Instead, it will be how much I made these criminals pay for what they’ve done. And if the law won’t make them pay, then I will.”

  Coltrane said nothing. He missed his wife and his dogs.

  “Madeleine has something to do with it,” continued Mackenzie. “She and all the fucking granola people who read that newspaper of hers. They’re all too shit scared to do anything until somebody else does it first. And isn’t it the biggest fucking irony that I’m the one who had the balls to start it?” He looked up at Coltrane, who had no answer. “You see, those people have no spine. They stick with something as long as it’s trendy and then they drop it and move on to something else. I bet that as soon as they decided they were going to be environmentalists and protect our resources, as if they even knew what our resources are, I bet they all threw away their old clothes and went out and bought new ones with goddamned SAVE THE WORLD slogans on them. How’s that for protecting our resources?” Mackenzie fell silent. He sat red-faced and out of breath, the nails still raised in the air.

  “I ought to be going,” said Coltrane.

  When Mackenzie was alone again, he struggled to think of a plan. The Algonquin was too big a place to patrol. Dodge couldn’t handle it on his own and he couldn’t spare his own loggers. They were working too hard as it was. It had to be something different. War against anyone who dared make war on him.

  “Mackenzie’s coming!” Martha the police switchboard operator yelled at Dodge over the row of rubber trolls arranged on her desk. She had been collecting them for years. They all had different uniforms and different-colored hair.

  Mackenzie was talking even before he made it through the door. He swung his body in violent jerks toward them, the artificial leg dragging in the dirt and his cane jabbed so hard into the ground that the heavy wood bowed with the pressure. “What are you doing sitting here? Why aren’t you out catching bad guys?”

  Dodge stood. “I’m making patrols through there several times a night, Mr. Mackenzie.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Well, you said you didn’t want us bringing people up from Skowhegan, and seeing as it’s your operation …”

  “Damn right it is! And I got enough bad press with that Forest Sentinel dogging my ass. Bring Skowhegan people in and pretty soon the whole world is going to be in my face.”

  “We could try bringing in some US Forestry Service personnel. They might agree to patrol the woods on foot.”

  “No. For the same reason.” He rapped his knuckles on Dodge’s desk. “If they come, we’ll all have more problems than before.” There were other reasons Mackenzie did not want this. He was afraid the Forestry Service would have something to say about his clear-cutting methods, particularly the way he had been bulldozing some of the slopes of Seneca Mountain. The streams and lakes were silting up at a rate that surprised even him.

  “There’s only me here, Mr. Mackenzie. Victor Coltrane’s been helping but …”

  “It’s not enough!” Mackenzie spat the words out, then spun on his heel and left.

  Martha took off her headphones and set them gently on the desk in front of her. “What was he going on about? He knows you can’t do more than you’re already doing and he doesn’t want you bringing in help from outside.”

  “I don’t know what he’s up to.” Dodge leaned back and ran his fingers through his short-cropped hair. “It’s like he was warning us or something.”

  Madeleine was in her darkroom, printing the pictures she had made of the clear-cut a few days before. She planned to release a special edition because of the spiked trees that had just been discovered. She knew people would draw a link between her paper and the spiking, and she wanted to make clear that she had nothing to do with it. The incident had sent a new tremor through the town, as if Abenaki Junction had just come under siege. Madeleine believed that Hazard had done the work, and wondered how many trees he had spiked before he died. But she wondered why. Hazard had never said anything to her about wanting to stop Mackenzie. She had never even seen him with a copy of the Forest Sentinel.

  In the ghoulish red of the darkroom lights, she slid each 8×10 sheet of Ilford paper into a developing tray. Then with a pair of rubber-tipped tongs she tapped the paper back and forth in the liquid until the print began to appear. She bent down over the tray as the smoky images emerged. As soon as the picture was complete, she slid the paper into a stop bath to prevent overdeveloping.

  The camera had captured it perfectly. The clear-cut ground looked like photos she had seen of battlefields in World War I. The landscape was so completely empty of life that the only things that could have survived the cutting had either fled or were hiding underground, the way the soldiers had done in their trenches, huddling from the shriek and blast of artillery fire.

  While she printed another picture, she found herself thinking about what Jonah Mackenzie had told her—that she saw everything through the world of her camera lens, where everything was compacted and idealized. The lens did do that. She could not deny it. These neatly bordered pictures made the Algonquin seem more graspable, less overwhelming in its vastness.

  A jagged barricade of torn-up tree stumps filled the picture. Behind it stood the uncut pines. Rising above them was the humped back of Seneca Mountain. She slid the print into the stop bath and at that moment she noticed a figure standing at the edge of the woods. She bent down, the fumes of the stop bath burning in her nostrils. Maybe it’s just a tree, she thought. But she looked again and realized she had been right the first time.

