Archangel (12 page)

Dodge drove away, scattering chickens, careful not to kick up gravel with his tires. Bugs and Tucker chased the car as far as the road, then stopped and drank from a puddle. As Dodge made his way back to town, he thought of the investigation. Now while others could move on with their lives, it became Dodge’s job to shuffle through the past, intruding into people’s memories like someone who wears muddy boots into a tidy house. Part of him wanted to call it an accident and let the dead man lie buried in peace. But there would be no calm in Abenaki Junction until this was solved. No calm.

Still dazed and angry at the sight of the clear-cut land, Gabriel followed the trail that led down from the mountain. He reached Pogansett Lake and peeled off his clothes. Dried sweat was gritty on his skin. He walked through black flakes of dead leaves at the water’s edge and let himself fall into the tea-brown water. It was cool but not cold. Clutched in Gabriel’s hand was a razor. He had no mirror, so he
shaved by feel, dragging the blade across his skin and following it with the tips of his fingers to see if any stubble remained. The razor was half-blunt and hurt when he shaved his upper lip. His eyes teared with the jabbing, pulling pain. It was strange to have smooth cheeks again. He ducked his head underwater and ran his fingers through his hair. Gabriel’s memories of this lake were still clear in his mind. He remembered riding out with his father in the predawn fog to go fishing. He had sat bundled in his parka, watching the
V
of their motorboat’s wake in the glassy water. Then, later, he had sat for hours watching the yellow and orange bobber on his fishing line, waiting for it to jerk beneath the surface. He had seen eighteen-wheeler trucks drive out across the ice in wintertime and felt his hair freeze in the wind blowing down from the north. Leg-thick icicles hung off the narrow river bridge, sometimes reaching the surface of the frozen water and forming bars like a gate across the river. He had been woken in the middle of the night by the gunfire sound of ice cracking on the lake, signaling the approach of spring. Now, as Gabriel raised his head from the brown water, he caught sight of the bony ridge of Seneca Mountain and beyond it the purple hills of Canada. Heat haze blurred the distant trees. It looked as if the mountains were smoldering.

For Gabriel, this place had lived so long as holy ground inside his head that it was hard at first for him to believe that he had actually returned and was not passing through it in the fog of some daydream. Unlike most places remembered from childhood, which might appear absurdly small when revisited as an adult, this wilderness had lost none of its vastness. He knew that in its shadowy cloisters of trees were places where no person had ever been before, where people could be lost for days and bears skulked in the hollows or sunned themselves on the bare rocks of Seneca’s crest. He was as awed and humbled by it now as he had ever been. It was not a mass of living things. It seemed to have, instead, a single collective life of its own.

He combed his hair and changed into the clean clothes that he had wrapped in newspaper in his pack. He wore his father’s old Filson cruiser jacket, heavy wool in a black-and-gray plaid, and khaki trousers with a double thickness of cloth from the knee up. These had also belonged to his father. It used to take him a year to wear out the
trousers and he never wore out the Filson. Gabriel stashed his pack and strapped on his money belt.

He walked the tracks into town, using a long stride to tread along the deep-cracked wooden spacers. Here and there beside the rails were piles of bolts for fastening the lengths of track together, left behind by the work crews. He crossed the narrow bridge, black paint chipped away to the brown antirust coat underneath. The builder’s plaque was still there—McClintock and Marshall 1931—not yet prized off for somebody’s collection.

A white-and-green-trimmed cabin stood just back from the tracks. Gabriel knew that it belonged to a family called Booth. His father had been friends with the Booths. Mr. Booth always flew an American flag on the flagpole whenever he was home. No flag was there today.

Gabriel walked past the ruins of the cabin where he had told Swain to cache the materials. For now, he did not check the cache, in case the place had already been discovered and was being watched.

Gabriel passed the first few houses. Mutt dogs on rope leashes barked at him and wagged their curled-over tails. Behind the garages, Gabriel saw snowmobiles set up on cinder blocks for the summer and huge piles of wood sheltered from rain under blue tarpaulins. Most of the houses needed a new coat of paint. The winters had bleached their colors away.

The Four Seasons diner was a short distance from the place where the VIA tracks ran through town. By the time Gabriel reached it, he was carrying his jacket because of the heat of the day. The food at the Four Seasons had never been his favorite, but Gabriel had been thinking about it for so long now that he kept having to swallow the saliva that welled up in his mouth as he walked toward the brown-and-yellow building with its potholed parking lot just now emptying of lunch-hour customers. Dusty-booted workers clomped down the steps of the diner, fitting on their baseball caps. They climbed into their trucks, some of them with suspensions that jacked the chassis far off the ground. The men wore beat-up jeans, wallet marks faded into the back pockets. Some had clip-on suspenders to hold up their trousers. They wore T-shirts or flannel. All of them had caps, greasy-brimmed and perched high on their heads. Their faces were deep-creased from hard work and living outside. These men reminded Gabriel of old pictures of his father, black-and-white shots of a man
leaning on his chain saw and standing next to a pile of fresh-cut logs. In later pictures, after Jonah Mackenzie had fired him and the family had moved to New Jersey, Gabriel’s father’s face had changed. His father never fitted into the suit that the pharmaceutical company made him wear to work. Gabriel had once walked into his parents’ bedroom and seen his father dressed in his old logging gear, standing in front of the mirror. His father was embarrassed, and quickly pulled off the jacket. One of the buttons came loose and he scrambled to pick it up as the button rolled toward Gabriel’s feet. That was the last time he ever saw his father in those clothes.

