by Paul Doiron
I parked in the paved guest lot and turned off the engine. Visiting hours began at nine o’clock, so I had to wait inside the Bronco for a while, listening to the rain tap-tapping against the truck’s steel roof. I desperately needed to piss, but this was hardly the place to sneak into the bushes. I wondered how many video cameras were already watching my suspicious, lonely vehicle.
One of Jimmy’s buddies from Afghanistan was a guard at the prison. Many of the guys with the 488th worked in law enforcement or corrections; it was why they’d joined the police corps. What was his name? Donato. He was the angry guy I’d seen on the television news. I wondered what I would say to him if we ran into each other inside. Offer condolences for the loss of our mutual friend? Or defend my other friend against his unfair accusations?
At nine sharp, I made my way to the door, my shoulders hunched against the rain. To my dismay, the bathroom in the lobby had an OUT OF ORDER sign taped to the door. The guard behind the armored admissions desk was a stern-faced man with the elongated torso of a weasel. He wore reading glasses balanced at the tip of his pointed nose. His nameplate said TOLMAN.
“I’m here to see William Cronk.”
He looked me up and down, and I realized how sketchy I must appear to someone who judged a person’s moral character by the cleanliness of his clothes or the length of his hair. Tolman pushed a clipboard at me through a slot. There was a pen attached to it by a little chain. “You need to fill out a visitor application.”
“I already did. My name’s Michael Bowditch. I should be in your system.”
He grunted and swiveled his chair around to a computer terminal. “Spell your name, please.”
I did so, trying to ignore the swelling pressure in my bladder. What had made me drink an entire thermos of coffee?
After a minute, the guard stared at me over his reading glasses. “You’ll need to schedule an appointment.”
“I thought I could just walk in if my name was on the list.”
“That doesn’t apply to prisoners in the SMU.”
“Wait,” I said. “Billy’s in the Supermax?”
“He’s in the Special Management Unit.”
It was the same thing. “Since when?” I asked.
“I can’t disclose that information.”
“Why was he moved from Medium Custody?”
“I can’t disclose that information.”
I could only guess what my hot-tempered friend had done to earn a trip to solitary confinement. If his actions were deemed heinous enough by the Knox County district attorney, he might be facing a criminal charge that would result in a longer sentence. Aimee would be out for blood when she heard the news.
“I’d like to make an appointment to see him,” I said.
Tolman removed his glasses and set them on the desk. “You need to do that by phone.”
“But I’m right here.”
“We have rules here, and they apply to everyone.” He handed me a card with a phone number on it.
“Who’s going to answer this number when I call?”
He ran his tongue along his lower lip. “I will.”
“But you won’t just schedule the appointment for me now—in person?”
“We have rules,” he said again.
I removed the cell from the inside pocket of my rain jacket and used my thumb to tap in the number on the card. The phone on the desk beside Tolman rang loudly, and a light flashed on top of it. He let it ring for a long time.
Finally, he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“I’d like to make an appointment to visit an inmate in the SMU.” I stared straight into his eyes.
“Don’t be a wiseass,” he said, actually speaking into the receiver, as if I were miles away.
“I’m just following the rules.”
A woman with two loud young children came bustling in through the door behind me, followed by an embarrassed-looking older couple, both dressed in dark colors, probably there to see their misbegotten son. Visiting hours were fully under way at the prison.
Tolman continued to speak into the phone, so his voice came to me in stereo. “Prisoners assigned to the Special Management Unit are permitted a single one-hour visit per week.”
I hung up my cell and addressed him over the desk. “Has Billy Cronk received his visitor this week?”
“No.” He placed the receiver back down on the cradle.
“Then can I please schedule an appointment to see him?”
“Visitors are required to give twenty-four notice.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
* * *
I drove halfway down the long wooded drive that connected the prison with Route 97 and then hopped out to relieve myself behind a tree. The Department of Corrections probably had hidden cameras in every bush within a mile of the jail, but I didn’t care. Let them arrest me for public urination.
I was deeply worried for Billy. I’d seen the inside of the Supermax and knew something of its horrors.
An inmate in the Special Management Unit spent twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement, living in a room measuring six and a half feet by fourteen. For the remaining hour, he might be given exercise in a dog run outdoors (provided the weather was good, which it rarely was). The lights in his cell burned brightly twenty-four hours a day. All food in the unit was served cold. Guards slid the tray through a slot in a door that might have been contaminated by the blood, feces, and urine of other inmates. Prisoners had no access to computers, and all radios and televisions were prohibited. Instead of a toothbrush, the inmate was given a plastic nub to use on his fingertip. Billy would get to shower no more than three times per week.
There were men in the Maine State Prison who deserved death, in my opinion, but execution would have been a kindness compared to what inmates endured every day inside the Supermax. The facility existed not so much to protect society from dangerous individuals or even to punish them in the conventional sense of denying free men their liberty; instead, it had seemingly been designed to drive convicted criminals slowly insane. Billy Cronk had fought for his country in foreign lands with codes of justice Americans considered medieval. After he’d survived Iraq and Afghanistan, it enraged me to think that the first time he’d experienced torture was now, after he’d returned home.
