by Paul Doiron
As I reached out to press the buzzer, the door sprang open. I found myself looking down at a remarkably small man. His features were fine-boned, and his eyes were overly large and heavily lashed. He had sandy blond hair parted in a heavy bang on one side. He stood no more than five feet two. He wore black snowmobile pants and boots and a T-shirt bearing the dragon logo of a karate school. My first thought was that he must be a boy, because he reminded me of those baby-faced kids in junior high school all the girls had crushes on. It took me a moment to realize that I was staring down at a man older than I was.
“What do you want?” His voice was adenoidal, as if he had ceased the aging process when he turned fourteen.
“Is Jamie here?”
“Who are you?”
Another realization came winging into my head. This man was Lucas’s father. The resemblance was uncanny.
“Mike Bowditch. Maine Warden Service.”
One small hand tightened into a fist. “Why do you want to see Jamie?”
“Mitch, who’s at the door?” It was Jamie’s smoke-strained voice.
“Some game warden.”
Looking over the man’s blond head, I saw her emerge from the kitchen. She had changed out of her zebra uniform and was wearing an apron over a chambray shirt and faded jeans. The overhead light brought out the golden strands in her hair. “Mike?”
“Hey, Jamie,” I said.
The boyish man flashed his eyes back and forth from her to me. “You know this guy?”
“He’s a friend.” She took a step to place her body between us. “Please come in, Mike.”
“Thanks,” I said.
The house smelled warmly of an apple pie baking in the oven.
“This is my ex-husband, Mitch Munro,” she said. “He dropped in unexpectedly.”
The emphasis she placed on the last word wasn’t lost on Munro. “Why shouldn’t I drop in?” he asked. “This is still my house.”
“This is my parents’ house. You only lived here once, a long time ago. We’re divorced, Mitch. Or have you forgotten?”
This statement seemed to be for my benefit, because she rolled her eyes at me when she was done. The look said, Can you believe this guy?
For his part, Munro looked dumbstruck. He started to open his mouth, then shut it fast when he caught me staring. “I haven’t forgotten,” he said under his breath.
“Are you joining us for dinner?” she asked me.
It was true that I had considered staying, but the appearance of her ex-husband seemed like an ill omen. “I’m afraid I can’t. I just wanted to drop off Lucas’s notebook.”
She frowned and took the dog-eared journal from my hand. “He’s been going crazy trying to find this thing. His notebook is like his security blanket. I told him I’d buy him another one, but he said this one has all sorts of important stuff in it.” She turned toward the living room, from which canned laughter and music from television advertisements was drifting at intervals. “Lucas! Get your butt out here and thank Warden Bowditch for finding your notebook!”
“I’m also hoping he has my binoculars,” I said.
“Oh, shoot,” she said. “I forgot all about them.”
“What binoculars?” Munro asked.
“Lucas took them from the backseat of Mike’s truck when he was giving us a ride home the other night.”
“My son isn’t a thief.”
“You don’t know the first thing about your son,” Jamie said.
The muscles twitched along Munro’s jawline. “I’m telling you, Lucas didn’t take his binoculars.”
I knew better than to get involved in a domestic dispute, but I didn’t like the lip this homunculus was giving Jamie. “I’m pretty sure he did,” I said.
“Prove it,” he said, puffing up his chest. His breath stank of cigarettes.
“Does he have a place in the house where he hides things?” I asked Jamie.
“I’ll go look under his bed.”
“I’ll do it,” said Munro.
Jamie rolled her eyes again. “Mitch,” she said.
“I’m his father, goddamn it!”
Before his ex-wife could stop him, the miniature man left the room.
“I’m really sorry about Mitch,” Jamie said, shaking her head in a way that suggested she’d apologized for him many times in the past. “Before I started dating Randall, he always took Lucas for granted, but as soon as there was another man in my life, he started acting like he was a loving father with all these legal rights.”
“Is that why Lucas has your last name?”
Instead of answering me she decided to change the subject. “This is the first time I’ve seen you out of uniform.”
“Disappointed?”
“Not at all.”
Neither of us knew where to take this conversation, so we both fell quiet again. I heard Munro stomping around upstairs.
“Were you able to see Prester?” I asked.
“Yes, but the cop there had to frisk me first. Can you believe that?”
“Was it Dunbar?”
“No, some bald guy with a red face.” She began to blink away tears. “Prester kept ranting about how they’re going to cut off his fingers and toes.”
Those were the least of his worries if the state pressed a murder charge against him. “The nurse said he’s going through alcohol and opiate withdrawal. He’ll be better once it’s out of his system.”
Her wet eyes glowed in the overhead light. “He keeps saying he wants to die. I’m afraid he’ll try to kill himself.”
“He’s safe in the hospital.”
Heavy footsteps came tumbling down the stairs, two sets. A moment later, Munro stepped into the room, tugging Lucas by one scrawny arm. Seeing father and son together, the resemblance was unmistakable: Both were undersize, delicate, and blond. But whereas Munro was as good-looking as a teen idol, Lucas looked like a poorly done caricature of his old man.
