by Mike Bond
Just before dawn is always the coldest, and the wind down the ridge was bitter. The underbellies of the low dark clouds flashed rosily from the turbine strobes, like over a volcano. Through underbrush and granite outcrops I headed toward where I’d heard the snowmobile leave, and soon found the dark cut of its track across the snow. I listened for an engine but heard only wind through boughs and branches and across the snow.
I still couldn’t figure how he knew yesterday I’d be coming up the mountain. Was it just chance, or had he been waiting for me? Why?
He’d parked his snowmobile at an overhang and from there hiked straight east across the gully toward where Bucky had hidden the .308. It was clear he wasn’t trying to find it; he knew where it was.
Where the .308 had been hidden, my snowshoe tracks lay atop his Red Wing boot prints. So he hadn’t been back.
I returned to where he’d parked the snowmobile. Another set of his tracks went to the cliff edge where he’d gone down on his left knee, no doubt to fire at me. Beside the imprint of his knee was that of a rifle butt pad with the same BROWNING logo.
It was getting light enough to see, a kind of quasi-daylight as if undersea, the trees black, the snow changing from gray then pink as the strobes flashed across it, the last stars dying in a web of branches. A moment of peace and silence, breathing in and out the frigid air, watching daylight seep into the forest, hearing the first chatter of distant crows, the wind sighing over the snow and through the fir and pine branches and the twittering of chickadees as they flitted in little tribes from tree to tree.
Still listening for a snowmobile I knelt and began feeling in the snow for cartridge casings. When ejected they’d have been hot and sunk through the crust. Any good sniper will pick up his empties but in this deep snow it would have been hard to find them all.
By luck I put my hand right on one. Long, slim and brass, Fiocchi .270, an unusual brand for this neck of the woods. But a perfect match for a Browning bolt action. Not removing my gloves I dropped it into a plastic bag and zipped it into my pocket.
06:50. Sunrise. I moved upslope forty yards and made myself comfortable inside a hemlock thicket. After 07:25 the sun cleared the mountains to the east and the temp went up to maybe minus ten but the wind stayed sharp.
When by noon he hadn’t come I took several phone pix of his snowmobile tracks then followed them along the ridge till they crossed the devastated top and took a snowmobile trail downhill past a white farmhouse and three barns and a frozen brook under tall oaks and from there into the trees. There was no need to go down; instead I returned to where a bullet had hit a tree root and dug out what was left of it with my KA-BAR.
It chilled my gut.
A ballistic tip, one of the most evil of bullets that do the most horrible damage to whatever or whomever they hit. A hollow point filled with a hard plastic tip. When it hits the target the plastic drives back into the hollow point and literally explodes it. So you get both the high accuracy of a jacketed bullet and the fragmentation lethality of a hollow point.
I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be hit by one.
Uphill I found another slug waist-high in an ash trunk and dug that out too. They easily matched the .270 Fiocchi casing I’d just found.
Circling the mountain I arrived back at Lexie’s two hours later, exhausted. I hadn’t learned much about my would-be killer, except that he was a very good shot, used a bolt action Browning .270 with Fiocchi bullets, and wore size 10 Red Wing Irish Setter Work boots.
And he didn’t know I knew.
Now I needed to find his machine. And him.
“THAT’S JANE’S PLACE,” Lexie said when I asked who lived in the white house and barns by the oak trees and brook.
“The one who fixed my finger.”
“That’s Jane. Half the kids around here she’s brought into the world. Her driveway’s two roads down, under the fourth to ninth turbines.”
“Lucky her.”
“She’s done health studies on what windmills do to people, particularly kids. The ADD, sleeplessness, mood swings and other stuff I see in my students, but the damage to adults too…”
“I need to know if she saw who snowmobiled down that trail past her house yesterday.”
“You should go see her. Just don’t try to grab her ass, she’ll break your jaw.”
