Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  “Do you want to get some breakfast at the Boom Chain?” Pulsifer said. “I’m paying.”

  My gaze rose to the hillside across the lot, behind which loomed the unseen mountains. “I’d prefer we go visit the woman who found Shadow.”

  “Because who doesn’t love the cops knocking at their door at five-thirty A.M.?”

  He had a point. “I guess I could use some breakfast. But since when do you ever pick up a tab?”

  “Didn’t you just turn thirty? Consider it a birthday present.”

  “My birthday was in February, Gary.”

  I had blundered into his carefully laid trap. “Well, mine’s coming up at the end of the month. So I guess it’s your turn to buy.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, we were seated in the corner booth of the Boom Chain Restaurant under a pair of antique snowshoes and a stuffed coyote head mounted on the wall as decorations. We were the first, and so far only, customers of the morning.

  A waitress appeared with a scorched-bottomed coffeepot. She had streaks of gray in her loose-flowing hair, an unzipped gray hoodie over her uniform dress, and a crooked smile of which she seemed utterly unashamed. I liked her immediately.

  “Whatcha doing down here in Oxford County, Gary Pulsifer?”

  “I heard the most beautiful waitress in Pennacook was working at the Boom and thought I’d come take a peek.” He made a show of scanning the empty tables. “You haven’t seen her around, have you?”

  She rolled her eyes at me as she filled our cups. “Mister, don’t you believe a word that comes out of this man’s mouth. I ain’t never seen his tongue—and I don’t want to neither—but I’ll bet you it’s forked.”

  She took our orders: poached eggs and hash for Pulsifer, pancakes and a molasses doughnut for me.

  I waited until she’d vanished through the swinging door. “You have a way with women.”

  Pulsifer extended a wanton arm along the top of the booth. He seemed to be unusually loose and relaxed: comfortable in a way I had never seen him before. “It’s the burden I was born to bear.”

  “What about this woman who found Shadow?”

  “Alcohol Mary.”

  “That’s an unusual nickname.”

  “Mary’s an unusual lady. She lives alone up on Number Six Mountain.”

  I wasn’t aware that anyone lived up there; I assumed that the oversize hill fell within the boundaries of the state-owned land around Tumbledown Mountain. Number Six was a camel-backed knoll that watched over the rich farmland of the Sandy River Valley. What could possibly have lured the wolf pair this far south, into the human-populated bottomlands?

  “On the phone you said she found Shadow on her doorstep?”

  “Close enough. He was hiding under the roofed shelter where she stacks her firewood. It baffles me why any wild animal would choose to take refuge at the home of Alcohol Mary Gowdie. It’s a wonder she didn’t shoot him and use his pelt for a rug.”

  “I’m not clear on why she called you, though. Intervale isn’t in your district. Doesn’t Ronette Landry live over in Strong?”

  Pulsifer raised his rust-red eyebrows, desperately in need of trimming. “Mary and I have some history.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  He seemed to rehearse several answers in his mind before he looked at me with guilty eyes.

  “During my drinking days, I used to buy moonshine from her. I should have had one of those punch cards, I bought so much hooch. Buy ten gallons and get the next bottle free.”

  Pulsifer had been an alcoholic, then a recovering alcoholic, then an active alcoholic again. His longest period of sobriety had ended with a pint of Jim Beam we shared one night in his kitchen. I felt responsible for his slip even though I hadn’t known about his addiction at the time. Now he was sober again. It had surprised and humbled me when he’d invited me to an AA meeting to present him with a medallion celebrating two years of continuous sobriety.

  “Mary’s got quite the distillery up on that mountain of hers,” he said.

  “I didn’t realize a person could make any money doing that these days, booze being as cheap as it is.”

  “Her stuff is 190 proof and half the price of Everclear. Mary runs a few side businesses, too. Last year she made two hundred gallons of maple syrup.” His sly smile returned. “You should see her sugar bush.”

  He knew perfectly well how that old Maine term—referring to a stand of sugar maples—would sound to my modern ears.

  “She seems like quite the entrepreneur.”

