by Paul Doiron
“That’s good detective work.”
My sergeant was in no mood for the old pilot’s jauntiness. “Jesus Christ, Charley. It’s bad enough Mike’s fucking up his career without your helping him. I told Malcomb I’d have him back to Sidney this afternoon. Where the hell were you two?”
“Mike wanted to see the scene of the crime.”
“So you decided to play tour guide? It’s a goddamned homicide investigation.”
“It’s not his fault,” I said. “I told him I wasn’t going to wait around for you. He came along to keep an eye on me.”
She exhaled sharply and rubbed her nose, which was peeling from a recent sunburn. “Well, it doesn’t matter, at this point. It’s probably too late, but maybe we can still salvage your job.” She gestured at her truck with her thumb as if hitchhiking a ride.
I stood still. “I’m not going, Kath.”
“What?”
“I’m staying in Flagstaff.”
She looked from me to Charley, found whatever confirmation she needed in his sheepish expression, then swung back around on me. “So you’re just going to disobey Malcomb’s order?”
“I guess so.”
“You guess so?” She gaped at me as if she had never truly seen my true self before. “You ungrateful, turd-brained, son-of-a-bitch. You understand what this means?”
Her anger was creating an echo in me. You reach a point where you’re just tired of people second-guessing even your worst decisions. “Do you want my resignation?”
“No! But I’m not going to stand for this insubordinate bullshit, either. Forget second chances. You’ve already had your third and fourth.” She turned and paced away ten yards, trying to get a handle on her fury, than came back with fists clenched. “I don’t know what kind of rescue fantasy you’ve got playing in your head,” she went on, “but it’s seriously twisted. Your old man’s a fucking cop killer. And all you’re doing with this crap is taking yourself down with him.”
“Shut up, Kathy.”
“Sarah said you inherited your dad’s self-destructive gene. I guess she was right.”
“Leave Sarah out of it. You had no business calling her, anyway.”
“She still cares about you, even though you treated her like shit. God knows why.” She stood close enough that I could smell the bug repellent on her-the familiar sweetness of Avon Skin So Soft. “If you think throwing your life away is going to help your old man, then you’re beyond hope. Give me your wallet.”
“My what?”
“Your wallet.”
I handed it to her without asking why. She removed my warden service identification card and stuck it in her breast pocket. “You don’t have your badge on you, I’m assuming. And I hope to God you weren’t so stupid as to bring your sidearm up here?”
“Everything’s at home,” I admitted.
“Lieutenant Malcomb will expect you to surrender the badge and pistol.”
“So you’re accepting my resignation?” My surprise surfaced in my voice. I thought we both understood my offer was just another bluff.
“It sure looks that way,” she said. “But if you’re any kind of man, you’ll have the balls to tell Malcomb in person.”
I stood there in disbelief as she got back into the truck. The engine roared, and the pickup backed up abruptly, brake lights shining. But she must have thought of one more thing because she stopped suddenly and rolled down the window. “It wasn’t rabid, by the way.”
“What?”
“Your bear. The tests came back, and there was no sign of rabies. But I suppose you don’t care about that anymore.”
Of all the things she’d said, that comment stung the most.
As we watched her taillights disappear through the trees, Charley said to me, “I’m sorry that I contributed to this situation.”
Without a word to him, I turned and walked down to the end of the float and stared into the black water. I was thinking about the first time Kathy took me out to “work” night hunters. She’d staked out a Jeep trail in Burkettville, where poachers were reportedly jacklighting deer. We set up an artificial deer decoy by the side of the road and hunkered down in some brush to wait. Then, just after nightfall, the skies opened up, and it began to pour. Kathy and I spent six hours crouched in the rain and never saw a single vehicle. The poachers had the good sense to remain indoors, but we were drenched to the skin. Afterward Kathy had only to say “Bucket-ville” and we’d both crack up laughing.
Now I was no longer a game warden. The realization just wouldn’t sink in.
