Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  Just then another dragonfly zipped by, brushing me with its wings; from high overhead a woodpecker set up a fast, chattery rat-a-tat. A fish jumped, landing with an extravagant splash down in the lake, and the sweet, sappy-sharp perfume of fresh lumber drifted up, waiting for me and Ellie to get to work on the deck.

  Off the end of the dock, a long ripple extended fast, heading for the other side of the lake. A small golden-brown head at the ripple’s tip belonged to a familiar creature:

  “Hey, Ellie! Cheezil’s here!” I called. It was our name for the weasel-like animal—thus his name, Cheezil the Weasel—who lived down by the dock somewhere; we hadn’t seen him all summer.

  Hurrying down the gravel path toward the dock, I watched him swim energetically away toward the far side of our small cove, feeling that the lithe, furry animal counteracted the dead bird’s influence at least a little bit. When he reached shore, I could just make out his slender form, scampering between the rocks and up toward a tiny log cabin, past a canoe that was overturned onto concrete blocks to keep snow from filling it up over the winter.

  Then he was gone, intent on some wild, weasel errand that only he knew; so maybe things weren’t so bad after all, I thought, and when I got back to the clearing Ellie was setting up the barbecue equipment.

  “Lunch in twenty minutes,” she said. Lowering the truck’s tailgate, she arranged hot dogs, buns, and the barbecue fork in a neat row on it, then lit the grill. “I’m starved, aren’t you?”

  And just like that, everything was all right again. We were here, we were fine, and I was going to get a lot done while also having a good time during my week of solitude, deep in the Maine woods.

  And mostly, I was going to get the deck done. Dead bird or no dead bird, five-thousand-word essay or no five-thousand-word essay …

  Victor’s ghost, I added firmly to myself, or no Victor’s ghost.

  Harold got a motel room, then set about pursuing his hiking plan right away; after the long bus ride, his legs needed a good stretching out anyway, and the four or five miles the guys in the diner had described sounded fine to him.

  So only a little over an hour after he’d arrived in Eastport, the same taxi driver who’d brought him there helped Harold unload his hiking gear from the trunk of the cab, then left him standing at the dead end of a paved road.

  Ahead, a dirt track curved into the woods; the guys in the diner had said it led to a lake, and past that to an old dam and a granite quarry. Harold could hike in the two miles to the lake, they’d said, glancing without comment at his footgear—black socks and walking sandals that he’d bought especially for this trip—take a swim if he wanted, then continue on to the quarry and past it to another paved road leading back to the highway. If he started soon and kept moving right along, they’d told him, he could be in Eastport again by dark, and the cabbie had agreed.

  As for the return trip, just stick your thumb out when you get back to the main road, the cabbie had advised. Someone’ll be along. Hitchhike, the driver meant, causing Harold to realize again how different everything was here. In the city, sticking his thumb out might’ve gotten him a ride, but it could also have (a) gotten him murdered, or (b) made someone else think they were in danger of being murdered, if they picked him up.

  A chipmunk scampered across the road, pausing to rear up on its back legs to scold Harold. A bird sang; he didn’t know what kind, only that its song was about the prettiest sound he’d ever heard. When it stopped, the silence was so complete that his ears rang, and the smell of this place … pine sap, warm dust slaked with the recent rain, and some kind of pungently aromatic herbal fragrance. It gave him a burst of energy, just inhaling it.

  He stepped onto the dirt road with his pack straps weighing pleasantly on his shoulders. A canteen of water, some sandwiches from the diner, and a chocolate brownie were in the pack. He’d bought a compass, too, and an emergency flare from the hardware store in Eastport.

  Also, he had a gun, a .22 pistol he’d borrowed from behind the counter of the video store, on his way out. The owner kept it in case of robbery, but there hadn’t been one in all the time Harold worked there. He would return the weapon before the owner even missed it, Harold felt confident; meanwhile, he kept it in his jacket pocket.

  A hundred yards in, the dirt road curved sharply again, so that when he turned to look back all he could see were the trees, some evergreen and others bearing reddish or silver-green leaves. He walked on, passing through a swamp where black tree skeletons jutted from black, algae-covered water.