I had felt anxious about seeing Billy before. Now I couldn’t imagine leaving the area without making sure my friend was OK.
11
I called my boss from the parking lot outside the Square Deal Diner and Motel.
“I’m not going to be available for a couple of days,” I told Jeff Jordan.
Technically speaking, Jeff wasn’t my employer. As a Registered Maine Guide, I was the sole proprietor of my own little business. Jeff hired out twenty or so local guides at a time, each of whom had a different skill set. Some were masterful entertainers who could spin stories to distract clients when the bass refused to bite. Others had a sixth sense for finding birds to shoot, even during “bad grouse” years, when the hens had been flooded off their nests. A few guides, like me, earned our two hundred dollars a day by taking on whatever was thrown at us—last-minute jobs, bored teenagers, or world-class assholes who wouldn’t be satisfied if they caught twenty salmon.
“I don’t have work for you anyway,” he said. “Two more parties canceled on me this morning. They saw the long-range forecast and backed out of their reservations. I swear, sometimes I think the Weather Channel is intent upon destroying my business.”
“What about the IRS?” I knew Jeff had no great love for the agency that had just audited him.
“They’re in cahoots with the Weather Channel.”
“I’ll let you know my availability when I’m back.”
“Stay dry.”
The parking lot of the Square Deal was as packed as ever. A celebrity chef on the Food Network had decided it exemplified all the best qualities of a classic New England diner, and now the place was routinely overrun with tourists. I no
ticed a specialty license plate from Maryland with the Ducks Unlimited logo.
I raised the hood of my raincoat over my ears and prepared myself to venture inside. When I’d been a game warden in the district, I had stopped at the Square Deal nearly every day. The owner, an apple-faced woman named Dot Libby, would set a molasses doughnut on a plate and pour a cup of coffee the second she saw my patrol truck pull up outside the window.
The last I’d heard, Dot was receiving chemotherapy for skin cancer. She could conceivably have passed away in the interim, and the news might have eluded me. It was sobering to realize that another person who had been a regular fixture in my life could have died without my knowing about it.
When I walked inside the door, it was as if I’d never left. The crowd at the Square Deal tended toward the gray-haired and the blue-collared: older couples who considered a meal at the diner to be an integral routine in their married life, plus a regular gang of lobstermen, clammers, builders, linemen, and road workers. I recognized several of the weathered faces at the counter, and there was Dot behind the register, ringing up a bill, looking thinner than I’d ever seen before, but not unhealthy.
“Well, as I live and breathe,” she said.
“Hi, Dot.”
She came around the register and gave me a big soft hug. She had round cheeks that were pimple-red with rosacea and wrinkles around her eyes from a lifetime of laughing. She gripped my shoulders and appraised me from arm’s length. “Look how hairy you are!”
“I need to get it cut.”
“What are you doing back in town?”
“Just passing through.” Under the circumstances, I decided not to mention my business with Billy at the Supermax. “I was hoping to get a room at the motel for the night. Do you have any vacancies?”
“We’ll always have a room for you, Mike.” She reached for the coffeepot and filled the ceramic mug in front of me. When she looked up again, there was an expression of concern in her eyes. “I was so sad to hear about your mom. Are you doing all right?”
The Square Deal had always been the hub of gossip around Sennebec, but I was surprised that word of my mother had reached Dot. I had been gone from the area for more than eighteen months. I figured Kathy must have told her.
“Thank you, but I’m fine,” I said in a tone that probably didn’t sound convincing.
She laid a hand on my forearm. “Just know that you are in my thoughts and prayers.”
“Thank you.”
“You know I’ve had cancer myself.”
“How are you doing?”
Dot shrugged. “The docs cut some things off my back—it looks like the craters on the moon—and now they’ve got me on all sorts of experimental medications. So far so good. ‘Any day aboveground is a good day,’ Earl used to say.”
There was a picture of her late husband on the wall. He had passed away a decade earlier, and had been underground a long time, but his weary hound-dog face remained a lugubrious presence at the restaurant.
I emptied two containers of cream into my coffee.
“It’s so nice to see you again, Mike,” Dot said. “We’ve been keeping tabs on you from afar.” She removed a molasses doughnut from the display case and set it on a small plate. “So what’s the story behind the beard? Are you working undercover?”
“Actually, I decided to leave the Warden Service. I’m working as a fishing guide up in Grand Lake Stream.
She appeared genuinely surprised. “I always thought you were in it for life.”
“I needed a change.”
She brought the nail of her little finger to her mouth and chewed on it. “Are you happy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then.”
A road worker at the other end of the counter signaled for her attention, and she hurried off to attend to him. I spun around on the stool, looking for familiar faces. There was a new waitress, a thin young woman with frizzy hair and a pinched expression. Her name tag identified her as Destiny. Otherwise, the diner looked exactly the same as it had the last time I’d visited. When I thought of the hours I had spent here as a rookie warden talking up the locals, trying to gain a working knowledge of the area—finding out where the four-wheeler trails were or who might be tending a secret marijuana plot in the woods—I felt another knife stab of nostalgia.
