Archangel (16 page)

Down at Coltrane’s farm, a screen door clacked against its frame. Coltrane walked across the yard and got into his car. He drove up the dusty road, headlights flicking on as he approached the highway. Then he turned toward town and was gone. Dodge knew where he was headed. The same place he went every night. To the Loon’s Watch for a beer.

It was seven o’clock. He wondered how much longer he should wait. His calves kept falling asleep. When he tried to rub the pins and needles from his skin, his nerves fizzed as if his veins were filled with seltzer. His toes felt like bees jammed into the ends of his socks, buzzing to get out. He raised himself up slowly and had to lean against the tree to avoid falling over. He heard a branch snap down the hill, and for a fragment of a second his mind told him to ignore it. He leaned slightly forward, careful not to make a sound, and saw the head of a man at the bottom of the steep slope. The man climbed
the hill at an angle, first in one direction, then another, zigzagging his way up.

It was Hazard. He walked with his head down, a black nylon rucksack on his back. It was the kind of sack that children used to carry their books to school.

Dodge slipped around the other side of the tree. He had lost sight of Hazard, but could tell from the footsteps that he was still approaching.

Then Hazard came into view. He stopped to pull off his navy-blue baseball cap and press the sleeve of his red-and-black checked hunting jacket against his forehead. Then he stuffed his cap back on and kept walking.

Dodge made himself thin behind the trunk of the pine. He saw no sign of a weapon.

Hazard was walking toward him now, up the slight incline, head still down as if to pull the weight of his rucksack from its slump against his spine.

Dodge pressed his hands against his trouser pockets to soak up the sweat that had gathered on them like a slick of oil. Then he stepped out from behind the tree. He moved so quietly that Hazard didn’t notice. Dodge raised his hands up to rest against his gun belt and remembered suddenly that it was not there.

Hazard looked up. There had been no sound from Dodge. Instinct had jangled Hazard’s nerves. As soon as he caught sight of the man, he leaped off the ground as if his legs were loaded springs. “Jesus Christ,” Hazard shouted, “you scared the hell out of me!”

“ ’Evening,” said Dodge.

Hazard stepped backward, then tripped and landed on the roots of a pine that bubbled up from the ground like snakes. He jumped to his feet. “What do you want from me?”

“It’s Marcus Dodge,” he said. Then he added, “With the police,” to show that this was business. Dodge saw the fear in Hazard’s face and his own worry began to diminish. “I’ve been looking to talk to you,” he said.

“What do you want?” Hazard squinted at the darkening branches to see if Dodge was alone.

“Would you mind now if I took a look in your pack?” Dodge did not step toward the man. Instead, he just held out his hand.

“What for? I’m not doing anything.”

Dodge saw no more need to be polite. “Just stand right where you are and take off your pack.” He watched Hazard’s features blurring in the dusk. In a couple of minutes, the colors of his clothing would vanish in the purple light.

Hazard’s foot brushed against something on the ground. When he glanced down, he saw Dodge’s gun belt, the buckle still sprinkled with needles.

The two men faced each other. For a second, Dodge’s confidence stumbled.

Hazard noticed it. His lips twitched. Then he exploded into movement. He shoved past Dodge and sprinted into the forest. He just seemed to disappear.

By the time Dodge had lunged for his gun belt, Hazard was already ten paces ahead, swerving between the trees. Dodge ran after him, his chest burning even after the first few paces. He tried to buckle the gun belt as he moved, but gave up and kept it knotted in his fist. “You stand your ground, God damn you!” he shouted at the blur in front of him. He could hear Hazard’s breathing and the stamp of his feet on the uneven ground. “What the hell’s your mother going to do without you?”

Hazard’s head snapped back as he ran. As his dark eyes caught the light, they looked like pools of mercury.

Dodge was gaining on Hazard. He reached out his hand toward Hazard’s hair. He imagined its stringiness in the grip of his hand. Hazard rushed ahead suddenly. He moved even faster, as if all his running until then had been at a casual pace.