  A man stood watching her. He carried some kind of satchel. She could just make out the features of his face. It took her a few seconds to recognize him as the one she had seen in the Loon’s Watch bar a while ago and since then each morning coming out of the Four Seasons while she was on her way to work. He was new in town, the one who had just taken Benny Mott’s old job. Mott had called to cancel the want ad in her paper only a few days before. And Lazarus had called to say his house had been rented by a man named Adam Gabriel. This area of clear-cut was a long way from the tracks. It was close by the area that had been spiked. She had no doubt what he was doing there.

  Her first reaction was to call the police. She walked out of the darkroom and into the harsh light of her office. She breathed out the acetic-acid fumes, which passed across her lips with the staleness of old tobacco smoke. She picked up the phone but then she paused and did not dial the number.

  Madeleine was thinking of the way Wilbur Hazard had been treated in Abenaki Junction—always as a stranger. And now this new man had arrived in town and within a few days she was calling on the police to ransack his apartment and take him down to the station. It was not illegal to go walking in the
woods. She realized she was thinking with the same paranoia that she usually blamed on Mackenzie.

  Madeleine decided she would talk to him herself. She waited until the end of the workday and then walked down to the old train station. She was sitting on the bench outside when the Putt-Putt rolled out of the woods, its burbling engine audible long before she could see the machine.

  Gabriel recognized the woman. She was the one he had met in the bar. He knew she ran the Forest Sentinel. He had often seen her on her way to work, but he had stayed away from her, even if she was the person in town most likely to understand what he was doing. It was not a chance he could afford to take. He bottled up his worry and by the time he climbed from the Putt-Putt he was smiling. “That’s a good place to catch the sun.” Gabriel nodded at where she was sitting.

  Madeleine looked at the bench as if she had never seen it before. Then she turned to face him. “I want to talk to you,” she said.

  He sat down on the bench with her. “All right,” he said cautiously.

  She pulled the photo from her satchel.

  It took a second for Gabriel to see the figure in the picture and a few more seconds before he recognized it as himself. Those weren’t binoculars after all, he thought. Now he looked at her. “You said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “That’s you.” She did not take her eyes from him. Her face was grim.

  He nodded. “I was on my lunch break.”

  “No you weren’t. No that far into the woods. You were spiking those trees. Finishing off the work you started with your friend Wilbur Hazard.”

  “I never met that guy,” said Gabriel quietly.

  “All right. Even if that’s true, why did you spike those trees?”

  Gabriel looked at her and his gaze faltered. He could tell she already knew. He didn’t want to insult her by lying. The photo was proof enough.

  “Why?” she asked again.

  He leaned back against the sun-warmed boards of the station building. The house of lies he had built for himself was coming apart already. Was it worth it? he asked himself. A hundred trees among millions? Was it worth what will happen to me now? He turned to face her, feeling the old paint on the walls crumble as he rolled the back of his head across the board. He felt a roughness in his throat. In all of the imagined endings to his struggle, he had never pictured himself sitting on a bench with a beautiful woman. “Have you already gone to the police?”

  “No. I wanted to be sure it was you.”

  Gabriel sighed and stared at the scuffed toes of his boots. “Not with that photo you didn’t. You were already sure. You just wanted to find out why.”

  She realized he was right. She took the photo from his lap and put it back in the satchel.

  “What are you going to do?” Not since he had stood, oil-coated and delirious with his hands in the air, before the commandos in Kuwait did he feel his fate so much in someone else’s hands.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She could not tell whether this man and what he had done against Mackenzie was the embodiment of all the ideals for which she had worked or whether he was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. “I’ve never resorted to …”

  Gabriel cut her off. “Violence?” He had suddenly stopped looking frightened, the way he had been only a second before.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  He was staring out into the trees beyond the tracks, his face dirty with sweat and dust. “What are you trying to accomplish with your newspaper?” Then, before she could answer that question, he fired another at her. “Isn’t it one of your main objectives to stop Mackenzie from cutting down the Algonquin? I mean, after all, if the Algonquin goes, you’ll be writing an environmental newspaper in the middle of a wasteland.”

  “Of course.” It was the first time she had ever heard someone in Abenaki Junction speak out passionately against the clear-cutting. “I’d give my front teeth to stop him.”

  “Is that all? Just a couple of teeth?”

  Madeleine watched him closely. He did not have the wild-eyed look she would have painted on the face of a radical. He looked strangely calm, considering the things he was saying. It was as if he had worked out all avenues of possibility long ago. In that, he reminded Madeleine of herself. She wanted to tell him about about the gradual process that she had begun here years ago, about the tortoise and the hare, but she could sense just from the tone of his voice that his ideals had been fixed for a long time. There would be no room to convince him of anything except what he already believed. “Why this place?” she asked him. “Why here?”

