by Paul Doiron
He hunkered down to wait, figuring nothing was likely to happen until the wee hours of the morning, but after a while his ass cheeks began to freeze solid again and so he climbed once more to his feet and did a little a French lumberman’s jig to return blood to his toes. The timing was fortunate because things might have gone much worse if he had been seated when the door opened.
There was a crack, as of a seal being broken, and then a blast of cold air blew past Charley’s ears toward a tiny light poking in through the darkness. Ahead of him, he heard a sharp intake of breath, and then Charley sprang forward, leaning with his raised shoulder at the spot he guessed the man’s chest would be. What he encountered felt like blubber. The impact knocked both combatants to the floor, and the pen light skittered away beneath the sink.
Charley was the faster of the two to his feet. “Police!” he said, through chattering teeth. “You are under arrest!”
The other man let loose with a series of asthmatic-sounding wheezes and slumped back to the floor. In the fuzzy light slotting in through the boarded-up windows, Charley couldn’t make out many details, other than the fact that the hermit was the largest man he had ever seen.
Charley removed his own flashlight from his coat pocket and directed the beam at the outline of the man’s head, hoping to blind him into submission. He saw, beneath him, a hugely fat man with an unruly salt-and-pepper beard and wire-rimmed eyeglasses that had been taped together after some previous mishap. The hermit raised his hands against the light, spreading gloved fingers that were as thick around as hot dogs.
Good lord, thought Charley. It is the ghost of Ernest Hemingway.
“Remain where you are, sir,” the warden said. “I have no interest in fighting you. Stay there and catch your breath.”
It took him a moment to locate the light switch on the wall. He understood that the hermit might be play-acting submissiveness, in which case he should probably unholster his revolver, but when the fluorescent bulbs blinked to life, the big man was still sitting on his enormous posterior, blowing his cheeks in and out like two bellows. The hermit was wearing a pair of farmer’s overalls that were too short at the ankles, a gray sweatshirt splattered with assorted stains, and a puffy blue parka that was spilling cotton batting through rips in the nylon. On any other man, the brogues he was wearing would have looked like clown shoes. Around his shoulders he had strapped an overstuffed army backpack.
“I apologize for giving you a fright,” Charley said. “But you forced me to resort to desperate measures to capture you.”
The big man opened and closed his mouth a few times, but the sounds that came out didn’t resemble words, so much as throttled attempts at clearing his lungs of some pulmonary obstruction. One normally thought of hermits as scrawny creatures, but years of junk food had given this one a sizable gut and a mouth full of brown teeth.
“Why don’t we sit down on in the chow hall while you catch your breath,” Charley said. In truth, the warden needed to warm up after his hour in the deep freeze, and he didn’t want the hermit to notice him shivering. They sat across a picnic table from each other.
“What is your name, sir?” the warden asked.
Behind his eyeglasses, the hermit had large brown eyes that seemed like the adaptations of a nocturnal creature. A faint odor came off him of rotting leaves.
“How about showing me some identification?” Charley said.
The hermit held out both empty hands, as if to indicate he possessed no such documentation, and there was no point in searching him.
Seeing that this line of inquiry was leading nowhere, Charley adopted a harder tone. “Well, what am I supposed to call you then? Sweet Tooth?”
“Sweet Tooth?” the hermit said hoarsely.
“Lo! He speaks.” Charley leaned back on the bench. “You don’t realize that the local populace has given you a nickname?”
The enormous man smoothed his beard with one gloved hand, but his eyes drifted toward the revolver peeking out from Charley’s coat. “That’s not my name.”
“So what is it?”
The hermit folded his arms across his overinflated chest. “I’ve forgotten.”
“You’ve forgotten your name?”
“It was of no use to me.” The man spoke with a formal, almost professorial air, as if beneath the layer of sweat and grime, he was a person of great accomplishment. “I have abandoned many things over the years.”
“And taken a few other things that don’t belong to you,” said the young warden. “Why don’t you show me what’s in your backpack, and we’ll start tallying the ledger.”
Sweet Tooth removed the pack from his shoulders and set it on the table. It occurred to the warden that the man might have a concealed weapon hidden inside, but the burglar seemed content to remain seated. If anything, he seemed to radiate relaxation. Maybe it was a relief to him to have been captured.
Slowly, he began removing items and displaying each with a prideful smile: three cans of peaches, two bags of marshmallows, peanut butter and jelly, a box of crackers, matches, a coil of rope, a folded plastic tablecloth, wadded trash bags, an aluminum canteen, and a Tupperware container filled with mildewed bills of assorted denominations. He carried a hammer and a crowbar in a flour sack. Also, a screwdriver taped with electrical tape around the grip. The tools of a burglar’s trade. “I was hoping to find some hamburger and steaks in the freezer,” he said after he reached the end of his show and tell.
Just to be on the safe side, Charley gathered up the steel tools and set them on the bench beside him, out of reach of the hermit. “I am sorry for interrupting your shopping spree. You do realize that this is a camp for disadvantaged youngsters that you have been burglarizing?”
“Of course I do.”
“And you have no remorse for your misdeeds?”
“I only took what I needed.”