Dodge couldn’t keep up. His lungs seemed filled with sand. He knew his strength was leaving him. His face was scratched by the pine branches. Pine sap stuck to his hands from fending off trees like a football player fending off tackles. Dodge felt the heaviness of his limbs as he lost speed. Then he stopped and bent over, gasping and angry with himself for having taken off his gun belt. Over the thunder of his breathing, he heard Hazard’s footsteps fading away into the darkness of the Algonquin. More than darkness. It was like the inside of a sealed coffin.

Dodge hiked out of the woods, stumbling against tree trunks. When he reached the lane that ran between Coltrane’s fields, he
turned to look at the Algonquin ridge. It was like a tidal wave of ink rising silently above him and about to drown the valley in darkness. He pitied Hazard being in there now. The Algonquin had swallowed him up. Dodge walked back to Coltrane’s farmyard. The breeze-shifted corn muttered on either side of him. Coltrane’s two dogs barked at his heels until he was close to his car. The curtain of nightfall billowed behind him, and against all the scoffing reason in his head, Dodge could not help quickening his pace.

He sat quietly for a moment in the car, which he had parked at the end of the road. He would have to go in after Hazard, but first he was going to find Coltrane at the Loon’s Watch and ask for his help. Coltrane knew these woods better than anyone. As Dodge pulled out onto the road, he looked back over his shoulder. The valley had become a lake of blindness. The only sign of life was a light in Coltrane’s house, a floating cube of amber in the dark.

CHAPTER 6

W
hen Mackenzie stopped at Madeleine’s house to pick her up for dinner, he shut down his last nagging feelings of affection. In his mind now was the clamp-jawed coldness he had once felt years before, when he had finished off a deer that he had hit with his car. It was lying in the road, bloody at the mouth and staring at him in the bleached glare of the car headlights. He thought he must have looked a bit like this himself that time he crawled out of the woods. Mackenzie had taken an old entrenching shovel from the trunk of his car, kept there for digging himself out of the snow. He killed the deer with three hard swings of the sharp edge of the shovel, splitting its skull. He then dragged the animal to the ditch and rolled it in. It was a distasteful job, but it had to be done. He felt that way again now. He hoped it would be quick. He hoped to keep the fighting clean.

“We are thorns in each other’s sides, aren’t we?” he asked Madeleine, once he’d pulled the Range Rover out onto the road.

Madeleine studied his sun-crumpled face, the coarse hair and the
way the white shirt dug like a garrote into his creased neck. She had never seen him this close before and was unable to recall when she had last felt so uncomfortable. She knew this had to be one of his schemes, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“To the Woodcutter’s Lodge.” Mackenzie kept his eyes on the slick black road ahead.

“I could have walked, you know. It’s only at the edge of town.” She thought how every word that passed between her and Mackenzie became a calculated move. She hated herself for being this way around him, but Mackenzie himself was the archduke of calculation.

“Well, I thought we might do things in style for once. Besides”—he rapped a knuckle against his artificial leg—“I’m not as fast on my feet as I used to be.”

“I thought that the lodge had officially closed down. I mean I thought it was just a meeting hall now.”

“It would have closed down if it weren’t for me.”

“It smells so funny in there.” The place always had a musty reek of wood fire and tobacco and leather and brass polish and the sweat of men.

“It’s a man’s club. At least it used to be. All women think men’s clubs smell funny. To men, it’s a comfortable smell.”

And you want me to feel as uncomfortable as possible, she thought. “Why did you ask to have this dinner?”

“I came to offer you an olive branch.” Mackenzie smiled. He had choreographed the whole evening, which would end, perfectly and on time, with closing down the
Forest Sentinel
.