“Where’s my notebook?” he said.
“Forget about the notebook,” said his father. “Tell him what you just told me.”
“I didn’t steal no binoculars.”
“Come off it, Lucas,” said Jamie.
“I looked under his bed,” said her ex-husband. “All I found was a Playboy magazine and a lighter and some other crap.”
“What about the closet shelf? He has other places he hides things.”
“Who are you going to believe—this guy or your own son?”
At that moment, Tammi wheeled herself into the foyer from the television room. Something about her frailness reminded me of origami, as if she’d been folded like paper into that chair. “What’s going on?”
“It’s all right, Tammi,” Jamie said.
“Look, Mr. Munro, all I want is to get my binoculars back,” I said. “Then I’ll be on my way.”
“I know you’re lying, Lucas,” said his mother. “You know you can’t fool me.”
“Search anywhere!”
“That just means you have a new hiding place,” she said.
Lucas readjusted his glasses and bit his lip. The kid was as guilty as sin.
When Munro stepped close to Jamie, I realized they were nearly the same height. “Why are you taking this cop’s side? You’re his mother. Why don’t you start acting like it?”
She shoved him with both hands in the chest, hard enough that he took a stutter step backward. “Get away from me!”
Munro turned to me as if I were a referee. “Did you see what she just did?”
I had, and it had taken me by surprise, too. I kept forgetting that Jamie had a temper. “Everybody needs to calm down here.”
“Can I have my notebook?” Lucas asked.
Jamie ignored my advice. “You don’t care at all about your son,” she snarled at her ex-husband. “You were scared shitless of Randall. Now that he’s dead, you’ve decided you’re the man of the house again.”
“I am the man of the house.”
“You aren’t half the m
an Randall was. Literally.”
He snorted and shook his head. “After everything I did for you, that’s what you to have to say to me? You fucking slut.”
“Watch your language in front of the boy,” I said.
“What are you? The language police?”
He was so small, it was hard for me to feel threatened, but in my short career I’d learned not to dismiss threats of violence, even when they came from little men. Two of the most dangerous sucker punchers in my previous district were a father and son duo who could have weighed in as jockeys at the Kentucky Derby.
“If you don’t calm down, you and I are going to have a problem,” I said.
“We already have a problem.”
Part of me was wary and watchful. I knew how quickly a situation like this could veer out of control.
Jamie grabbed his biceps with both hands. “Stop it, Mitch. Please, just stop it.”
Munro peeled her hands away. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, revealing a muscular abdomen totally lacking in body fat. Across his chest was a large tattooed heart bearing the inscription FOREVER JAMIE. “You see this?” he asked her. “Do you even remember when I got it?”
“I remember,” Jamie said in a softer voice than the one she’d been using.
“I don’t deserve to be treated like this,” Munro said. “Not in front of my own son.”
On cue, we all looked at Lucas, who was standing there with an expression of dismay on his pale face. The boy had no idea what was going on here. He and I were in the same boat in that regard.
Jamie crouched down to get closer to eye level with her son. “Here’s your notebook, Lucas.”
“Thank you.”
“Tell the warden.”
“Thank you,” the boy mumbled.
She tousled his hair, then smoothed it back into shape. “Now are you going to tell us where you hid his binoculars?”
“I didn’t steal nothing,” the boy said.
“See?” said his father, as if that settled the matter once and for all.
22
Before their divorce, my mom and dad were constantly nipping at each other like two starving dogs. Looking back, I realize it was my mom who bit the hardest. Not that I could blame her. Living with a violent alcoholic, watching him stay out all night or disappear into the woods for an entire weekend, not knowing whether he had run off with another woman or was lying dead in some flooded roadside gully, watching him squander the dollars and cents she’d carefully saved on bottles of whiskey while she and I made two meals out of a single box of macaroni and cheese—was it any wonder she wanted to tear his hair and scratch his face? After ten years of this uncertain life, she had become hardened, desperate, even a bit cold-blooded, you might say; a grim woman faced with a choice: leave this dangerous man once and for all, or lose herself and her son forever.
That was why I was so shocked to learn that she’d maintained sporadic contact with my dad over the years that followed. She talked to him on the phone at night when my stepfather and I were asleep. Maybe they even met a few times. It is not inconceivable that they had sex.
In that light, the spectacle I had witnessed at the Sewall house was not surprising. I could believe that Jamie was both determined to break from her past and incapable of banishing her ex-husband from her affections. Jamie’s interest in me might very well be heartfelt, I realized, but mistakes aren’t so easily shaken off, especially when they take the form of a twelve-year-old boy.
Having been that child myself, I thought I understood the contradictions inside a mother’s heart. But one of the perils of being naïve is that you cannot identify that particular quality in your personality. You have an outsize sense of your own sophistication.
So when Jamie escorted me to the door and whispered, “I’ll call you,” I felt confident that she would continue to struggle for a while, feeling affection, pity, and disdain for Mitch, but that eventually her emotions would align and point the way forward. In the meantime, all I had to do was be patient. I considered myself to be a realist. Whatever would be, would be.
