The Poacher's Son

by Paul Doiron

  “Barred owl,” I said.

  “It’s good to know they’re teaching you something in warden school.” He repeated the noise again and then we waited.

  Through the branches overhead stars were salted across the night sky.

  Far away I heard a noise: Who-cooks-for-you.

  “There he is,” said Charley. “Let’s see if I can draw him in.”

  Back and forth Charley and the owl called to each other, the bird moving closer and closer until finally the answering hoots were coming from a tall evergreen directly overhead.

  “Do you feel him watching us?” Charley whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s up there in that big spruce looking down at us wondering, ‘Where’s that son-of-a-gun owl who’s poaching on my territory?’ Who-cooks-for-you!”

  “Charley, don’t torture the poor bird,” said Ora.

  “We’re just having a conversation. Why don’t you give it a try?”

  I cupped my hands around my mouth and made a loud attempt.

  No response.

  “You get an A for effort,” said Charley softly, “but an F for pronunciation. Try it again but garble the sounds together more. You’re talking to an owl, not a person.”

  “Charley’s a regular Dr. Dolittle of the Maine woods,” said Ora.

  I gave the call another attempt, focusing on the actual sounds the bird was making, not the human words they reminded me of.

  This time the owl answered.

  Charley clapped me on the back. “There you go. You want to try some coyotes?” He pronounced the word ki-otes. “We’ve got to drive a little ways, but it’s not far. How about you, Boss? You up for a moonlight drive to Pokum Bog?”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I want to get back to that book I’m reading. You two go.”

  “We’ll miss you.” Charley knelt down and kissed her on the lips. Then in the near dark we watched Ora wheel herself back up the ramp and into the house. A moment later the light flickered on in the hall window, and we saw her smiling face shining back at us.

  We were riding along over a dirt logging road in Charley’s pickup truck, the headlights cutting a path for us through the dark.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  He laughed. “You sound like my wife. Whenever she says those words, I get the hell out of the room. But go ahead.”

  “Why is Ora in a wheelchair?”

  He smiled, a tired smile. “I knew I should have left the room.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “It’s all right. It’s common knowledge. Hell, I thought everyone in the Warden Service knew.” He kept his eyes on the road while he spoke. “We were in a plane crash six years ago, before I retired. I’d been nagging her to learn to fly for thirty-odd years and finally she gave in. I practically live in the air, so I figured she’d take to it the way I did.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had another plane back then. I showed her a few things on the ground, the instrument panel and how to use the stick, but I didn’t spend near enough time. Then the first couple times we went up together she did fine, better than I hoped, so I figured that was it. She was a natural, I thought.”

  He rolled down the window, letting air rush in between us.

  “Well, the third time we went up together the wind was really blowing and she panicked bringing us in to land. We came in at the wrong angle, and there was nothing I could do. The plane got crumpled down to half its size. It was a miracle we didn’t both get killed. She broke her back, and I got off with a concussion and a busted flipper.” He lifted his right elbow. “But then I’ve always been close to indestructible.”

  We turned off the main dirt road down a narrow path. Tree branches brushed the sides of the truck as we blundered ahead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Me too. And of course it was harder for me being the one relatively uninjured, although Ora never blamed me for what happened.”

  “But your daughters blamed you.”

  He glanced over at me, eyes narrowed. “You’re quite the perceptive young warden. I guess I’ll have to watch what I say around you from now on.” He swerved slightly to avoid a toad in the road. “Yes, Anne blamed me at first, but not anymore. Stacey, though… I think she blames us both. But me more.”

  I didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t, either, until we’d finally come to a stop.

  The path dead-ended at the edge of a small black pond in the hollow between wooded hills. There was a dark cabin there half-hidden in the trees and the ruin of an old pier jutting out into the water. “That’s Jim Grindle’s old cabin,” Charley said. “He’s living in a nursing home down in Waterville with Alzheimer’s. I suppose it’s just as well, given what’s happening with Wendigo.”

