Dead Meat (11 page)

I nodded. “You think she might do the same thing.”

“She comes on to the guests, Brady. I came here to get away. Now she wants to get away from here. You shouldn’t use a man to get yourself away from things. I try to tell her. She won’t listen.”

“I expect it’s out of your control.”

“I guess you’re right. Still…”

“You’re blaming yourself, Marge. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

“Yes. Shouldn’t I?”

“No, you shouldn’t. But you will. It’s what parents do.”

There was a bitter edge to her chuckle. “For some reason there’s not much consolation in that.”

We finished our drinks in a silence that was finally broken by the loons uplake. Then we got up and went back to the lodge. Rolando was sitting on the porch. Beside him in a rocking chair was Polly. I had the feeling that they had been watching Marge and me the entire time we had been sitting on the end of the dock.

Marge walked right into the lodge. I paused beside Rolando and Polly to nod and smile at them. Rolando nodded back at me. Polly kept staring out at the lake.

“I
DON’T WANT A
motor,” I told Woody as he helped me load up a canoe for my day of solitary fishing. “I’m happy to paddle. I like to travel light and quiet.”

“Gonna play Indian, eh?” The old Penobscot grinned.

“I’ll see what I can sneak up on.”

I shoved off from the sand beach, kneeling on the bottom of the canoe behind the middle thwart. For the first few hundred yards it was work, stroking with the paddle and feathering in the J stroke. The backs of my thighs burned, and I felt hard, painful knots on the fronts of my shoulders. But gradually I found my rhythm—stroke, feather, glide. The canoe knifed through the glassy water. The only sound was the faint hiss up at the bow where the canoe sliced through the water. I was in no particular hurry. The fish would be there, and the old Indian burial ground wasn’t going anywhere. But I wanted to go fast, to step up the beat, so I could feel the air move across my face and savor that sense of power as the blade of the paddle pushed against the solidness of the lake.

I stopped paddling to glide up on a pair of mergansers that were diving and frolicking in the shallow water against the shore ahead of me. They let me approach almost into shotgun range before they dipped under the water and out of sight, and I wondered how they had become educated. Farther on, I saw a heavy swirl break the smooth surface of the lake. It could have been a bass, but I preferred to think it was a salmon. I unlimbered my fly rod and cast to it, but it didn’t take. And I didn’t actually care.

By the time I arrived at the mouth of Harley’s Creek, I had worked up a healthy sweat. I nosed the canoe into the slow current and pushed against it. Soon I entered the channel where it cut through the big evergreen forest. The current flowed smoothly near the mouth of the river, where it narrowed before entering the lake. Then the river widened as the riverbed grew shallower, and the water bumped and eddied unevenly as it passed over submerged boulders.

I beached the canoe and pulled on the waders I had stowed up in the bow. I tied on a bushy Royal Coachman and waded into the riffles. The little Orvis rod was a wand in my hand. The currents surged around my knees. The gaudy dry fly bobbed and drifted, and then there was a quick burst of silver. I struck too late and felt just a momentary tug before the fly came free. I cursed, but not with enthusiasm. I felt too good to care very much about failing to hook a trout. I false cast a couple of times to dry out the fly and then set it down as soft as an autumn leaf on the water where it divided on an exposed rock. Again, the silvery flash of a trout. This time I didn’t miss him. The brook trout tugged upstream, a poor tactic, since he had to battle both the tension of my rod and the force of the moving water. Soon he allowed me to lead him down to where I stood in the water. I ran my fingers along the leader and carefully twisted the hook from his jaw.

Without moving from that spot I caught half a dozen foot-long brook trout, brilliantly colored little bundles of muscle, with spots like drops of fresh blood on their flanks and flashes of orange like Baltimore orioles. Then I waded ashore and sat beside the canoe. When I lit a cigarette, I realized it was the first one I had had since breakfast. I held it in my fingers for a moment, staring at it. Then I scooped out a hole in the earth and crammed the butt into it. I stood up and ground it under my heel. I felt exhilaratingly virtuous.

