Bad Little Falls (23 page)

I hadn’t drunk that much, just four beers ultimately, not enough to get drunk in any meaningful sense. Not enough to excuse anything. And Jamie hadn’t touched a drop. She’d come to the motel with a six-pack of beer and condoms in her purse. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t the emotionally fragile victim of circumstances I’d imagined her to be. This was a woman who made choices. We’d had sex because Jamie Sewall wanted it to happen.

The bathroom door opened, and she came out dressed in her turtleneck and jeans, looking hurried but radiant. Seeing her again in the morning light, with her hair mussed but gleaming, and her tattoos hidden, was like seeing her again for the first time, and all my second thoughts disappeared, replaced by powerful feelings of attraction and affection.

“Oh my God, I am so late for work,” she said. “Jim’s going to fire me this time for sure. And I have to drive all the way home to get my uniform still.”

“I could tell him you hit a moose,” I suggested.

“Would you do that? If he gives me any grief, I might need you to give me an alibi.”

I clumped the sheet in my lap to cover myself. “You look great,” I said.

She smoothed the wrinkled front of her top without making eye contact. “How many beers did you have?”

“I mean it.”

She turned and leaned across the bed to kiss me. Because she was so short, she didn’t need to lean much. Her breath had the wintergreen taste of Nicorette.

“I’ve really got to run,” she said. She zipped up her ski parka and reached into her pocket to check that she had her keys. She must have pressed a button, because I heard the van beep outside in the lot. “Why don’t you stop by McDonald’s later?”

“I’m supposed to meet a friend, or I would. He’s taking me up in his plane.”

“Don’t crash! That would definitely send me into a permanent binge.”

“I’ll give you a call when we land.”

She smiled and then leaned across the bed to kiss me again. “I’d like that.”

After she left, I let my gaze wander happily around the room. Joe Brogan and his skunk had forced me out of my house and into this tiny motel room, but I would always remember it now as the place Jamie and I first made love. The Blueberry Bunch Motel had unexpectedly attained landmark status on my life’s crazy road map.

I would need to clean up the place before I checked out. I always wondered what it was like for the maid to clean up a room where two people had enjoyed a debauched night of lovemaking. Five empty beer bottles were arranged in a straight line along the desk, beside Jamie’s half-empty soda bottle. Funny, I thought I’d drunk only four.

A gust blew the door open, causing me to shiver. The skin on my arms and legs was covered with goose bumps. Jamie must not have closed it tightly enough. I clamped the sheet to my groin and got up and turned the lock, then wandered into the bathroom.

I stared at my bleary, stubbled reflection, wishing I could reach into the mirror and slap the reckless bastard. Instead, he confounded me with an unspoken question: Do you always have to make things so difficult for me?

I drank three glasses of water from the tap, then shaved and showered. I put on my uniform, but it only made me look more sheepish. I tried tidying up the room, but it was no good. The stained sheets told our illicit story.

I went over to the office with my duffel bag.

The little old woman was standing on her wooden box behind the registration desk, a
Forbes
magazine spread out beneath her withered fingers. “Checking out?” she asked.

“I had company last night,” I said.

“Did you?” Of course she had noticed Jamie’s van parked in front of my cabin, but I appreciated the feigned ignorance.

“I want to pay for another person, since it was just supposed to be me in there.”

“Forget about it,” she said. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

I smiled. “But this isn’t Las Vegas.”

“That explains the snow.”

I stopped at the nearest gas station and bought a quart of Gatorade, which I swallowed in one enormous gulp. I also purchased a cup of coffee and half a dozen granola bars for the plane ride. The snacks Charley usually brought with him were things like smoked bear jerky and pickled eggs—food I could barely stomach, even without a low-grade hangover.

The coffee was too hot to drink until I’d arrived at the Gardner Lake boat launch and was sitting in the plowed lot. There were clusters of ice fishermen out on the frozen surface. One group had driven a big SUV out there—a Chevy Yukon. You had to have a lot of balls, or very little brains, to drive something that heavy onto the ice. People assumed that because it had been so cold lately, the conditions must be safe, but they didn’t understand how snow cover could retard ice formation. I rarely felt safe on the ice, no matter how frigid it was, and always wore a float coat in case I fell in.

