Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  Mill workers stood around, crowding doorways and blotting out the daylight. Coltrane waited with a shorn-off piece of the nail between his thumb and first two fingers. He prepared himself for the detonation of Mackenzie’s rage. “We must have missed one of the spikes with our metal detector,” he said quietly when Mackenzie reached him.

  “Anybody hurt?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No, sir. It’s just the saw blade and the motor.”

  “Do we have a spare blade in stock?”

  “There’s one in the back.” Coltrane jerked his chin in the direction of the storehouse.

  “Well, replace it, and get the spare motor that’s out there, too. Make sure to pass all the logs under a metal detector again. Get the place running.”

  Coltrane felt like a man in a bunker into which a grenade had been thrown. The time had passed for the explosion, and he was slowly beginning to realize that the bomb would not go off. Coltrane did not understand it. He did not trust the silence and the illusion of Mackenzie’s calm. It seemed more threatening than the eruption he’d expected.

  Mackenzie walked back to his office and shut the door. He sat with his hands neatly folded on the blotter in front of him. His lungs were filled with the sour lumberyard smell, like that of old beer left out after a party. It came from tons of woodchips dumped in a pile by the roadside. The pile steamed all year long, melting the snow that fell around it from October to late March. “Sal Ungaro,” he said. “Sal Ungaro.” He repeated the name as if it were an incantation, like summoning the devil from the letters on a Ouija board.

  At the other end of town, Madeleine Cody stood in the middle of the street. She had been frozen by the noise, as if giant fingernails had scraped down a blackboard. What reached her next was not a sound but a lack of sound. Across the street, she saw Lazarus in the doorway of the Loon’s Watch bar, a steel beer keg in his arms. He seemed to have forgotten about its weight. His mouth hung slightly open in his concentrated efforts to hear through this sudden stillness. There were others, waiting and listening. After a few minutes, they began to filter back inside.

  Madeleine caught sight of Gabriel standing outside the station house. He was watching her. He did not look afraid, as if he had resigned himself to whatever choice she made. He just watched her, waiting to see what she’d do. Madeleine turned and walked on, finding her way home on instinct alone, swerving like a long-distance driver with each curve of the road, but miles away inside her head.

  To hell with a clean fight, thought Mackenzie. To hell with all the gentlemanly rules of war. He paced back and forth in front of his fireplace. “What if it’s one of those terrorist groups? The kind that set off bombs?” he asked Alicia.

  “I’m sure Dodge has a handle on it.” Alicia knew that nothing anybody said would make sense to him anymore. It was late at night, and he often talked wildly when he was tired.

  “But Dodge is just one man. With a thousand of him, I could conquer the whole damn world, but I’ve only got one!”

  “I don’t think you’re being fair.”

  “Fair? Why are you always waving that word in my face? Nothing in business is based on fairness! The only time people are fair is when it’s profitable!”

  “Don’t shout at me. You can’t win arguments just by making noise.”

  “I’m not shouting!” Mackenzie clenched his hands into fists. Then he began to speak more quietly. “I just don’t think I can get this solved by relying on the law.” Even though he sometimes pretended not to listen to her, Mackenzie balanced everything Alicia said, and thought carefully before proceeding. He considered her his equal in most things. And in the things in which they were not equal, he knew she far outclassed him. “I might have to hire some people.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “People who will clear these bastards out of the woods. People who don’t fancy-dance around.” He breathed out violently. “You know.”

  “You mean you’re going to be calling that old friend of yours. Ungaro. The one who does shady bits and pieces for foreign governments.” She remembered Ungaro from their days at college. He was always at the parties, usually alone and standing with his back to the wall, shit-grinning at some joke inside his head.

  “I might give old Sal a call. Might have to.”

  Don’t use his first name to me, thought Alicia. Don’t call him “old Sal.” Don’t try to humanize him. I’ve seen the man. I’ve seen the damage he does. She didn’t have to say any of this to Mackenzie, because Mackenzie knew it well enough himself. Ungaro would get the job done, but it would be like unleashing a pack of dogs who wouldn’t come back when you called them. “I can’t believe you’re considering this,” she said.