  Startled by his footsteps, a huge frog jumped from the road into the water with a plop that made Harold jump, too. Silly. There’s nobody here. No one to be scared of, or mad at, to resent or be repulsed by.

  One thing about solitude, it didn’t make you feel as if you were being rejected. Like somehow, everyone else had grabbed a brass ring and you’d missed yours. Here, Harold felt … normal, as if he fit in, just another creature among many.

  Like a natural man, he thought, savoring the idea. Ahead, the road’s damp tan surface was a bright ribbon reflecting the sun. It was a lot warmer here than in Eastport, just the exertion of walking with the pack on making him sweat. He stopped to pull off his jacket and sweater, leaving on only his T-shirt.

  God, it was beautiful out here. If he’d brought along his cellphone, he could’ve taken pictures with it, but he hadn’t; besides, he had no one to call: no relatives, a few acquaintances but no real friends … a loner even as a child, with his parents now passed away he had even fewer people to miss him.

  None, actually, he admitted frankly to himself. When his bus had pulled out of Port Authority, he’d thought forlornly that if he never returned, no one would care. His boss would get a new guy to rent porn. Everything would go on as if he’d never existed. But now …

  Suddenly, Harold didn’t feel lonely at all. This world, full of birds and trees, grasses and insects, a blue sky overhead, sun shining and a little breeze blowing so it wasn’t too hot … it was enough. He stopped, feeling his shoulders straighten pleasantly and the tension in his neck vanish.

  More than enough. Maybe he wouldn’t even go back. It was just a thought, not a plan or even a real possibility yet. But hey, it was a free country.

  A free world, and he was a free—a naturally free—man. Hiking the pack up onto his shoulders again—happily, he realized with a tiny shock of wonder—he looked down the road ahead of him, suddenly seeing something about it that he hadn’t noticed before.

  There were marks in the damp tan dirt, not just tire tracks from whatever vehicles were sturdy enough to be driven in here—one set of those, he noted, looked quite recent—but a double line of smaller ones, too. Harold squinted at them, recalling a joke about three not-very-bright country boys out hunting, who’d fallen to arguing about what kind of tracks they were following.

  Bear tracks, said one. Moose tracks, said his brother. Deer tracks, insisted the third stubborn hunter. And while they were arguing over what kind of tracks they were, the train came along and hit them.

  Pursing his lips thoughtfully, Harold began walking again. The marks went on down the dusty road for a quarter mile or so until they veered off onto an even smaller, grass-covered trail that led into the woods.

  Puckerbrush, the taxi man had called the thick undergrowth between the trees. Don’t get lost in it, the driver had advised, and Harold had promised not to. Now he crouched, peering at the marks where they left the road.

  But then it hit him, how ridiculous he was being. Who did he think he was, anyway, Daniel Boone? The only tracking he’d ever tried doing was of customers who didn’t bring video rentals back on time, via the phone numbers (usually fake) and email addresses (likewise) they’d given at the time of their first transactions.

  Even Harold could identify these tracks, though. He followed the grassy trail with his eyes until it bent between an enormous tree stump, twenty feet tall at least, and a moss-covered boulder that was even bigger, lunging
up from the earth.

  Then he eyed the marks in the road again, seeing that they obscured small, round pockmarks and runnels that must have been left by last night’s storm; the cabdriver had talked about it. And these other prints he’d been following were on top of the storm traces; that must mean they were more recent.

  From this morning, then. Huh, Harold thought, a prickle of unease shifting the hairs on his neck. He wasn’t as alone out here as he’d thought. Because these prints leading off into the woods weren’t deer tracks, or moose tracks, or even train tracks.

  They were boot prints.

  Marianne … Striding down the trail just off the dirt road leading to the lake, escaped prison inmate Dewey Hooper scowled ferociously as the thought of her hit him yet again.

  She’d put a spell on him, that was the trouble. A hex that kept him thinking about her. Back in prison, he’d been crazy with it: her name, day and night, filling his head, drowning all other thought. Writing it down helped, like emptying a pitcher.

