the Poacher's Son (2010) (22 page)

As we skittered along the calm surface of the pond, I watched the wall of trees along the far shore draw nearer and nearer. Then, as if a balloon were inflating inside me, I experienced the lift of the wings via a sudden lightness in my stomach, and we were airborne. I looked down at the jagged treetops and wondered how we'd missed clipping them.

Charley was right about the noise. Between the sound of the throttle and the rush of wind outside the cockpit I was half-deaf. I put on the intercom headset.

"Keep your eyes on the horizon if you get to feeling green about the gills," said Charley. "There should be a bucket back there, too, if you need it."

"I'll be all right."

"That's what they all say!"

Beneath the plane the midcoast was spread out in a quilt of blue and green. Behind us were the indigo waters of Penobscot Bay, with its islands scattered about like puzzle pieces. Ahead stretched miles of broadleaf forest and blueberry barrens and pocket farmland, all crosshatched with roads.

To the south I saw the muddy coils of the Segocket River and my own little tidal creek. I glimpsed the Square Deal Diner and the Sennebec Market. But what really struck me, from above, was all the new development--whole neighborhoods being carved out of wooded hilltops, luxury houses sprouting up in lawns of mud. It was a domesticated landscape, growing even more so, and the thought of a few fugitive bears hiding out along the ridgetops and in the remaining cedar hollows filled me with a melancholy ambivalence.

"Jerky?" Charley asked through the intercom.

"No, I'm fine."

He held up a plug of what looked like withered shoe leather. "I meant moose jerky. The Boss made it."

"The Boss?"

"My wife, Ora."

"I'll pass," I said.

Charley began gnawing at the plug of dried meat. For some reason my eyes kept focusing on the white line above the tan of his neck where his hair had recently been barbered. In the close quarters of the cockpit the hickory smell of the jerky was pungent.

He said, "So why did you join the Warden Service, if you don't mind me asking?"

The shuddering motion of the plane was beginning to get to me. "Because it's all changing."

"What's changing?"

"The woods. The state. Everything. More and more people keep coming up here, up to Maine, and they don't understand what's special about this place. They have these distorted ideas about nature that comes from growing up in a city or a suburb. Kids think meat comes from a supermarket. They're disconnected--the whole country is--and I didn't want to live that way. I thought that if I joined the Warden Service maybe I wouldn't have to, and maybe I could help a few people see things differently. It sounds stupid to say it."

"No, I wouldn't say that. But it does sound like you're mighty attached to the past for a young man."

"I just wish I could've seen the woods back when you were starting out."

"Back in the Stone Age, huh?" He chuckled. "Well, it was changing even then. Oh, there were still the river drives, but people forget how sick those rivers were not so long ago. Why, back in the sixties the Androscoggin used to light on fire from time to time on account of all the pollution from the paper mills. And we didn't have near as many moose or deer back then. Of course there weren't all the logging roads--which meant people had a harder time getting into the woods." He tapped some dial on the control panel. "I guess my philosophy is that time moves on, and you better move with it. If you live in the past, you just miss out on the present."

I didn't answer. I was beginning to feel nauseated.

"Being a warden isn't for everybody," said Charley. "The pay's poor and the benefits are slim. I've known a few young wardens who had second thoughts and decided to get out and no one thought the worse of them."

So this was why he wanted to talk with me. The old fart wanted to determine for himself whether I had the right stuff to be a warden. Well, the joke was on him because, by blowing off my meeting with Lieutenant Malcomb, I was likely shitcanning my career, anyway.

"You can't be angry all the time and do the job well," Charley continued. "I take it your lieutenant wasn't happy to see you yesterday."

"I made an error in judgment."

"That's natural. You know, the night you and I first met, over at Rum Pond, I could see you were a different sort of character from your dad. Still, it surprised me when I heard that you'd applied to become a warden."

"It surprised my father more."

"I'll bet it did," he said. "Tell me something. What would've happened if I'd gone up those stairs that night? What would I have found?"

"A deer, just like you thought. But you never would have made it up the stairs."

"Why's that?"

"Because Truman Dellis would have shot you."

Charley laughed. "Old Truman's a mean shot, all right, drunk or sober. I was grateful you helped me out that night."

"But I didn't help you."

"Sure, you did. You told me not to push my luck. Maybe you didn't say it, but I could read that look in your eyes."

"I was a stupid, scared kid."

"Don't be so hard on yourself. Most of the brave men I've met used to be scared kids. Hell, you can't even be brave without first being afraid."

"You sound like a fortune cookie."

Over the intercom Charley said, "Yeah, the Boss says I'm getting to be a gasbag. But when you get to my age, you figure everyone expects you to be wise."

My forehead had grown clammy with sweat. I began wishing I'd skipped breakfast.

"Soctomah tells me you think your father's innocent," Charley said suddenly.

"It just doesn't make any sense that he would want to kill that Wendigo guy, Shipman. If they close Rum Pond Camps and put Russell Pelletier out of business, so what? My father's had other jobs. He'll survive. He always does."

"Maybe he had a different motive."

"Like what?"

"Could be somebody paid him to do it."

That was something I'd never considered. I took a minute to think it over and look out the window. We'd already crossed more miles than I would have imagined possible in such a short time--heading north and west above the hardscrabble farms and glacial bogs of central Maine. Looking down at the ant-line of cars moving along the roads didn't help my airsickness any. I pressed my hand to my stomach.

"You know they found tire tracks," he said.

I wasn't sure I'd heard him. "What's that?"