  “Jesus, Alicia! I can hardly believe it either. But extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures.” The idea had walked into Mackenzie’s head and now it wouldn’t leave. It jabbered at him like the red-tailed squirrels in the trees.

  “What if you try to contact these tree-spiking people and reach some kind of compromise?” Alicia thought of her talk with Madeleine. She didn’t want to be the go-between, but they were both so stubborn that she knew it might be the only way.

  “I refuse to negotiate with terrorists.” Mackenzie’s voice had reached an ugly calm.

  “Well, maybe you should ask yourself why people might do this. Maybe you should think twice about clear-cutting the Algonquin. You have to remember that your father did things differently. He kept up a sustainable yield.” It was always dangerous for her to bring up the topic of his father. Sometimes he would simply ignore her. Other times he would explode. There was never any telling what nerves would be struck. She had never known anyone so driven to succeed by the memory of a dead man. It was as if everything her husband did was somehow to gain the approval of his father. But since the man was long gone, the approval never came, and Jonah Mackenzie just kept working harder and harder, as if to bridge the gap between life and death itself.

  Mackenzie avoided the topic of his father. “It has something to do with this damn Forest Sentinel. I know it does. If I could stop that little paper from spewing out all Madeleine’s gossip, I know I’d stop the trouble. But she’s not going to take my offer. If she were, she’d have done it already.”

  “So talk to Madeleine. Don’t just try to buy her out and shut her up that way. Understand a little better what the environmental movement is all about. It’s not just the Algonquin. And it’s not just Madeleine, either. Your own loggers are afraid that you’ll wipe out their jobs in a decade.”

  “That forest belongs to me, Alicia! I paid for it and it’s mine. It’s an investment. In order to get my money back, I have to cut down the trees.”

  She got up and stared down at him. “Ask yourself what it means that you’re thinking of bringing Sal Ungaro into this. Are you just going to turn this forest into a combat zone? Your ability to hire someone to take care of your dirty work doesn’t prove that you were right.”

  No, thought Mackenzie. But I’m the one left standing at the end.

  The next day, in the space of fifteen minutes, even before the early-morning sun had untangled itself from the treeline, five out of seven circular blades at the mill struck nails and were put out of action.

  The whole plant shut down.

  Coltrane said nothing. When the fifth blade crashed, he just punched the grimed and sawdust-coated emergency ALL STOP button one more time. Then he took off his hard hat and kicked it like a football out into the mountains of logs that lay in the compound, still waiting to be cut and bleeding sap like honey. All of the logs that broke the saws had been checked in the forest for nails before they were cut, so he knew these had been double-spiked. The loggers must have checked each tree for just one nail. Either that, or they had been spiked after cutting.

  The plank stackers and machine operators stood waiting, as if they were parts of the same broken machinery and their power had also been shut down. Everyone at the company, even the secretaries far
above the cutting floor, weighed the possibility of anger slung in their direction.

  For a few minutes, while the sawdust settled and curious eyes peered at the crippled teeth of the saw blades, Coltrane stood motionless on the loading ramp, as if waiting for his hard hat to come boomeranging back to him from its place among the logs. He was balancing in his mind whether to go on or to give up. He knew he might take the fall for this. Be the sacrificial goat. Then Coltrane caught sight of people watching him from the cutting floor and the administrative office. Eyes glinted softly from every shadow of the compound. All waiting.

  “Get the metal detectors!” Coltrane called to them.

  There was no hesitation. Loggers were almost fighting over who got to use the detectors, while the rest followed behind with pliers and chisels to dig out nails once they were found. Soon the lumberyard was humming with talk and the ear-grating bleep of detectors finding metal in the logs. Then came the whack of chisels digging into wood and the whispering shush of spray cans painting bright-orange splats over the spots where the nails had been. Soon the logs were polka-dotted with paint. No one stopped to think about the work that lay ahead of them.