The sky and the ice were the same hard zinc color this morning, and every few minutes, a gust of flurries would blow through, scattering flakes across my windshield.

I heard the plane before I saw it. The whine of the engine preceded its appearance above the treetops. I saw the people on the ice shade their eyes and point, and I followed the direction of their raised arms until I saw the white-and-blue Cessna 172 come swooping down like a fish hawk through a cloud of snow showers.

The sight brought back the memory of my first ride with Charley, two years earlier. Wanted for murder, my father had escaped into the North Woods. Charley had flown down to the coast to take me to the search area. He’d had a Piper Super Cub then. It was as fragile as a model airplane, and it broke into a thousand pieces when it crashed into Rum Pond, its fuselage pierced with bullet holes.

I got out of the truck and removed the Cap-Stun canister from my belt. If the pepper spray discharged inside the cockpit, it would blind us both, and the plane would fall from the sky. The wind vibrated the wings of the Cessna as it skipped down onto the ice. I raised my hand in greeting and ventured out to meet my friend as he taxied toward the ramp. The ice was slick beneath my boots, making me wish I’d paused a moment to fasten on the cleats I usually wore.

The door popped open—literally popped—and I found myself gazing into the smiling face of Charley Stevens. He looked as craggy as ever, with his sun-browned skin and lantern jaw; his eyes were as clear and green as sea ice. His white hair was longer than I’d seen it before, and he wore an outfit of heavy wool clothing that his grandfather might have worn half a century earlier, going off on a river drive.

It took me a second to realize that Charley was seated in the passenger seat and that someone else was behind the controls of the Cessna.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Howdy do!” he replied, hopping down with surprising agility to shake my hand.

“It’s been too long, Charley.”

“That it has.”

“I’ve never seen you riding shotgun before.”

“I’m just the flight attendant for this trip. You’ve got the top pilot in the fleet today. Mike Bowditch, meet Stacey Stevens.”

A young woman leaned toward the open door, but she remained seated behind the yoke, the belt drawn across her chest. Her mirrored sunglasses and the awkward headphones clamped down over her brown hair made it difficult for me to act a good look at her. I saw high cheekbones and a slightly pronounced chin.

“Hello,” I said.

“You two need to stop gabbing and get inside before you frost up all our windows,” she said.

Charley chuckled and clapped me hard on the collarbone. “You heard her. Captain’s orders.”

He slid the passenger seat forward so that I could clamber onto the seat behind him. The Cessna, like the Piper before it, was packed with all sorts of odds and ends, making my patrol truck look neat by comparison. Snowshoes, ski poles, an ax, blankets, first-aid and survival kits, extra parkas and boots, and God knows what else were stowed in various canvas bags and pack baskets. I leaned forward between the seats to make a joke, but Stacey stopped me before I could speak.

“Use the mic,” she said.

I put on the pair of headphones and moved the microphone so close, I was almost sucking on it. Charley slammed and locked the door. Stacey stepped on a pedal on the floor to turn the nose of the plane and then pushed a lever forward. We began taxiing toward the wide part of the lake, where we could take off without running over ice fishermen.

“What were you going to say?” Charley asked over the intercom.

“Stacey, your dad didn’t tell me you were a pilot.”

“Yeah, I’m full of surprises,” she said without humor, although the electronics made it difficult to catch subtle intonations.

Now that we were in the clear, she opened up the throttle, and we began to slide faster and faster on the skis. Stacey pulled gradually back on the yoke until I felt the nose of the plane rising, although it looked as if we were still on the ground. Suddenly the ice dropped away beneath us and we were airborne, ascending sharply into a cold headwind.

“I had the devil’s time teaching her,” said her father. “She was the worst white knuckler I’d ever flown with.”

“Watching your parents crash tends to have that effect,” she said.

Charley had told me that his daughter blamed him for the flying accident that cost her mother the use of her legs. I hadn’t expected to hear that long-standing grudge expressed so soon.

