Archangel (4 page)

“Accident,” Mackenzie told her. “Appears to be. You’ll just have to let Dodge here do his investigation. Then you can find out along with the rest of us.”

Dodge looked up at the mention of his name. He had been sitting in the car and smoking a cigarette, preparing himself to look at what had happened to Pfeiffer. He had met Pfeiffer’s family when the boy first came to town. The father was wiry and weatherbeaten, his jaw permanently set from years of hard physical work. The mother seemed nervous to have her son live so far from home. And James Pfeiffer himself had seemed a little ill at ease. He kept looking around as if to see the huge waves of the Atlantic pounding on a beach nearby. But he had settled in all right. The boy could have made a career of it, if he had lived a little longer.

Mackenzie shuffled a little closer to Madeleine. He ran his fingers through his dry gray hair in gesture of losing his patience. “Please don’t make me remind you that this is private property.”

Madeleine turned to Dodge. “Do you mind if I take a picture?”

Dodge met her gaze. He thought of all the things he would say to her if he could, and if he thought it would do any good. But he just lifted one hand and let it drop on the open car door to show it was all right.

While Madeleine took pictures, Mackenzie drilled a stare so hard into Coltrane that the man looked up from his boots. “Drive me home,” Mackenzie said, and threw him the Range Rover keys. Then he turned to the crowd. “As soon as Dodge is finished with you,” he called to the loggers, “go home and take the day off.” He turned to leave and then turned back. “With pay.” He didn’t pause to see if any signs of gratitude flashed across their faces. He didn’t want their gratitude now. He would claim it at some later date. It was like paying insurance, and given for the same reason he handed out free turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas trees at Christmas, and paid for the annual Fourth of July fireworks display. Everyone in town owed Jonah Mackenzie something, even if it was just gratitude. And in return he owed them nothing, which was as he wanted it. Everyone except Madeleine, anyway.

A storm was coming. Rain from the north in a gray stampede. Its dampness sifted through the air.

Coltrane drove Mackenzie down the hill. “Now then,” said Mackenzie, “what the hell happened up there?”

“We could talk about this later, if you want.”

So it’s as bad as that, thought Mackenzie. He slapped his thigh pocket and felt the squared-off edges of his notebook. He pulled it out and removed a tiny pencil from its spine. On one of the delicate blue pages he wrote “James Pfeiffer.” He always carried his notebook with him, and always in the same pocket. Several times a day, he would slap his thigh pocket to see that the notebook was there, then the left chest pocket of his coat to check his wallet and finally a gentler tap across his right shirt pocket, where he kept his glasses until the moment when, every night, he set them on his bedside table. It gave him peace of mind to know what belonged where, the same for people as for things. “Just go ahead and tell me,” he said.

“Well, it was an accident …”

Mackenzie didn’t let Coltrane finish the sentence. “So that’s all there is to it?” Mackenzie kept his pencil poised above the notepaper.

“No, sir. The chain bust because the saw was no good. It was one of those old saws that should have been replaced at the end of last year’s cutting season.”

“So why wasn’t it?” Mackenzie noticed the clot of mud that had fallen from Coltrane’s boots onto the seat-well carpeting.

“You told me not to, sir. I still have the memorandum. You told me to string out the machinery until it fell apart. Which it just did. Sir.”

Mackenzie sat back. His lips puckered as he sucked at his teeth, deep in thought. “Fuck,” he said, after a minute, as if it had taken him this long just to choose the right word.

“If Dodge has the chain saw analyzed by an expert, he’ll be told that it was unsafe equipment. And if Pfeiffer’s family finds out about that …”

“They’ll sue me.”

“They’ll want some kind of restitution, anyway.” Coltrane wiped his hand across his stubbled chin, trying to find a gentle way of agreeing. He could think of other families in town, who, if they heard that one of their own had been killed by unsafe equipment, would load up their guns and come hunting for Jonah Mackenzie. He didn’t know
about Pfeiffer’s family. They were from the coast and he had no idea about those people.