“People around here are generous. If you had asked for a handout, I am sure they would have been glad to help.”
“I am not a beggar!”
No, Charley decided, he was more like a two-legged raccoon. By this point, however, the warden was less interested in challenging the man than in plumbing the depths of his self-regard. “What are you then?”
“A man in full, Warden. I am a man in full.”
“From the weight you are carrying around your midsection, I can’t dispute you on that point,” Charley said. “But I suspect the district attorney will use a different term.”
“There is only one who can judge me.”
“He’ll get his turn, too, but first you’ll have to face a man in a black robe down in Augusta.”
The hermit moved his tongue around the inside of his cheeks as if it were a ping pong ball. “So you’re going to arrest me, I gather?”
“That was the general idea of me hiding inside that freezer,” Charley said. “I went to great lengths to apprehend you.”
Sweet Tooth folded his hands together across his belly with a certain satisfaction. “I saw you under the porch and on top of the roof. You’re not very good at camouflaging yourself. Not very good at all.”
“I guess you could say I’m learning on the job, though.” He tugged an earlobe that was beginning to ache from frost nip. “So you’re telling me that you’ve been hiding in these woods this past week, watching me run around the place like a fool?”
“This past week!” The big man smiled broadly. “I have been living in these woods for nineteen years.”
“Nineteen years?”
“That is correct. I was eighteen when I left home.”
“And no one ever went looking for you or reported you missing?”
“They never knew I was there to begin with.”
Charley had suspected a bad family situation; it was a topic he knew something about himself. “Where exactly have you been hiding?”
“I’m sure you’d like me to show you.”
“Yes, sir, I would. Because I have trouble believing that even a resourceful
feller like yourself could camp out in the forest since 1956 without assistance.”
The hermit’s forehead drooped; he looked quite literally crestfallen. “You don’t believe me?”
“Not without evidence.”
Sweet Tooth pushed himself abruptly to his feet. The action was so sudden that Charley himself sprang backward and landed lightly, like a startled cat.
“My camp is closer than you’d probably think,” boomed the hermit. “You can almost see it from the counselors’ quarters.”
Now Charley was even more skeptical. Lafontaine had told him that the camp staff had beaten the bushes with a half mile of the property, looking for signs of the hermit. And the warden himself have done a thorough search of the surrounding woods, too. It scarcely seemed possible that this Sweet Tooth character had been hunkered down within earshot the whole time, with no one the wiser.
“Show me,” said Charley.
It occurred to the young warden that the hermit might be contemplating some sort of breakneck escape into the darkened forest, so he decided to follow the big man closely. As they picked their way through the puckerbrush and damp leaves, Charley was struck by the hermit’s style of walking. For such an enormous specimen of humanity, he moved lightly, almost seemed to dance. He hopped from one moss-covered rock to the next, always set his foot down a tree root instead of a patch of mud, never seemed to snap so much as a twig. He left not a single footprint to mark his passage upon the earth.
Charley’s disbelief began to melt a little. “So you say you’ve been out here for nineteen years. What is the last thing you remember?”
“Elvis Presley,” said Sweet Tooth. “I remember him singing on the Ed Sullivan Show ”
“What drove you into the wilderness?”
The big man stopped so abruptly Charley almost collided with him, but he didn’t turn his head to make eye contact. “Talking.”
“I am not following you.”
“I got sick of all the talking. Gab, gab, gab. I couldn’t hear anything. Believe it or not, you are only the third person I have spoken to since I took to the woods. The other two were fishermen.”
The hermit started moving again, forcing the warden to catch up. “You seem a talkative enough feller to me,” Charley said. He was still dressed in his heavy winter clothes and boots, and now found himself sweating profusely through his long johns. “Was there something in particular you were having trouble hearing?”
“Jesus.”
The answer caused Charley to nod. “Oh, so you’re a religious hermit then?”
“The preacher at our church said, ‘Pray and your prayers will be answered.’ When I told him that wasn’t the case, he said I wasn’t listening hard enough. So I started going off into the woods by myself, but I kept hearing … nothing. So I went a little farther and stayed a little longer, and eventually I was living out here by myself. That was nineteen years ago.”
“Did you ever hear Jesus?”
“Not yet.”
Beyond the bushy edges of the camp, the land took on a different aspect. Huge glacial erratic boulders appeared out of the darkness, forcing them to make a detour. Spring freshets cut ravines through the melting earth, too far to jump across and deep enough to make scrambling down one side and up the other a challenge. Before Charley had realized it, they had pushed through a dense green curtain of hemlocks, and the next thing he knew he was standing in the middle of the most fantastic place he had ever seen.
The hermit’s compound was completely hidden. Green tarps were stretched across the sky from tree to tree to form a waterproof ceiling. Metal trash cans were covered with dirt and moss so they would not shine in the sun. Brown blankets, draped over sagging ropes, formed curtains that separated a cooking area with a camp stove and an impressive store of empty propane tanks from the raised platform where the hermit had pitched his tent. There were buckets hanging from trees to collect rainwater and plastic tubs buried in the ground where the man could keep frozen meat cool well into the summer. Charley had seen the inside of Viet Cong spider holes and tunnel mazes, but never had he seen an encampment so well-camouflaged.