  On the other side of town, Dodge had heard the saw blades crash. He had been waiting at the old station depot for over an hour. He wanted to question the man who’d taken Mott’s place, although no one he talked to said the man seemed suspicious, including Mott. Dodge knocked on the depot door, and because the place was not locked, he walked inside. The depot looked bare now and reminded him of when he was a little boy, catching the train west to Montreal with his mother. He remembered snow piled up so high that it blocked the light from the windows and the smell of hot cider spiced with cinnamon and cloves, stewing in a pot and given out free in tin mugs by the Stationmaster, a man named Adler. And on the last day that the passenger train stopped in town, Mr. Adler got on that train with a suitcase, waved good-bye and never came back.

  Gabriel was working on the tracks up by the Canadian border. Out there, he felt as if he had reached the end of the world, and that only a few miles away the polar ice was nudging against the land. He felt the strange seduction of routine. There was no sense of heroics as he set out each morning; there was only the fatigue of walking the tracks with the rolling stride he had adapted for moving along the ties. Automatically he reached into the pocket of his canvas Filson vest and pulled out a spray can of fluorescent paint to mark any place where a pin had come loose on the rails. All he had been thinking about was whether Madeleine would help him or whether this would be his last day under the open sky for years to come.

  As Gabriel rode home, he listened to a portable radio that Mott had left behind. Its best reception was on a French-Canadian station that played cowboy songs in French. Gabriel sang along, inventing words to replace the lyrics, which he could not understand. Rounding the last bend in the tracks, the Putt-Putt’s engine racing, he saw Dodge’s police car parked at the depot. Bile tipped into his stomach. She brought in the police after all, he thought, and suddenly he knew how Swain had felt. That sense of being too tired to run. Of having no place to go. He was glad that he had spiked another hundred trees that day. It would be his parting shot. Swain had told him to expect rough treatment from the police, and even rougher if the loggers got to him first. The more he resisted, the more he would be beaten. If they caught him out in the woods after all the damage he’d done, there was a fair chance they would kill him, the way they had tried to kill Hazard. As soon as Gabriel stopped the engine, he climbed out with his hard hat in his hands, like a man come to ask for a job. “What can I do for you?”

  Dodge walked out of the shadows. “I just wanted to know if you’d seen anybody walking on the tracks these past few days. You know, we’ve had a little trouble with some trees being spiked.”

  “I did hear about that,” said Gabriel. It dawned on him that Madeleine had not gone to the police. He felt relief like nervous laughter in his throat and had to choke it back. He wanted to find Madeleine as soon as he could and thank her. Perhaps she had even decided to help him. The great cage of his loneliness was suddenly gone, even if he knew it would return.

  Gabriel recognized Dodge. They had been in school together for a while, although they had barely known each other because they were two grades apart. They had crossed paths several times since Gabriel had returned to Abenaki Junction, and Gabriel had waited for the sharp stare of recognition to pass across Dodge’s face. But there was none. It made Gabriel both relieved and sad to think that he had vanished from Dodge’s thoughts.

  “Where did you hear about the spikings?” Dodge walked to within a few feet of Gabriel, deliberately too close for comfort. He knew that to get answers from a person, he sometimes had to make them ill at ease.

  “They practically have it on the menu at the Four Seasons.”

  Dodge smiled, but Gabriel’s face stayed serious. Dodge sat down on the station-house bench, remembering how he had once sat here when his feet didn’t touch the ground. “So you haven’t seen anybody on the tracks lately?”

  “It’s only me out there.”

  “Personally, you know”—Dodge folded his hands on his lap—“I don’t think they should be cutting down the Algonquin.”

  It seemed like a trap to Gabriel. Even a clumsy trap. “I only just arrived in town,” he said, as if this would excuse him from anything.

  Dodge knew he would be keeping his eye on this man for a while. He didn’t want to make him too uncomfortable for now. Dodge slapped his knees and stood. “Well, if you see anything, give me a call.”

