Archangel (6 page)

“Are you all right, Marcus?” Twitch sat down next to him on the carcass. The bones creaked under his weight.

“Just give me a minute,” said Dodge.

Twitch stood and opened the freezer door. Condensation billowed across the floor. “Well, I don’t see as why you got to stare at that body anymore, anyways. It ain’t nothing now.” He walked out into the musty stockroom and the door clunked shut behind him.

Dodge took out his notebook and began to write. His report on the accident was due first thing tomorrow. He had only written three words when the door swung open again. Dodge sighed and looked up, ready to tell Twitch to leave him alone a while longer. But it wasn’t Twitch. It was Madeleine. “Oh!” said Dodge, unable to hide his surprise. He stood up from his beef-carcass seat.

Madeleine walked into the room. Heat seeped like smoke from her clothes, as if her whole body were smoldering. “I’m doing a story on the accident,” she told him. Her voice was too loud in the cramped space of the freezer.

“I know,” Dodge answered quietly. The cold was getting to him, seeping through each layer of his clothes, but now he felt sweat on his forehead. Sometimes it made him nervous to be stuck alone with Madeleine, even if he longed for her company. He found conversation with her difficult. Not because he had nothing to say. It was because of all the things he wanted to tell her but did not dare. He was afraid the words would slip out, and he would look worse than a fool.

She looked down at the body for a few seconds. Her eyes slowly narrowed and she pressed her lips together.

Dodge could tell she was holding her breath. He had done the same when he first walked in. But now all the smells of the meat locker had soaked into his lungs and he could not tell one scent of death from another.

Madeleine turned to him. “So what do you think? Are the Pfeiffers going to sue Mackenzie? Is Mackenzie going to settle out of court?”

None of this had occurred to Dodge yet. In time it would, but not now, when the body was just growing cold. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that at times like this,” he said.

Madeleine knew it was inappropriate, but she couldn’t help herself.
She never could. If she thought something, she almost always said it without thinking of the consequences. “I’m sorry,” she said, and genuinely did regret the remarks. But even as she apologized, she knew she would say the same thing again if she had the moment to live over. “Has anybody checked the chain saw? Was it working all right?”

“I’ll get to it.” Just now, Dodge could not look her in the eye. He looked past her to Pfeiffer’s body. He had seen plenty of corpses, but mostly they were old people. People about whom you could say “They had a good run” and not think that their passing was a tragedy. But about a death like this he could find no words of consolation. There was nothing to do but feel sick about the waste.

“You’re really casual about this, aren’t you?” Just then, Madeleine felt no reverence for the dead. There was too much that she wanted to know. Suspicions crowded her head. “Are you even going to have an investigation? Or has Mackenzie taken care of that, too?” She knew Dodge was the last person who could be bullied into something by Mackenzie, but she wanted to make Dodge angry. She wanted to punch a hole through his calm, and at the same time, she wished she could find that same calm in herself.

He looked at her and shook his head. He was not angry or disgusted. He knew Madeleine well. They had grown up together. He knew what she was trying to do and how she never could sit still or keep her mouth shut when she ought to. He accepted it, just as he had been forced long ago to accept the whole impossibility of any future they might have together.

“Nothing ever gets to you, does it?” she asked.

“It’s not like that, Madeleine.” Dodge closed his notebook and slotted it into his pocket. He had to leave now. He could no longer stand the cold.

“Then how is it?” she asked. She was so frustrated at him that for once she found herself at a loss for words.

“Nothing ever gets to me in front of you.” He walked past her, resting his hand on her shoulder as he squeezed between her and a hanging side of beef. He drank in the smell of her cologne and the leather of her satchel and the faint clean smell of shampoo.

Madeleine said nothing to him as he left. To her, Dodge was the enemy. He had been ever since he became a policeman. She had to
keep reminding herself that nothing would change that. As soon as he was gone, she sat down on the beef carcass where Dodge had been sitting when she walked in. She stared at the body of James Pfeiffer and after a minute she began to cry.

Even in the cool air, Dodge felt heat wrap around him. It was deep in the night. Loons wailed out on the lake. Dodge had grown up believing the Abenaki Indian legend—that the noise of the loons was really the voices of the dead calling to their loved ones from the spirit world. The sound made better sense in legend than in truth. Dodge walked away down the road. He moved with the unconscious rhythm of a long-distance runner, as if he could keep going for the rest of his life and never tire, drawing footprint rings around the world. He kept thinking of James Pfeiffer. The great fragility of flesh. The swindle of dying too young. But in that freezer room, with everything around him dead except that woman, Dodge had never felt so close to life.

CHAPTER 3

T
wenty miles to the north, Adam Gabriel was moving through the forest. He walked alone through the trackless thickets of pine, past nameless lakes and shimmering groves of white birch. He was thinking about what he planned to do in the days ahead, and how he stood a chance of being killed. It was not fear that reached him now, but loneliness. To keep himself company, he sang:

The song did not cheer him up, the way it had done when he was a child and he had shouted the first line when he walked home through these woods after a day of fishing or climbing Seneca Mountain. It was a song that all his friends used to know, and if one person heard
another singing it, they would join in. He remembered his relief when someone in the distance would sing out the rest of the song. He wondered where those friends were now, and whether he would be fighting against them in the days to come.

