Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  “I should go home and get my stuff.”

  “No, you shouldn’t go home. You should get the hell out of here before they start making arrests and another member of the group gives up your name.”

  “But they wouldn’t do that.”

  “You never know what people will do.” It was hot in the truck. The windshield seemed to magnify the sun. The dusty air gave no relief. “You can’t stay here. You’ll have to go south or east or up to Canada.”

  “But how much good can I do on my own?”

  “There is one place where one person could get something done, but it’s on the other side of the country.” Then Swain told Gabriel about the Algonquin and how it was due to be cleared.

  As Gabriel listened, he felt pressure building in his head. It pushed at his eyes from behind. He had not told Swain about growing up in Abenaki Junction, or that his father had been fired by Mackenzie.

  “It’s a long shot,” Swain said.

  “I’ll do it,” Gabriel told him. He explained that he had grown up there.

  Swain got out of the truck. His chisel-toe boots stirred the dust. He had to move around. Nervous energy was sparking inside him. “When’s the last time you were there?”

  “It’s been years.”

  “Where are your parents now?”

  “Oh.” Gabriel shook his head. “My father died in a car crash a year after we left. He sailed over a bump on a dirt road and hit a telephone pole. It split the car in half. The police said there was no explanation for the accident.”

  “Maybe it was suicide.”

  “Maybe so,” said Gabriel. You never did soften your words, did you? he thought “Mackenzie made it so that my dad couldn’t find work with any of the other logging companies. I think that part of it broke him.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She runs a bed-and-breakfast in Stonington, Connecticut. She’s never been back to Abenaki Junction either. She won’t even say the name.”

  “In some ways, that’s good. They won’t be looking for you. But still, you’ll probably be caught,” Swain said. “If you believe in luck, you can bet you used up all you’ve got right here.”

  Gabriel didn’t answer.

  Swain pulled off his cowboy boot and shook out a pebble. “I’m driving east tomorrow. It would be too dangerous for you to come with me, but I could drop off some supplies for you, if I get that far, and if you tell me where to go.”

  Gabriel gave Swain the directions, using an AAA road chart and then drawing his own map for the last mile. He chose a safe place in the ruins of a cabin down by Pogansett Lake. He hoped the old house was still there.

  “Good enough.” Swain pulled on his boot again. His jeans were tattered at the cuffs.

  “Where are you going from there?”

  “Washington. I’ll turn myself in after I’ve talked to the press. I figure it’s where I can do the most good before they shut me away.”

  Gabriel thought about the Navajo Indians, who were imprisoned by the whites and died in a very short time. It wasn’t the prison that killed them. It was the idea of not being free, so alien to them that they could not survive it. Swain might be the same way, thought Gabriel, and suddenly he knew he would never see the man again.

  “I have to go now.” Swain walked back to his truck and climbed inside.

  “Why don’t you run?” asked Gabriel. “You don’t have to turn yourself in.”

  Swain lowered his head slowly until it was resting on the steering wheel. “The truth is I am tired. I’m all tired out. My luck is all gone. And the most good I can do now is hope the newspapers will print what I say in the courtroom. I’ll still go to jail, of course. I never tried to pretend I wasn’t a criminal. But you know”—he raised his head from the steering wheel—“I believe that history will absolve us. The same way it absolved the people who ran the Underground Railroad to free the slaves in the Civil War. Or the people who blew up Zyklon-B gas chambers in Germany in World War Two.” He had one last thing to say: “You’ll be on familiar ground in the Algonquin. You must be careful. No fight is more vicious than the one for your home ground. They’ll fight you with everything they’ve got. They’ll kill you if they think they can get away with it. And the question you have to ask yourself is whether you are prepared to kill them. It’s all about knowing how far you are prepared to go. And don’t expect people to understand why you would risk your life for a bunch of trees. If you have to explain to them why the wilderness is important, with all the information that’s out there, they’re already part of the problem. The time for reasoning is past. But you have to be careful not to lose your humanity in all of this. What use is it to fight for humanity if you lose your own in the process?” Swain started the engine. He reached into the glove compartment, took from it a small manila envelope and flipped it to Gabriel. “It’s forged ID. Driver’s license. Social security card. Everyone in the group has a set of these. Do you have any money?”

