Archangel (28 page)

“But any old bear doesn’t come down from the woods this time of year and kill dogs.”

“Not usually, I’ll admit. I think Coltrane’s just gone crazy is all.” But then Mackenzie remembered seeing Harry Crowe at the police station the morning after Kobick’s death. Crowe sat in a plastic chair while Dodge typed out a report. Crowe had pulled out his revolver and would not let it go. The gun was empty but Crowe would not put it down. It was his last useless and stubborn defense against the bear. All that lay between him and the madness of a person who has seen too much blood in one life.

Alicia was thinking to herself that the woods had always belonged to No Ears, and it did not matter whether the animal’s heart was still beating or whether all that remained was a toothless skull patched with the stains of fallen leaves. “I think if that bear is still alive, it must have lived in agony.”

Good, Mackenzie thought. Then let it live. Let the pain come down on it like rain.

Over the next few days, people stopped Coltrane in the street and in the stores and bought him beer he was not supposed to drink at the Loon’s Watch and treated him like a hero. But Coltrane didn’t feel like a hero. He had allowed a man to swat a loaded shotgun out of his hands. And he had hunted down a man who did not deserve to be hunted. He had kept silent about the tree spike, in the greatest act of cowardice of his life. I deserved to get that knife in my gut, he told himself. And now No Ears has come back. My dogs are gone. He took it as a warning from above. I ought to be dead instead of Hazard, he thought, and imagined setting the barrel of a rifle in his mouth, big toe of his right foot hooked against the trigger. The blued steel clunked against his teeth. The idea seemed so real that it shocked him, as if it were already done and all that remained was for him to go through the motions, whether he wanted to or not. Sweat beaded up on Coltrane’s face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

He found himself wanting things to be as they were before. Back to normal. The unchanging objects that once had meant nothing to him, he now used like talismans against what his life had become. The badger-bristle shaving brush hanging upside down on its dulled copper stand in his bathroom cabinet. A stuffed bear with a brave but crumpled face, which he had bought at a flea market because he felt sorry for it, sitting among old lampshades and chipped crockery. His old aluminum coffeepot. Coltrane ran his fingers over these objects the way a blind person would, releasing the magic of the talismans they had become. One day he would let them return to what they were before. Just the coffeepot. Just the crumple-faced bear. Just the shaving brush. But until then he felt each day as if he were waking up in someone else’s body. His own face seemed foreign to him now. Coltrane used to think he knew how much he could take. Until then, his life had run along the clear train-track lines of knowing where his limits stood. He never thought of what would happen if those limits were breached, like the tide coming over a breakwater. He assumed he would simply be dead.

Maybe I am already dead, he thought. Everything had the muffled feeling of being in a dream. In his frustration, Coltrane took his
penknife from the desk drawer, opened the blade and slid the tip deep under his thumbnail, not trusting anything but pain to tell him this was not real. His nerves shrieked in long burning branches up his arm and into his shoulder, anchoring him to the world.

“I saw that,” Clara said, “and all you had to do was ask me and I could have told you. This is where you really are, sweetie. In the land of flesh and bone.”

CHAPTER 10

W
hat the hell is that?” Barnegat sat behind the wheel of a Mackenzie Company truck as it bumped along the logging road. The truck was a two-ton Magirus, painted hunter green with a red stripe, the Mackenzie Company colors. It was dawn. The sun shined brassy through the mist.

Coltrane sat beside him. He looked up at the sound of Barnegat’s voice. Coltrane had been studying a blueprint map of this section of the Algonquin, checking which wooded areas were to be cut over the next few days. He smoked a Lucky Strike. Every now and then, he held the cigarette out the window and let wind chip off ash that had gathered at the tip. “What the hell is what?” All he saw was mist and trees and the road.

Barnegat pointed at something up ahead. He wore his black wool watch cap pulled down over his ears and heavy-rimmed glasses, with fingerprint-smudged lenses. He had kept to himself lately, unsure whether to approach Mackenzie for the $10,000 reward, or to stay
silent and hope that this whole business blew over. “There’s writing on those trees.”

Coltrane saw it now. “Stop the truck,” he said quickly.

“What is it?” Barnegat’s arms were slung across the giant steering wheel.

“I said stop the fucking truck!”

The truck shifted down, stopped and then backed up. The loggers sitting in the rear had also noticed the writing. They had parked their pickups and cars at the edge of the Algonquin and were hitching a ride in, not wanting to risk getting stuck in mud or smashing the undersides of their machines when their wheels sank into ruts. The loggers sat side by side on benches bolted to the floor. They wore T-shirts, hard hats and jeans. Some had flannel shirts tied around their waists. Their greasy-handled Kubota saws were locked in a rack at the front, chain blades pointing at the sky. When the truck came to a halt, they jumped off. In the grainy morning light, they walked past the huge letters and into the forest, silently treading by the banded trees, wide-eyed at the hostility that seemed to meet them.