  He flicked off the highbeams and we got out of the truck and walked down to the waterline, letting our eyes adjust again to the darkness. In the weeds frogs were blowing like bagpipes. And the sky was an enormous black bowl overhead.

  “How’s your astronomy?” Charley asked.

  “I know the Big and Little Dippers, of course, and there’s Mars. Those are the Pleiades. I’m fairly certain that’s an airplane. Or a UFO.”

  In the starlight I could see Charley smiling at me. “That’s not so bad. My dad made us memorize all the different constellations, summer and winter. They say birds navigate by the stars.”

  We stood there for a while breathing in the rich balsam smell of the forest and the algae smell of the pond.

  “Let’s see if I can get those dogs singing.”

  He cupped his hands around his mouth, just as he did with the owl, but this time the sound he let loose was a thin, mournful howl.

  Almost instantly there came a cry from across the pond, a high-pitched wail that sent shivers up my spine.

  Charley called again, and the first coyote answered, and then a second coyote, off on one of the hills, joined in. Then a third and a fourth replied.

  “This pond is the boundary between two family packs,” said Charley softly. “I think they’ve got a feud going on over whose it is. Some nights it doesn’t take much to get them worked up.”

  Back and forth the coyotes called to one another, wailing like lost souls.

  “Listen to them sing,” he said. “Doesn’t the sound of it do something strange to your heart?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It does.”

  26

  When I awoke the next morning, sunlight was streaming through the window beside my bed. I lay there a long time, breathing in the warm balsam smell of the forest that drifted through the screen.

  Lying there, it was easy to fantasize about hiding out here from my life, enjoying Ora’s home cooking and Charley’s stories. But in my heart I knew it was a false dream. All I was doing in Flagstaff was interfering with a homicide investigation, making it less likely-not more-that the detectives would ever focus their attention on Truman Dellis, Russell Pelletier, Vern Tripp, or anybody else, for that matter. It was time I stopped playing Hardy Boys with Charley Stevens. My life back home was a mess and I needed to clean it up.

  My father was somewhere far away, maybe in Canada, maybe not. He might be caught today or next week or never. My being here would make no difference. The thought that I might somehow be able to talk him into surrendering-if the opportunity ever arose-was laughable. We were strangers. We always had been. Ora Stevens was right: I couldn’t save him.

  I found her sitting in her wheelchair on the porch with a cup of tea, reading Jane Austen’s Emma. She turned when she heard my footsteps and removed her bifocals and gave me a big smile.

  “Did you sleep all right, dear?”

  “Better than I have in a long time, actually.”

  “I always sleep better in the woods myself. Charley’s out with Nimrod, but he should be back soon. There are clean towels in the bathroom, and Charley left a T-shirt that should fit you.”

  Charley was sitting at the kitchen ta
ble, drinking coffee, when I came out of the bathroom. “There’s the man of the hour,” he said.

  I pretended to look over my shoulder. “Where?”

  “I hope you’re hungry because I’m making my world-famous, four-grain waffles.”

  “It’s the only meal he cooks,” said Ora from the porch.

  He gave a mock frown. “My secret’s out.”

  I sat down at the kitchen table while Charley poured me a mug of coffee.

  Ora rolled herself in from the porch. “What did you see this morning, dear? Anything unusual?”

  “Mostly thrushes and chickadees. There was a mourning warbler singing over by that new clear-cut. And Nimrod spooked a partridge.”

  “There was a red-eyed vireo outside my window,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “My girlfriend taught me a few things,” I said. “Ex-girlfriend, I mean. She’s a hardcore birder.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Pretty name.”

  “She’s prettier than her name.” I smiled at the memory.

  “What’s she do for a living, dear?” asked Ora.

  “She’s a teacher’s aide, studying to be a teacher. But I think she has higher ambitions than that. She wants to change the educational system across the country.”

  “And how long were you two together?”