At that moment, Madeleine’s red Volkswagen overtook them on their way into town. Mackenzie looked down at her pale hands gripping the steering wheel. She had undone her ponytail and her hair streamed behind her in the breeze.

Mackenzie would regret closing down Madeleine’s newspaper. He admired her stubbornness, even when it worked against him. He wanted to protect her, even when he had to protect himself against the things that she had done. Mackenzie wished she could have come to work at the mill instead of making things difficult for him every chance she got. When she was a teenager, she had stood in single protest outside his logging company gates, with a sign condemning his first clear-cut operation. The sign was made of plywood, with
STOP CLEAR-CUTTING
in fuzzy-edged, black spray-painted capital letters. The sign was too heavy for her to hold up for more than a few minutes at a time. She leaned against the fence, coughing in the dust that logging trucks kicked up as they rumbled into the mill. Mackenzie once sent out some lunch to her on a tray, but she refused it, just as he would have done if he had been in her shoes.

Despite her hostility toward him, Mackenzie could not help his affection for her. Mackenzie had no children, and Madeleine was the age his own child would have been if things had gone differently.

The Volkswagen passed by, its engine puttering with the same persistent energy that Madeleine herself seemed to possess.

Mackenzie thought about the other newspapers that would be calling soon—
The Skowhegan Times
and
The Down East Gazette
, based over in Greenville. He thought of them smacking their lips at the scandal. The Forestry Safety Commission would demand a report, too. They would send investigators to check every machine in his mill, every chain saw, every truck. The Pfeiffer family would have to be taken care of. There would be a burial. A memorial service organized. He would shake hands and make a speech and politely refuse the Spam-and-mayonnaise sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Even if the news of the unsafe chain saw never leaked out, Mackenzie knew he would still be blamed by the family. He would be blamed because there always had to be someone to blame. Mackenzie thought of time moving ahead without mercy for James Pfeiffer,
already chipping away at the memory that remained of him in other people’s minds.

“If we can just make it through these months ahead,” Mackenzie said, as much to himself as to the silent man who rode with him, “we’ll be all right. Better than all right.” At that moment, he caught sight again of his reflection in the car’s window. He shuddered. Suddenly he remembered why it bothered him so much. The warped image reminded him of the night he cut off his leg. He had stared at his pain-twisted face in the moonlit frozen puddles on the road as he waited to die or be saved.

CHAPTER 2

L
ong after dark, Mackenzie sat in his office. Floodlights illuminated the lumberyard. They gave a shine like snow to the corrugated iron rooftops. Grit left over from the winter still pebbled the roads. With one more season, the old Victorian houses on Main Street had sunk deeper into the ground. Their roofs were bowed like the backs of beaten horses and the porches tipped forward, as if they meant to dump their cargo of paint-chipped Adirondack chairs onto the front lawns.

Mackenzie laid his hands on the lime-green blotter on his desk and felt the paper drink sweat from his palms. Dodge would follow through with the investigation. No sense praying that he wouldn’t. I have to find a way out, thought Mackenzie. Make it look like someone else’s fault.

He picked up the phone and called Coltrane. Told him to come back to the mill. Then he went down to the storeroom, where spare chain-saw blades and hammers and boxes of nails were piled so high
that he could not see the walls. He felt uneasy in the quiet. For Mackenzie, the mill was a place of noise and motion always bordering on chaos. It haunted him to be here when the place was closed. When he returned to his desk, carrying the thing he needed from the storeroom, Coltrane had already arrived. Mackenzie stashed it in his desk drawer and waved Coltrane into his office.

Coltrane stood in front of him, arms folded, long back arched with age. Coltrane hadn’t sounded sleepy when Mackenzie called. He knew I would call, thought Mackenzie. Knew I wouldn’t leave this mess to sort itself out. That this wouldn’t be a night for dreaming.

“Coffee?” asked Mackenzie.

Coltrane shook his head. There was no time for small talk and caffeine.

