Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  “I don’t know,” he said. He smoothed wrinkles from the red-and-black Hudson’s Bay blanket on the bed. Then he looked up suddenly. “Do you remember when they used to send up fireworks over the lake on the Fourth of July? I used to sit where I’m sitting now and watch them explode over the water.” Just then he needed to find something in common with her that was not spoken in the war talk of what their lives had become. He wanted to fill in the huge blanks that still kept a part of them as strangers to each other. Gabriel didn’t know how he would cope with this new danger. He didn’t see how he could go on working in the forest while a man who made pain for a living was out there hunting him down. He wondered what he would have to do in order to survive the days ahead, and whether he would lose whatever remained of his humanity in the violence he felt sure was coming.

  Madeleine remembered the fireworks. She had stood with the crowd at the edge of the lake and watched the great flowers of sparks spread and drop and disappear into the night sky. She understood why he would speak of something other than the danger. Madeleine recalled the way he had seemed before. All avenues of possibility mapped out. All reactions planned in advance. She was seeing him for the first time as he really was, without the mask of his ideals to shelter him.

  “You could leave town,” she said. “I doubt you would be followed.”

  “But this is my home.” He lifted his hands, palms up. “It was before and now it is again.”

  “I think you’re in a lot of danger.”

  Gabriel nodded, lower lip clamped between his teeth. Then he turned to face her. “But he’s got to catch me first,” he said, and smiled weakly.

  She reached up and touched his cheek with the palm of her hand.

  Gabriel felt the warmth of her brush through him, and it brought to the surface all that he had tried to hide away. She leaned toward him and he closed his arms around her, sweeping across the smoothness of her back.

  Her arms were around him, too, and she felt the buckle of his belt press into her stomach and his breath across her neck and the sharpness of his unshaven chin along the delicate outline of her ear. She pressed her hands to his face and kissed him until she was dizzy behind her eyes. She ran her fingers through his hair, smelling the pine-tar soap he used, and pulled him down on top of her. The old bedsprings creaked. She had closed her eyes while she was kissing him and now she opened them again. His eyes were open, too, and so close that they were out of focus. It was then she remembered that she did not know Gabriel. All she knew was his ideals, and even if she was in love with them, it was not enough. She realized what she had not known before. She was in love with someone else.

  Gabriel watched a glassiness come to her eyes. He understood what she was thinking and sat up.

  Then they were both shy and looked away.

  Gabriel lay down beside her on the too-small bed and she fell asleep with her head on his chest. He smelled her hair and ran his fingers through it and imagined how it might be to lie beside her more than just this once. He was not lonely anymore, even though he knew that when she woke she would walk out and this would never happen again. Sometimes, he was thinking, you run into people and after five minutes it is as if you’ve known them all your life. But that knowledge is fragile. Something always seems to come along to make them strangers again. As close as they were, too much still lay between them. Gabriel found himself wondering if she had ever been one of the voices to call back to him when he had sung out the Old Man Tucker song in the woods however many years ago it was.

  Then Gabriel’s thoughts turned to Mackenzie and the man who had been hired to track him down. It would not be long before the man found out who he was. He remembered what Swain had said about knowing when to quit, and until today he might have said the time was now. But in the moment he had raised his hands to Madeleine and said “This is my home,” he realized he would not be leaving once his work was done here. Not if he could stay. Before, he had planned to move on and exorcise this place and all its memories from his mind. But he could not do that, could not start again somewhere else.

  He left Madeleine sleeping on the bed, easing her head onto a pillow, and went over to where he kept the Webley revolver. He fetched out the gun from its hiding place beneath a floorboard where, as a young man in this house, he had kept a bottle of slivovitz plum brandy, knocking back the clear and burning liquid late at night while he sat on the windowsill, feeling the breeze off the lake on his alcohol-numbered face. He unwrapped the gun from its cloth and then unpacked the bullets from their waxed-paper case. With the cloth he wiped the thin gun oil from the barrel and the grip and then wiped the bullets in the oil. He opened the gun, which cracked the way a shotgun cracks to load. Then he filled the chambers, checking each bullet for rust as he slid it into the breech. He would carry that gun from now on and for the first time he knew he would use it. He stashed the gun in his boot by the door and went back to lie beside Madeleine.

