The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

by Laura Lippman (ed) (epub)

  Soured by it all, we gave Pillow Rock back to the rattlesnakes. Now we let them lie prone to soak up the heat like powerful conductors. And we gave it to Kelly.

  We found ways to occupy our time: machining engines, welding catch-gates, jacklighting deer. The lesser waters no one coveted, so we dove off the cliffs at Summersville Lake till the state fenced it off. Then we cut the wire with bolt cutters—the “West Virginia credit card”—and dove at night, our jacklights trained on green water, attracting a fine mist of moths and mayflies.

  But Gauley Season never ceased to be part of our year. The rafters buy potato chips and high-test, they flag us down for directions, but they don’t miss us, our catcalls from the rock. They palm tips into knowing hands, book next season’s trip, tighten luggage racks on foreign cars. As we do our chores, we imagine the shredding water, the cry of clients, the slur of rubber on stone. They slalom down Sweet’s Falls with nothing but the growl of water in their ears. We hate them. We hate them with the fury that is the same as love.

  The rafters notice a single man perched on the granite. Shirtless, Kelly Bischoff raises a hand or touches a hat brim. A wise, gray-bearded fisherman gone down to ply the waters. Hair lank, skin mottled like a Plott hound’s. Bedraggled, harried by weather and briar, the river guide has earned this lonesome place by great effort, by true compass. Stalwart, wiry, keen of limb. A true mountaineer, rifle-true. But they know no better. The river guide has made good on his mortgage. With the yellow tusks of a bulldozer, he breaks the mountain. He draglines the coal.

  Against the glossolalia of the water, the river guide cups his hands and calls to the rafters, but they can’t hear, they tip over the falls and lose sight of him in a joyous crush. A plea is lost to history.

  The nude crag of Pillow Rock, stripped of its people, scrawled and scrimshawed in the shit of swallows. They don’t know that we—the true fishermen—will not return until season’s end, rods ready, faces hard, when the heavens part, the rotors of helicopters mutter their staccato hymn, and we receive the silver benediction of government fish.

  ANNIE PROULX

  Rough Deeds

  FROM The New Yorker

  IN NEW FRANCE, which people more and more called Canada, from the old Iroquois word kanata, Duquet was everywhere—examining, prying, measuring, observing, and calculating. Limbs and low-quality hardwood waste became high-quality firewood, and every autumn he packed twenty wagons full for the Kébec market and for Paris, when he could charter available ships with the promise of a good return cargo of tea or coffee or textiles, spices or china. Without the sure promise of a rich return cargo, he thought, let the Parisians freeze, for all he cared.

  Leasing a Dutchman’s ships was well enough, but he needed ships of his own. In 1712, a business acquaintance in Boston, an Englishman named Dred-Peacock, connected him to an English shipbuilder and a new but promising yard on the River Clyde, in Scotland, joined to England by the Act of Union, in ’07. Duquet wanted a ship; the yard wanted wood.

  “Regard the map, sir,” Dred-Peacock said. “It’s the closest point to the colonies—the briefest sailing time. There are signs of success on the Clyde, but they need good timbers. They will pay for them. It is an opportunity that cannot be neglected.”

  There were good precedents in New France for trading with the enemy, but arrangements with the English and the Scots were still secret, complex, expensive, even dangerous. Yet Duquet knew that there was profit in selling to the English, despite their colonial aims. Duquet took the plunge and Dred-Peacock took a goodly share of the profits, which increased year by year. Fifty acres of oak were needed to build one seventy-four-gun warship, and the hardwood stands along the rivers of New France began to fall to Duquet’s ambitions. But he felt hampered by Kébec’s distance from the money pots of the world and by the ice blockage of the Saint-Laurent River in winter.

  “Duquet, it is past time for you to consider shifting your business operation to the colonies,” Dred-Peacock told him as they sat over their papers and receipts in the Sign of the Red Bottle, near the wharves, the inn they favored in Boston. Never did Dred-Peacock present his ill-formed face to Duquet in Kébec; always Duquet made the trip south by schooner or by packet.

