Bad Little Falls (4 page)

Unlike many of my fellow wardens, I’d studied history rather than conservation law, and while the degree served no useful purpose in my current job, it made me see shadows of the past everywhere. I knew that the first naval battle of the Revolutionary War—nicknamed the “Lexington of the Seas”—had been fought at the entrance to Machias Bay in 1775. There was even a commemorative plaque down by the water. With crushing unemployment, a row of shuttered storefronts, and a rampant drug culture lurking behind locked doors, I couldn’t blame the good people of Washington County for wanting to celebrate their past glory, such as it was.

Route 1 crossed the Machias River above Bad Little Falls, where a torrent of coffee-colored water—stained brown from pine needles—plunged down a steep terrace of granite shelves, dropping from one swirling pool to the next. It was so cold that the waterfall had partially frozen, forming a jagged crust of ice along the edges and a coating of rime on everything else from the frozen spray. Long icicles hung from the footbridge strung across the falls.

We passed the little university—a huddle of brick dorms and classrooms—on its lovely hillside, heading south along the Machias “strip.”

The McDonald’s was located in a mall across from the one and only grocery store. It advertised itself as a café, although I didn’t understand what made it one. You couldn’t order a McCroissant or anything. Several ring-billed gulls perched atop the roof, waiting to grab a dropped hash brown or whatever fried thing people ate at this hour of the morning.

There were five vehicles waiting in line at the drive-through. “Let’s just go inside,” I said.

Rivard groaned. “I knew this would happen.”

Inside, a group of old men sat around a series of adjacent tables. Across the room, a group of old women sat similarly. In Machias, as in so many Maine towns, the neighborhood McDonald’s doubled as the local senior center.

I waited for my turn to order and stepped to the counter.

“Good morning,” said a young woman with an incandescent smile.

She was wearing the standard uniform—striped back smock, loose black pants, and a visor with the Golden Arches emblazoned on it—perhaps the least sexy outfit a woman could possibly wear. And yet she was undeniably attractive. She was short: scarcely five feet tall. Maybe a few years older than me. Her hair was chestnut-colored, although there were streaks of blond and red in there, too. She had cheekbones fit for a fashion model and a slight cleft in her chin. Her eyes were large and maple brown. Her name tag said
JAMIE
.

“What will you have?” Her voice was a bit rougher than that of most women her age.

I smiled back. “The usual.”

She cocked an eyebrow at me. “I don’t know what that is.”

“You will.”

She laughed and nodded, clearly an expert in deflecting flirtations. “Nice try,” she said. “What can I get you?”

“An egg McMuffin and a large coffee with cream and sugar.”

She punched the order into the computerized cash register and took my money with practiced efficiency. I watched her fill a cardboard cup with steaming coffee and then place a wrapped sandwich on a plastic tray. She didn’t make eye contact again until she slid the tray across the counter at me and said, “Are you a forest ranger?”

I tapped the badge on my chest. “Game warden.”

“My son’s really into nature and stuff. He’s reading this book about rangers that his teacher gave him.”

I glanced down at her hand but didn’t see a wedding ring. The mention of the boy seemed to be a yield signal, though. “Sometimes we do school visits,” I said with a bit of a stammer. “We have a display we take around of antlers and furs we’ve confiscated from poachers. We’ll have an exhibit at the Machias Blueberry Festival in the summer.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said with another smile, this one more polite than come-hither. She looked over my shoulder at the next person in line, indicating I should move along.

Damn, though, she was pretty.

I carried my tray to the table where Rivard was hunched over his BlackBerry. He seemed totally preoccupied by whatever text message or e-mail he was reading. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“The National Weather Service just issued a blizzard warning for tonight.”

“I thought we were just supposed to get a few inches.”

“Now it’s a foot of snow, with sixty-mile-per-hour winds.”

I thought about my soirée with Doc Larrabee, wondering if the revised forecast would be a legitimate excuse to cancel, then imagined the old widower slaving away in the kitchen in anticipation of his big dinner party. I peeled the waxed paper from the egg sandwich, took a bite, and again felt nostalgic for the home cooking at the Square Deal Diner in Sennebec.