  The rain had stopped now. Stray drops plipped off the gutters.

  When Madeleine woke, it was late in the night. Gabriel was asleep next to her. She did not need to wake him, or to say good-bye. They would see each other again. They had gone as far as they could go and turn back and still be friends. Madeleine was not filled with regret. She knew she might never have been sure about Dodge if it had not been for Gabriel and these past few hours spent beside him. All her life, Madeleine had been trying to find a balance between a love of people and a love of ideals, thinking that she could never have both. And what she realized now was that a worship of either extreme would reduce her life to misery. There had to be some middle ground, and now she had found it.

  Madeleine slipped out into the dark and walked home through the empty streets. She thought how peaceful Gabriel had looked asleep, and then she wondered how long it would be before this town became a combat zone.

  She was wrong about Gabriel. In his dreams he was not peaceful. He had gone to the place where he had often been before, hunted like an animal through the green and shadowed labyrinth of the forest. When he opened his eyes an hour later, it was still dark outside and he was covered in sweat. He had known that Madeleine would leave when she woke up and the worst thing he could do was try to make her stay. Still bleary-eyed, Gabriel pulled on his boots and stuffed the Webley in his coat pocket. Then he took up his duffel bag and headed back out into the forest.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Milky Way pushed back the other stars, spreading a blue-steel halo across the sky. Gabriel was moving through the woods. His joints ached from lack of sleep. As he passed through an area of clear-cut, he smelled the torn earth and sap on the tree trunks that lay uprooted on the ground, their roots like crooked fingers reaching up into the air. The soil was soft and clotted on his boots. Once he trod on an empty soda can. The metallic crackle dropped him to the earth in search of cover, the Webley yanked from his pocket and its hammer cocked before he realized where the noise had come from.

  He had brought with him his angle-headed military flashlight with a red filter over the bulb, but he did not need it. The red filter would have kept his night vision and made the light harder to track, but the moon was bright enough to see by. He had stopped at the cache and picked up more supplies. They were heavy, and he was covered in sweat from the effort of carrying them. Mosquitoes whined in his ears. In the distance, he could hear cars on the road that ran past Coltrane’s farm.

  Gabriel reached the logging track and stopped. He was worried about leaving footprints on the road, so he pulled an old pair of socks over his boots. It was a trick he had learned out west. As Gabriel advanced through the trees, he could distinguish the silhouettes of flat-bed Magirus and Mercedes and Volvo trucks, Case, Komatsu and Mitsubishi bulldozers and a road grader made by CAT. He could smell the damp-oil reek of the machinery. The day had been warm, and now as the metal cooled, it clicked and muttered to itself. The machines were parked by the side of the logging road, all painted yellow with their company names in black on t
he side. The steel had rusted through dents in the wasp-colored paint. The huge tires had treads four inches deep. Gabriel ran his hand over the teeth of the bulldozer, worn shiny and blue in the moonlight. They looked like dinosaurs. Some of this road-building equipment, Gabriel guessed from his scouting trips, had been sitting here for weeks, unused. But the flatbeds were used every day, and the bulldozers too, skidding down the slopes with their shovels serving as brakes, peeling off the top layers of soil as they cleared the land.

  Gabriel had brought with him a funnel, some heavy wire cutters and a loaded grease gun.

  He knew that it would be possible to damage the vehicles just by pulling out or cutting any wires he could find, slashing tires and ripping the stuffing out of the driver’s seat. This might keep them out of action for a number of days. But he only had one chance, so the damage he did was permanent. He moved from machine to machine, removing the oil-filler caps and pouring in handfuls of powder-fine graphite sand. Then he carefully wiped away any spilled grains from around the cap. After that, he took the grease gun from his bag and pumped grease into the lubrication zerk points at each joint in the machinery. Before he left home, he had emptied half of the grease from the gun and replaced it with the graphite. Now he pumped the grease and graphite mix into the lubrication points. After a few hours of use, the sand would have dispersed itself throughout the engine lubricating system and would begin to grind up the insides. The graphite-grease mixture would also do irreparable damage. Gabriel knew that by the time the engines showed signs of breaking down it would be too late. The vehicles would have to be towed away and their engines dismantled completely. Most would be beyond repair.