  “Most gangsters are.” He spread both arms, winglike, along the top of the booth. “So tell me about the shitshow at the prison. It sounds like someone really wanted that female sergeant dead.”

  “The men who tried to murder her are both dead themselves.”

  “Thanks to your buddy Cronk.”

  “Billy killed one of them—in self-defense.”

  “He seems to kill a lot of people in self-defense.”

  I tried not to bristle. “He nearly died of a pierced bowel, Gary.”

  “I’m sorry. That was out of line. I shouldn’t have spoken that way about your friend.”

  The apology shocked me into silence. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d heard Gary Pulsifer utter a contrite word.

  His voice was softer when he spoke again. “You wouldn’t know this, but there’s a local connection to those homicides. The guard who got killed—Kent Mears—grew up in Pennacook. His dad still lives in town. What a miserable bastard the old man is.”

  “Miserable in what way?”

  “I’m not allowed to say.” Pulsifer clenched his eyelids shut. “I shouldn’t even have mentioned him.”

  I realized at once that Old Man Mears must be a fellow member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Pulsifer had always been an incurable gossip. “Getting back to the matter at hand, what do you think your wolf was doing in the Sandy River Valley?”

  “I told you before he’s not my wolf.”

  His shrug indicated he was done parsing pronouns.

  “Wild wolves have ranges of hundreds of square miles,” I said.

  “What about the lady wolf he’s been spotted with? Where do you think she is?”

  “Somewhere safe, I hope.”

  Even though we were alone in the restaurant, he lowered his voice. “Do you know how many people have called me the past two years swearing to have seen wolves out in the woods? And I’ve had to say, ‘Must of been a couple of coyotes.’” He pronounced the word in the Western fashion: ki-otes.

  “I appreciate your keeping the secret.”

  “It was in my own interest! Can you imagine what would’ve happened if the press got hold of a picture of those animals? The environmentalists would have rushed to the courthouse with a petition to outlaw all hunting and trapping up here because of the Endangered Species Act.”

  Pulsifer knew, as well as I did, that wolves were no longer listed as endangered for the ironic reason that they were presumed extinct in the eastern United States. How can something that doesn’t exist be threatened with expurgation?

  “That’s a little alarmist, don’t you think?”

  “If you ask me, the worst thing that ever happened to deer in Maine was when coyotes moved in.”

  Like almost all the wardens, guides, and deer hunters I knew, Gary Pulsifer had a hatred for coyotes that bordered on the pathological. It wasn’t so long ago that the state offered self-defeating bounties on their pelts. Wildlife biologists had discovered that coyotes react to attempts at eradicating them by reproducing more prolifically.

  The waitress returned with our breakfasts.

  “Do you know anyone in the valley who hunts coyotes with a bow or a crossbow?” I asked after she’d left us alone.

  Gary doused his breakfast with hot sauce until his plate was a bloody mess. “I know plenty of guys who have tried and failed. Bowhunting coyotes isn’t easy, even over bait.”

  I ate the doughnu
t in two bites. The phrase wolfed it down came into my head.

  “I’ll talk to Ronette and see if she can point me to the local bowmen,” I said. “Maybe canvass the sporting good stores between Rangeley and Farmington and see who sells that brand of arrow. If I’m lucky, the bolt was bought locally and not ordered online.”

  Pulsifer dabbed with his napkin at the red corners of his mouth. “Does that mean you’re finally going to pay a visit to Fairbanks Firearms?”

  The name made my heart sink. “I suppose I will.”

  “If you do, tell Denis Cormier hello.”

  “My uncle and I aren’t on the greatest of terms.”

  “But he’s potentially one of your best sources.” Pulsifer made another pass with the napkin. “You know, Mike, the odds of finding the guy who shot your wolf—”

  “They’re long odds, I admit.”

  “And even if you do find him, he’s going to claim he mistook Shadow for a coyote. And the state says you can kill as many of them as you please, provided you do it by the book.”