“Back in the truck!” yelled Coltrane. Then again, when nobody moved, “Back in the goddamned truck!”

They piled onto the Magirus.

Coltrane climbed into the cab and slammed the door.

“Where to?” Barnegat asked. He did not look at Coltrane, but stared straight ahead. Barnegat would not have traded places with Coltrane when he brought this news to Mackenzie, not even for the $10,000.

“To the mill. Straight to the mill.”

The truck turned around and drove out of the forest. It stopped at the main road to let the loggers get out and start up their own vehicles. Then they left for the mill in a convoy of over thirty cars and pickup trucks, kicking up dust like a cavalry charge.

Mackenzie heard the mass of engines long before they arrived. He looked up from his fax machine and then walked to the window. He saw the convoy, and felt something splinter inside him. Engines quit one after the other. The men gathered on the lot, reaching for cigarettes in the pockets of their vests or under their hard hats or bummed off friends. Lighters clicked open and burned. Nervous eyes flicked up
to where Mackenzie stood in the business office. Most of the loggers never went inside except to buy a soda from the machine or collect their paychecks.

Coltrane walked toward the business office, shoulders hunched like a man walking into the rain.

Mackenzie started down the stairs. He stepped out into the lot as Coltrane was about to enter the building. The two men began to talk.

Barnegat stood at the back of the crowd. The only movement around him was the rising smoke of cigarettes. Coltrane and Mackenzie were standing very close together. He couldn’t hear what they said. Coltrane began wiping his hands on his chest. Barnegat had seen him do this before, and knew it was a sign of nervousness. Mackenzie listened, his head lowering slowly until he was staring at the ground. Then Coltrane folded his arms and looked down at his boots. Barnegat felt as if he were the one who had set all this in motion, in that moment when the butt of his rifle connected with the back of Hazard’s head. Sooner or later, he told himself, you will pay for it. Worry rushed through him like the onset of a fever, freezing and burning and crawling all over his skin.

That afternoon teams of loggers moved through the woods carrying metal detectors and cans of spray paint. They fanned the detectors across tree trunks in the area where trees had been marked. In the first three hours, they found twelve spikes. These they painted with two broad yellow bands. The rest they painted with a single blue band, to show the trees were safe for cutting.

Mackenzie shifted logging operations away from the spiked area. Some loggers refused to cut in there, even if every tree was covered by metal detectors and sprayed. They did not trust the detectors, and most of them had seen what had happened to Pfeiffer, even though Mackenzie assured them that the chance of actually being injured was minimal. Rumors slithered through the lumberyard that it would be only a matter of time before new trees were spiked.

Mackenzie sent for Coltrane. While he waited, he rolled a silver dollar back and forth over his knuckles. His eyes stayed fixed on the slowly turning coin. Except for the mechanical motion of one hand,
Mackenzie remained as still as a man who has rested his foot on a landmine and knows it, realizing that the slightest movement will trigger the device. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts, setting them in one last rank of order before the explosion. Then he heard Coltrane’s boots in the hallway. “Come in and sit down,” he said.

Coltrane was uneasy as he shut the door behind him, as if blocking an escape route he would need.

Mackenzie let his breath trail out. “Who’s doing this to me?” he asked. “What have I done to deserve it?” He ran his hand across the dull, rough-edged steel of the tree spikes he had collected on his desk. “I have been honest, decent, kind and loyal to the people of this town.” With the knife edge of his palm, Mackenzie chopped the thought where it hovered in front of his face. “I have done nothing to make people hate me. But how can I fight an enemy who won’t show his face? I refuse to allow fifty dollars’ worth of bridge spikes to ruin an operation worth millions. In years to come, Coltrane”—Mackenzie snatched up the nails and held them like daggers in the air—“it won’t be this tree-spiking that people talk about. Instead, it will be how much I made these criminals pay for what they’ve done. And if the law won’t make them pay, then I will.”

Coltrane said nothing. He missed his wife and his dogs.

“Madeleine has something to do with it,” continued Mackenzie. “She and all the fucking granola people who read that newspaper of hers. They’re all too shit scared to do anything until somebody else does it first. And isn’t it the biggest fucking irony that I’m the one who had the balls to start it?” He looked up at Coltrane, who had no answer. “You see, those people have no spine. They stick with something as long as it’s trendy and then they drop it and move on to something else. I bet that as soon as they decided they were going to be environmentalists and protect our resources, as if they even knew what our resources are, I bet they all threw away their old clothes and went out and bought new ones with goddamned
SAVE THE WORLD
slogans on them. How’s that for protecting our resources?” Mackenzie fell silent. He sat red-faced and out of breath, the nails still raised in the air.

“I ought to be going,” said Coltrane.

When Mackenzie was alone again, he struggled to think of a plan.
The Algonquin was too big a place to patrol. Dodge couldn’t handle it on his own and he couldn’t spare his own loggers. They were working too hard as it was. It had to be something different. War against anyone who dared make war on him.