  The work took him a little over an hour. Every few minutes, he crouched down and listened, but there was only the booming sound of wind gusting over Coltrane’s fields, and the traffic on the road, becoming less frequent as the night grew deeper.

  Coltrane sat in the Loon’s Watch. It was almost closing time, but the bar was still crowded. There had been no work that day at the Mackenzie Company. The mill had completely closed down while each log was inspected for nails. There weren’t enough detectors to keep everyone busy, and at least half the workforce had been given the day off, this time with no wages. Now the men talked about the bills they had to pay.

  Coltrane would normally have been at home and asleep by now, but he had promised to help Dodge patrol the Algonquin that night. He lifted his mugful of the local north Maine beer called Gracey’s, took a drink and felt the bubbles crackling against the insides of his cheeks. It was his first time in the woods at night since he’d been stabbed. These days, Coltrane could not look at a knife without feeling the cold pinch of being cut. He couldn’t look up at the sky on a clear night without remembering how it was to lie in dirty water at the bottom of a canoe and have his life sputtering out like a candle with the wick burned down.

  Half an hour later, Coltrane and Dodge stood at the yellow metal gate that marked the entrance to the Algonquin Wilderness. Martha had driven them to the head of the logging road and then taken the car away.

  Dodge took a wine cork and burned it with Coltrane’s lighter. Then he blew out the flame and spread the black across Coltrane’s face. “Like war paint,” he said. Dodge’s face looked ghoulish in the light of the Zippo’s reeking flame.

  Coltrane tried to hold his breath so that the sour smell of beer would not reach Dodge. He wished he hadn’t had the drink. It only made things worse on his nerves.

  They jumped up and down on the spot to check that none of their gear was rattling. Each carried a flashlight, a canteen and their gun belts. It was the middle of the night when they headed into the Algonquin.

  “We got no better chance of finding someone tonight than we did last time. And that was in daylight,” Coltrane whispered.

  “At least we’re out here.” Dodge was barely listening. The faces of centuries-dead Algonquin Indians shimmered from the pillared darkness. He wished he had not painted his own face, as if in invitation to the ghosts.

  The rain was falling again and the woods seemed filled with footsteps. Water slithered through the chinks in their raingear and their bodies shrank away from the cold. They walked to the end of the logging road, where it disappeared into piles of gravel and cut tree branches.

  “Why don’t we just go to the Booths’ cabin and sit on the porch all night?” Coltrane told himself that if Dodge quit, then it was all right for him to do the same. And even going to the Booths’ cabin, where his blood was still dried into the wooden floorboards, was better than sitting in the woods.

  “We have to do this, Victor, even if it is almost useless. We have to do it because it’s all we can do.”

  They found the trailhead, took out their flashlights, and headed into the forest. Stones on the path glimmered like drops of spilled mercury. Now and then, Coltrane stopped and swung the beam of his light among the trees, but all they saw were the shuddering leaves of the white birches, and the darkness ready to lunge at them again as soon as the light swung away. Dodge kept his flashlight aimed at Coltrane’s heels. He couldn’t hear anything except the rain. Someone could have walked past ten feet away from him and he would not have seen.

  There was a shriek. The dark came crashing into Dodge and he cried out. His flashlight went spinning into the trees. He hit the ground, hard rocks under him, and heard Coltrane howling in confusion. Dodge rolled into the forest, struggling through the layers of raingear for his gun. He felt his nose begin to bleed and his eyes fizzed full of painful tears. He spat the blood off his lips, and tasted the blood mixed with the gritty bitterness of burnt cork. Dodge crawled through the dead leaves. Coltrane was shouting something, but Dodge did not know what. His hand closed on the gun butt and he pulled it from the holster. Dodge rolled onto his back and held the gun out at arm’s length, his eyes useless in the night and the rain.

