Archangel (34 page)

M
ackenzie sat by himself at the Dutch Boy diner in Skowhegan. Ungaro had called that morning and told him to meet a man there. First, Mackenzie had to transfer the money into Ungaro’s bank account. Now everything was in motion. Mackenzie had the feeling that events had slipped suddenly and completely beyond his control.

Mackenzie looked at the door whenever anyone walked in. Sometimes he kept his gaze on the person, hoping to make eye contact because he felt sure this was the one. Every time he raised his head, he caught sight of the sign out in front of the diner—a blond-haired boy in Dutch costume. The boy had a fat-lipped smile and stood with his arms folded and one wooden-shoed foot stuck out, as if frozen in the middle of a Cossack dance. The boy’s clogs were outlined with glass bars of white neon. They lit up at night.

At last one man returned his stare. Mackenzie’s hands clenched under the table. Despite all the mental preparation he had done, the
face still caught Mackenzie by surprise. He looked like a college boy, square-chinned and heavy chested from bench-pressing weights. He wore hiking boots and slightly baggy khaki trousers tucked into his heavy wool socks. He walked with his hands in his pockets. His blue-jean jacket had a worn-out corduroy collar. The man walked over. He had rosy cheeks and dirty blond hair and eyes like old glacier ice.

“Hey,” the boy said, and sat down. He moved confidently. “You are Mr. Mackenzie, right?”

Mackenzie nodded. Face-to-face with the person who would help him, he felt suddenly embarrassed to be needing the assistance.

The boy set his folded hands on the place mat. On the ring finger of his right hand he wore a gold college ring of the knuckle-duster type, with two lacrosse sticks in an
X
set into black enamel at the top. “Well, I hear you got some trouble, sir.”

“A little.” He listened to the boy’s accent. South but not Deep South. Not Alabama south. Virginia maybe. Kentucky. The great-great-grandson of some Bowie-waving Rebel at Bull Run.

“Well, all we have to do here is find out who you think is causing your problem.”

“How do you know Sal?” Mackenzie asked. Questions crammed Mackenzie’s head. What on earth is a clean-cut boy like you doing in this job? Do your parents know? Do you do this for a living? Who the hell trained you? How much is Sal paying you? The questions jostled in his head, lining up to be asked.

“Friend of a friend. My name is Shelby.” He extended his hand to MacKenzie.

Mackenzie shook the hand and felt its strength. He told Shelby how he thought Madeleine was either out there in the woods spiking the trees herself or was getting someone to do it for her. He mentioned Wilbur Hazard’s death, but nothing more about it.

“Are the police still carrying out an investigation?”

“There’s only one guy. He patrols the woods twice a day and once at night. It’s not having any effect.”

“And if it is who you think? Exactly how far are we going here?”

And here it is, thought Mackenzie. Of all the questions I have asked myself, this one I did not answer. “I just want them to stop.”

“Good. Then that gives me some latitude.”

“Take all the latitude you want, as long as you can make them
quit.” Just thinking about it made Mackenzie angry. “Have you been to Abenaki Junction before?”

“I’ve been there for the past four days. I passed your Range Rover on the way down here. I wanted to get a feel for the place before we met.”

“I didn’t see you around.” Mackenzie felt old and slow. The boy was far ahead of him. The people who never play games, Mackenzie thought.

“No, I expect you didn’t see me,” said Shelby. The south twanged in his voice. “I’ll see if this woman is spiking the trees. If she is, I will give her grief. But if it isn’t her, we might have to meet again.”

“Yes. I’ll give you my number.” Mackenzie fumbled for his notebook.

Before Mackenzie could write anything, Shelby rapped on the table with his knuckle-duster ring. “Good-bye, Mr. Mackenzie.” He slipped out of the diner. No waitress had come to give him coffee. No one turned to watch him go.