If Charley felt stung by his daughter’s words, he didn’t show it. “You ever do one of these aerial moose surveys before, young feller?”

“No,” I said. “Maybe you can explain to me how this works.”

“We fly transects within a random sample of survey plots,” Stacey said. She had recently gotten a job as an assistant wildlife biologist, Charley had told me. “We record the number and sex of the moose we spot. The presence of antlers this time of year isn’t the best indicator, so we’re also looking for the vulval patch on the females.… Stop snickering.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“I was talking to my dad.”

She went on to explain that, because of tree cover, it was impossible to see every moose, especially in a fixed-wing aircraft that couldn’t hover, so the biologists had developed a model to overcome what she called “visibility bias.” I couldn’t quite follow the rest, but it had something to do with visual obstruction being a covariate of something or other and bulls being estimated as a ratio of cows to calves seen, or maybe it was the other way around, but she used the term
confidence interval
as if it was a phrase I should have picked up in elementary school. Results would be adjusted for sightability and sampling, she said. “Does that make sense?”

“Sure.”

“Just tell me if you see a moose.”

She leaned forward to wipe away some frost that was forming on the windshield in front of her. At that moment, a gust grabbed the plane and gave it a shake, the way a cat does with a mouse. Neither Stacey nor Charley seemed alarmed, but the flurries seemed to be gathering into a white vapor around us.

“How are we going to see anything in this snow?” I asked.

“What snow?” asked Charley.

“Those big white flakes falling all around us.”

“Oh, that’s just a little scud.”

I glanced down at the rolling pine forest and snow-covered muskeg beneath us. The ancient history of the landscape showed itself as a series of geological scars. Round kettle lakes, left behind by the last glacier’s advance, pockmarked the face of the land. There were undulating moraine ridges, miles long and dotted with boulders the size of houses. There were peaked eskers bisecting sprawling blueberry barrens. There were bleak expanses of frozen swampland, layers of frozen peat piled atop sandy glacial till, through which urinous streams wiggled like worms. One of these swamps might be the Heath that bordered the Sprague property, although, by my reckoning, we were many miles south of that trackless bog.

“I promised Mike we’d do a spy mission for him over that game ranch in Narraguagus,” said Charley. “Maybe we should buzz over there first.”

“You didn’t tell me about that!”

“It’s just a quick detour.”

“No way.”

“Tell Stacey about your zebra,” said Charley.

“What zebra?” she asked.

“I knew that would pique her curiosity,” her father said.

It was difficult telling the story over the intercom, above the drone of the engine, with the windows of the plane rattling and gusts buffeting us from every direction. But I described the poor animal with its frosted haunches and rictus smile, and that was all I needed to say.

“You mean some idiot imported a zebra to Maine and then released it onto his property in the middle of winter for hunters to shoot?”

“Not just the zebra,” I said. “Brogan advertises other exotics. He keeps bison, red deer, and who knows what else.”

The plane swung around sharply and accelerated in the direction of Call of the Wild.

Charley turned in his seat and gave me the thumbs-up sign. “I think you got her attention,” he said.

25

The longer I spent in the plane with Stacey, the more curious I became to see what she looked like beneath the headset and sunglasses, but I was seated behind her, and she kept her face turned to the window.

I’d wanted to meet Stacey Stevens forever. Charley and Ora were the parents I would have chosen had such a thing been possible, and yet Stacey seemed to have no end of grievances with them. Based on the stories her father told, the younger of their two girls had inherited these qualities from him: an eagerness to take risks that bordered on suicidal recklessness, a capacity for stirring up mischief, and a love of the great outdoors that surpassed his own.

“Fortunately,” Charley always added, “she got her looks from her mother.”

Ora was quite beautiful.

How ironic it was that I was finally meeting her on the day I’d just started a new relationship with a woman. Nevertheless, I found myself gawking. Her skin was uniformly smooth and pale. There was a small mole beneath her jawline. She wore her brown hair tied in a ponytail, exposing a long neck. Once or twice she may have caught me staring, because she turned her head sharply, and I saw my goofy face reflected in her mirrored glasses.