I got back into the canoe and navigated the riffles, sticking to the light currents against the shore. Up ahead lay a broad, shallow stretch studded with rocks. I clambered out and, still in my waders, dragged the canoe upstream to the next pool. At that point the character of the stream became consistent: broad, deep pools alternating with shallow rapids. I didn’t stop to fish. I knew that somewhere deeper into the woods the creek divided and at the top of the bluff was the Indian burial ground. I wanted to see it. Perhaps I’d fish some more on the way back to camp.

So I paddled through the pools and dragged over the rapids, and by the time I arrived at the fork, I found myself regretting my indulgences in Winstons and Jack Daniel’s and renewing my resolve to amend my self-destructive habits. I beached the canoe and then dragged it entirely out of the water. It was only about eleven in the morning, but I was ready for the lunch that I had hastily assembled in Bud Turner’s kitchen after breakfast. It consisted of half a dozen leftover breakfast sausages, a slab of Vermont cheddar, half a loaf of home-baked bread, and a canteen of icy lake water.

I munched on my cold lunch and watched a trout that was rising steadily against the opposite bank. A kingfisher swooped over the river, dived, missed, and flew up into a tree, chattering like an out-of-tune lawn mower. After lunch I shook a Winston out of the pack. I hesitated only an instant before I put it back. I didn’t need it, I told myself.

I disassembled my fly rod, shucked off my fishing vest and waders, and shoved them all up into the bow of the canoe. Then, out of habit instilled from fishing more populated spots in Massachusetts, I wedged the canoe up into the bushes and laid some balsam boughs over it. Then I began to climb the hill.

It wasn’t exactly hands-and-knees going, but the slope was steep and the undergrowth thick, and I soon worked up my second healthy sweat of the day. I had just begun to persuade myself that the exercise was going to do me good when I felt the first dart jab into the back of my neck.

Out on the lake, one forgets about blackflies. In the heavy woods, where there is no breeze to blow them away, one cannot forget them. Blackflies have a special fondness for human crevices and orifices—ears, nose, mouth, among others of a more intimate nature. They enjoy crawling under pant legs and down shirt collars. They like to wander through human hair. And wherever they go, they bite. Mosquitoes plunge a tiny needle into the soft parts of human flesh. Blackflies bite. A thousand blackflies bite ten thousand times. I can tolerate mosquitoes. Nobody can tolerate blackflies. The Maine guides that I have known claim that blackflies will not bite pretty women. The truth is, perfume repels blackflies. The cheaper it is, the more effectively it repels, and the really savvy guides dose themselves until they smell like Times Square whores.

City sports bring expensive concoctions from L. L. Bean and wonder why their tawdry-scented guides don’t seem to be bothered by blackflies.

I had brought neither perfume nor Cutter’s. So I cursed and sweated, swatted and scratched, and by the time I got to the top of the hill, I decided my day had been irrevocably ruined. I paused there, waving my hand in front of my face like a windshield wiper on fast speed. One of the miracles of the natural world, which intrigued me at that moment, was the uncanny navigational system that directs blackflies to the insides of a man’s underpants, where they find his tenderest, juiciest parts to munch on.

The top of the hill proved to be a round, relatively flat place, almost a mesa. I imagined with the fringe of undergrowth cut away it would give a broad panorama of the two tines of the forked river below—a classic Indian lookout.

I moved to the middle of the circular area. It was, I realized, gently mounded and unusually free of undergrowth. Some low-bush blueberry bushes were scattered here and there among mossy rocks. The area itself was perhaps fifty yards in diameter, enclosed by a square of four giant deciduous trees. It took me a moment to identify them. They were chestnuts, virtually extinct but somehow surviving up here. And the four huge trees were identical in size and shape. A quick fix on the sun told me that they had been planted at the four quadrants of the compass—due north, south, east, and west.

Inside the square of trees a ring of boulders had been laid out. They lay tumbled and moss covered now, but I wondered if one day they had formed a kind of Stonehenge up in this primeval spot in the Maine wilderness.

I stood in the center of the sacred circle, my feet, I had no doubt, atop the bones of generations of Penobscot Indians, and even this jaded twentieth-century urban cynic was awed. The Indians, I felt with conviction, had a greater right than the Wheeler brothers to claim ownership of this place. As I gazed around, my eye was caught by an alien shape and color half hidden behind one of the great chestnuts, a solid dark mass where all around were dappled greens and tans. I walked over to it, and I was almost close enough to touch it before I identified what it was.