  “Oh, I think on it,” Duquet said, swirling the ale in his tankard until it slopped over the rim, as if that settled the question. “I think of it often. I am of half a mind to do so, sir.”

  “Damn, sir! It is quite time you acted. Finish with thinking and act. Every day those poxy whoresons of mill men push into the forests and gain control over the land. In Maine there are countless white-pine mast trees and lesser pines to be used for tar and pitch. You know there is a great market for these if you can get them on a ship bound for Scotland, England, or even Spain or Portugal.”

  Duquet nodded, but his face was sour. He knew that Dred-Peacock saw him as an ill-bred boor, a creature from the depths. True enough, he had escaped a cramped childhood spent pulling rabbit fur from half-rotten skins, pinching out guard hairs, plucking the soft fur for quilt stuffing. As a boy he had coughed incessantly, bringing up phlegm clotted with rabbit hair. The fine hairs had settled on every surface, matted on his family’s heads and shoulders. Finally, in this clinging miasma of stinking hair and dust, his mother, choking blood, had lain on the floor as his father’s black legs scissored away into the night, and Duquet began his struggle to get away from France, to become another person.

  Dred-Peacock may have sensed Duquet’s squalid beginnings, but his fantastic drive to make money was what interested the Englishman. Dred-Peacock went on, his voice vibrating, “Where there is a market, the businessman must act. And all this would be immeasurably easier if you operated from Boston rather than bloody Kweebeck. And with my help these affairs can be managed.”

  It was obvious and timely advice, and yet Duquet hesitated to commit to leaving New France. He had valuable connections there, and a lifetime dislike of the English language, with its vile obscenities, and those who spoke it.

  Soon several ships belonging to Duquet but flying British flags ran the seas between Portsmouth and Boston harbors and the ever more numerous Clyde shipyards. It was like walking on a web of tightropes, but the money flew around Duquet like dandelion fluff in the wind. He had only to catch it in his net. And share it with Dred-Peacock.

  During the next decade Duquet began to acquire tracts of woodland in Maine. Dred-Peacock’s genius in the legal procedure of acquiring remote “townships” was immeasurable, and an old acquaintance from Duquet’s first years in New France, Jacques For­geron, scouted out the best timberland. Forgeron, a surveyor when he could get work, a voyageur when he could not, had joined forces with Duquet in his earliest days. Together they had entered the fur trade, had paddled, portaged, walked, and sung the rivers of New France. Forgeron was something of a Jonah, who attracted foul weather, but he had a curious regard for the wild forest and often told Duquet that it could be the source of great wealth. This man cherished his measuring chains and could use one as a weapon, swinging it around and around until it gained velocity and the free end leaped forward to maim. And if he had used it in this way in France, the old days counted for very little. Now he was a partner in Duquet et Fils, perhaps even a friend, if a business tie between two friendless men could be so described.

  From time to time Duquet would join Forgeron in the Maine woods to explore his growing territory. One October afternoon they landed their canoe on a sandy Maine river shore fronting one of their new white-pine properties, twenty thousand acres at a cost of twelve cents an acre. There was a narrow hem of ice along the shaded shoreline.

  “Frog ice,” Forgeron said. In the rich autumn light, the deciduous trees stunned with xanthine orange and yellow. The men’s swart shadows fell on the ground like toppled statues. Without speaking, they began to gather firewood. Forgeron held up his hand.

  “Listen,” he said quietly. They heard the sounds of chopping not too far off and began to move cautiously toward the sou
rce.

  With an acid jolt of fury, Duquet saw unknown men in stiff, pitch-blackened trousers cutting his pines, other men limbing the fallen trees, and yet another scoring them. Two men worked with broadaxes to square the logs. Duquet was sure they had a pit sawmill set up nearby. By their bulging pale eyes and doughy faces he knew them to be English colonists. Although Duquet et Fils had no hesitation in cutting big trees where they found them, it was intolerable when they were the victims of this poaching.

  “Ho la! Who say you come my land, cut my tree?” Duquet shouted, forgetting his careful English. He was so furious that his voice strangled in his throat. Forgeron advanced beside him, lightly revolving a section of his 33-foot chain.