I fondled mine uncomfortably. It had already been broken several times – all painfully – and I had no desire that it happen again. “I like women too…” I was going to add how I’m particularly fond of gay women because we share the same interests, but Lexie was getting a little steamed.
“Pono,” she snaps, “how can you expect me to ever get back together with you when you keep wanting to screw other women?”
“We ain’t getting back together,” I answered. “Remember?” And to add insult to injury added, “even when we were together we were both still screwing other people.”
She gave me a look halfway between love and hate. “Go see Jane.”
JANE’S was one of those stately white clapboard farmhouses you see on Maine Vacationland postcards, under centuries-old oaks, with three vast barns clustered behind it and a wide stream along one side, all nestled against a beautiful rocky slope of beeches and pines. And atop the ridge – outside the Vacationland postcard of course – were WindPower LLC’s fifty-five-story corporate welfare towers.
No wind was blowing but the turbines were howling away. Maybe there’s wind on the ridge, I wondered. But when I checked the few trees remaining near the top not a bough was budging. Figuring why was far beyond my physics IQ so I let it go.
“I have no idea who came down that ridge yesterday,” Jane said. “ I was delivering twins in Albion all afternoon and night.”
She was tall, back straight, an aggressive jaw and strong pretty face, short-cut dark hair like a medieval helmet down her cheeks. A strong grip, slender strong wrists, small nice biceps, small perfect breasts and a runner’s beautiful ass.
She led me through an ancient paneled parlor with floorboards foot-and-a-half wide – old Maine pumpkin pine from back when the trees were forty-five feet around and a whole village could stand on one stump. We sat in wooden rockers by the fireplace drinking some kind of strange green tea while I explained her what had happened.
She had a bright sunny smile and wide white teeth, freckled dimpled cheeks and gorgeous blue eyes that you could look into all day and keep seeing more and more. Everything about her seemed lanky and alert, powerfully together. The instant you met her you sensed she didn’t lie or bullshit, would be exactly who she was.
“It wouldn’t be surprising if somebody shot at you,” she said. “The wind industry’s getting pretty desperate, all these towns passing ordinances against it, the lawsuits, even some of the enviros turning on it –”
“Biting the hand that feeds them?”
“Did you hear the latest?” She took the Bangor Daily News down from the mantle. “The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting just revealed that former state Senate President Justin Alfond, a Democrat from Portland, has been introducing bills in the Senate written entirely by wind industry lawyers, and has worked with the industry to intimidate Senators who opposed them. This was after, the Center said, the wind industry gave lots of money to his Political Action Committees, some of which he paid to other Democrats so they’d vote for him as Senate president.”
“This boy will get ahead.”
“Thank God Governor LePage vetoed it.”
“This guy LePage, Lexie tells me, is a conservative Republican but very protective of Maine’s environment, while these Democrats seem intent on destroying it.”
She shrugged. “This story wasn’t even printed in the southern Maine papers owned by one of those Democrats.”
“Maybe freedom of speech means the media owners get to say what they want.”
“This house which is two hundred twenty-one years old, in which eleven generations of my people have lived, and which is
on the National Historic Register, is now worthless.” She got up and put two more oak splits in the fire. “And it was worth almost a million five years ago. And now because of the Wind Law I can’t even sue the windmill bastards.”
This seemed impossible. “Why’s that?”
“The Law takes away our right to sue. And, as the governor said, it actually legalizes bribery.”
“Those turbines up there,” I nodded above our heads.“There’s no wind but they’re turning?”
She scowls. “You don’t know?”
“If I did would I be asking?”
“Maine has very poor winds. But the damn things have to keep spinning or they seize up.”
So why build them here, I started to ask but caught myself: Follow the money. “But they were turning.”
She looks at me like a teacher at a student so dumb she fears she’ll have him back next year. “You know what the three largest electricity consumers are in Maine?”
That got me thinking, rare as that is. “The Millinocket pulp mill – biggest on the east coast, or one of Maine’s huge log mills, or the Bath Iron Works?” The latter was a sure thing, one of the world’s major shipyards.