  Coltrane stood on the path, looking hunchbacked in his rain-clothes. He held the light toward something that blocked his way.

  At first, Dodge thought it was a fallen tree. Then he saw it was a moose, nine feet tall at the tips of its fuzz-covered antlers. Coltrane and the animal stood frozen in the glare of the flashlight, each terrified of the other.

  Dodge let the gun drop slowly down to his knee. His heartbeat was so out of control that he felt as if he were being slapped rhythmically in the face.

  Coltrane switched off the light.

  Blindness swam into Dodge’s eyes.

  When Coltrane switched the light on again, the path was clear. He aimed the beam into the woods, but the woods were empty. The huge animal had disappeared without a sound. Then Coltrane shined the light in Dodge’s face.

  Dodge waved his hand, as if to swat the beam away. He crawled around until he found his own flashlight, spitting the last trickles of blood from his lips.

  They set off again, this time with Dodge in front. The two men had been walking for several hours when they heard the long wail of the night train coming down from Canada. The sound was muffled by the rain. The woods ended suddenly. The canopy of trees pulled back and they found themselves at the tracks. The rails flashed their lights back at them. The dull line of tracks converged into the forest. The wail came again, closer now, and then the first winking glare of the train’s beams sparked in the distance.

  Dodge and Coltrane turned off their flashlights and stood back from the tracks. Out in the open, the rain fell harder but not as noisily. They felt the clamminess of raingear against the bare skin of their arms.

  The rails pinged as the train came close, the headlight not winking now but steady and growing. The sound of the engines made a single unchanging rumble through the Algonquin. All other sounds were lost to it. The huge snub face of the VIA engine grew and grew and was suddenly almost on top of them, booming in their ears. The wind was in their faces. One, two, three, four engines. All deafening giants.

  The two men squinted from the force of it. The passing cars were like houses of coal and then
suddenly cars that were not dark. They saw people walking about, or sitting or sleeping. A dry, calm bubble in the middle of this thunder, having no idea that eyes were on them from outside. Thinking it was only the great darkness of the woods. Then the cars were dark again. Cargo wagons clattered by. And then the caboose, with a light to fend off the darkness that came careening in after it.

  It was in that light that both Coltrane and Dodge clearly saw a man standing on the other side of the tracks. He was dressed in black and his face was also blackened and the only thing to bounce back any light were his blue eyes.

  “Jesus,” Coltrane said quietly. Ever since Hazard’s death and the discovery of more spiked trees, Coltrane had felt as if he and Dodge were not on the trail of anything human, but a supernatural presence, which at any moment could explode from the forest and kill them, the way No Ears had butchered his dogs. And now, staring at this figure only a few feet away, Coltrane didn’t know whether he was in the presence of a man or Death himself, who had come up to finish the job.

  The man was gone. They heard the thrashing of his footsteps as he ran away.

  Dodge sprinted after him, leaping over the tracks made warm by the huge metal wheels, and then skidded down the slope onto the other side. Coltrane followed, the beam of his flashlight igniting the raindrops. Then the beam found the man in black and locked on him. He was following the path that led up the side of Seneca Mountain.

  Dodge knew that when this man left the path, they would have only a few seconds before he lost himself in the maze of trees. He raced after the man with all his strength.

  The ground was beginning to slope. Coltrane was already falling behind, exhausted by fear and the pain of his wound.

  The man in black tried to evade the flashlight’s beam, as if the light itself would bring him down. Then he swerved into the trees.

  Dodge jumped off the path after him. The cold air raked at Dodge’s throat. He didn’t know how long he had been running now. He did not reach for his revolver, because he was afraid that if he took his eyes off the man even for a second, he would lose him. “Will you Goddamn slow down?” he called. “I’m not against what you’re doing!”