  “Off and on, four years. We met in college.”

  “So why aren’t you together anymore?”

  “Ora,” warned Charley.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “Sarah doesn’t like what I do-what I did-for a living.” It was a simplification, a lie, basically, but I didn’t want to get into all the things I’d done to alienate her.

  Charley turned around from the stove. “Why the hell not?”

  “She doesn’t think being a game warden is a real career. She called it ‘a small boy’s idea of a cool job.’ ”

  He laughed. “Well, of course it is! What’s wrong with that?”

  As we ate I thought about how I’d bad-mouthed Sarah to the Stevens. Why was I always unfair to her that way? Maybe she did have some reservations about my job, and maybe she did worry too much about money, but she’d never actually asked me to quit being a warden. What the hell was wrong with the men in my family that we forced the women in our lives to leave us?

  After breakfast, I asked to use the Stevenses’ phone. I got Sarah’s answering machine, and since she didn’t believe in screening calls-she saw it as an act of impoliteness-I knew she wasn’t home.

  “Sarah,” I said. “I owe you an apology. I’ve made a lot of mistakes lately-you have no idea-but the way I treated you is the worst. I’m up at Flagstaff now. Some things have happened. I might not be a warden for very much longer. I’m not going to ask for a second chance, because I don’t deserve one. I just wanted to apologize one last time.”

  When I came out of the bedroom, Ora was off somewhere and Charley was washing and drying the dishes with the police scanner going in the background. I asked him if he would fly me home to Sennebec. “I appreciate the hospitality you and Ora have shown me,” I said, “but I need to get back and face the music.”

  “I understand,” he said, and I was surprised at the sadness in his voice. “I’ll go tell Ora.”

  He disappeared down the hall. I stood looking out the windows at the smooth surface of the lake, a perfect mirror of the blue sky above. It was a beautiful sight, but it only made me feel more alone.

  The phone rang. I heard Charley pick up in the bedroom, heard him say hello. Then he closed the door.

  I waited, feeling my heart beginning to speed up.

  Finally the bedroom door opened, and Charley came out. His expression was hard for me to decipher. “That was Soctomah. He just got off the line with Brenda Dean. I guess Truman got stirred up last night after our visit. He called over to Rum Pond wanting to know why Brenda was telling the authorities he killed those men. She told Soctomah he threatened her. She says she wants police protection.”

  “You mean she’s still out there?” She’d told me she was just going to gather up her things yesterday and leave. If she really thought Russ Pelletier was a murderer, why did she spend the night? “So what’s Soctomah going to do?”

  “He said he’d send a trooper out to Truman’s place to chat with him. And I told him I’d fly over to Rum Pond to see what’s up. That is, if you don’t mind making a stopover on the way home.”

  It seemed that I was going back to Rum Pond one way or the other.

  Charley had already gassed up the plane, readying it for another day in the air. Ora wheeled herself down to the dock to watch us depart.

  “Well, Boss,” he said, kneeling down to kiss her. “We’re off into the wild blue.”

  “Be careful.”

  “You know me.”

  “That’s why I’m saying be careful.”

  “Thank you for everything, Ora,” I said.

  “Please come back and see us again.” She took my hand in both of hers.

  “I will.”

  She smiled, but her eyes were full of doubt.

  I climbed into the backseat while Charley gave the plane a shove away from shore, hopping after it again to land on the pontoon. He was as agile as a monkey getting in and out of that plane.

  A minute later, after he’d strapped himself in and started the engine, we were skittering off across the lake. The air was dead still, but we rose as if swept aloft on a gust of wind. Charley turned so that we banked back over the cottage. I looked down and saw Ora wave at us from her wheelchair at the end of the dock. From this height she seemed so small and frail. And just like that, I felt a premonition that something very bad was about to happen.

  The woods stretched out beneath us like a nubby green bedspread thrown over the hills. The glare of the sun, blazing white in the eastern sky, made it impossible to see far in that direction, but in the west I could clearly see the heavily forested mountains that marked the boundary with Canada, forty-some miles away.