  “You don’t seem to understand my interest here. If Shadow dies, I need to know what happened to the female he’s been seen with. Was she shot and killed, too? Maybe the hunter has her pelt hanging in his man cave. This is the only known wild wolf in the state of Maine we’re talking about.”

  “And the chances of finding her in thousands of square miles of timber…”

  “Improve considerably if I find the son of a bitch who wounded Shadow and learn where it happened.”

  Pulsifer lifted his gaze to the tin ceiling as if he could see heaven through it. “This is the part of the conversation where I remind you, as your union representative, that you can’t break rules because you find them inconvenient. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to use the pissoir.”

  While I waited for him to return, I stared at the mounted head of the coyote on the wall. The taxidermist had given the animal a postmortem snarl. The suggestion was that the vicious canine had been preparing to rip out the hunter’s jugular when a well-placed bullet had ended its short, savage life.

  What was it about human beings, I wondered, that we needed to categorize other creatures as “good” or “bad”? Nature cared not a whit for humankind’s morality. And a good thing for us, too, or it would have wiped our small, selfish species from the earth eons ago.

  14

  In the gray light of morning the paper mill loomed over the town like an industrial fortress, abandoned and falling into ruin. I watched its snuffed-out smokestacks disappear in my rearview mirror as we drove up the hill until there was nothing behind and nothing ahead except trees and more trees. We were following the road that cut through the pass between the mountains.

  Ahead of me, Pulsifer roared along in his black GMC Sierra. The patrol truck had a big 285-horsepower V-6 engine that found no challenge in the steepness of the grade even as my four-cylinder Compass labored to keep pace. I had taken my Warden Service vehicle in the event I discovered something that would prompt a sudden return to duty. But my Scout was a hell of a lot more fun to drive in Mud Season.

  Because of the tall pines that shadowed the road, it felt to me as if night were falling all over again. Down along the river, the snow had largely melted, but high in the uplands, the white carpet might not melt before Memorial Day. Even with the heat blasting, I felt a chill.

  I hadn’t seen or spoken to Pulsifer in months, but he seemed different. More than that, he seemed transformed. He was still a wisecracker extraordinaire, but at the Boom Chain he had showed flashes of vulnerability and restraint: two qualities I would never have used to describe the man.

  He had let slip that the probably alcoholic father of the dead CO, Kent Mears, resided in Pennacook. Aside from his having been a brutal sadist, I knew nothing about the younger Mears. If I didn’t have other matters concerning me, I might have liked to meet the father, if only to satisfy my curiosity. Maybe I could ask Dani about the family. She had to have known them.

  By the time Pulsifer and I reached the turnoff to Webb Lake, the sun had finally cleared the summit of Mount Blue. The frozen lake was big but shallow and ringed around with seasonal camps and cottages. Generations had summered along its shores, drawn by the scenic vistas of the mountains that rose in every direction, their names almost ridiculous in their quaintness: Tumbledown, Spruce, Blueberry, Jackson, and Little Jackson. Not to mention Blue itself: neither the tallest, nor the most spectacular, and yet somehow the defining prominence of the range, perhaps because of the signature fire tower at its summit, a landmark in every sense of the word.

  Continuing on, we crested the heavily wooded ridge that marked the watershed between two valleys. To the south, the streams and brooks emptied into the Androscoggin; to the north, the tributaries fed the farms along the smaller Sandy River. Having crossed over the divide, I noticed a subtle change in the landscape. I became aware of how the friendly cottages around Webb Lake had been supplanted by isolated homesteads, set far back in the conifers, often with signs at the foot of their drives warning trespassers of prosecution and dangerous dogs.

  At a fork in the road, Pulsifer veered off to the left onto a poorly maintained track that seemed to consist of nothing but ice-filled craters. Then the pavement dropped off hard. The half-frozen grit sucked at my tires until I could hear the pebbles banging around the wheel wells.

  We passed through a thick grove of sugar maples, every one of which had been spiked with a steel spile and connected by an arterial system of blue tubing to some distant pumping station. I’d never seen such a sophisticated sugaring operation before. This network of sap-sucking pipes must have been the sugar bush Pulsifer had described.