In the plus column, this had to be the cleanest McDonald’s I’d ever seen—not a crumb anywhere.

My chest hurt. I’d strained one of my pectoral muscles doing push-ups. I massaged the muscle through the Gore-Tex fabric of my parka. Lately I had begun to feel like a convict doing life in prison: Compulsive exercising and masturbation seemed to be the available leisure activities.

At the far end of the room, the door swung open, and I saw a few of the older customers stiffen in their seats.

Two men entered the restaurant. One was fairly short and wore a watch cap, a faded denim jacket, and baggy jeans: your garden-variety Washington County hoodlum. The other guy seemed to belong to another species:
Homo giganticus.
He was tall, with wavy brown locks, and was dressed in a distressed-leather jacket and black cargo pants. But what you noticed all the way across the room was the Maori-style tattoo on his face. The dark spiked pattern looked like permanent war paint.

The two men swaggered to the counter. From the angle at which I was sitting, I couldn’t see the reaction of the woman at the register, but the older people at the end of the room began whispering to one another nervously, as if trouble were brewing, and I decided I’d better take a look for myself.

Rivard raised his eyes from his cell phone with surprise. “What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure.”

Before I could reach the front of the restaurant, the two men had reversed course and were being escorted out the door. The pretty young woman had the tattooed one firmly by the arm and was pulling him along, a look of utter mortification on her face. The shorter, shambling guy kept his head bowed, his eyes to the ground. As the other one passed me, though, he smiled wide, tapped his illustrated temple with two fingers in a kind of mocking salute, and said, “Top o’ the mornin’, Officer!”

The three of them exited through the double doors out into the frozen parking lot. They crossed the salted asphalt to a waiting Pontiac Grand Am. The smaller man slid immediately into the passenger seat, as if desperate to escape the wrath he knew was coming. The woman began shouting something—her words were lost through the glass walls and road noise—and shook a finger in the face of the tattooed man. He kept grinning from ear to ear.

Suddenly he thrust out a hand and lifted the McDonald’s visor from her hair. He held it above her head, playing keep-away for a few seconds, before setting the visor down at a jaunty angle on his own skull. The woman snatched it away and stormed toward the restaurant’s entrance, her hands balled into small fists at her sides.

Stepping aside as she came through the doors, I said, “Is everything OK, ma’am?”

But she refused to meet my eyes. “No, but I’ve got it under control.”

The old folks looked at me with scared and confused eyes, but there was nothing I could think to do except return to the back booth, where Rivard sat scowling.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“I thought that woman might need help.”

“If she’s with Randall Cates, she definitely needs help,” he said.

“You know that creep?”

“Everyone knows everyone around here,” my sergeant said. “But that tattoo is kind of hard to mistake.’”

“What’s his story?”

“Dealer,” Rivard said. “Oxycodone, heroin, crack, meth. Anything and everything. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency thinks he has somebody working for him across the border in New Brunswick. There’s another rumor he’s paying off someone inside the sheriff’s office, which is total bullshit, if you ask me. Last year a girl died—a student here at the university. It’s no secret who sold her the poison that killed her, but the DA couldn’t connect the dots.”

Looking through the frosted window, I could see the Grand Am still parked in its space, blue smoke rising from the tailpipe. I memorized the license plate: 766 AKG. I was wondering what the men were waiting for, when I saw Jamie emerge from behind the counter again, this time carrying a big paper bag and a tray with two coffees. She walked purposely out through the door and straight to the driver’s side window. Two big hands reached out to accept the food and coffee.

Rivard followed my gaze. “You’d think those women would learn eventually, but they never do.”

So my sergeant believed. But my own mother had escaped a youthful first marriage to a violent and abusive alcoholic, even if her later life in the suburbs didn’t turn out to be the dream she’d imagined. I’d also seen Jamie’s expression up close, and the look on her face hadn’t been one of submission, but of defiance and rage.

On the way out the door, I noticed her smiling picture posted on the wall:

JAMIE SEWALL
EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH

FEBRUARY 13

Mrs. Greenlaw gave me this book to read … NORTHWEST PASSAGE. It’s pretty cool.

