by Paul Watkins
For Gabriel, this place had lived so long as holy ground inside his head that it was hard at first for him to believe that he had actually returned and was not passing through it in the fog of some daydream. Unlike most places remembered from childhood, which might appear absurdly small when revisited as an adult, this wilderness had lost none of its vastness. He knew that in its shadowy cloisters of trees were places where no person had ever been before, where people could be lost for days and bears skulked in the hollows or sunned themselves on the bare rocks of Seneca’s crest. He was as awed and humbled by it now as he had ever been. It was not a mass of living things. It seemed to have, instead, a single collective life of its own.
He combed his hair and changed into the clean clothes that he had wrapped in newspaper in his pack. He wore his father’s old Filson cruiser jacket, heavy wool in a black-and-gray plaid, and khaki trousers with a double thickness of cloth from the knee up. These had also belonged to his father. It used to take him a year to wear out the trousers and he never wore out the Filson. Gabriel stashed his pack and strapped on his money belt.
He walked the tracks into town, using a long stride to tread along the deep-cracked wooden spacers. Here and there beside the rails were piles of bolts for fastening the lengths of track together, left behind by the work crews. He crossed the narrow bridge, black paint chipped away to the brown antirust coat underneath. The builder’s plaque was still there—McClintock and Marshall 1931—not yet prized off for somebody’s collection.
A white-and-green-trimmed cabin stood just back from the tracks. Gabriel knew that it belonged to a family called Booth. His father had been friends with the Booths. Mr. Booth always flew an American flag on the flagpole whenever he was home. No flag was there today.
Gabriel walked past the ruins of the cabin where he had told Swain to cache the materials. For now, he did not check the cache, in case the place had already been discovered and was being watched.
Gabriel passed the first few houses. Mutt dogs on rope leashes barked at him and wagged their curled-over tails. Behind the garages, Gabriel saw snowmobiles set up on cinder blocks for the summer and huge piles of wood sheltered from rain under blue tarpaulins. Most of the houses needed a new coat of paint. The winters had bleached their colors away.
The Four Seasons diner was a short distance from the place where the VIA tracks ran through town. By the time Gabriel reached it, he was carrying his jacket because of the heat of the day. The food at the Four Seasons had never been his favorite, but Gabriel had been thinking about it for so long now that he kept having to swallow the saliva that welled up in his mouth as he walked toward the brown-and-yellow building with its potholed parking lot just now emptying of lunch-hour customers. Dusty-booted workers clomped down the steps of the diner, fitting on their baseball caps. They climbed into their trucks, some of them with suspensions that jacked the chassis far off the ground. The men wore beat-up jeans, wallet marks faded into the back pockets. Some had clip-on suspenders to hold up their trousers. They wore T-shirts or flannel. All of them had caps, greasy-brimmed and perched high on their heads. Their faces were deep-creased from hard work and living outside. These men reminded Gabriel of old pictures of his father, black-and-white shots of a man leaning on his chain saw and standing next to a pile of fresh-cut logs. In later pictures, after Jonah Mackenzie had fired him and the family had moved to New Jersey, Gabriel’s father’s face had changed. His father never fitted into the suit that the pharmaceutical company made him wear to work. Gabriel had once walked into his parents’ bedroom and seen his father dressed in his old logging gear, standing in front of the mirror. His father was embarrassed, and quickly pulled off the jacket. One of the buttons came loose and he scrambled to pick it up as the button rolled toward Gabriel’s feet. That was the last time he ever saw his father in those clothes.
When Gabriel walked through the door, only a family of Quebecois tourists remained in the Four Seasons. The man and woman leaned across the table toward each other, whispering in French. Their two children, both girls, were playing ticktacktoe with a purple crayon on a paper place mat. They all wore the clothes of city people, fashionably fragile against the coarse cloth of the Abenaki Junctioners. Gabriel sat with his back to the wood-veneer paneling. An electric clock hummed on the wall above him. Arranged around the clock were gold-painted flowers and a plastic cherub with a featureless face.