  The best weather for sugaring is mild days and below-freezing nights, neither of which we’d consistently had. It would be a bad year for the maple syrup makers. I hoped Mary Gowdie had pumped out plenty of moonshine from her still.

  I hailed Pulsifer on the radio. “How much farther?”

  “A couple more miles. How’s that glorified sports wagon of yours handling the road?”

  “Fair.”

  “Are the tires studded at least?”

  “So the road ahead is shitty, is what you’re saying.”

  “Ever hear of the La Brea Tar Pits?”

  Soon we were climbing through a storm-blasted grove of deadfalls and widow-makers, up the steep southern face of Number Six Mountain. As we gained altitude, the sky finally opened overhead—a perfect robin’s-egg blue—and I felt a pressure building between my jaw and my eardrum. I wondered what poor soul was charged with driving a snowplow up this series of switchbacks.

  The house came into view little by little. The stunted pines and leafless gray trees prevented a good look at it from below, but it seemed to be a structure unlike any residence I’d ever before seen. The derelict wooden building was more tall than wide, with sharply pointed arches, scrollwork trim, and a square turret at the center that rose four floors above the foundation.

  We turned into the clearing that surrounded the place, which had once, no doubt, been much more extensive before the willows, birches, and poplars had begun their slow and steady encroachment. The only vehicles in sight were a flatbed Ford outfitted with a snowplow and an ATV parked under a carport-type assemblage.

  I pulled up beside Pulsifer’s truck and got out. The temperature was well below freezing at this elevation, although there was no hint of a breeze. We stood side by side and gazed upon the grotesque house.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Pulsifer said.

  “I’ll say.”

  Its original color was impossible to discern as the paint had flaked off decades ago. There were many windows, some of them tall, grand, and intact. The rest were covered with sheets of plywood. Two great chimneys rose at either end of the hillbilly castle, but smoke only drifted from one of them.

  An architectural term I hadn’t heard since college came into my head: Carpenter Gothic.

  The first bird of the morning ap
peared, a mute robin. People associated the species with springtime renewal. But flocks of robins remained in Maine all winter, feeding on crabapples and winterberries instead of earthworms. They were harbingers of nothing.

  Just then a woman’s voice boomed from behind one of the pillars on the front porch.

  “I hope you ain’t here to tell me that creature’s dead!” She pronounced here as he-yuh.

  Pulsifer raised a hand in greeting. “Not yet, Mary! Not yet!”

  She let out a piggish grunt. “Hate to think I went to all that bother for nothing. He would’ve made a hell of a rug if I’d only just waited.”

  “It was good of you to call us,” I said.

  Alcohol Mary Gowdie emerged from the shadows of the porch into the daylight. She wasn’t fat exactly, although she carried a lot of weight. Rather she was barrel-chested in the way opera singers always are in cartoons. She looked as if she’d be right at home onstage, dressed in a Viking helmet, clutching a spear.

  But instead of a winged headpiece, she wore a man’s fedora, and instead of a Valkyrie’s breastplate, she wore a cotton dress under a buffalo plaid coat that was splashed with mud at the bottom. On her feet were shearling-lined duck boots with leather uppers and rubber bottoms.

  “Who’s the fancy-pants with you, Gary?”

  “This is Mike Bowditch. He’s a warden investigator.”

  She squinted at me from beneath her hat. “Bowditch? You ain’t Jack’s son!”

  “I am.”

  Under my shirt and “executive” bulletproof vest I was wearing his army dog tags. If she had needed proof.

  She made a grunting sound that might have signaled acknowledgment or displeasure. “Heard you was the one who killed him.”

  “My father killed himself.”

  “So you say.” Her tone suggested his suicide was somehow a matter of interpretation and still up for debate. “I used to sell ’shine to your old man. What a rogue he was, let me tell you. The last of the genuine outlaws. And not bad to look at neither.”

  Up close, I could see that she had blond curls that couldn’t have been natural. The brassy hair contrasted with a face that made me think she subsisted off nothing but tobacco, alcohol, and red meat.