“Sir, I have to tell you, this is the most impressive camp I have ever seen.”
“Thank you.”
“And you’ve lived here for nineteen years—blizzards and all—without ever seeking shelter in a building?”
“I conserve my energy and hibernate.”
“Incredible!”
Sweet Tooth seemed delighted to show off his home. He pointed out the mouse traps he had set near his food to protect it from vermin and the mattress he had sewn out of bed sheets and stuffed full with magazines.
“Let me guess,” said Charley. “National Geographics.”
The hermit smiled his rotten-toothed smile. “I am proudest of my commode. Building it was a problem it took me ten years to solve. My outhouse stands as my greatest achievement.”
He gestured toward a leafy structure, a mass of sticks and vines and interwoven branches, downwind of the tent. This, Charley had to see.
The warden took four steps in the direction of the toilet when suddenly he heard a metallic snap and felt a crushing pain in his left leg that caused him to fall forward onto his elbows, howling. Just like that, the hermit was on him. Before Charley even realized that he had stepped carelessly into a hidden bear trap, he saw the huge man standing over him, holding his own service revolver. The trap had sharp steel teeth that bit into his boots. He was utterly helpless.
“If you had just believed me, none of this would be happening to you,” Sweet Tooth said. “I told you my camp was here. I don’t know why people just can’t believe things.”
Charley yowled but he realized there was no one to hear his cries. He twisted his head, seemingly in pain, but really to look for a weapon. There was a fist-sized rock within reach but the hermit would shoot him before he had a chance to close his hand around it. “You don’t have to do this.”
“None of us has any choice in life.” The hermit seemed genuinely sad as he said this.
“Can you do it clean then? Right between the eyes?”
The big man squatted down on his heels and stretched out his arms, using both hands to grip the pistol. He closed one eye and squeezed the trigger.
There was a click as the hammer fell on an empty cylinder.
The sound seemed to confuse the hermit, who opened his other eye to look at the gun, then quickly pulled the trigger again.
Click, click, click, click, click.
Before Sweet Tooth understood that the revolver was unloaded, Charley had gotten hold of the rock and flung it squarely between the man’s eyes, shattering the wire-rimmed glasses in the same spot they had been previously broken. The hermit fell like Goliath.
* * *
Charley drained the coffee dregs from his cup and screwed the plastic top back on the thermos. His expression remained deadpan.
“A bear trap, huh?” I said.
“One of the biggest bone crushers I ever saw. Must have weighed close to fifty pounds.”
A school of fish dimpled the water thirty yards off the bow of the canoe. Something big and unseen was chasing the minnows to the surface. It might well be a pike. I remained still, holding the fly rod in my cold, cramped hand, studying my friend’s weathered expression, waiting for it to crack.
Finally he laughed. When he smiled, wrinkles radiated from the corners of his eyes. “You don’t believe me. Do you?”
“I don’t know. It’s quite a story.”
The old man bent down and rolled the pants leg up from his left leg, then turned the sock down over the bootlaces so I could see his pale calf. A crescent-shaped scar arced across the shinbone. Even now, decades later, it looked like it hurt.
“I was lucky I was wearing my winter boots in the freezer that night because the leather cushioned the bite of those trap teeth,” Charley said. “We dug up two bodies from under the hermit’s camp, and both of them had broken legs, the poor sons of b
itches.”
Read on for a sneak preview of Knife Creek the new novel from Paul Doiron
Available June 2017
Copyright © Paul Doiron 2017
1
The pigs were coming. I could hear the sows grunting and the piglets squealing as they moved toward us through the underbrush. I listened for the raspy-throated growl of the boar that might be with them. My friend Billy Cronk, who had hunted razorbacks in the Texas scrub when he was stationed at Fort Hood, had given me some advice before my hog hunt. Dispatch the male first, he’d said. Otherwise, I might find myself knocked to the dirt by a two-hundred-pound killing machine. Trampled, disemboweled, or slashed to ribbons: there were plenty of ways a man could die at the tusks of a blood-mad boar.
I was lying on my stomach on the forest floor with my rifle barrel resting on the root of an ancient yellow birch. Somewhere below me, hidden in the bushes beneath the bluff, was my girlfriend, Stacey, also armed. It worried me that I couldn’t see her in all her camouflage.
The first week of July had brought ninety-degree temperatures to the low hills and river floodplains of western Maine. The tree canopy overhead filtered the summer sun and filled the clearing with an emerald-tinted light, but the saw-toothed leaves did nothing to soften the heat. The incessant whine of mosquitoes in my ears was its own form of torture. Dripping with sweat, I felt a brief urge to strip naked and roll like a pig in the puddled mud below me.
The oppressive humidity, the tormenting bugs, the absurdity of the assignment itself—the whole scenario had the surreal quality of a drugged-out dream. Feral hogs didn’t belong in Maine. But they had been multiplying by the millions down south and been pushing steadily northward for decades, and now their vanguard had finally crossed the state border from New Hampshire. I was a Maine game warden, and my assignment today was to stop the outriders in their tracks.