"They found tire tracks near the crime scene that matched your dad's old Ford. They also got a partial boot print that matched your dad's size based upon ones in his cabin."

A bad taste had risen in my throat. "Did they find the boot?"

"Nope," said Charley. "There were no spent cartridges. And the dogs didn't pick up his scent. But then a woods-smart man like your dad knows how to throw them off."

I began to salivate. "Why are you telling me this?"

"If it were my old man, I'd want to know. Your dad's in a mess of trouble."

I felt like I was going to throw up.

Charley left me alone for a while after that. I heard him talking on the radio--presumably to Soctomah, giving him our estimated arrival time--but I couldn't focus on what he was saying. The hour was approaching when I was expected to report to Lieutenant Malcomb's office, and very soon it would become clear that I
wasn't going to show. What would happen then? I wondered. Would he send Kathy Frost to my home to drag me in, or just start dismissal proceedings? At the moment, I couldn't recall what the policy manual said on the subject of unexplained absences from duty.

When I could finally bring myself to look out the window again, the land had changed. No longer were we flying over patchwork fields and house lots. Instead, a mixed evergreen and hardwood forest extended out to the horizon, a lush green expanse broken only by ponds and rocky hills.

This was the wild country I'd dreamed of as a boy--what Ernest Hemingway had called "the last good country" of big maples and hemlocks--but it had been a false dream then, and it was a false dream now. The last of the old-growth stands had been cleared half a century ago. Swaths of razed ground opened up like ragged wounds on the hillsides. Slashings littered the edges of these man-made barrens and a network of dirt-and-shale logging roads connected them to one another.

"Look at all these new roads," I said.

"They keep building them. Used to be they'd leave the cedars and birches standing. But these days, you know, they can find a use for every tree. I swear they have saws now that can cut a straight board from a crooked tree."

Old clear-cuts and plantations of new saplings showed themselves as pale green patches against the darker green of the second-growth woods. From the air the forest looked like the commercial crop that it was.

But still there was a
wildness
here--at least in the speed with which the forest healed its scars. I saw deer browsing in a clear-cut, a big bull moose using a logging road as a short cut from one bog to another. Nature will forgive humankind just about anything, and what it won't forgive I hope never to witness.

We passed a ribbon of road that must have been Route 144,
but I didn't see any of the landmarks--the fish hatchery or Wally Bickford's cabin--to orient myself. Over to the right I thought I spotted the Dead River, creasing the tops of the trees. The Bigelows loomed ahead.

"Is this the Wendigo land?"

"Part of it," said Charley. "Did you see the new gate and checkpoint back there?"

"Where's Rum Pond?"

"Over there." He gestured off to the right. "It's way behind those mountains, so you can't see it. But that little lake up ahead is Flagstaff Pond. Back in the forties a power company was going to dam the Dead River and flood this whole valley--until people got up in arms about it. Just like they're doing now. It's always something."

As we drew nearer and began turning for our descent, I could see a little downtown between the Dead River and marshy Flagstaff Pond. I saw clapboard houses and a Mason hall and not a whole lot else. As the plane touched down on the lake, I was beginning to think that I'd just made the worst mistake of my life by coming here.

"The evidence you mentioned," I said as we floated, motionless, beside a dock. "None of it's incontrovertible. It could be someone planted it to set him up."

Charley didn't respond directly but instead asked a question of his own. "Where do
you
think he ran off to?"

"The last I heard he was across the border in Canada. That's what he told my mom yesterday."

"But you don't believe it."

"No."

"Nor do I," said Charley Stevens, opening the door.

Climbing out, I glanced again at my watch. It was 11:05 a.m. And I was officially AWOL from the Maine Warden Service.

W
e left the plane tied to the dock and walked into the village. It was a short walk, not more than a quarter mile or so, but hard going because of the heat. The sun was burning a hole in the sky above Jim Eaton Hill, and the air was suffocating even in the shadows of the pines. We passed some cabins for rent near the lake and then a row of farmhouses with blistered paint and gardens all gone to seed. Grasshoppers sprang up at our every step, the only signs of life around. The entire population of Flagstaff--all hundred-and-something people--seemed to be taking a collective siesta.

A sheriff's patrol car and an unmarked state police cruiser were parked outside the clapboard town hall. Charley and I went inside.

Detectives Soctomah and Menario were waiting for us in the clerk's office. They were both wearing dress shirts and ties they refused to loosen despite the heat. We exchanged sweaty handshakes all around.

"Thanks for coming, Mike," said Soctomah. "You look a little green. Charley didn't show you any of his stunt-flying tricks."

"Just one. I think he called it a death spiral."

The detective smiled. Charley threw back his head and laughed like this was the funniest joke he'd ever heard.

Soctomah motioned to a chair beside the clerk's desk. "Have a seat."

"So where's Brenda Dean?"

"Downstairs."

"I thought she was getting out of jail today."

Menario's face was brick red under his gray buzzcut. "We told her we'd give her a ride back to Rum Pond. We didn't tell her about the pit stop."

"Does she know I'm coming?"

"No," said Soctomah, "but she indicated earlier that she's willing to speak with you."

"I don't know why."

"That's what you keep saying," said Menario, tugging on an earlobe.

Soctomah leaned against the desk. He looked shrunken since the last time I'd seen him--as if the investigation had forced him to miss a few visits to the weight room. "There's something else we want to talk with you about, Mike. Before we bring you downstairs." Something about the way he said these words made me uneasy. "We understand your father called your mother yesterday."