  Gabriel tapped his belt buckle. It was a money belt. He had $2,200 in rolled-up hundreds inside. He opened his mouth, but Swain spoke first.

  “You trying to think of a way to say good-bye?” He had to shout over the rumble of the engine.

  Gabriel nodded.

  “Well, I guess we just did.” Swain smiled. He nodded one last time, lips pressed tight together. Then he knocked the truck into gear and drove out of the parking lot.

  Gabriel watched the truck until it vanished into the hills. For a while he could hear the whine of its engine as it changed gears. Then that faded, too. That afternoon, Gabriel hitched a ride up into Canada. Then he took a series of buses across the Trans-Canada Highway.

  Now that Gabriel had arrived in the Algonquin, the more he thought about stopping the clear-cutting, the more of a long shot it seemed. He knew he was walking toward a conflict in which there could be no middle ground. To prepare for it, he had stored away a vast reservoir of strength, a cavern deep inside himself, packed to its stalagtite rafters with weapons for the war. He knew he would probably be caught and what would happen to him then, but it was as Swain had said—the time for reasoning was past. After all he had been through already, Gabriel did not know how much of his humanity he had left, but he was in too deep to care.

  CHAPTER 4

  When Mackenzie saw Marcus Dodge walking across the compound toward the company office, he knew something had gone terribly wrong.

  Dodge strode up the stairs and into Mackenzie’s office without knocking. He held something behind his back. People in the workroom outside Mackenzie’s office could see what Dodge was holding. They kept their eyes fixed at the level of his black gun belt, with its spare flat-headed bullets in loops along the small of his back, the handcuffs in their pouch and the slot for his nightstick, which he had left down in the car. Mackenzie saw mixtures of shock and fear and puzzlement on the faces of his employees. He did not have time to wonder what this new disaster could be. All he felt was the onset of dread.

  Dodge swung his arm around and held out the bridge nail. “I dug this out of the tree.”

  Oh, thank God, thought Mackenzie. Nothing’s gone wrong after all. In fact, it’s all going according to plan.

  Dodge set the spike down on the desk. It was the same color as a galvanized tin bucket. The head of the spike was as thick as a man’s thumb and had been dented with the half-moon shapes of hammer blows. Dodge pointed to a shiny gash in the nail. “This here’s where the chain saw struck it.”

  Mackenzie stared at the nail. He imagined the news spreading through Abenaki Junction like a drug through blood. No stopping it now, he thought. No, by God. Now this thing has a life of its own. It left him with a feeling of being swept downstream by a great river, and no way to pull himself out.

  “It’s a killing, Mr. Mackenzie. This morning it was just a death and now it’s a killing.” Dodge picked up the nail and set it down a little closer to Mackenzie. “You got any ideas who could have done it?”

  It sounded to Mac
kenzie like an accusation. Perhaps Coltrane had talked. It was just a question, he told himself, trying to stay calm. A question Dodge had to ask anyway. After a minute of quiet, with no other sound but the creaking of Dodge’s leather belt as the man shifted from one foot to the other, Mackenzie stood, leaning hard on his desk to hoist himself upright. “I have no idea who could have done this.” For the first time, he looked Dodge in the eye. “Ten thousand dollars for information that leads to an arrest.”

  “Ten thousand.” Dodge scratched the back of his neck, a look of disagreement on his face. “That could cause more trouble than we’ve got already.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m offering. I’ll post the reward. Spread the news around.” Mackenzie kept his eye fixed on Dodge, trying to detect any sign of suspicion. But he didn’t see Dodge. Instead, the ripped face of James Pfeiffer appeared behind Mackenzie’s eyes, blinding him to everything outside. The face was gray like dirty snow, and cold and bloated with death. Get away from me, Mackenzie thought. Get the hell back in your grave.

  Deep in the night, an old black bear came to the place where James Pfeiffer had died. It was following the scent of blood. The bear did not walk up the long dirt road from town, or across the wreckage of the clear-cut ground beyond the road. It arrived through the forest. The long pine branches slipped against its fur.