  Charley was uncharacteristically quiet. Every now and again he zigzagged the plane to pass over a clear-cut or to parallel a logging road for some distance. A couple of times he canted the plane completely onto its side to have a better look at something on the ground. I never saw anything but trees.

  I tried to start a conversation over the intercom. “You’re awfully quiet.”

  “Did you tell Brenda you’d talk to Truman?” he asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “I don’t like this. It doesn’t feel right.”

  Between two mountains up ahead a body of brownish-blue water reflected the clouds. We came in directly over the forest gate that blocked the driveway leading from Wendigo’s logging road to Rum Pond. The stand of old-growth pines was still there. But for how much longer? I wondered. The next thing I knew we were over the water, making a sharp U-turn to approach the camp from the south. I looked for my father’s cabin on the eastern shore of the lake, but the pines hid it from view. We settled down with a splash on the water and began taxiing toward the compound of log buildings that was the sporting camp. I saw a motorboat moored at the dock and canoes drawn up on a beach, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.

  As we drew up to the dock, a door opened at the main lodge and Russ Pelletier stepped out into the sun. He wore blue jeans and a paint-spattered canvas workshirt that looked too hot for this weather. On his belt was a big knife in a sheath. He didn’t raise his hand or greet us in any way, but remained standing there, smoking a cigarette on the doorstep, while the plane came to a stop.

  “He doesn’t look too happy to see us, now does he?” said Charley.

  “Not really.”

  We climbed out of the plane and Charley tied a rope to a cleat to keep it from floating off. Side by side we walked up to the main building.

  “Morning!” said Charley.

  Pelletier’s mustache needed trimming, and his oil-black hair hung over his forehead in heavy
bangs. “Hello, Charley.”

  “Where are all your guests?”

  “Left this morning. Don’t have any more until Friday. You always said I should probably close this place in August, given how little business I get.” He gave a smirk. The full sunlight showed the nicotine stains on his teeth. “But I guess I won’t have to worry about that problem soon, will I?”

  “I guess not.”

  He looked at me over Charley’s shoulder. “You’re here about Brenda, right? She’s over at Jack’s cabin.”

  “You fired her then,” I said.

  “No, she quit. She did it in front of my guests last night. Classy as ever. She doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, though.”

  “We’ll talk with her,” said Charley pleasantly. “But first maybe you’ll invite us in for a cup of coffee.”

  Pelletier exhaled a cloud of smoke. Was it really possible that he and Truman had set my dad up? I remembered the story Brenda had told about him-how he’d tried to rape her. At this moment, he looked capable of all the bad things she’d claimed.

  “Sure,” he said finally. “Come on in.”

  There wasn’t a trace of welcome in his voice.

  We sat at one of the long tables in the dining room, across from him. Through the big plate-glass window that made up the southern wall of the room I could see the aluminum canoes on the beach and Charley’s plane moored at the dock.

  “So I guess you’re looking for a new cook,” I said.

  “Why? You want a job?” Pelletier crushed the butt of a cigarette in an ashtray. “Doreen said she’d help me out until I found someone.”

  His hatchet-faced ex-wife didn’t strike me as the charitable type. He must have promised her a mint in exchange for her help. “It sounds like you won’t miss Brenda,” I said.

  “And she won’t miss me. The only reason she stayed here the last couple years was Jack, the damned cradle-robber. What kind of fifty-something-year-old guy hooks up with a girl that young? It’s disgusting, is what it is.”

  “She was devoted to him?”

  “That’s not the word I’d use. They fought like cats and dogs, but she loved him. Women have always thrown themselves at the guy, for some reason. And I think he loved her, which was a rare thing for Jack. He’s always had some woman in his bed, but he never gave a shit for any of them.” Pelletier’s red-veined eyes met mine. “Except your mother.”