Mackenzie looked out into the parking lot but did not see where Shelby had gone. Suddenly he knew who else Shelby reminded him of. It was the Dutch Boy. The one whose wooden shoes lit up after dark. Shelby the Dutch Boy. Mackenzie tried to laugh about it but only slumped further into quiet. He did not feel the cat’s purr in his heart as control returned to his life, the way he had hoped he would. Instead, Mackenzie knew he had unleashed a wave of chaos into the neatly ordered streets of his town.

Shelby drove straight to Abenaki Junction. He parked his metallic-blue Honda Civic across the street from the
Forest Sentinel
office. For three hours, he watched who walked in and who came out. He thought it was a shame to be sitting in his car on a beautiful morning like this when he could have been out canoeing on the lake or climbing the mountain that rose up so steeply beyond the town.

Shelby thought how desperate Mackenzie had seemed, and how clumsily the man had tried to hide it. He wondered what kind of woman it was who could be running this paper and doing so much else on the side that she could send a man like Mackenzie out of control. Shelby had no doubt that the man was out of control, because that was when people like Mackenzie, who valued control above all other things, called for people like him. He knew the questions
that Mackenzie had wanted to ask. Everyone thought the same thing when they met him. He was more surprised than anyone at how a bright Virginia boy like himself could end up in a job like this. At the University of Rhode Island, he had planned to study Ocean Sciences at the University’s Bay Campus after his undergraduate work. The only way he could afford his time in school was to sign up for five years of military service after graduation.

Now, sitting in his car in the quiet Abenaki Junction street, Shelby wondered if, should his former self come walking down the street, that man would even recognize the person he became on the night he parachuted onto an airfield in Panama as a member of a Special Forces unit. He remembered how, on landing, he had become separated from the rest of his squad and run for the first piece of cover he could find, diving into a drainage ditch and feeling his bare hands sink into jellylike mud at the bottom. His eyes were stinging from the oil that filmed the ditch water. He could taste it in his spit. It raked at his throat like steel wool.

A Panamanian truck with a searchlight mounted on the back drove around the airfield. It seemed to plow up the ground with its harshly glaring beam. The truck stopped a hundred yards down the runway and began to play its light back and forth across the ditch water.

Shelby remembered taking the rounded bottle-shaped charge of a 40mm rocket-propelled grenade from his assault pack. He fitted it into the grenade tube under the barrel of his M-16.

His eyes felt as if they were on fire. They had never been the same since. Even now, as the memory returned, Shelby took his hands off the steering wheel of the Civic, closed his eyes and touched his fingertips against his lids to stop the pain.

When the Panamanian truck was fifteen yards away, Shelby had a strange feeling of standing outside himself, as if from a hundred feet up in the air, looking down without concern for the men in the truck or for the spidery shape that crouched in the ditch. He wondered at the time if this meant he was about to die, and already his soul was leaving his body, knowing what his heart did not yet know.

He undid the safety on his rifle and stood, the crumpled rainbows of oil making him slip. The truck was huge, almost on top of him. Shelby fired from the hip, and the round seemed to fly out slowly, hissing and wobbling through the air. The RPG splashed through the
truck’s windshield, and in the explosion that followed Shelby was thrown back by a wall of heat and concussion. Then he was under the ditch water. When he rose to the surface, the ditch was burning in patches of ignited oil. The truck was only the frame of a truck now. It roared with flames and sank down on the melting rubber of its tires. Ammunition exploded like a string of Chinese firecrackers.

Shelby felt his soul returning to his body. Suddenly he was whole again, and clinging to the earth. He lay there for a long time, watching the last yellow-orange flames burn out on the surface of the ditch water. He heard waves break and the clatter of seashells being dragged back down with the tide. When he raised his head from the ditch, he saw a pile of smoldering rags. One of the men who had been inside the truck. The body was whole, but shrunk into something almost baby size and leering like a gargoyle torn from the stonework of a church. The breath of its burning blew past him. He remembered the smell, and how for one disgusting moment it had reminded him of food.