What she said next blew my mind. “Three different wind farms,” snickering at the last word. “They have to keep them turning when there’s no wind so they don’t freeze or corrode inside. And so people think they’re working. It’s an enormous net loss in electricity.”
I sat trying to understand, gave up. “Got any gin?”
“I don’t drink that crap. But I’ve got some monster weed.”
Her white wide teeth in her wide succulent mouth were giving me trouble down below. “Well if I have to I’ll take that.”
She had a big jar of it up on the shelf with the basil, oregano, sage and other good things. Just the smell when she opened the jar near knocked me out and I kept wanting to take her in my arms but remembered about getting a broken jaw and all that.
Amazing how weed can weld you together, get you seeing inside each other’s heads so there’s no way or need to lie or in any way misstate because you’re so connected. In Afghanistan I remember once a few of us smoking hash before standing at attention in front of some Tampa scrambled eggs, or a Senator buying votes with a forty-five minute trip to the safest base we could find. And I could see right into their minds like reading a bad novel.
“So you can’t sell the place?” I repeat after a while.
“Wind Power LLC bought a few neighbors off at ten grand apiece. Now they can’t sell their places either.”
“Serves them right.”
“No, some of them were really suffering. Like Don and Vivian Woodridge, she’s ill and he was injured in a logging accident so they had to take the bribes. And now the turbine sound’s driving them crazy and they’re leaving next week.”
“Would you have taken the money?”
“From the Wind Mafia? Hell no.” She kills the roach, stretches out her long legs. “So why are you here? And not Hawaii?”
Useless to explain her why. I try anyway. About Bucky being a former comrade and me wanting to get him out.
“Bucky’s an asshole,” she says companionably.
“He’s your neighbor. Plus he shot out three of those turbines you hate.”
Deep in her armchair she smiles at me. “But he didn’t get the ones behind me.”
I nod, pissed off. “Who knows, maybe I will.”
As we sometimes do when pissed off we say things we shouldn’t. To the wrong people. Or in the wrong places.
Night Recon
AN OFT-BORING TASK you learn in SF is night reconnaissance. They drop you up in the mountains to lock in on somebody and watch what they do all night. A good way to freeze your ass and lose all faith in humanity.
So after dinner I drove an hour to Hallowell to do a night recon of Ronnie Dalt’s widow Abigail. It had been almost a month and a half since he was killed, and I was curious to know how she was taking it.
Her White Pages address turned out to be a three-story Italianate Victorian on the steep hill above the magnificent old town of Hallowell. It had magenta gingerbread, tall peaked windows and a widow’s walk atop the gabled roof. As I mentioned earlier, Hallowell is where my ancestor Elias Hawkins grew up before he took the boat in 1838 with his new wife to Hawaii, where despite being a missionary he managed to make life better for many thousand souls. If you visit Hallowell you can see the Old Congregational Church where he preached his first sermons, and the roiling River where he swam out to push logs ashore for ten cents each.
Night recon of Abigail was infinitely easier than watching some freezing village in Afghanistan. There you’re lying under white camo at 8,300 feet looking at a clump of stone houses huddled in the arctic wind, waiting without hope or expectation till suddenly at 22:18 a black silhouette slips out a back door and starts climbing the mountain, AK in hand.
You’re so concerned about his safety out here in this freezing night that you follow him, keeping to the stunted junipers and outcrops so he doesn’t see you one of the many times he checks his back trail.
He descends the far side of the mountain and stops, a black spot on the starlit snow, above a large stone house with five vehicles parked beside it. After fifteen minutes of watching, he goes down to the house and slips inside.
After a few minutes I wander downslope and hang out by a window seeing all these armed-to-the-teeth motherfuckers sitting in council, a map of the Varduj Valley between them, till it becomes clear they’re planning a raid.
