Archangel (24 page)

The bow of the canoe ground against the sand and suddenly people were everywhere. Dodge heard familiar voices, but for now he couldn’t place them. He was still too blinded by the glare to see. They dragged the canoe up onto land. Faces zoomed in close out of the night and questions popped in his ears. Dodge did not answer. He was too tired and confused. Strong hands helped him from the boat and walked him over to a picnic table which in daytime had a view of the lake. Dodge realized he had come ashore at the edge of the municipal park, just across the road from the house of Mary the Clock. Dodge looked at the man who was leading him. It was Twitch. He was wearing his paramedic jacket. He asked Dodge what had happened, so Dodge told him.

An ambulance bumped over the curb of the parking lot and drove across the grass to where Coltrane had been laid beside the canoe. Twitch opened Coltrane’s shirt. Under the glossy film of plastic wrap, Coltrane’s blood was a puddle of neon cherry.

Talking. Everyone seemed to be talking. In each voice was the high-pitched jabber of panic. Wind blew off the lake and slapped waves on the pale sand. Loons grieved out on the water. Children ran past him toward the flashing lights.

Coltrane was placed on a stretcher, strapped to it with orange nylon straps, and carried to the ambulance by five times as many people as were needed to hold the man’s weight. Lazarus was there, holding the IV bottle.

Dodge could not see Coltrane’s face. He was lost in the crowd.

The ambulance spun its wheels on the grass. It roared into the street, ear-drilling sirens sounding through town, rising and falling.
The children ran after it, until the ambulance gained speed and left them behind, coughing from the exhaust.

Dodge had no idea where they were taking Coltrane. There was no place in town that could handle such an injury. Part of Dodge wanted to get away from the noise, but the rest of him thought he should stay. He told himself there must be more to do, bringing order to the chaos of the crowd. As a policeman, he should be helping. But the chaos belonged to itself and was unstoppable. For a while longer, Dodge just sat there, his sweat growing cold and pasting his shirt to his back with the clamminess of raw meat. No one came to talk to him. They still hovered around the canoe, as if afraid to leave the place.

Dodge got up and walked. He was going to tell Clara what had happened. It was several miles to their house, but he was too dazed to think of anything but walking there. He headed down Main Street. Grit crunched under his boots in the gutters, sand left over from the winter, scattered on the roads to stop people and machines from slipping on the ice. People ran past him toward the park. Some wore windbreakers over their pajamas. Their eyes were fixed on the commotion. When Dodge turned to look, he saw the sabers of flashlights, still feeling their way across the black water. It was as if they were expecting more canoes, a flotilla from the island of the dead.

Dodge moved past the Quonset-hut arcade, where teenagers played out the last of their video games before running over to the park to see what was happening. Past the Ice Cream Shack, its windows plastered with sun-bleached pictures of people holding ice-cream cones and smiling. A boy leaned across the counter and shouted at Dodge, “Where the hell did everybody go?”

Dodge didn’t answer. He just pointed, feeling like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He walked on a ways farther and then somebody called his name. He looked up and saw it was Madeleine. She stood on the porch of her house across the road. She was barefoot and had pulled on some jeans and a sweatshirt. Her hair fell in front of her eyes.

“Where are you going?” she asked him.

“To tell Clara.”

“She already knows.” Madeleine hugged herself against the chill. She walked down the rickety boards of her porch steps.

There were times Dodge had dreamed of walking up those steps,
taking off his boots at the front door and setting them by the fire-place. In the dream, he would strip as he moved up the stairs, draping the banisters with his clothes. He would slide in beside Madeleine and spoon himself into her warm and sleeping body. And even in her sleep, when she felt him there she would move closer to him, and his hand would come around under her arm and cradle the softness of her breast. And he would sleep so deeply that he was afraid he might never wake up. Dodge exhaled suddenly, snuffing out the dream.

“I’ll make us some cocoa,” she said.

It was the only peace offering she had ever made him. They sat on the porch, holding their steaming drinks and looking out into the dark.

“It’ll be hard on the town if Victor dies,” Madeleine said.

“I don’t think he’ll make it.” Dodge felt the cramp in his hands being smoothed out by the heat of the mug. “I should go,” he told her. “I’m not good company right now.”

She took the mug from him and set it on the porch beside her. “I was thinking about what you said in the car the other day. It helped to see things from your point of view. We’ve known each other for a long time. I think we’re closer than we realize.”

“I could have told you that a long time ago.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I think you had to see it for yourself. I know you well enough to see you don’t take advice if you can help it, especially on how to live your life.”

She was looking at him.

He leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. Then he stood and walked down the steps.

“Call me if you need anything,” she said.

Dodge walked home through the streets. He didn’t know what would come of their meeting and whether he had started something or ruined everything with that one kiss. He couldn’t think about that now. At first light, he had to get out to the tracks and find Hazard’s body.

Madeleine stayed on the porch. She noticed how quiet it had become. In the night, Abenaki Junction and the Algonquin forest and Pogansett Lake all lost their boundaries and merged. Silence wandered
in the streets and through the woods and up into the hills. Then the cold drove her inside.

Hazard lay spreadeagled on the tracks. His consciousness kept ducking into black. He had been shot once in the side of his neck. Another bullet had smashed his cheekbone and exited just under his ear. The third slug had struck him in the left shoulder joint, and he could no longer feel his left arm. Now his heart beat with a strange metallic clanging like hammer strikes inside a fifty-gallon drum. He could not keep his head clear for long enough to know exactly where he was or to realize that he was dying.

When he had reached the Booths’ cabin that evening, he’d broken in and lain down on a sagging mattress in a room at the back of the house. Moving through the woods had tired him out. After a few minutes, he’d found enough strength to roll over. The next thing he knew, the two men were on the porch and he had no idea where the daylight had gone. He knew he had to get out of the house or he felt sure he would be caught. He had stabbed Victor Coltrane in what he thought was self-defense. Now he played and replayed the scene in his mind, as if in a fever dream.