When Gabriel walked through the door, only a family of Quebecois tourists remained in the Four Seasons. The man and woman leaned across the table toward each other, whispering in French. Their two children, both girls, were playing ticktacktoe with a purple crayon on a paper place mat. They all wore the clothes of city people, fashionably fragile against the coarse cloth of the Abenaki Junctioners. Gabriel sat with his back to the wood-veneer paneling. An electric clock hummed on the wall above him. Arranged around the clock were gold-painted flowers and a plastic cherub with a featureless face.

At first, Gabriel was worried that someone would recognize him. He tried not to catch anyone’s eye. After a few minutes, he settled into his chair and reassured himself by counting off the years that he’d been gone. He had changed too much since then for his face to be familiar, but he still felt a part of this town. Time had no bearing on how strongly bound to it he was. He ordered a salad and a bowl of soup and a ham-and-Swiss omelet and some french fries. It was a lot of food, but the waitress didn’t blink at it. All she said was, “It might take a minute.” She wore white nurse’s shoes and an apron over a pink dress. She poured him a cup of coffee and dropped two tubs of half-and-half on the table.

Gabriel had picked up a free copy of the
Forest Sentinel
from a stack at the door. He saw it was a local publication, but he had never heard of it before. The headlines announced the closing of Mackenzie’s purchase of the logging rights to the Algonquin. There was no shock, only the dullness of confirmation. There was also a story of a logger who had been killed in an accident that may have been caused by a nail being driven into a tree. Gabriel set the paper down. Without thinking, he began smoothing his hand across the print, as if to
rub the words away. His palm came away sooty with newsprint. Somebody’s started already, and didn’t mark the trees that had been spiked. That might have ruined everything. He realized then that he was shaking, maybe to have come this far for nothing. But until he found out for sure, he knew he had to continue as he had planned, so he flipped to the back of the paper and looked through the Help Wanted section.

One by one, Gabriel weighed the jobs in his head. With a french fry dunked in ketchup, he drew a line through the cook and the weight-loss program, wondering how much weight he had already lost these past few days in the woods. The cook’s job was no good. It would keep him tied down too much of the time. This left the line-walker job. He wasn’t even sure what that meant, but if it was the only job available, he knew he’d have to take it. And before anything else, he had to find a place to live.

His coffee shuddered as a logging truck approached. Then the whole restaurant shook when the huge machine rolled past. The minor earthquake reminded Gabriel of the times when his parents had brought him to this diner. He recalled the way his father greeted everyone and then walked from table to table having private, muttered conversations. His mother talked with the waitresses, who stood with one hip cocked and heavy coffeepots gripped tightly in their hands. Gabriel had felt safe here. Everyone knew them in town. He had not known how fragile all this was until it ended. The truck drove on down the road, leaving behind a screen of khaki dust which painted the cars and the houses. He wished he could start up a conversation with one of these people. Just to talk after his days of quiet. But these conversations, which had seemed so simple before,
had become dangerous now. It was his silence which would keep him company in the days and weeks ahead.

Gabriel couldn’t finish everything he had ordered. After days of hardly eating, the saltiness of the ham was almost too much for him. The flavors of the spices jumped like sparks in his mouth. And the news of James Pfeiffer had tied a knot in his stomach. He had the waitress wrap the rest of his french fries in foil and he took them with him. As he left the restaurant, he paused on the stairs that led down to the parking lot. He saw a woman walking on the other side of the street. She carried a camera and a leather satchel. When she saw Gabriel, she paused. Instinctively, Gabriel stared down at his boots. It was not the sidelong glance of someone finding him attractive. It was a look of suspicion. The woman walked on down the street, and after a few seconds Gabriel felt his heartbeat return to normal. He looked out past the houses at the Algonquin forest. It was a green ocean, with Seneca Mountain rising from it in a sawtooth ridge of pines. Then, on the breeze, Gabriel heard the whine of chain saws from deep inside the forest. There was no time for considering the odds. No time even to think. He would just have to begin, and not weigh the cost of it on some quivering scales in his imagination. The cost would show itself in time, and either he would stand it or he would not.

It was Madeleine who had seen Gabriel as he walked out of the diner. He had made her suspicious because he was dressed like a local, and she didn’t recognize him. But then Madeleine convinced herself that he must be some young truck driver passing through. She told herself not to be so mistrusting of people, but it was in her nature and she knew she couldn’t change it.

Gabriel stood looking down Main Street. Bright, powdery light sparkled off grit in the road. It seemed like the end of the world. He walked for a few minutes, until he was standing in front of the house where he had spent the first sixteen years of his life. The sun was hidden behind its chimney and threw bolts of gold across the shingle roof and into the sky. A
FOR RENT
sign hung on the door. The house was still painted red, although its color was faded now and in places the white undercoat showed through. The porch sagged like every other porch in town. The house seemed to have exhaled and forgotten to breathe in. He was sad that the house had fallen so badly into disrepair. He thought of how hard his parents had worked to keep it
up. The flowerbeds his mother had planted in the garden were gone now, and it had obviously been years since anyone replaced the damaged cedar shingles on the roof, the way his father had done every spring, the new wood dappling the roof until it faded silvery like the rest. The garden had become a cemetery of old lawnmowers and car fenders, bedsprings and busted chairs, and car engines gouged from their chassis and a truck filled so full with old magazines that anyone who opened its door would be buried under a yellow avalanche of
National Geographies
.

A man walked out onto the porch. He stood in the shadows, as if frightened of the light. He wore brown trousers with clip-on suspenders over a thin white T-shirt. He had hemmed the trousers himself. Pink thread inched across the brown polyester. “You come about the room?” He let the last word trail in a Down East drawl.