Impossible to convey the excitement, terror and freezing discomfort of being there, your ears so cold you keep them covered but then can’t hear, your fingers numb, your toes too, and all the time the awareness you have to climb four thousand feet in frigid darkness then descend nearly the same then hike all the way back another seven miles to your outpost of smelly bored SF guys and Marines, where the only talk is pussy and football. Plus Master Sergeant Buckford Franklin, who’s waiting to chew your ass for being out there alone and following this motherfucker without calling for backup, and for generally screwing with all kinds of regulations.
As I scope out Abigail’s house the question does cross my mind how had she and Ronnie afforded this classy Victorian, he on his enviro pay and she doing some job at the Capitol?
I park Bucky’s 150 five blocks away, wheels turned toward the curb so if it decides to ignore the parking brake and first gear it can’t roll downhill (everything in Hallowell goes straight downhill and then you’re in the Kennebec River).
Few years ago, Lexie told me, a huge fuel tanker truck lost his brakes on this same hill going down to Water Street, Hallowell’s main road along the Kennebec. So down he goes like a 747 on turbo, faster and faster taking out parked cars left and right then flies across Water Street miraculously not killing anybody and smashes through the front wall of the best left-wing bookstore in Maine, taking out thousands of rare books, first editions, and the cash register, and knocks out the back wall of the building so that the now-leaking tank is spraying fuel all over the surviving books while the truck’s cab, with its astonished driver, is projected from the brick wall above the River and hangs there perilously.
Even more miraculously, five minutes before the truck’s driver had so unwisely decided to descend this street, the manager had closed the bookstore for a staff meeting in an upstairs room, thus they aren’t killed but are knocked off their feet by a great crash that shakes the ancient brick building to an inch of its life, and they get to stare with disbelief at the truck cab sticking ludicrously out from the building beneath them.
Only one of many perils of running a left-wing bookstore in Maine.
Anyway, back at Abigail’s it’s as usual freezing and I’m trying to read Thoreau’s Maine Woods by a headlamp that my gloved fingers keep freezing to, so cold the paper breaks when you bend it…
Only solemn bear-haunted mountains, with their great wooded slopes, were visible where, as man is not, w
e suppose some other power to be. My imagination personified the slopes themselves, as if by their very length they would waylay you, and compel you to camp again on them before night.
At 20:42 a rusty maroon Subaru wagon stops in front of her house and a tall slim woman gets out with a lanky long-haired guy who trudges behind her up the walk and proceeds to feel her up while she gets out the keys and opens the door and they stumble through it kissing and fondling and tripping over each other, from which I deduce this might not be a platonic relationship and that she’s dealing quite well with her bereavement.
An upstairs light goes on. There was clearly going to be the usual falling on the bed while tearing off each other’s clothes, then all that salacious rutting and grunting, but by this time I’ve seen more than I want so I drive Bucky’s 150 back to Lexie’s farm. Such a magnificent starlit night till about twenty miles from Eagle Mountain the flashing red strobes blot out every star in the sky.
I don’t give a damn, I told myself. In thirty days I’ll be in Tahiti under a big curl and all of this will be a bad memory.
IN LEXIE’S BATHROOM there’s a black spider in the toilet, running around the edge of the water but can’t climb up the bowl.
So I give it a good lookover, like you might a hand grenade, thinking back to a Special Forces field exercise on which bugs not to eat etc., and for sure it was a black widow, no doubt.
But there was a million acres of forest and ridges outside, so all I had to do was lift her out and dump her in the woods and the problem would belong to the next insect she caught.
Then I thought of her fangs in Lexie’s thigh and flushed the john.
NEXT MORNING AT 05:47 I’m back at Abigail’s keeping a wintry eye on her nascent whereabouts. Which means two and a half frigid hours in Bucky’s 150, scraping my breath off the windows while the bitter dawn wind swirls up through the holes in the floor, till last night’s beau stumbles out, nearly breaks a leg on the icy steps, navigates toward his Subaru and leaves in a typhoon of smoke.