A large black bear was walking down the tracks. The fur on the bear’s back was shiny and caught a pale silver-blue light, even though there was no moon. The bear crossed over the iron railway bridge, the Narrow River slipping by below. It stopped and raised its head to the breeze, wet nostrils twitching. The bear smelled Hazard’s blood. It lost the scent and turned and caught the scent again. Then the bear began to move toward the smell. A moment later it saw the shape of Hazard’s body lying in the middle of the tracks. The bear skidded down the gravel embankment to avoid coming at the thing head-on, in case it was not dead. It thrashed through the raspberry bushes that grew thick at the base of the embankment, and then worked its way slowly up until it came to the body. With its nose an inch from Hazard’s face, it took in the scent of the man’s cooled sweat and blood. The bear rolled Hazard over, shredding his jacket until it reached flesh. Then the bear opened its mouth very slowly and clamped down on Hazard’s head.

Hazard smelled the bear’s breath. It was musty and foul and clammy warm on his half-open eyes, which he could not close. The truth of what was happening to him flashed briefly in front of him, but he could not bring himself to believe it.

The bear bit down on Hazard’s temples and his bullet-broken cheek. Then it began to drag him down the tracks.

Hazard felt the pressure on his head, but the force of it seemed to come from inside his skull, not outside. Saliva ran over his face. Rail ties slid underneath him, bruising his chest. The toes of his boots dragged through the gravel.

The bear dragged Hazard fifty feet and then dropped him. It hooked its paw under Hazard’s chest and heaved him up. The man found himself sitting in a slumped-over position. His hands lay useless on the ground in front of him. The bitter, sugary smell of creosoted rail ties reached into him and branched off through his lungs.

One of the rails made a sound like cracking ice. The bear started. From the distance came the rumble of a train.

Hazard did not hear the train. He wondered if perhaps he was still lying on that sagging mattress in the cabin and this was all the jabber of a nightmare. The train’s whistle sounded as it passed through Abenaki Junction. It rode with four engines and fifty-five wagons, carrying fuel and liquid nitrogen and boxcars of farm machinery.

The bear stood and followed the whistle’s echo across the lake, turning its head slowly as the sound spread out through the trees. The rumble of engines was clearer now. A steady, rising roar. The first gold blast from the train’s forward light showed through the trees. The ground beneath the rails began to shake.

The bear loped away down the embankment. Then it stopped. As the beam grew stronger and the earthquake of the train came closer, the bear turned again and ran from the sound and the light.

Hazard’s head felt strangely clear. He knew it was the train and that he was on the tracks. The pinging of the rails was almost constant now. He raised his head, rolling his neck to the side away from the bullet wound, and he could see the great eye of the forward light. He felt the rushing wind. The light surrounded him. The beam burned out his sight. The noise hammered through him. Hazard
stared at the train with a lopsided glance and howled out the last of his breath.

The lead engine roared around a bend in the tracks. Alain Labouchere, the driver, did not even have time to blow his whistle at what he thought looked like a wounded deer. He ducked his head away from the window, its ironplated grille segmenting his view like the eye of an insect. Labouchere felt a thump as the train slammed into and through the obstacle. Then he was past it. The rails were smooth again, and bright.

Four hours later, Clara Coltrane heard a sound out in the cornfield. She was sitting at the bare-wood kitchen table. The rising sunlight slipped across the walls. She had only just arrived back from the hospital and she was still in shock. Twitch had said he would probably survive. She alternated between convincing herself that if Twitch said this it had to be the truth and not believing anything but the worst.

At first she thought the noise came from the dogs. They were always play-fighting roughly enough to draw a yelp now and then. But this sound was different. There was a shrillness to it. Something wrong in the way it trailed off. Clara waited for another sound, but there was only the breeze, which shuffled through the dust and scattered straw in the barnyard as if it were looking for something.

Clara pulled on Victor’s ratty wool vest with the old Indianhead nickel buttons, and walked outside. She called to the dogs. When a minute had gone by and no dogs came, she walked down the dirt road that ran between the fields. She glanced toward the trees, where turkey vultures always circled in the summertime.

A huge shape was climbing the slope toward the canopy of trees. At first, Clara thought it was a man, but the shape was too big. Too dark. It seemed to be more than one thing. Two things joined together. Clara squinted and saw now that it was a bear, a huge bear, and in its clamped-shut jaws was one of the dogs. It was Bugs. She could tell from the white-tipped tail. The bear had Bugs by the neck. The dog’s head lolled down and its legs trailed on the ground. Clara could tell the dog’s neck was broken.

She let out a long shout. The noise trailed across the field. She knew that bear. Knew from its gnarled ears that this was the same animal
that had killed Gil Kobick, the bear people thought was long since dead.

The animal heard her shout and turned. The dog’s head swung toward Clara. Its muzzle was crushed and bloody. Then the bear turned again and was gone, merging with the shadows of the trees.

Clara ran back to the house, kicked open the screen door and grabbed Victor’s Springfield rifle from its two-pronged iron cradle over the fireplace. Then she ran back out the door. The rifle felt heavy in her fine-boned hands. The bear was gone, but she still fired off a round to chase it away. The concussion left a far-off ringing in her ears and bruised her shoulder. The valley’s echo met her with slamming applause. She fired another round and then another, and the valley’s thundering ovation did not stop. When all of the bullets were gone and the bright, smoking cartridges lay ejected at her feet, Clara lowered the rifle and stared through the disappearing cordite smoke at the trees. They seemed impenetrable to her, as if the copper-jacketed bullets had just bounced off the solid wall of their trunks.