Archangel (27 page)

After every nail, he paused and listened for the drumming of a truck engine or the crunch of footsteps on the road. The rain fell harder and the woods grew misty. Puddles formed out on the gravel road. He was sweating and his arms were tired. Sometimes they cramped so badly that he dropped the hammer. When he unclenched his hands, they creaked like old hinges.

Gabriel drove his last fifty nails into trees at shoulder height, so that the chain saws might miss the nails, but the logging saw down at the mill would strike them and be ruined. He knew that each circular logging saw cost almost $3,000 to replace. These trees were also marked with red paint. With the last of his paint, he marked trees that had not been spiked, to increase the numbers that would not be cut.

He tore down the plastic tape that the loggers had used to mark the boundaries. The last thing Gabriel did before he headed back out to the tracks was to paint S-P-I-K-E-D in letters as large as he could
make them on the trunks of trees that faced the road. This way there would be no mistake.

He ran back toward the Putt-Putt, feeling the air cool him. When he reached the tracks, he looked to make sure they were empty. It was warmer here than in the woods. The rain beaded into rainbowed pebbles on the creosoted ties. He climbed back into the Putt-Putt and rode two miles toward town. On the way, he stopped and buried the spray-paint cans in the mossy earth beside the tracks.

He reached the depot at noon. Ten minutes later, the VIA train roared past. Four engines. Fifty cars. The driver waved to him and blew the horn. Gabriel waved back, sweat clammy down his back. Then he sat down on the waiting bench outside and ate a peanut-butter-and-raspberry-jam sandwich for lunch. The raspberry seeds got stuck in his teeth.

Back into the woods again, sleepy now from the food. For the rest of the day, Gabriel walked the tracks, marking places in need of repair. He had easily enough time to do this job. New sweat replaced the old sweat. He thought about how everything was in motion now. Gabriel wondered how long it would take the police or the logging company to catch him. It seemed only a matter of time before they did, and he knew he stood a chance of being killed or badly hurt, depending on who caught him. At the very least, he would go to prison. Then the most he could hope for was to be like Swain and make a showcase of his trial.

Other times, he had always been sure to leave himself an escape route, but often that meant not doing as much work as needed to be done. By taking a job in Abenaki Junction, by renting an apartment and eating each day at the diner, he made his face familiar. If they ever found out who he really was, they would know long before he ever found out they were on to him. But he knew this was the only way to do more than just bother the Mackenzie Company. Bothering them would not slow them down enough or stop them altogether. He had to come back day after day into the woods and plant nails by the hundreds and thousands through the wilderness. When he started out in the west, it had been the hardest thing to do, to break the law. It took a while before he truly understood the line that he had crossed. More than just a line between doing something and just thinking about doing it. This was the line where his own safety became less
important than carrying out the job. Strange, Gabriel thought, that I had to cross the line before I could see what it was.

When he reached home, he hung his heavy leather tool belt on the coat hook on the back of the door. He put on his leather-and-canvas work gloves and fetched a pad of paper and a pencil. He took a page from the middle of the pad, to be sure it would have no fingerprints on it. Then he sat down at the wobbly kitchen table. His hands were so raw and cramped from spiking the trees that he could barely grip the pencil.

He wrote a letter to Mackenzie, spelling out the words in capital letters. He told Mackenzie how much spiking had been done and asked him to stop all clear-cutting in the Algonquin, listing the reasons of old growth and the preserve that the Algonquin was to become. When Gabriel had finished the letter, he put it in an envelope, which he took from the middle of a box of fifty, and stuck a 32-cent stamp with an American flag on it onto the envelope. Then he posted the letter in a mailbox on the main street, next to the tourist information hut where campers signed for their fire permits. No one was in the hut, since it was after five, and he made sure no cars passed him as he dropped the letter in. Gabriel knew that the letter was probably a useless gesture, and that the other, harsher measures that he was prepared to carry out would most likely have to be done. But he felt he had to try.

Sometime that night, as Gabriel lay sleeping in his rusty-springed bed, the old nightmare came toward him, like wind across the water. He heard the thunder of the blazing oil spigots. The same gasps of dehydration rasped from his throat. His lips were so chapped that they felt like dried grass rustling together. He felt as if his teeth were coming loose. He wondered if he might be dying.

Suddenly, Gabriel had the sensation of standing up out of his body. He tried to prevent it, clenching his muscles as if to rein back with bands of physical strength something that was not physical at all. The shadowy image of himself set out across the sand, while his body stayed behind like the husk of a beetle on some old windowsill. He followed the chalky path of recent footsteps over the blackened earth.

I’m dead, he thought, as he reached a place where a man sat cross-legged by himself, while clouds of thick smoke billowed past. The man looked up. His face was painted half yellow and half black, the
line drawn down the bridge of his nose. Shiny creosote black on the bottom, as if he had gouged tar from the soil and smeared it on his skin. The other side was an angry sulfur yellow, like the flames that rushed from the spigots until they vanished into smoke. At the man’s feet was a drawing, made with a finger in the sand, of a circle divided into quarters by a cross inside. In the top right quarter was a crooked line, like a lightning bolt.

Before Gabriel could ask what this meant, he opened his eyes and found himself in the red house again. The Hudson’s Bay blanket was pulled up to his throat. He smelled smoke and the sleep slithered out of his body, leaving him cold and wide awake. He swung out of bed and walked out onto his porch, catching sight of the clock in his kitchen as he walked by. It was five in the morning.

It was not the incense smell of burning pine or birch. Instead, this was the peppery-sweet stench of flaming oil. He knew then that this was what had led him to the dream. Smoke was rising from behind the gas station across the road. It muddied the sky like fountain-pen ink dropped into clear water. Gabriel ran over, feeling the jagged gravel against the pads of his bare feet. A breeze off the lake tousled the leaves of the sugar maple in his garden, green to white to green.