  Gabriel didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he turned to her, head tilted to one side and eyes narrowed with curiosity. “Do I seem familiar to you?” he asked.

  She looked at the slight upward curve of his upper lip and the russet in his hair. Slowly she shook her head. “No.”

  “I used to live here. A long time ago.” Gabriel told her who he was. In the last few minutes, he had remembered Madeleine. He recalled how she had been on the fringe of groups at school, always so outspoken that few children her age felt comfortable with her. She seemed to have more patience for ideas than for people. Time has treated you well, he thought as he looked at her. Better than it treated me. “I could use your help,” he said. “If you honestly want Mackenzie stopped, you’ll see this is the only way it can be done. If we had all the time in the world, it would be different. But we have only a couple of months.” Gabriel had lived for so many days in the intense loneliness of his forged identity that suddenly to be requesting help from this woman uncovered instincts he thought he had buried for good.

  “You mean go into the woods and spike trees with you?”

  “Well, you could start by not turning me in.” He watched her closely. Even though she was a stranger, it was one of the few times in Gabriel’s life that he had met someone with whom he had so much in common that there was almost no need to talk. His eyes were dry from staring.

  Madeleine was surprised at herself that she did not immediately refuse his request. The softness of his voice was persuasive. He had a gentle face. He was not what she had expected.

  “I respect what you do,” said Gabriel. “It does a lot of good. It does all the good in the world, because from reading your paper and others like it, people will eventually understand how big the problem is. But it’s not happening quickly enough. Mackenzie is out there in the Algonquin destroying life we don’t even know exists yet. If you don’t act against this clear-cutting, and I mean act, all you and your newspaper will be is the chronicler of the last days of the Algonquin Wilderness. I need you to help me.” He paused for a moment. “To help me, please.”

  “I have to think about this,” she said. She stood and heaved her satchel onto her shoulder. “I can’t make you any promises.”

  Gabriel nodded. It was more than he had expected. He raised his hands a few inches from his lap and let them drop again.

  Madeleine saw his gesture of helplessness. She realized how alone he seemed, but he was not a stranger to her either. What this man was doing now in the Algonquin, she herself had thought of doing many times before. And now she asked herself if the only reason she had stopped short of spiking the trees was fear or some high ideal of non-violence. This man could not answer that for her. She would have to find it out for herself.

  Madeleine walked away. In the light of sunset, shadows stretched across the road. TV aerials threw shapes like the branches of dead trees across the dust. She had gone only a few hundred feet when a metallic shriek came from the direction of the sawmill. It sent birds racing from the telephone wires.

  Over the years, the people of Abenaki Junction had grown used to the whine of Mackenzie’s band saws and the thump of the bark stripper as it bounced over uneven logs. They heard the constant humming of conveyor belts as wood was cut into planks and fed out to the lumberyard, where the planks were sorted by size and placed into different stalls. Forklift drivers carried the stacked planks into a storage
house the size of a small airplane hangar. People set their watches by Mackenzie’s noon lunch whistle. During the week, they no longer noticed the noise, the way a person stops hearing the tick of a clock in a room, but they would notice the silence if ever the band saws stopped running. They felt the rumble of logging trucks coasting down the hill that led to Skowhegan, scattering old wood chips like brown confetti, and the punched-out hiss of air brakes kicking in at the steepest part of the hill. By the time anyone from Abenaki Junction came to work at the mill, the sounds of its operation were so familiar that the only difference was a slight increase in volume as they set foot inside the logging compound.

  But this shriek was like nothing anyone had heard before. One of the huge circular saws had bitten into a ten-inch nail, hammered by Gabriel into a tree above the line where the metal detectors had reached. Sparks sprayed like fireworks across the cutting room. The jagged edges of the saw bent sideways and the jolt threw the main piston of the saw’s engine. The machine howled and crashed as its insides broke apart and gear wheels spun without connecting.

  Coltrane was so shocked by the noise that at first he did not move. Then his senses returned and he ran to the greasy black ALL STOP button that cut power to the mill. Engines throughout the building hummed deeper and deeper until Coltrane could see the mangled shark-teeth cutting edge of the saw as it finally quit spinning. The conveyor belt stopped. The bark grinder stopped. All sound disappeared. Then came the clatter of workers running toward the cutting room.

  Mackenzie had been in his office, on the phone to a trucking company in Bangor. When he heard the noise, he hunched over his desk, teeth bared, as if the blade of the saw were about to carve its way through his office wall. He replaced the receiver without saying another word and stamped down the main staircase into the logging yard. No one had to tell him what had happened. He walked from machine to machine. On a chalkboard in his head, he drew a series of numbers. It would cost $3,500 to replace the ruined parts.