Sarah had called me self-destructive. The label certainly seemed to fit. In the past few days I’d lost a last chance with my former girlfriend, my career, and a friend I hadn’t truly appreciated. And what had I gained?
I felt the dock sway beneath Charley’s feet. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“You’re sure Ora won’t mind putting me up for the night?”
“When I was a game warden,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “I brought home injured coons, foxes, and bear cubs. If there’s anything Ora’s used to, it’s me bringing home strays. As long as you don’t start gnawing the furniture, we’ll both be fine.”
The floatplane skipped across the water, ten feet above the waves. Charley lifted the nose just enough to become airborne and then brought us down with a ducklike splash on the opposite side of the lake.
As we taxied toward shore, I saw a log cottage with a shingled boathouse at the water’s edge and windows glowing gold through the pines. I felt my heart lift at the sight, as if I were returning to a place I’d once visited in childhood and then forgotten. It was a surprising sensation considering how depressed I was.
Charley brought the Super Cub up against the dock beside the boathouse, opened the door, and jumped out. He fastened the floatplane to cleats on the dock. I stepped down onto the riveted metal pontoon, holding on to one of the struts to keep my balance.
A dog came bounding from the cottage, a gray-and-brown German shorthaired pointer with a quick-wagging stub of a tail.
“Hey, Nimrod.” Charley fell to his knees and let the dog lick his face.
I ran my hand along his coarse back while he sniffed my legs. “Good-looking dog.”
“Dumb as a post.” He slapped me on the back, trying to rouse some good cheer in me. “Come on, let’s see what the Boss has got cooking.”
A strip of rough tar paper ran down the center of the dock and led to a paved walkway that seemed out of place in such a rustic setting. The walk climbed in a switchback up the lawn to the cottage. A wooden ramp rose to the porch door.
The cottage was built partly of peeled fir and spruce logs and partly of beams and cedar shakes, and it had a red-shingled asphalt roof and a squat fieldstone chimney from which a wisp of smoke was rising. Yellow light streamed out through the windows onto the forest floor. I heard classical music playing softly from a stereo inside.
“Ora?” said Charley, pulling open the screen door. “We’ve got company.”
The inside of the house smelled of a log fire and of meat cooking in an oven. There were vases with wildflowers in all the windows and books piled everywhere on tables and on the floor. On the walls hung innumerable deer and moose antlers and mounted trout and salmon trophies the length of my leg. The furniture all seemed too short somehow.
“Ora?”
“Hi, Charley. I’ll be right out.”
He frowned at the crackling fireplace. “Isn’t it a little warm to have a fire going?”
“My bones were cold.”
Charley removed his green cap and hung it from a deer-foot coat peg beside the door. His thick gray-and-white hair stood up with the electricity even after he tried to smooth it. “She’ll be right out.”
I gestured at the taxidermy on the wall. “Those are some impressive fish.”
“Ora caught that salmon there. She’s a better fisher than me. Always has been. Of course, it’s harder now for her to get out than it
once was.”
I was about to ask why it was harder when the answer arrived in the person of Ora Stevens herself. She rolled into the room in a wheelchair, a handsome woman with deeply set green eyes, high Scandinavian cheekbones, and shoulder-length, snow-white hair swept back behind her ears. She wore a spearmint-colored sweater over a white T-shirt, khakis, and tennis shoes.
Charley knelt down to kiss her pale cheek. “How you doing, Boss?”
“Boss! I wish he wouldn’t call me that.” She held out a hand to me. “Hello, Mike.”
The grip was firmer than I expected. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Stevens.”
“Ora,” she corrected me.
“Mike has agreed to spend the night with us,” he said, not mentioning anything about what had just happened back at the boat launch.
“That’s wonderful. I have a room already made up.”
“I hate to put you out this way.”
She waved a hand. “It’s no bother. We don’t get enough company these days, as it is. Can I offer you something to drink, dear? We have lemonade, iced tea, beer.”