Gabriel sang until the words made no sense to him anymore. After three days in the woods, he needed to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it was his own. He needed the rhythm of the words to keep himself moving, because hunger had made him weak. It had pushed his senses beyond the confines of his body. It seemed to him that he could feel the stones and branches in his path before he touched them. His canteen, which he had filled from a stream that morning, was almost empty now.

Gabriel was tall and strong without looking muscular. His hair, which he combed straight back on his head, was dark brown with threads of coppery-red bleached in by the sun. His lips were full and chapped and sometimes he ran his tongue over them to moisten the dried skin. His heavy canvas shirt and trousers were dirty from living in the woods. Mud and pine needles had lodged in the laces of his boots.

Returning here alone and after so much time had brought his life full circle. Everything he had done and what he had become all boiled down to these past few days, from the time he had set out into the wilderness from the side of a highway in Canada, smuggling himself across the border. He knew about the sale of the Algonquin and had watched from a distance as environmental groups petitioned against it. He read their well-tuned arguments. He watched them fail and move on to other sales of wilderness land, just as they had many times before. When the Algonquin sale went through, he decided he would have to come here himself and put things right once and for all. Gabriel’s family had been gone from Abenaki Junction for many years, ever since his father was fired as foreman of the Mackenzie Company for complaining about the clear-cutting. But Gabriel still knew Jonah Mackenzie well enough to understand that no amount of reasoning would change the old man’s mind about clear-cutting the wilderness. Other methods were required. The more he thought about this, the more extreme his plans became.

When Gabriel took off his canvas backpack to rest, he saw an arch of sweat darkening the cloth between the straps. He had been sweating
so much that he’d lost track of where his skin ended and his soggy clothes began. When the clothes dried, the salt tie-dyed them with white powder. It had been a hot day, even under the canopy of trees, where the still air filled his lungs with the fragrance of earth and pine needles and the faint sweetness of white birch. In places, the pines grew so thick that nothing but poisonous amanita mushrooms grew between the trees. When he came to the stands of birch, the bony pillars seemed to shift around him.

The only thing Gabriel had now to guide himself with was a compass. There were no paths except the narrow trails of moose and deer, which he followed when he grew too tired to make paths of his own through the face-scratching branches of pine. Every hour, he took out his compass and took a bearing. Then he began walking again. Often there were mountains in the way. He climbed them, feeling the ascent in his calves and his thighs, leaning into the slope so that his face was no more than a couple of feet from the path. His arms went numb from the digging pack straps. When he reached the stony skull of the mountain crest, he would stop, let his pack slip from his shoulders and sit down on it to rest. Blueberries grew among the ripples of the rock and he would pick as many as he could, the pale-blue and the dark-blue, almost black berries disappearing without inspection into his mouth. He would crush them with his tongue and swallow, feeling the sugar jump through his body.

It was dusk before he even realized it was growing dark. The light had faded so gently that he’d barely noticed it. The first stars popped out of the blue. He walked on a while longer, seeing color fade from the trees until he was in a world of black and white and the navy of the sky. He began to stumble on roots. Then he knew it was time to stop.

Gabriel found a patch of soft earth. He walked around the place where he would put his tent, the way a dog circles the ground it chooses for a bed. When his tent was pitched, he cut a two-inch-deep hole into the trunk of a birch tree. As the sap started to run, he folded a piece of birch bark into a tube and set it in the hole to act as a funnel. Then he pulled the lace from one of his boots and tied a blue-and-white-speckled enamel mug to the tree to catch the dripping sap. He touched his finger to the drop-by-drop trickle and brushed the clear liquid across his lips, tasting the sweet pepperiness of the
sap. He checked that the mug was secure and crawled inside his tent.

The night brought silence, except for wind moving like a scavenger around the trunks of trees. Inside his tent, he felt the quiet cup itself around him. He switched on his angle-headed flashlight. It had a red filter over the bulb to help him keep his night vision. He rooted in his pack, taking out the plastic-bagged bundle containing his clean clothes, smelling the perfume of detergent from a Laundromat in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he’d washed them a week ago. At the bottom of the pack was a tan canvas holster. From it, Gabriel pulled an old Webley revolver. Its blue-black, hexagonal barrel showed him back the red light of the bulb. There were no bullets in the gun now. He kept those in an airtight plastic tub, which was itself wrapped in plastic. He was careful with the bullets: they were .455 caliber, which was hard to find, and he could not afford to go buying handgun ammunition now. Suspicion would follow him out of the shop. He put the gun away and sniffed the oil on the tips of his fingers. Each time he brought out the gun and looked at it, he felt reminded of how far he was beyond the point of turning back.

The last thing he looked at from his pack was his wallet. It was made of black nylon with a Velcro closing strap. From it, he pulled his American driver’s license and social security card. It was a New Jersey license, with a red band across the top that said
Operator
. The name on the license was Adam Gabriel. The first name was his, but not the second. He had been given the forged document six weeks before, out in Idaho.

Gabriel switched off the flashlight and lay down in his tent. He looked out through the mosquito-netted opening. A meteor shower cut arcs above the trees. He imagined the night as black paint on the glass vault of the sky, the meteors scratches across it, showing the sunlight beyond. “Get out the way for old man Tucker,” he whispered. Then he stayed silent, as he used to do, but not even his daydreams called back.