* * *
On the drive through the streets of Machias, heading to the motel, I passed the Spragues’ darkened Laundromat and remembered my icy conversation with Kendrick that morning.
When I got back to my motel room, I decided the time had come to check up on Doc Larrabee myself. I didn’t know the veterinarian well, but he struck me as a garrulous and inquisitive man. He liked people, and he liked stories. A few nights ago, he and I had raced into a blizzard to rescue a hypothermic drug dealer. Now a murder investigation was under way. By all rights, Doc should have been chewing my ear off. Something seemed amiss.
The phone rang six times before triggering the voice mail. It was the usual spiel about not being available and leaving a message at the tone. Doc included another number for clients with veterinary emergencies. I hung up when the recording kicked in.
I tried his home number again. On the fifth ring, he finally picked up.
“Hey, Doc,” I said. “I hadn’t heard from you since the night of the storm. I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Fine.”
“Have the state police come to see you?”
“I gave then a statement yesterday. That Detective Zanadakis said I’m not supposed to talk about what happened, even with you.” His voice sounded thick, gummy, as if he might have been drinking.
I considered whether this sufficiently explained his distant demeanor. “I ran into Kendrick this morning outside the Spragues’ Laundromat.”
“Where?” His voice went up a few decibels.
“The Laundromat in Machias. He’s a strange character. I don’t think he likes me, for some reason.”
Doc paused before he spoke. “Kendrick is his own man. He doesn’t care what people think of him. He says and does what he believes is right. Damn the consequences.”
That description matched the wild-eyed activist I’d read about in the New York Times. “I wanted to let you know that I saw Prester Sewall in the hospital. The charge nurse says they’re going to transfer him to Eastern Maine Medical so they can deal with his wounds.”
“Frostbite in January, amputate in July.”
“But it’s February.”
“It’s an old medical saying. It means they’ll amputate the gangrenous tissue in six months.”
“Thanks to you, it looks like he’s going to pull through.”
He seemed to chuckle. “Thanks to me.”
“Are you OK, Doc? You sound out of sorts.”
“I’m an old man, living by himself in a wreck of a farmhouse, a thousand miles from his grandkids. Why shouldn’t I be out of sorts?”
I decided to bring the conversation to an end. “Thanks again for dinner the other night,” I said. “Julia Child would have been proud.”
“Not hardly.”
After we’d hung up, I sat on the bed and wondered where Doc’s outburst of frustration had originated. I could tell that he was a lonely man who missed his dead wife. Maybe the stress of that night at the Sprague house had undermined his abilities to cope. He was a veterinarian, not a medical doctor, and being thrust into a position where the life of another human being rested in his half-drunk hands must have terrified him. Still, I was surprised he didn’t want to hear more about my own experience in the Heath or quiz me about the murder investigation. Doc didn’t seem like the sort of straight arrow who would obey a detective’s order to refrain from discussing a criminal investigation.
But maybe I was projecting Charley Stevens’s rebelliousness on the veterinarian, trying to make the two old men more similar than they actually were. I hadn’t spoken with the retired warden pilot in many weeks, and I missed him. Charley and I had become good friends following the manhunt for my father in the mountains around Flagstaff. He had taught me more about being a good warden—about being a good man—than anyone I knew. He’d listened to me recite my romantic troubles with Sarah or describe my latest dustup
with the warden colonel without passing judgment; instead, he would set my mind on a healthier course by asking, “Now what other way might you have handled that pree-dicament, do you think?”
It was ironic that we no longer saw each other, since we were living less than an hour apart. Charley and Ora were up around Grand Lake Stream and I was down along the coast. The move had kept them busy, and they’d had a troubled adult daughter, Stacey, living with them for a while. For my part, I had figured that the best way through my current problems was to be a man and tough them out.
To hell with that. I decided to brew myself a cup of coffee and give him a ring.
“Hello there!” said the old pilot.
“Hey, Charley. How’s that new house treating you?”
“Just grand. We may be short on a few creature comforts, but we’re long on scenery.”
“So when are you going to invite me up there to see it?”
“When my moose survey is over. The department has got me hopping like a flea across this country.”
I’d gotten a report that the state was conducting an aerial census of moose in District C, but no one had told me the contract had gone to Charley. Although he was officially retired as chief warden pilot, he still did odd jobs that required a fixed-wing aircraft for both IF&W and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He might be in his late sixties, but there was no better pilot in the state of Maine.
“I’d like to go up with you some time. I’m still getting to know this area, and it always helps to see things from the air.”
“How about tomorrow? The forecast calls for snow showers and northwesterly breezes, but I never let a few flurries hold me down.”
A woman murmured something in the background. The volume went dead, as if Charley had clapped one of his big hands over the receiver. I had to wait half a minute for him to return to the line.
“I had a bird singing in my ear,” he explained. “So I heard about your escapade in last week’s blizzard. Got the story from young Devoe, who said it was a drug deal that went off the road, so to speak.”
“I suppose you want me to tell you the whole story,” I said.
“You know I’m as curious as a tomcat.”