  The startled woodsmen stared and then, still gripping their tools, they ran on an oblique course toward the river, where they likely had boats. But one with a dirty bandage on his right leg lagged behind.

  Duquet did not pause. He drew his tomahawk from his belt and hurled it, striking the runner’s left calf. He fell, crying to his comrades for help in a high, childish voice. One of the escaping men turned around and stared at Duquet as he called something to the fallen one. The confrontation lasted only a few seconds but left Duquet with an unfading impression of a man swelling with hatred. Duquet would not forget the man’s mottled slab of a face, encircled by ginger hair and beard, the yellow animal eyes fixed on him, the sudden turning away and violent dash for the river.

  “They come from settlements along the coast,” Forgeron said. “All Maine settlers are voracious thieves of fine timber. They are everywhere on the rivers.”

  They bound their wounded prisoner, a boy not older than fourteen, and dragged him to a pine, tied him up against it in a hollow between projecting tree roots.

  “You, garçon, talk up or I cut first your fingers, then your balls. Who are you? What men you with? How you come here?”

  The boy folded his lips in a tight crease, either in pain or in defiance. Duquet wrenched the boy’s arm and spread his left hand against one of the great humped roots. With a quick slash of his ax, he took off a little finger and part of the next.

  “Talk or I cut more. You die no head.”

  Duquet’s bloody interrogation gave him the information that the thieves were in the employ of a mill owner named McBogle, an agent of the politico Elisha Cooke. He had been hearing of Cooke for years; all described him as a passionate opponent of Crown authority, especially that vested in the English surveyor-general, who struggled to enforce the dictate that all ship-mast pines were the property of the British Admiralty. But McBogle’s name was new. Although Duquet’s heart was pounding with anger, it occurred to him that Elisha Cooke and perhaps even McBogle might be useful men, and he fixed their names in his memory.

  “Eh, no trees on Penobscot? Why you come here steal pine?” he said.

  “We thought only to cut a few. Away from the surveyor’s men.”

  Duquet did not believe this.

  “Show your wounds.” When the boy held up his maimed hand, Duquet said angrily, “No, not that. Only scratch. Old wound.” He could smell the stink of infection from a distance. With his good hand the boy unwrapped his right leg and exposed a deep and rotten gash in the thigh. A streak of red inflammation ran up toward the groin.

  “How happen this?” Duquet demanded.

  “Uncle Robert felled a big pine, and when it smote the ground it broke off a branch that bent double and then sprang to gouge my leg.”

  It was an evil mess. In contrast, the cut in the boy’s calf inflicted by Duquet’s ’hawk was clean, though it had nearly severed a tendon, and the chopped finger was a trifle. Nothing to be done.

  They carried the youth about half a mile upstream to the interlopers’ camp, which was strewn with abandoned clothing and cook pots, a deer carcass suspended in a tree, and laid him in the lean-to near the still-smoldering fire.

  “We will stay here,” Duquet said to Forgeron, “as the thieves have prepared a camp for us.” He tried to speak calmly, but he was filled with a greater anger than he had ever experienced. After all the injustices he had suffered, after all he had done—crossing to the New World, learning the hard voyageur trade and how to read and write and cipher, working out a way to use the forest for his fortune, all the business connections he had made—these Maine vermin had come to steal his timber.

  Forgeron brought their canoe up to the campsite while Duquet searched until he found the trespassers’ pit sawmill. There were no sawed planks beside it, indicating they had been there only a few days, but with the clear intention of stealing his trees. The stack of limbed and squared logs told him that. He wondered if they had planned to build a fort. It was said that the English were plotting to build forts along all the rivers.

  “Let us put our mark on them,” Duquet said, and he and For­geron took possession of the logs with two deep hatchet slashes on the butt ends. They talked of ways to move them. It seemed that a raft floated to the nearest sawmill might be the best way, getting what they could, and while Duquet stayed to guard the timber in case the thieves returned, Forgeron went to Portsmouth to hire raftsmen.