  “Yes, of course.” Gabriel waited while Dodge climbed back into the patrol car and drove away. He was suspicious that Dodge asked no more questions. That man’s not through with me yet, he thought.

  A face loomed gruesomely against the window of the Forest Sentinel door. The pebbled glass seemed to make its flesh boil. The door opened and Jonah Mackenzie walked in. He wore a black-and-gray-check woolen vest, khaki trousers tucked into boots, and a plain blue wool tie that was frayed at the knot. He instantly became the center of the room. Even the walls appeared to back away. “May I talk with you?” he asked Madeleine and crumpled his face in an unenthusiastic smile.

  Madeleine knew what this was about. Since her dinner with Mackenzie, she had tried not to think about his offer, but it was as if he had planted a tiny transmitter in her head that sent messages crackling through her brain. A constant and monotonous voice announced the reasons she should leave Abenaki Junction and begin again someplace else. It reminded her of when Barnegat had come back from Vietnam, out of his mind on heroin and the knowledge of Black Ops atrocities, swearing that the Vietcong had captured him and replaced one of his fillings with a miniature radio that broadcast Radio Hanoi twenty-four hours a day.

  Each time Madeleine wrote about Mackenzie in the Forest Sentinel, which was almost every issue, she had expected him to come storming into her office, but this was the first time she had seen him walk into the building. She saw the familiar smile knife through his waxy cheeks. It was his perfect camouflage. He was the most pokerfaced, unreadable man she had ever encountered.

  “Have you been thinking about the money?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Madeleine told him. It felt like a confession. The voices were still there, hundreds of them like dirty sea-foam bubbles piled up in the corners of her mind.

  “It serves us all in the end.”

  “I’m not going to sell the paper, Jonah. If I were in your shoes, I might be making the same kind of offer. But I think that if you were in my shoes, you would say the same thing I’m saying now, which is thank you, but no.”

  Mackenzie had prepared himself for this. He had even expected it and was glad Madeleine spoke so gracefully. People had come to him in years past and tried to buy him out, and he had sent them on their way far less politely than he was being sent now. He began to feel sorry for her, wishing he could explain that the alternative to selling the paper was a call to Sal Ungaro.
Mackenzie decided to make one last effort, and came straight to the point. There had been enough slippery talk. “How much do you want?”

  “Nothing. Really. It was a generous offer to begin with.” Now that she had refused, the voices were suddenly gone.

  “I’ll increase the offer by five thousand dollars. That’s my limit.”

  “It’s not for sale. My business isn’t worth even a third of that. You’re making fools of us both.”

  “Please take the money. Let me worry about who looks a fool.” For your own good, he wanted to say. Or I will scythe you down. I will clean the slate. “Look, I know, even if you don’t, that your paper has something to do with whoever is spiking the trees.”

  Madeleine drummed her fingers once on the tabletop. “If you can find one paragraph in my paper that advocates tree-spiking, I’ll give you the damn paper.”

  “Well, what about this?” He yanked a neatly folded page out of his pocket. “Your last issue had a whole segment on it.”

  “An explanation of what’s going on. Nothing more.”

  “It’s practically a battle cry! Look, this is my final offer. Instead of buying your paper, I will offer to leave a thousand acres of the Algonquin standing. And you don’t even have to stop writing your paper. You don’t even have to leave town.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You have to stop the tree-spiking. Make it stop.” He had the thousand acres already bracketed in his mind. It was bottomland, so swampy that few trees grew there and those that did were stunted and not worth the cutting. What he hated most of all about the offer was that it made him look like someone backing down from a fight.

  It was at this moment that Madeleine decided for certain she would not call Dodge and tell him about Gabriel. The things that Gabriel said had sunk into her mind. Now was not the moment for the tortoise and the hare. With so little time left, there was no other way to fight Mackenzie except with the same ruthlessness that he himself employed. She could not see herself out in the woods spiking trees, but her silence made her just as guilty as if she had hammered in the nails herself. “I can’t make it stop,” she told Mackenzie.