Gabriel couldn’t see the owner in the station office. There was only the metal desk cluttered with pink receipts, the grubby candy-bar machine and calendars with beaming, long-toothed girls. Oliver Clemson, the owner, sat in the cold shadow of the back of his garage, wrestling with his German shepherd. The dog kept raising its paws and slapping at Clemson. Clemson had his fist in the dog’s mouth and the dog clamped down without force, making soft growling noises that Clemson growled back, as if they had their own growly language.

The smoke was coming from a fifty-gallon oil drum. Ashes coughed into the air and scattered.

Gabriel looked around at the oil-patched earth, rusted machine parts and worn-out tires in a stack against the garage wall. “What are you burning there?”

Clemson and the dog stopped playing and looked at Gabriel. “Just some rags.”

Turn away, said the voice of caution in Gabriel’s head. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t make enemies. Every rule of camouflage
will be broken if you open your mouth. But Gabriel couldn’t help himself. “You’re messing up my clear blue sky,” he said.

“I am?” Clemson asked. Even the dog looked puzzled.

“You just shouldn’t be burning this stuff. It’s a fire hazard. You could set your whole yard burning.” Too late, said the voices. The damage is already done.

Clemson pushed his dog gently aside. The animal went to sit by its doghouse, dragging the chain leash. The chain jingled over the concrete. Clemson filled a tin bucket with water and poured it into the drum. Gray ash mushroomed out and Clemson stood back from the cloud. The water hissed.

Gabriel wished he could have explained to the stubbly-chinned gas-station owner why it was that he could not stand to see this funeral-pyre smoke, or breathe in this smell that he knew he would be coughing up for days.

“I got to get rid of them somehow,” Clemson said, the bucket dangling in his hand, “and the garbage men won’t take them.”

“The town should recycle them.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t.” Clemson had no wish to offend this half-dressed man. He tried never to offend anyone, and putting out the fire was no great inconvenience. He knew this guy worked in Benny Mott’s old job, so he could burn the stuff later, when the man was out on the tracks.

Gabriel thanked him and went back to his house. “Big mistake,” he said quietly to himself, and wondered how many lives he had left.

Each night Coltrane lay in the hospital, he was woken by something that lunged at him out of the darkness. He would snap awake and lie staring at the pattern of rain on the ceiling, projected through the orange glow of streetlamps. At first, he didn’t know what this thing could be, but in time he came to recognize it. The thing was Hazard, a memory of him at least, and the fraction of time that it took for Hazard to plunge the knife into Coltrane’s stomach. It was all seen in a strange and reddish light, as if through a smear of his own blood. Night after night, Hazard lunged at him and the sleep was wrenched from Coltrane’s mind as the blade flashed on a screen behind his eyes.
In time, the nightmare would grow dull with repetition, but for now he had no choice but to endure it.

After ten days, Coltrane returned from the hospital. His middle was wrapped in bandages, which made him walk with an unnaturally straight back. The expression on his face was one of nervous caution, as if he were treading on mirror-thin sheets of ice, which might at any second break and drag him under the ground. Coltrane had been in pain so long that he could no longer recall what it felt like not to be. The scar was purple and the marks of stitches showed like train tracks drawn by a child across his nipple and down toward his navel. He hoped he would never see another hospital again. It was the smell that stayed with him. A reek of dead things preserved. The stench kept reappearing in his nostrils, as if those people at the hospital had left something inside him and he was burping it up like a bad meal.

Clara had waited until her husband reached home before telling him about No Ears and what had happened to the dogs. As he listened, Coltrane hung his head. There was no sound except the quiet wheezing of his breath. First thing next morning, he climbed into his truck and drove to town. He stopped beside Mackenzie’s house and got out and banged on the door.

After a minute, Mackenzie leaned out the window above him. “What the hell’s the matter? It’s six-thirty in the morning! Is that you, Victor?”

“No Ears is back!” he shouted.

“Who is it, Jonah?” Alicia looked up bleary-eyed from her pillow.

Mackenzie ducked inside. “It’s Victor Coltrane. I think he’s hysterical.” Mackenzie stuck his head back out the window. “Who’s back? What are you saying?”

“No Ears. The bear that mauled Gil Kobick. It killed my dogs.”

“No Ears?” Mackenzie recalled the squads of men who had gone into the woods to hunt the bear. “But that was years ago.”

“Ask him in,” Alicia called behind him. “Tell him he must come in and sit down.”

“He’s back,” said Coltrane again.

“Why don’t you come inside, Victor?” Mackenzie glanced at the old paint on his windowsill. He reminded himself to get it repainted. “Because it’s your damn fault is why!”

“What the hell do you mean, it’s my fault?” He stopped thinking about the windowsill.

“You can’t cut down the Algonquin! That’s where No Ears lives. You’ve gone and set him loose again.” Coltrane clenched his hands against his stomach. It hurt to talk. He thought his stitches might tear out.

“It’s not a ghost we’re talking about, Victor. It’s some ratty-furred old bear.”

“I’m telling you, Jonah. You woke up that beast and now we’re all going to pay for it.”

Alicia appeared beside Mackenzie. “Will you come in for some breakfast, Victor?”

“No!” he shouted. Then he breathed out and seemed to have no energy left. “No, thank you.” He climbed into his beaten-up truck. Mackenzie appeared at the door in his bathrobe and called to him, but Coltrane did not respond. He drove back into the hills. There was no sense in trying to make Mackenzie understand. He felt a fool for even trying.

Mackenzie watched the truck until it was out of sight.

Alicia appeared beside him. “Do you think it was No Ears that killed his dogs?”

He turned to Alicia. “It could have been any old bear.”