Mackenzie leaned into the steering wheel as he twisted it arm over arm into the parking lot of the Woodcutter’s Lodge. As he climbed out of the Range Rover, he looked at the huge door of the lodge and wondered how many hundreds of times he had walked through it. He had been coming here all his life, brought by his father to the annual meetings of the logging company heads. He recalled the massive fires in the fieldstone fireplaces at either end of the hall and the harsh tobacco smoke and the knuckle-bunching handshakes of the logger barons. Now its main room was used for dances and flea markets. But the back part of the building was reserved for the members-only Loggers’ Club, and there was only one member now and that was
Mackenzie. The caretaker, an old Welshman named Paul, kept this part of the hall locked up until Mackenzie called. Crowded onto its walls were the paintings and smoke-blackened prize antler racks that had once been spread across the entire hall. The paintings were of presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Grant. The Washington portrait was painted by Gilbert Stuart. The most famous thing about the Loggers’ Club had been that if a call ever came through to speak with one of its members, Paul would say the member was at the club, but could not be reached just then. Not for any reason, not for bribes or favors or threats. This used to mean, for the shadowy and secret-living members of the club, that they always had an alibi. Sometimes it was even called the Alibi Club. But it had been years since the last time Paul had given an alibi. To Mackenzie, the club was more the vapor of ghosts than anything real, a place where he had two whole legs again and could drink all night and never be hungover in the morning. His youth was locked somewhere inside these walls. He felt the slight melancholy of memories he could not share because they would not be understood except by his old friends who had come and gone from here. Now they stared out through the fading photographs of old club-member reunions. One day, he thought, I will be in there as well.

As Madeleine walked up to the door of the hall, she paused to wait for Mackenzie, whose stiff-legged shuffle slowed him down. She felt the muscles tighten around her temples. The windowless door carried no sign, but the push-plate and handle were shining more like gold than brass. It was only in the last ten years that the club had allowed women to enter the dining room. Before that, they had been made to wait in the foyer. It was Alicia who had forced Mackenzie to change the rule, and it had taken her five years before he finally gave way.

Paul came to the door. Age had made his eyes watery and bowed his back and crooked his once-strong hands. He wore a plain blue double-breasted suit with gold buttons, each stamped with the emblem of an ax splitting a log. He took Mackenzie’s coat and then Madeleine’s, laying them across his arm as he walked them into the foyer.

“Good evening, Paul,” she said and watched the faintest smile appear on his face. She wondered what had led him to this place,
what he had left behind, and why he was content to live in such loneliness, the caretaker of a club with a membership of one.

They walked across the black-and-white parquet floor, footsteps echoing, to a room whose walls were duck-egg blue. In the corner stood a table with a backgammon board inlaid into the wood. Ivory counter pieces were stacked on either side. Several current newspapers were laid out on a large table at the back of the room. Mackenzie picked two chairs close together beneath the portrait of U. S. Grant. He settled in the body-polished leather as if his imprint had long ago been set into its burgundy hide. The horsehair stuffing rustled. His artificial leg stuck out stiffly in front of him, until he hooked his hand under the knee and bent it into a sitting position. Then Mackenzie pressed a brass button bolted to the table next to him. There was no sound that either of them could hear, but a moment later, Paul appeared. He stopped a few paces short of where they sat. Mackenzie ordered two Tanqueray and tonics. “Paul’s specialty,” he explained. “Along with the occasional dangerous margarita. You don’t mind trying it, do you?”

“It’s your club.” She looked around, marveling at the way Mackenzie could continue this tradition purely for himself. The newspapers that Paul must have known would never be read. The way each surface had been polished. The way drinks were kept in stock. The clunking tick of the 1750-dated Thomas Lister grandfather clock in the corner. And Paul himself, who had kept up Woodcutter’s Lodge in all capacities, from reshingling the roof to baking single soufflés in its giant ovens, for as long as Madeleine had been alive. Now, face-to-face with every exclusive and wasteful thing she took pleasure in despising about Mackenzie, Madeleine could not bring herself to loathe him altogether. There was something charming about this bizarre evening out. Mackenzie was the last of his breed and he knew it, but just as clearly he knew he could not change and he would live out these rituals until his old heart surrendered to time.