Archangel (41 page)

Mackenzie rolled onto his back in time to see an eagle fly over, cast its shadow on the polished green hood of his car and then swerve suddenly, wide wings flexed, and swoop past where he lay. As it passed directly above him, Mackenzie swore it was no bird, but some man cloaked in wings—the unforgiving angel who had watched him all these years and judged him as harshly as he judged himself. He craned his neck to see where the bird had gone, but could see only the highway of blue sky in the path he had cut through the forest.

It was then that Jonah Mackenzie had a vision of his own death. Not one concrete image. Instead, it had a quality of light. White. Yellow. It dropped from the clear sky like crystalline splinters of sun, broken into the hard lasers of each primary color. It was a feeling of certainty. The experience was strangely familiar, as if this news had been brought to him long before but somehow he’d forgotten it. From the silence that followed, stilling even the breeze through the tops of the pines and the razzing hum of cicadas, it seemed to Mackenzie as if every living thing in the forest had felt the shock of this vision and was hushed by it. Even the forest itself, for which Mackenzie had shown no pity in his life, seemed to be pitying him. Death walked toward him at a steady pace, and as it drew closer Mackenzie felt the swirling emptiness that surrounded it.

“Wealth dies,” Mackenzie found himself muttering, eyes tightly shut. “People die. The only thing that never dies is the verdict on each person dead.”

The vision slowly faded, as if whatever it was had traveled through him and past him and carried away with it the savage waking-dream. Mackenzie climbed to his feet, one metal and one bone, and staggered back to his car. Then he drove home and got drunk by himself in his study on the smoky burn of Islay whiskey, staying up until late in the night. He offered no explanation to Alicia. If he did not mention it,
the thing might not be real. But even if the promise of it had not been true, the vision itself would never leave him. Not even in the pendulum rocking of his skull as he raised the decanter to his mouth and drank the fiery liquid, blue night winking off the crystal.

Coltrane put in a call to New York. It was the first time he had used his phone in months. He had made up his mind what to do. Days had passed since he walked out of the Mackenzie mill. Each morning at five, he swung himself out of bed and got halfway to the sink to shave before he remembered that he didn’t have a job. The perfectly rationed energy that had seen him through the days began to smolder in him. He sat confused in a chair in his kitchen, watching Clara go about her day and fuss over him, but he was beyond any help she could give. Slowly his confusion began to distill. He knew what had to be done, as much for himself as to put right some of what had happened.

He made an appointment to see Linda Church, producer of a television program called
Focus America
. Her assistant was clipped and rude on the phone, the way people are rude to door-to-door salespeople. On the day, Coltrane put on a pair of Florsheim shoes and a jacket and a tie, none of which he had worn in years. The shoes were so old and out of use that they had curled up at the toes and made him walk as if he were on rockers. He told Clara where he was going. He had expected that she might try to talk him out of it, but she did not. She seemed to have a better idea than he did about what he would accomplish with his trip. Coltrane took the bus to Portland and from Portland down to Boston. Then he boarded an Amtrak train and headed south.

Eight hours later, Coltrane left the train at Penn Station in New York. It was his first time in the city. He walked out through the low-roofed corridors, past a gift shop where mechanical toy dogs yipped and wandered around the dirty floor as if they were looking for something. Past one man wearing the pink plastic wristband of a hospital patient. The man was dressed in army-surplus clothes and stalked invisible enemies, shooting them down with a gun made from his fingers. Others stood beside closed shops, talking to themselves and swinging their heads from side to side. Coltrane rode up the escalator,
past a flower seller and a legless Vietnam vet holding out a paper cup for change. “I suffered for you,” the man said. “I suffered for all of you fuckers.”

Before Coltrane stepped into the cab, he stood looking around at the chinks of blue sky above the buildings and the cars and the sky-reflecting windows. He was trying to figure out how he would explain this place to Clara. Not just describe it. Explain it. It would not be enough to talk about the legless man or the way he found himself taking shallow breaths so as not to cough on the fumes. There was something else. Some discord that he felt beyond all senses he could name. He realized it would be hard to explain to these people what was being lost in the place he had come from, because it was already gone from here. He understood then that this was the source of the discord, not all the things that were here but the things that were not. It would not make a difference if they drove out to a forest for a week or so each year. The thunder of the city would not have left their bones by the time it came to leave again. If Coltrane had known this in advance, he would not have come to the city. He would have lived out his life feeling like a coward for not having tried, but he had come this far and he had nothing left to lose.

Ten minutes later, Coltrane climbed out of a cab at the entrance to the
Focus America
studios on Forty-fourth Street and went inside. The guard at the front desk called his name upstairs. He was on time, but was made to wait in a little room with seafoam-green walls and magazines fanned out like playing cards on glass tables. Eventually, an assistant showed him in. She was petite and wore a short cherry-red dress. He followed her past many booths with papers stacked on desks and phones ringing, to a room with a view.