  But it always came back; that, and the memory of her face … He shook his head angrily, forced himself to think of something else. Like freedom, for instance: now that he wasn’t locked in there like some zoo animal, things would surely be better.

  As if to prove it, his right palm began itching. That was a good sign; everyone knew an itchy right hand meant you were going to get money. He was right-handed, too; that doubled the luck and was appropriate for him, besides.

  Right for spite, the old saying went, and he was full of that, wasn’t he? Always had been, but at the moment just being free felt so good, he wasn’t dwelling much on that, either.

  He spotted an acorn on the leaf-mold-covered earth under an oak tree and snatched it up. An acorn in your pocket brought long life, and if, as he fully expected, he found a place to sleep indoors tonight, it would keep lightning out. Now if he would only see two crows, or three butterflies …

  He’d always been superstitious. Even in prison, if anyone spilled salt in the lunchroom, Dewey got some and flung it over his left shoulder. It drove the guards nuts, because some of the guys were so strung out, they’d go off on you for looking cross-eyed at them, never mind taking what they imagined belonged to them, even salt.

  A grin twisted his lips as he continued along the trail, still thinking of them back there: the night-shift guards, their skin the color of dried paste and their guts hanging over their belts on account of all the junk food they gobbled, the sunlight and fresh air they never got. The dayshift officers, stringy as beef jerky and doing their time just as surely as the inmates were, ugly and dead-eyed.

  And the support staff; oh, they were the worst. His smile tightened to a grimace as he recalled the parade of mealymouthed social workers, pinch-faced nurses, and snot-nosed so-called teachers, all bent on improving Dewey whether he liked it or not.

  Scowling at the memory, he spied some apples dangling from an old tree. The land around here had been hardscrabble farms once, small homesteads each with a herd and a henhouse, hayfields and a garden, plus an orchard for pies and applejack. Here and there you’d find a row of those trees still standing, but mostly now it was only a singleton that survived, like this one here.

  He climbed the tree, snatched one fruit plus another for his pocket, and jumped down. The apple in his hand was wormy but what the hell; biting into it, he imagined turning a flamethrower full blast on the prison social workers, crisping them where they sat.

  When he first got there, he’d have done it if only he’d had the flames. But soon he’d had something better: a plan, which he’d begun working on constantly, in part to try keeping thoughts of Marianne out of his head. Meanwhile, he’d been careful to keep his good luck polished up, too, always choosing the chair that was facing a door, for example, stealing a bit of parsley for his pocket when the cooks weren’t looking—by then, he had a kitchen job—knocking wood every chance he got.

  And now his planning and polishing had finally paid off: he was back in his own familiar territory of downeast Maine, hundreds of miles from where the cops were looking for him.

  He was, he congratulated himself, so smart and lucky that he could hardly stand it. Free, he thought with a burst of delighted exhilaration. No one telling me what to do anymore, or how and when to do it. When you were behind bars, you could barely blow your nose without somebody trying to give you static about it.

  He could hardly believe the pleasure of just being out of there, as if he’d been inside a pressure cooker and someone had taken the lid off. No more orders, no more work duty, no more pretending to be a good little boy. Free …

  But he was also hungry, thirsty, and in need of a warm, dry place, free of insects, field mice, and any other pesky wildlife that might prevent him from getting a decent night’s sleep.

  Fortunately, though, he knew how to take care of all these needs. He’d grown up hunting and fishing here, and he knew every path, trail, and road in Washington County, not to mention every house, garage, and backyard clothesline in the area.

  These new jeans he wore, for instance: he’d had to roll the cuffs up and cinch the waist with a length of wild grapevine, but otherwise they weren’t bad. His boots, too, were stolen off a back step; no doubt they’d been left there by some poor guy whose shrewish wife nagged him about mud in the house.

  Women, Dewey thought, tossing the apple core away. Somehow they always managed to mess up a man’s life. But then the memory of how clever he’d been returned: his jacket and sweatshirt, too, were pinched from different places. That way no one would twig to the notion that someone had stolen a whole outfit.