“A beer would be great.”
“I’ll have iced tea,” said Charley. “I guess I’ll show Mike around in case he needs to use the facilities.”
With Nimrod trailing us at every step, Charley escorted me through the cottage. I realized now the reason for the paved walkway and the low furniture. Everything in the house had been arranged to be accessible to Ora Stevens in her wheelchair. The cottage was larger than it looked from outside and was cluttered with all sorts of woodsy knickknacks: animal skulls and hand-carved duck decoys, eye-catching rock specimens, and lots and lots of books. There were several framed photographs lined up along the top of a bureau. I noticed that two young women appeared in multiple pictures. “Are those your daughters?”
Charley nodded. “Anne and Stacey.”
The photo that looked to be the most recent showed Ora standing-no wheelchair in sight-with her arms around both young women. Her hair was darker, as was Charley’s.
“Do they live in Maine?” The question was all I could do to maintain the semblance of good manners.
“Anne does, down to Augusta. I’m not sure where Stacey is these days. She moves around a lot.” He guided me back out into the cottage’s great room.
“I’d love to have a place like this someday,” I said honestly. It was the kind of cabin in the woods I’d always dreamed about.
“We only live here April through November. But sometimes I come up on my own to do some ice-fishing in the winter. It gets damned cold, but if I sleep out in front of the fireplace with Nimrod and a few blankets, I’m all right.”
“How much land do you have here?”
“Twenty acres. Of course it belongs to Wendigo since we’re on a lease.”
“And they’re really going to evict you?”
Charley made a face. “Oh, I expect they’ll give us a chance to buy the land at a price five times what we can afford to pay. After we refuse, they’ll make an offer on the buildings here, knowing we don’t have the money to move them anywhere else. That’s the way it happened when they went into Montana, from what I understand. Wendigo never evicts anybody. They just force you to sell out at their asking price.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Thirty-three years.”
Ora came rolling out with our drinks and a bowl of roasted pumpkin seeds on a tray on her lap. “Dinner will be ready in half an hour,” she said. “Why don’t we go out onto the porch?”
Charley’s mouth tightened. “I thought you felt cold.”
“I’m warmer now,” she said with an unconvincing smile.
Charley and I sat down in wicker rocking chairs, facing the lake, while Ora positioned her wheelchair to one side.
“Supper smells great.”
She smiled. “I hope you don’t mind moose. Charley got about three hundred pounds of meat from a man in town who hit one with his car.”
“Totaled his Subaru,” he said. “Lucky he wasn’t killed.”
“The irony is the poor man is a vegetarian.” Ora gave a sad laugh.
“We’ll be eating moose until it’s coming out our ears,” said Charley. “How many moose have you shot?”
“None, yet.” It was an embarrassing admission for a Maine game warden.
“You’ll get one with brainworm or struck by a car before too long, and you’ll have to put it down.” He was speaking as if I hadn’t just resigned from the Warden Service. “So I understand you shot a bear last week.”
“It was killing pigs. I was hoping to relocate it somewhere up this way, but a farmer wounded it, and I had to put it down.”
“How big a guy was he?” asked Charley.
“Two hundred pounds. But he looked twice that size.”
“Bears always look bigger than they are,” he said. “That’s the problem I have with baiting them during bear season. These dimwit hunters shoot the first bear that comes close to their tree stand. Half the time it’s a yearling cub, thirty-five pounds or so. Then they’re too embarrassed to haul the little thing back to camp, so they stash it behind a brush pile and try for a bigger one.”
“Charley.” Ora gave him a hard look.
“I’ll shut up,” he said. “Baiting just gets me steamed. I know the state’s got to manage the bear population, but still-”
“Charley.”
“I’m finished.” He took a sip of iced tea.
We gazed out through the porch screen at the lake’s dark chop, the lights of Flagstaff burning like yellow and red stars in the far distance. The purr of a motorboat carried across the water, a fisherman returning late to shore.