Eventually, Dot returned. “I just realized you must be here on account of Kathy.”
“Everybody’s been talking about the shooting, I suppose,” I said.
“That’s the truth,” said the new waitress, Destiny, passing by with dirty plates balanced on her forearms. “There was a Neanderthal in here yesterday who couldn’t stop yakking about how cops can shoot anyone they please and call it self-defense.”
“We have lots of vets who come into the diner, and people know Kathy, of course,” said Dot. “What a horrible thing! It sounds like that poor soldier was in a lot of pain from his injuries. It’s too bad he couldn’t have found comfort without resorting to such desperate measures. He is in a better place now at least. God rest his soul. But I can’t imagine what Kathy and that new warden must be feeling.”
I noticed that Dot hadn’t used Dani Tate’s name. “Does she come in here much? The new warden?”
“From time to time,” Dot said. “But she’s real quiet. Not that you were a chatterbox, but she just sits at a booth, alone. Won’t even sit at the counter unless she’s here with Kathy or another officer.”
The job attracted plenty of loners, individuals who preferred their own company to that of other people. And yet one of the most important lessons I’d learned was that you couldn’t be antisocial and succeed as a warden. Too much of your success depended on creating relationships with potential informants. A good police officer of any kind needs to be a diplomat. Danielle Tate might not be a natural people person—I certainly wasn’t—but sooner or later she’d have to learn how to fake it.
“I guess I should throw my stuff in my room,” I said.
“Let me call Destiny over to work the register, and I’ll get your key,” Dot said.
I reached for my wallet to pay for the coffee and doughnut, but Dot rested a hand on my forearm again. “Mornings here haven’t been the same since you left us,” she said.
The sincerity in her voice took me aback. I had gone through life with the conviction that I could disappear at any moment and never be missed. What else had I been wrong about?
* * *
Dot handed me a key attached to a lozenge-shaped piece of plastic with the number 6 on it. The motel was located across the parking lot from the diner and consisted of a string of small cabins painted white, orange, and green.
I kept a bug-out bag in the Bronco in case I ever decided to spend the night in the woods. The hours before dawn were the best for fishing, and I’d slept in my truck on many occasions to get an early start on a stream. I pulled the waxed canvas duffel from the backseat and threw it on the bed.
It was still early in the day, but I didn’t know what to do with myself. I could have taken a drive around my old district, but I’d indulged my nostalgia enough for one day. I sat down in a chair in the curtained darkness, smelling the residual cigarette smoke in the carpet and listening to the hum of the combination heating and air-conditioning unit in the wall above my head.
When Sarah and I had lived in Sennebec, we rarely went out, at least as a couple. Over time, she’d made friends of her own, other women her age, whom she’d meet for a glass of wine in Rockland. At first, she’d invited me along on her girls’ nights, but I was usually too exhausted, and not that interested in any case, and eventually she stopped asking. It always bothered Sarah that I had no social life—that I’d based my entire identity around being a Maine game warden.
“You’re more than just your job, Mike,” she’d said to me during one of our final arguments.
“I know that,” I’d replied.
“You need to get a life!”
I wondered if Maddie Lawson had actu
ally met Sarah for drinks in Portland after leaving Weatherby’s. If so, I could only imagine the surprise with which Sarah had received the news that I had belatedly followed her advice.
It had been a long time since I’d thought about Sarah. Even now I was having trouble seeing her clearly in my mind’s eye. The elements were all there—short blond hair, clear blue eyes, a killer smile—but they no longer came together to form a coherent memory. When I tried to imagine Sarah’s face, I kept seeing Stacey Stevens’s instead.
12
Somehow, despite having consumed a quart of coffee, I managed to fall asleep in the motel chair. It said something about the extent of my caffeine addiction that the stimulant had so little effect on me. The hum of the heater might have caused me to drift off, or maybe it was the steady rumble of tires on the wet pavement outside the window, but when I awoke, it was already late afternoon.
I got up and washed my face in the bathroom sink, and then I went back to the diner for the early bird special. I ordered the meat loaf and mashed potatoes. And another cup of coffee.
Dot had gone home, leaving the restaurant in the care of Destiny and an older woman, whom I also didn’t know. There were a few people I recognized in the booths and at the counter, and some of them even recognized me as their former warden. I tried making small talk with a plumber named Pulkinnen, who had repaired a frozen pipe for me once, but all he wanted to do was bemoan the sad state of affairs that had descended on midcoast Maine since I had departed for my posting Down East.
“The poachers are running wild around here, Mike.” He was a paunchy man with thinning sandy hair and a walrus mustache that was a darker shade of brown. He had slitted blue eyes and a broad face. He wore a pin shaped like the flag of Finland on the pocket of his blue coveralls. “Not a week goes by that I don’t hear shots in the woods after dark.”
“Have you tried talking with Warden Tate?”
He let out a whopper of a snort. “Oh, sure. She comes over when I call. She’s good about that. Writes everything down in a little notebook. But does she ever catch a poacher? No.”