“Mr. Coltrane,” he said. Mackenzie always used last names at the mill. The fact that the workday was over made no difference to him. The mill itself demanded such formality. “Go ahead and sit.” Mackenzie waved at a chair.

“I’ll stay on my feet.” Coltrane’s windburned forehead reflected the lights in the office.

“Chances are that it will come out about the chain saw being—being—” He didn’t want to say “defective.”

“Worn out,” Coltrane said. “In need of replacement.” He was poker-faced, all emotion hidden somewhere behind the Maginot Line of his skull.

“Exactly. It could destroy the whole company.” This was the first time he had actually said the words, and hearing them now made him realize how true they were. “I’m way in debt from buying the Algonquin rights. I couldn’t handle a lawsuit. Not the kind that could come from a man dying.”

“I don’t know how the money works that far up the ladder.”

“Well, I’m telling you. And I’m telling you this, too. If this company goes down, the whole town goes with it. The mill is the town and everything else is servicing the people who work for the mill. Can you imagine what this place would look like if all those jobs suddenly vanished?” Mackenzie didn’t pause. It wasn’t a question to answer. “We have to do something to take people’s minds off the condition of the chain saws.”

“How are you going to do that without breaking the law?”

“Whose law?” Mackenzie raised his hands and let them slap down on the blotter. “Look, this was an accident. That’s all it was. And I’ll take care of Pfeiffer’s family. But I don’t want some lawyer getting fat off what was only an unfortunate mistake.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Now Mackenzie slid open the drawer of his desk, slowly, ceremoniously. He took out a finger-thick, ten-inch bridging nail. There had been a whole case of them down in the basement, left over from some repairs done to the mill five years before. “All you have to do is hammer this into the tree at the place where Pfeiffer’s chainsawing ended. Make sure the metal is gashed with a file or something and people will blame it on that. They’ll call it somebody’s prank. Or terrorism. Or the work of one of those radical, environmental, dirt-eating, tree-kissing druids that Madeleine wishes we’d all turn into. And in return you save the lifeblood of this town.”

“I’m not doing that, Mr. Mackenzie.” There was no hesitation in his voice.

“It would only take you ten minutes!” Mackenzie rolled the nail between his palms. It was cold and dull and gray.

“Time isn’t what it’s about.” Mackenzie honestly believes what he’s saying, thought Coltrane and shook his head slowly in amazement.

“You’d be an unsung hero, Coltrane. It requires courage.” Mackenzie set the nail down within the man’s reach. “Not to do this—well, it’s almost the opposite of courage, isn’t it? A person could almost call it cowardice.” He knew he had to be careful with this word. It carried the same power to insult as the abrupt shoves he had seen start fights in bars.

“The cowardice, sir, is that I’m not quitting the company.” Coltrane ran his hand over the smoothness of his head. His sled-dog eyes blinked shut for a moment and he whispered, “Christ.”

“If you don’t want to do it, Coltrane, then don’t. I don’t need you to quit. I won’t fire you, either. I just need you to keep your mouth shut. Can you do that much?” Mackenzie waited long enough to breathe in once, then said again, “Can you?”

“I think I’m going home now, Mr. Mackenzie. Pretend I’m having a bad dream.”

“Good.” So it is a night for dreaming, after all, he thought. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Coltrane shut the door and found himself alone among the empty desks of the main workroom. The place smelled of old cigarettes. Coltrane was thinking how unfair it seemed that he felt like a crook when all he would do was stay silent. He hadn’t done anything wrong, except to do nothing at all. He marveled at how unruffled Mackenzie had seemed. So convinced of what he was doing. That was Mackenzie’s power in this town. He ruled by foregone conclusion.

Mackenzie waited until the sound of Coltrane’s car had faded away down the road. Then he stood up to leave. As he was pulling on his frayed canvas jacket, he saw a movement outside the gates. At first, Mackenzie thought it might be the wind twisting up another cyclone of dust to warn of the approaching storm. Then a figure stepped from the curtain of black and into the glare of the floodlights.