  So now a bunch of pudgy, limp-spined husbands were going to come home from their stupid office jobs, Dewey imagined, and want to know where their stuff was, and when their wives didn’t have an answer for them maybe they’d grow a pair, find the nerve to smack the women upside the head a few times. It was the only way to handle them, Dewey knew, and the sooner a guy manned up to it, the better.

  And if he went too far, it was the woman’s own fault, Dewey thought as he stepped over a log, up onto a rock, and sideways off the path to avoid a muddy patch. Tracks on the dirt road were one thing; people walked or drove there a lot.

  Back here, though, he didn’t want anyone getting any ideas, like maybe that the famous prison escapee, Dewey Hooper, wasn’t really headed south out of Portland, hundreds of miles and a whole world away from the backwoods of downeast Maine.

  That instead, he’d deliberately stolen three cars and then crashed or abandoned them one after the other on purpose, like dropping a trail of breadcrumbs. A trail for the cops, who had fallen for it, at least from what Dewey had read in the newspaper he’d fished out of a trash barrel that morning.

  The grassy path narrowed between a pair of massive boulders that stuck up like the two sides of a doorway. Beyond them, the thicket of mostly brush and saplings he had been walking through darkened to mature woodland, a patch of it that two centuries of loggers had not yet quite gotten to.

  The forest canopy spread green and fragrant over his head, a few patches of blue poking through and the air cooling suddenly. Dewey felt his neck and shoulders relaxing for the first time in years. A couple of miles ahead, the lake’s few rustic shoreline cabins were mostly empty now that the summer season was over.

  But in them there would be firewood and drinking water—you couldn’t drink out of the lake unless you wanted a nasty gut bug called beaver fever—plus coffee and food, mostly canned stuff left by the summer people. At least one would have a rowboat or a canoe he could use, too, and he might even find some guns.

  By tonight, Dewey would be tucked up snugly in one of those cabins, with a fire going in the woodstove and beef stew from one of those cans warming in a kettle on it, coffee in a percolator, maybe even biscuits if they’d left biscuit mix. He’d be warm and toasty, with not a soul suspecting he was nearby.

  And even if anyone spotted, say, the smoke from the chimney or light from a window, he might s
till be okay. This time of year it was mostly only hunters who came out here: good old boys, many of whom wouldn’t tell on him, he felt certain.

  Because Dewey wasn’t the only guy who’d ever wanted to slap some mouthy broad halfway to kingdom come, that much he knew for a fact. And it wasn’t his fault, either, that instead of halfway, as it had always been before when he’d needed to teach Marianne a lesson, that last time it was all the way.

  He plucked the other apple from his pocket. Biting in, he let the sweet juice and pulp dribble down his lips.

  That last time, he’d actually killed her. And no good-luck charm in the world could do a thing about that.

  Not that he cared, he told himself firmly. Boohoo, he thought as he made his way through the forest toward the nearest of the lakeside cottages. Boohoo with a freakin’ cherry on it …

  But then he stopped. Directly ahead, the trail continued uphill between more boulders; he knew the way, having been here before many times, hunting and trapping.

  To his left, though, the land sloped down into a hollow with what remained of a long-dead tree sticking up out of it: a twisty gray trunk denuded of bark and aged to a silvery sheen with sharp daggers of broken-off branches stabbing out in all directions.

  Dewey stared at the tree, or rather, at what was under it. A circle of stones marked where someone had built a fire of sticks very near the tree trunk. From its lower branches hung pieces of clothing: shirt, pants, jacket. A pair of boots stood with toes nearly touching the charred campfire remnants.

  To Dewey, the scene described disaster: someone had gotten wet, fallen into the lake, maybe. Maybe it was late, and as cold out here as an October night in the Maine woods could be; getting back out again in wet clothes had looked iffy. Starting the fire, drying the clothes, and waiting until it was light had looked better to someone.

  But the tactic hadn’t worked, and now as he approached the dead fire, Dewey saw who that someone was.