A bald man with an earring walked out carrying a file and Coltrane stepped back to let him pass. Then he found himself looking at a very tall, pale-skinned woman, whose silvery hair was parted severely down the middle. She wore a dark blue suit with gold buttons. This was Linda Church.
Focus America
uncovered scandals and schemes, people jailed unjustly and cases of political corruption. On the TV at the Loon’s Watch, Coltrane had seen people run away from Linda Church as she and her camera crew ambushed them outside office buildings and chased them down streets in a flurry of trenchcoats and wiring, bawling out questions as she went.

“Mr. Coltrane.” She cleared some papers off her desk, as if to find a place where she could rest her hands. She told him with her movements that she had no time for chat.

“Yes, that’s right.” He undid the front button on his jacket and sat down in the chair opposite her desk. The toes of his shoes were still curled up. He planted his feet hard on the floor.

“So you have a story for us.” She talked almost without moving her lips.

“I believe so.” For days, Coltrane had thought about little else but the moment when he would explain his story to her. Now that he was here, his words and everything around him seemed pillowed in an anesthetic fuzziness.

She tipped in her chair. It looked for a moment as if she was about to pitch backward out the window and into the crawling traffic ten floors below. “We normally have a policy about doing stories that involve personal vendettas.”

“It’s always personal,” said Coltrane. He had become uneasy in the waiting room, but now he began to gather himself together. “If it weren’t personal, I wouldn’t be here. And if it weren’t more than personal, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

The black dots of her pupils seemed to freeze. “I suppose you could see it that way,” she said.

Coltrane explained the Algonquin deal, and told her what would be left of the wilderness by the time Mackenzie had finished with it. She took some notes with a fat black Mont Blanc fountain pen on a yellow legal pad. Not looking up. Lips pressed bloodlessly together. Then she sat back and set the pen down on the desk. “I don’t believe a person would put himself in danger just to save a bunch of trees.”

“It’s not just the trees.” Coltrane allowed his voice to rise in the soundproofed white walls of the office. “It’s the wilderness. It’s where you come from,” he said. “And when it’s gone, even if you haven’t ever seen the wilderness, a part of you goes with it.”

“Really.” She smiled at him. It was the kiss-off smile. “I just don’t think it has the kind of appeal that we’re looking for.”

Coltrane nodded, to say thank you and good-bye. He stood and felt a hard pinch in his stomach where his scar was still healing. A quiet groan worked its way out of his throat. He pressed one hand to the
scar and with the other he propped himself up against the desk. “Jesus,” he whispered.

“Are you all right?” Linda Church stood. “Do you want me to call someone?”

“No.” It hurt to talk. “I got stabbed a while ago and sometimes when I stand too fast, the hurt comes back.” He looked up, straining his neck to meet her eye. “It goes away in a bit.”

“My God, who stabbed you?”

“It was out in the forest. It was a guy some people thought was spiking trees. But it wasn’t him.”

“What happened to the man?”

“My best friend shot him in the face. After that, he got hit by a train, but by then I think he was already dead.” Coltrane lowered himself back into the chair. “If I could just sit here for a minute.”

Linda Church also sat. She unscrewed the cap of her pen and made another note. “And have there been any other deaths?”

“Ayuh. There was James Pfeiffer. That was what started it all.”

“What happened to him?” She was writing it down.

“Chain saw.”

The phone rang. Linda Church picked up the receiver, listened for a second and then said, “Not now.” She hung up. “Chain saw, did you say?” Her eyes were narrowed almost shut.

Coltrane nodded. The pain was going now.

“Mr. Coltrane, I think maybe we could work with you on this. Now tell me again from the start.”

One hour later, Coltrane walked out into the street. Linda Church had said she would be looking into it further. She had made him promise to go on camera with what he had said and Coltrane had agreed. He took the next train north. It was night when he left New York. For a long time, Coltrane looked out at streetlamps rushing past like fireflies. As he watched the lights go by, Coltrane thought back to when he watched the fireworks exploding over Pogansett Lake every Fourth of July. The glittering and falling stars always amazed him, as if he were witnessing the creation of another universe. He felt the same sense of wonder at being involved in something that was larger than he was, something he could never fully understand and was not meant to. He kept his face pressed to the window, not
wanting to miss a single light, and the train carried him on into the dark.

When Mackenzie arrived back from work at his office the next morning, Alicia had just finished writing him a message on a pink piece of While-You-Were-Out notepaper. She wore a white dress printed with tiny red roses.

Mackenzie smiled at her. “You look good,” he said. He was feeling better today. Some of his workers had returned. He felt sure that the rest would follow soon. He would find someone to replace Coltrane, and when Shelby had finished his work, the mill could get back to business as usual. The mill would survive. The town would survive. It was one of those days when he felt sure that he had saved himself a place in heaven.

Alicia tore the piece of notepaper from the pad and stuck it on his chest. “I think you’re about to be famous,” she said.

“Why’s that?” He tried to talk and read the note at the same time. It said that Linda Church had called. There was a number for him to call back. For one confused moment, Mackenzie felt pride balloon in his chest. First, he imagined himself in front of a camera outside the Mackenzie mill, walking with Linda Church down one of his logging roads, both of them wearing trenchcoats and deep in discussion, followed by the camera crew. More pictures lined up, like anxious students, arms raised and hands waving. Then suspicion snapped him out of it. “Did she say what she wanted?”