  During the early evening the mildness went out of the weather. The sky filled with clouds the color of dark grapes, torn by flailing stems of lightning. An hour of rain moved along, and behind it the temperature dived into winter. Duquet woke at dawn, shivering. There was not a breath of wind, but every twig and branch bristled with spiky hoarfrost. In the distance wolves howled messages to one another, their cries filleting the morning. They had likely scented the boy’s blood and infection and would linger out of sight, waiting for a chance. Duquet got up and piled more wood on the fire. The wounded boy’s eyes were closed, his face feverish and swollen, cheeks wet with melting frost. Duquet thought that he would be dead after one more cold night. Or he might not last until nightfall.

  With some urgency, Duquet prodded the boy awake and fired questions at him: his name, his village, his family’s house. But the boy only croaked for water, which Duquet did not give him, and then went silent. He still lived. Duquet spent the short day estimating the boardfeet of the felled pines.

  The light faded early as the growing storm invaded the sky, the wind and sleety snow rattling and hissing in the pines. While there was still light enough to see clearly, Duquet walked over to the prisoner. The boy lay on his back, his right leg bursting with infection, a yellow froth of pus oozing out from under the bandage, the leg a little splayed, as though it were detaching itself. Nothing could be done with this burden except wait for him to die—one more cold night. The boy opened his eyes and stared at something across the river. Duquet followed his gaze, expecting to see Indians or perhaps one of the woodcutters returning. He saw only a wall of pines until a blink of yellow showed him where to look. A tall gray owl sat on a branch, seeing them. Its eyes were very small and set close together, like twin gimlets.

  The boy spoke. “Help. Me,” he said in English. “Help. Me.”

  Inside Duquet, something like a tightly closed pinecone licked by fire opened abruptly, and he exploded with insensate and uncontrollable fury, a lifetime’s pent-up rage. “J’en ai rien à foutre. No one helped me!” he shrieked. “I did everything myself! I endured! I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk that I might die! No one helped me!” The boy’s gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet’s rising arm, closing only when the tomahawk split his brain. Duquet struck the hatchet into the loam to clean it, and the owl lifted into the air.

  In the flying snow, Duquet dismantled the saw-pit scaffolding and threw the boy into the pit hole, piled the scaffolding on top, and set it alight. The gibbous moon rose.

  Hours later, when the burning ceased, he went to shovel in the half-frozen excavated soil, but before he hurled the first shovelful he glanced down and saw the black arm bones crooked up, as if reaching for a helping hand.

  “Foutu!”

  He shoveled.

  Forgeron arrive
d four days later with six men, who began constructing a raft of the cut pines. Not seeing the wounded boy, For­geron opened his mouth several times, as if to speak, but he did not say anything except that the war was making it very difficult to find able-bodied labor.

  “What war is that?” Duquet asked.

  “Has not Peter the Great invaded Persia? They spoke of nothing else in Portsmouth. That and the smallpox inoculations inflicted on Bostonians.”

  In the next years Duquet changed, reinventing himself. In Boston, Duquet et Fils became Duke and Sons. But although there were endless business opportunities in the English colonies, he kept his enterprise and some holdings in New France. He sat with Dred-Peacock in the taproom of the Pine Dog, a pleasant tavern with a sign showing an eponymous carved mastiff, now their favored meeting place, as the Sign of the Red Bottle had burned in a conflagration that took half the wharves and several ships.

  “Do you know aught of that fellow McBogle?” Duquet asked, breaking the crust edge from his meat pasty with heavy fingers.

  Dred-Peacock, bewigged and togged out, regarded his steaming coffee. “I have not made his acquaintance, but I’ve heard much deleterious talk concerning his ways. As we both know, Maine is full to the scuppers with woodland entrepreneurs, water-powered sawmills, surveyors, tree choppers, potash makers, turpentine distillers, and settlers, every man assaulting the free-to-all timberlands.”

  “They think as I do,” Duquet said, “so I cannot fault them. But dealing with them is always a struggle.”

  “The settlers are hard men, right enough, but there are others even harder, mostly in New Hampshire. I mean those men of Scots lineage lately removed from Ulster, in Ireland.”

  “Surely they are as other mortal men?”