RANGER ORDERS

• Have your musket clean as a whistle, hatchet scoured, sixty rounds powder and ball, and be ready to march at a minute’s warning.

• When you’re on the march, act the way you would if you were sneaking up on a deer.

• Don’t sleep beyond dawn. Dawn is when the French and Indians attack.

• If somebody’s trailing you, make a circle, come back onto your own tracks, and ambush the folks that aim to ambush you.

• Don’t stand up when the enemy’s coming against you. Kneel down. Hide behind a tree.

• Let the enemy come till he’s almost close enough to touch. Then let him have it and jump out and finish him up with your hatchet.

For my birthday I’m going to ask Ma for a hatchet.

5

A sign loomed ahead:
WHITNEY HIGH SCHOOL. HOME OF THE WARRIORS.

It was a boxy two-story brick structure indistinguishable from a hundred school buildings around the state, except that the cars and trucks in the parking lot looked harder used than the vehicles kids drove in southern Maine. There were also a dozen or so snowmobiles parked in a line on the banked wall of ice. No teenagers had ever ridden Arctic Cats to my alma mater. It was yet another sign of the cultural rift between the suburban and rural parts of the state.

Schools always reminded me of Sarah, who’d been a teacher before she moved to D.C. If she had carried our baby to term, he or she would be two months old now, I realized. After Sarah miscarried, the doctor offered to tell us the sex of the fetus, but Sarah said she didn’t want to know. She’d said it would make her too sad.

I’d wanted to know.

Rivard turned off the engine and hopped out of the truck without waiting for me. I followed him inside, down the greenly lit hall to the vice principal’s office. From my best guess, Whitney High School must have received its last renovation during the Eisenhower administration. The tan lockers and scuffed linoleum floors would have looked at home on the set of the movie
Grease.

The vice principal was a wiry young guy with a ponytail and round little glasses. His outfit—tweed jacket, blue jeans, open-throated hemp shirt—reminded me of a hippie teacher I’d had in elementary school in the backwoods of western Maine. Rivard introduced him to me as a Mr. Mandelbaum.

“I have to tell you I am very uncomfortable with this situation,” he said. His forehead was furrowed, his eyes wary.

Rivard had turned his sunglasses around so they faced the back of his head, the way baseball players do. “We just want to ask him a few questions.”

“If this is some sort of interrogation, I need to call Barney’s parents. I won’t allow you to question him without their consent. The children here have rights.”

“You’re blowing this way out of proportion,” said Rivard. “We just think Beal can help us out with some information about a case we’re investigating. It’s a routine inquiry. All we want is five minutes.”

I was fairly certain that my sergeant was misleading the vice principal. He’d told me he suspected Barney Beal of theft and drug dealing. The earlier discomfort I’d felt about this school visit returned as an itchy sensation along my torso.

Mandelbaum readjusted his glasses on his nose. “If any of your questions seem at all accusatory, I will cancel the interview. Understood?”

Rivard curled his lips like someone attempting a smile for a portrait photographer. “So where’s Mr. Beal at the moment?”

“In America Two.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Social studies,” Mandelbaum explained. “If you wait right here, I’ll go get him.”

The vice principal carefully closed the door behind him as he left the office.

“You told Mandelbaum you weren’t going to interrogate the kid,” I said.

“Just let me handle this, will you?”

A moment later, the vice principal returned, followed by the Incredible Hulk’s twin brother. “These wardens have a few questions for you, Barney,” Mandelbaum said. “You don’t have to answer anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

Barney Beal had a brown flattop and painful-looking acne. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt bearing the Teutonic logo of a heavy-metal band that had been popular in the rest of the country three decades ago. His eyes remained blank as he shambled into the room. Without waiting for directions, he took a seat in one of the three chairs arranged before the vice principal’s desk, extended his legs, and folded his thick, pimpled arms across his chest. He had some sort of biblical verse tattooed on his forearm: Ezek. 23:30. How old did you have to be to get inked these days? I wondered.