  The northern lights glimmered like abalone shell. There was no moon. All the stars were clear. When it reached the clearing, the bear crouched down. With its black bayonet claws, it dug into the earth and sawdust where Pfeiffer had fallen. It sniffed the bloodstained dirt, then swung its head away and snorted and breathed in clean air.

  After a minute, the bear slipped back into the woods. Meshed branches cut out the stars and the sky until there was nothing but blackness. The bear groped its way past trees, claws brushing through the combs of pine needles, feeling the dark the way the blind feel the absence of light.

  Gabriel crawled out of his tent. It was six-thirty in the morning. He had been dreaming of the Gulf again. He kept waiting for the dream to lose its sharpness and take on the blurred edges of every other repeating dream he had experienced. But the oil fields were like nothing he had ever seen before. He was thankful that the rising sun had snuffed out his sleep, dappling the shadows of birch leaves on his tent.

  In the mornings, he always felt hope. There was something about starting out that made him believe all he had set out to do was possible. The rain and the darkness made him cynical, but today there was none of that and, as he looked up through the trees, Gabriel could see only the vault of blue sky. Days like this, he felt the preciousness of his solitude.

  He dropped the tent and packed it. Then he sat on his rucksack and ate the blueberries he had saved from the day before. They were cold, and the cold took their sweetness away. He had almost a cupful of the birch sap in his tin mug. He made a wooden peg from some deadfall birch and stuck it into the hole he had cut the night before. The peg fit tightly and stopped the flow. He pulled on his boots, feeling pain in the curve of his spine as he hunched over.

  Gabriel poured the birch sap into a mess tin and set it on his hand-sized Trioxane stove. The sap was only a little thicker than water. He lit one of the Trioxane cubes and set it on the stove. Soon it was wrapped in a salty blue flame and the bitter smoke made Gabriel go and sit down a few paces away. After twenty minutes, when the Trioxane cube had burned out, Gabriel lifted the mess tin from the stove and waved his hand through the steam above the liquid in the mug. The sap had darkened and the level had dropped by two-thirds. He took a handful of blueberries and stirred them into the syrup. Then from his pocket he took another handful of pale, spaghettilike strands and stirred them in, too. The strands were cambium, the soft inner bark of a birch tree that he had found the day before. The tree had grown on rocky ground and the wind had recently tipped it over. The leaves on its branches were still green. From another pocket, he pulled the black crumbs of some rock tripe that he had scraped off a boulder at the top of the last mountain and stirred it all together in the mess tin. The rock tripe turned the stew into a kind of jelly and gave it a bitter taste, which the sap just barely covered. The sap was sweet and spicy, like maple syrup with a small amount of licorice thrown in.

  Until now, all Gabriel had eaten for three days was blueberries and raspberries. His daydreams of food had grown so intense that they seemed to appear in front of him. He would be walking along and see a plate of roast potatoes set out on the path, or a glass of milk perched on a branch above his head. His hunger had become more than an annoyance. He began to feel his strength fade after only an hour of walking. From the crests of mountains he had seen lakes where he could have fished and maybe pulled a few landlocked salmon or trout, but the lakes were not on his route. The amount of energy he would have spent getting to them was more than the journey was worth.

  Gabriel didn’t know how many days he had been walking. Five. Maybe six. The leather and canvas with which he surrounded himself had drunk up so much of his sweat that it was as if they had become a part of him. The trappings of his other life became clumsy ornaments of comfort. He had been worried about returning to this other world, afraid of having lost the instincts that he needed to survive there, but the longer he spent in the wilderness, the less he wanted to return to that other place. He felt as if he were metamorphosing. Soon the change would be complete.

  When Gabriel had finished his meal, he heaved on his pack. The arches of his feet were bars of pain. He stood still for a minute, waiting for some sign or thought to shove him into motion. But no sign came, and his thoughts were fluttering like moths inside his head from lack of food. He forced himself to start moving. Ahead on the path, a strangely luminous image of a Granny Smith apple was resting against the tree trunk. “Go away,” he said, and walked through the image as it disappeared.