The next thing he recalled clearly was standing in a chow line three days later, when all the fighting had finished, while army cooks slapped spoonfuls of scrambled egg and beans into the mess tin in his outstretched hand. In one of his pockets, he felt what he thought were dried apricots, which had been part of his rations when he landed at the airfield. But when he pulled them out into the light, he saw instead that they were human ears. He had no recollection of how they came to be there and felt none of the fury that would have driven him to take these gruesome souvenirs.

After coming back to the States, he received an early discharge from the service. He tried to make his way back into the ranks of old college friends, but it was as if a curtain had been drawn down between them. Too much had happened to him and, it seemed to Shelby, not enough to the friends he left behind. They helped him find jobs, but he didn’t want to work and he didn’t even want the kindness that went with their offerings. Time pushed past him. It was a simple fact, like the fact of dying, and he could not explain it to people who had planned out their lives around houses and cars and what vacations they would take. Shelby looked around and what he saw were people who were not dead but lifeless nonetheless. Wind just rustling the dried-out tongues in their mouths.

Then Shelby met Mr. Salvatore Ungaro. Or rather, Ungaro met Shelby. Tracked him down from God knows where, which, now that Shelby knew Ungaro well, did not surprise him at all. He had been working for Ungaro ever since. Some of the jobs were legal. Most weren’t.

Sitting silently now in this car in the blue-sky Maine afternoon, Shelby felt as if his senses had been chiseled away until the only ones remaining were those that kept him alive. Shelby didn’t know where the rest of him had gone. One day, perhaps, those lost fragments would belong to him again. Then he would go back to the world in which he used to live. But for now Shelby lived where he was comfortable—out in the dark, where things made sense to him.

At a quarter past five, a woman walked out of the
Forest Sentinel
office. Madeleine. Mackenzie had told him her name. She looked as if she had a lot on her mind. She was so far from the kind of person he had imagined would unhinge a man like Mackenzie that Shelby waited several minutes more, expecting someone else to emerge from the office. But no one did, and by now he had lost sight of the woman, so he could not follow her home.

There were instincts Shelby had come to trust since he began working for Ungaro. They told him when it was dangerous, who to trust and who not, and when he was on the right path. Now these instincts muttered to him. They told him that this woman was either very good at what she did, or she had nothing to do with Mackenzie’s troubles. Shelby knew this job would take longer than he’d expected.

A bird shrieked in the trees above him.

Gabriel dropped down to his knees. His eyes struggled to refocus. Nothing. He had been spiking pines out in the woods near Coltrane’s farm. Gabriel chose the areas at random, sometimes walking two or three miles into the woods and not following any trails so that he could lead people away from the idea that the railroad tracks were being used to deliver the spikes. Gabriel knew that these areas would be found eventually. It was not important that they be found all at once. In fact it was important that they weren’t. He wanted to give the impression of many people working at the same time. He began to use the helix nails that Swain had left him. They were shorter than the
bridge spikes, but twisted in such a way that once the heads were clipped off they could never be removed. They were harder to work into the wood, and the heads of his hammers were becoming badly dented. Even though he wore gloves, his hands were patched with calluses that bulged off the level of his palms.

Light filtered down through the trees, touching the ground only in places where white birches reached up their slim and bony trunks. There was no more sound. After a few minutes, Gabriel’s breathing became regular again. He had come to rely on birdsong to warn him of anyone’s approach. A great stillness had entered his body since he’d started working on the tracks. He could ride the rails now almost without thinking, his body swaying in and out of the turns. On clear mornings, his eyes narrowed automatically as he passed the sun-reflecting ponds. Now he knew the many shades of green, from the pale reeds beneath the Narrow River bridge to the dullness of the new pine needles. The green of wild strawberry leaves and the green of loganberry bushes. Green of mold on fallen trees and brassy green of the sky before it rained. And all these greens had facets of other greens in the different lights of day and shadow. He knew them all without thinking, as he moved through the wilderness without sound, relying as much on instincts that he didn’t understand as on those he did, beyond all sight and smell and hearing.