Then Ora said, “Mike, I’m sorry about your father. This must be very difficult for you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Have you talked to anyone about this? A minister or counselor?”
“Ora,” said Charley.
She leaned forward and touched the arm of my rocking chair with two fingers. “You can’t save him, dear. Whatever happens is up to him. I hope you’ll remember that.”
“Ora, that’s enough.” Charley rose to his feet. “My God, what a busybody you are. She loves to ask questions she has no business asking.”
She looked up at her husband, leaning back in her chair. “Charley’s right,” she said.
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“Oh, yes she does.” He took hold of the rubber handles on the back of her wheelchair and pivoted her toward the door. “We’ll check on supper and let you finish your beer in peace.”
They left me alone on the porch.
Dinner was the best I’d had in ages. The roast was lean and tender with a stronger flavor than beef. There were new potatoes and onions from the Stevenses’ big garden, and Ora steamed some sort of greens Charley plucked from the yard. On the table was a Mason jar of wild mushrooms pickled in cider vinegar and a crusty loaf of home-baked bread wrapped in a warm napkin.
It was the kind of meal my mother never made. I remembered all the nights I’d spent as a kid staring down at an orange lump of boxed macaroni and cheese. Even when my dad brought home deer meat she managed to burn all the taste out of it. She just never put any effort into cooking. And, of course, the TV was always going, background chatter to their arguments.
Charley and Ora drank glasses of cold milk they poured from a pitcher. But I stuck with beer. There were four empty bottles in front of me, and I was feeling woozy by the time Ora brought out the blackberry pie.
“Charley gathered these berries along the dirt road that leads out here from town,” she said. “We grow or gather most of what we eat. Always have.”
“On a warden’s pitiful salary, what else could we do?” he said. “We’re like that Ewell Gibbons feller from those old TV commercials? ‘Did you ever eat a pine tree?’ There’s just so much to eat out there if you know what to look for-fiddleheads and frog’s legs and mushrooms. Then there’s the usual ga
me: moose, deer, rabbits, squirrels.”
Ora patted his hand. “Charley has a stronger stomach than I do. I can do without rodents,” she said. “I do love fish, though. Trout and salmon. Pan-fried perch and bullheads.”
“Of course, these days you can’t eat fish like you used to,” said Charley. “On account of the mercury. All that damned acid rain from the Midwest dropping down into our lakes and rivers, poisoning our fish and birds. That’s another sad development from when I was a lad. But I guess every old fart says the world has gone to hell in his lifetime.”
“I think it really has,” I said.
Ora looked at me with concern. “Why do you say that?”
“There’s no wilderness left. There are roads everywhere now, and GPS receivers if you do get lost. You can make a cell-phone call from the top of a mountain or the bottom of a cave. You can go to the ends of the earth and if you look up, you’ll still see a plane flying overhead.”
I hadn’t realized how crocked I was until I’d opened my mouth. But the more time I spent with Ora and Charley, the angrier I became at Wendigo for threatening to take away this beautiful house and this life of theirs. I thought of that heated meeting at the Dead River Inn, and part of me felt a little murderous.
“It’s just change,” said Charley with a big grin.
“Change for the worse.”
“Son,” he said, shaking his head with mock sadness, “you are the youngest old fart I’ve ever made the acquaintance of.”
After Charley had washed the dishes, he said, “Let’s call some owls.”
Outside it was dark. When we looked out through the windows all we could see were our reflections floating like ghosts on the glass. Charley lifted his green cap from its peg and put it on his head, and then Ora turned off the lights in the house, and we all went outside. In the darkness I could smell the lake and hear a rustle of breeze in the treetops. Crickets were chirping under the cabin.
“Do you speak Owl?” Charley asked me.
“Not fluently.” I could taste the beer on my breath.
“I’ll teach you, then.”
He cupped his hands around his mouth and made a shrieking noise that sounded like “Who-cooks-for-you.” He repeated the noise a few times, modulating it so that it was always a little different.