  After three hours, he came to the base of a mountain. The slope was steep and he had to ease the pack straps off his shoulders one at a time as he walked, holding them away from the skin around his collarbone because they had rubbed his flesh raw. One more day of this and his shoulders would start to bleed. Already the toes of his socks were red from blisters that had burst. He took them off every night and threw them to the other side of the tent because he did not want to look at them.

  There would be blueberries on the top of the mountain, he told himself. There had been some on every other mountaintop, and the raspberries grew in the valleys. He knew where to look for them, was able to spot the exact lush green of raspberry leaves and the smaller, more brittle, brown-tinged blueberry bushes that grew in crevices in the rock.

  He looked around for water. He had an instinct for that, too, now. He could smell the dampness in the air whenever he came close to a spring. But there was nothing for him here. The air was thin and empty. The clouds were like rippled sand. Stratocumulus. He knew it might rain tonight. He was thinking how gloomy it would be to set up a tent alone and in the rain, when he heard a sound come from beyond the mountain. It was a wail, a huge mournful noise that echoed through the trees. At first it startled him. Then he knew what it was. The train. The only train to run through these woods. The Canadian Atlantic express. Then he knew that this was Seneca Mountain he had been climbing. Abenaki Junction lay only two miles beyond the other side.

  He used his last reserves of energy to climb the rest of the way, hand over hand up the steep slope, until he reached the bald, rocky outcrop of the summit. He scrambled past the clots of blueberries bubbling up out of each hollow in the stone until he could see across the valley of the Algonquin Wilderness. Far below was Pogansett Lake, and there was the train, trailing the sound of its thunder, crossing the bridge, the whistle blowing again as it slowed to pass through Abenaki Junction. He could see the white church tower and faded-shingle rooftops and the road that looped down from Canada. Gabriel had not risked taking that road because of the border guards there. The sound of the whistle faded. The murmur of the wind returned.

&n
bsp; Until now, his eye had been following the train, but now he saw the clear-cut everywhere, patching the wilderness like a checkerboard. Here and there, one pine tree stood alone in the middle of the emptied ground, left by the loggers to seed the area with pine cones. The dirt tracks of new logging roads unzipped the forest. Gabriel’s thoughts began to jumble as the endless destruction piled up in his head. He thought of the animals who would no longer be able to move through the forest because they could not cross open ground. He thought of birds and animals and plants that depended on the types of trees that would not be resown by the loggers. He thought of the soil, which would dry up and be washed into the streams, killing the fish and the eggs they laid. The infinitely complicated balance of life that man had not yet understood, or had chosen to ignore. He thought about what Swain had said, how some people would not comprehend why he might put himself at risk to stop this damage. He didn’t own the land. No invading army had come to take control. They would see it simply as business. Jobs. The making of money. Even his old self might have questioned why he would fight for an ideal that he did not fully understand. But the way Gabriel thought now, that was the best reason of all.

  As he stared at the ruined landscape, a familiar anger spread like wings inside him, but this time it was worse. He started running down the mountain.

  “It’s blood money, Jonah.” Alicia Mackenzie sat on the couch in the living room. She picked at the fuzz balls on her sweater. She glanced at her husband and thought, Does this town have to become a slaughterhouse before you realize what you have just done? But she kept silent. There were ways to argue with him, and this was not one of them. As soon as he felt threatened, he would go down into the bunkers of his stubbornness and refuse to be budged. It was some vicious instinct left over from the time of his ancestors, when the solution to all threats was violence.

  “What?” Mackenzie held a newspaper in front of his face. It was the latest copy of the Forest Sentinel. He found he couldn’t concentrate on the headline about Pfeiffer’s death. I know what it says anyway, he thought. He refused to lower the paper, not wanting to catch Alicia’s eye and have her beauty muddle his thoughts. She was younger than Mackenzie by five years, but looked more like ten years younger. She wore thick glasses and people rarely noticed her eyes. Growing older had not worried her. She seemed more curious about it than afraid.