Hung by her hind legs from a sturdy branch of the chestnut that grew on the east compass point was the carcass of an enormous cow moose. Her body cavity had been slit from sternum to pelvis and emptied, and it was wedged open with two sticks. Her throat had been sliced halfway through. A dark stain covered the leaves under the cow’s upside-down body.

The sight didn’t sicken me. I have spent enough time around sporting camps to grow accustomed to eviscerated game. I don’t anthropomorphize animals. I like them. In many ways, I like them better than people. But they aren’t people.

I have seen dead human beings. That sets my gastric system flip-flopping. But the blood of animals does not affect me the same way.

My reaction was a mixture of anger and disgust. I recalled what Woody had said to me the previous day—that folks in this part of Maine respect wild game, if not the laws that governments create to protect it, and they kill it in order to use it. This dead moose that I was staring up at had not been killed for sport or for a trophy, which, to me, is the worst possible excuse. She had been proficiently gutted and strung up out of the reach of bears, and she waited to be taken off for butchering. A big slab of dead meat.

But this cow undoubtedly had left a spring calf somewhere, and that angered me. No one who respected wild game would kill a cow moose with a calf. Anyway, moose are great, noble creatures. They live a gentle vegetarian life. The death of this particular one struck me as a violation—a violation of the same natural law that some philosophers claim prevents men from wantonly killing each other.

But men do sometimes wantonly kill each other. And they kill moose, too. And if my feelings about it didn’t add up to a coherent philosophical view, they did produce an unmitigated sense of disgust with my race.

I moved closer to the big bulk and touched her thick, oily hide. I put my hand inside the vacant body cavity. It was no longer warm. Killed, I guessed, by jacklight the previous night, or possibly even the previous afternoon. At the junction of neck and shoulder I found the wound. It was nearly an inch across, and triangular in shape. I probed it with my forefinger, pulling the hair away, and I could see that the skin had been sliced at the points of the triangle. An arrow wound, not a bullet.

“Don’t turn around. Don’t move. Don’t say anything. Put your hands behind your neck. Real slow.”

The voice came from behind me. I obeyed it exactly. There was a spot between my shoulder blades that tensed as I imagined the arrow that had sliced through the hide and muscle and vital parts of the moose and how easily it might slip through my body.

“Good.” The voice was low, calm, and faintly familiar. “Now. Down on your knees. Keep your hands where they are.”

I sank awkwardly to my knees and stayed there beside the dead moose.

“Okay. Now lie down. Keep your hands on your neck.”

I dropped down onto my stomach. I heard the man approach. He came slowly, cautiously, his feet light on the soft earth. Then his hands were patting at my sides and prodding my legs apart.

“Okay. You can sit up. Keep your hands where they are, and do it slowly.”

I rolled onto my side and sat.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake…”

“It’s you,” I said.

Philip Rolando held an ugly revolver in his hand. It had a short barrel, unlike a Colt Woodsman or other handguns popular among outdoorsmen, and a bore that looked about twice the size of a .22.

It was aimed at my belt buckle. Rolando let his hand fall to his side. Then he grinned. The bastard seemed to be enjoying it.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said.

“What am
I
doing here? You pulled a gun on me, you son of a bitch. What are
you
doing here is the question.”

“Why, I’m out for a stroll in the forest primeval,” he said.

“Yeah. Bullshit. Did you kill the moose?”

Rolando cocked his head to the side and gazed at the upside-down carcass. “Me? Naw. Look. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

“You didn’t scare me, for Christ’s sake. I have people point weapons at me all the time. What is that thing, anyway?”

Rolando held his gun up in front of his face and looked at it with what I took to be affection. “Colt Python .357,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Right. That’s what I thought,” I said. “Well named. Think maybe you can put it away now?”

I fumbled for a Winston. So much for good intentions. I found my hands trembling, whether from fright or fury I wasn’t sure, so I turned my back on Rolando so he wouldn’t see them shake as I struck a match. When I turned back to look at him, the Python was out of sight, and he was frowning at me.