At first, Gabriel was worried that someone would recognize him. He tried not to catch anyone’s eye. After a few minutes, he settled into his chair and reassured himself by counting off the years that he’d been gone. He had changed too much since then for his face to be familiar, but he still felt a part of this town. Time had no bearing on how strongly bound to it he was. He ordered a salad and a bowl of soup and a ham-and-Swiss omelet and some french fries. It was a lot of food, but the waitress didn’t blink at it. All she said was, “It might take a minute.” She wore white nurse’s shoes and an apron over a pink dress. She poured him a cup of coffee and dropped two tubs of half-and-half on the table.
Gabriel had picked up a free copy of the Forest Sentinel from a stack at the door. He saw it was a local publication, but he had never heard of it before. The headlines announced the closing of Mackenzie’s purchase of the logging rights to the Algonquin. There was no shock, only the dullness of confirmation. There was also a story of a logger who had been killed in an accident that may have been caused by a nail being driven into a tree. Gabriel set the paper down. Without thinking, he began smoothing his hand across the print, as if to rub the words away. His palm came away sooty with newsprint. Somebody’s started already, and didn’t mark the trees that had been spiked. That might have ruined everything. He realized then that he was shaking, maybe to have come this far for nothing. But until he found out for sure, he knew he had to continue as he had planned, so he flipped to the back of the paper and looked through the Help Wanted section.
Short-order cook at the Four Seasons. Experience preferred.
Line Walker for the Railroad. Must be Good Physical Shape. Potential.
Subject for Experimental Weight-Loss Program. Work at Home! Good Pay!
One by one, Gabriel weighed the jobs in his head. With a french fry dunked in ketchup, he drew a line through the cook and the weight-loss program, wondering how much weight he had already lost these past few days in the woods. The cook’s job was no good. It would keep him tied down too much of the time. This left the line-walker job. He wasn’t even sure what that meant, but if it was the only job available, he knew he’d have to take it. And before anything else, he had to find a place to live.
His coffee shuddered as a logging truck approached. Then the whole restaurant shook when the huge machine rolled past. The minor earthquake reminded Gabriel of the times when his parents had brought him to this diner. He recalled the way his father greeted everyone and then walked from table to table having private, muttered conversations. His mother talked with the waitresses, who stood with one hip cocked and heavy coffeepots gripped tightly in their hands. Gabriel had felt safe here. Everyone knew them in town. He had not known how fragile all this was until it ended. The truck drove on down the road, leaving behind a screen of khaki dust which painted the cars and the houses. He wished he could start up a conversation with one of these people. Just to talk after his days of quiet. But these conversations, which had seemed so simple before, had become dangerous now. It was his silence which would keep him company in the days and weeks ahead.
Gabriel couldn’t finish everything he had ordered. After days of hardly eating, the saltiness of the ham was almost too much for him. The flavors of the spices jumped like sparks in his mouth. And the news of James Pfeiffer had tied a knot in his stomach. He had the waitress wrap the rest of his french fries in foil and he took them with him. As he left the restaurant, he paused on the stairs that led down to the parking lot. He saw a woman walking on the other side of the street. She carried a camera and a leather satchel. When she saw Gabrie
l, she paused. Instinctively, Gabriel stared down at his boots. It was not the sidelong glance of someone finding him attractive. It was a look of suspicion. The woman walked on down the street, and after a few seconds Gabriel felt his heartbeat return to normal. He looked out past the houses at the Algonquin forest. It was a green ocean, with Seneca Mountain rising from it in a sawtooth ridge of pines. Then, on the breeze, Gabriel heard the whine of chain saws from deep inside the forest. There was no time for considering the odds. No time even to think. He would just have to begin, and not weigh the cost of it on some quivering scales in his imagination. The cost would show itself in time, and either he would stand it or he would not.
It was Madeleine who had seen Gabriel as he walked out of the diner. He had made her suspicious because he was dressed like a local, and she didn’t recognize him. But then Madeleine convinced herself that he must be some young truck driver passing through. She told herself not to be so mistrusting of people, but it was in her nature and she knew she couldn’t change it.
Gabriel stood looking down Main Street. Bright, powdery light sparkled off grit in the road. It seemed like the end of the world. He walked for a few minutes, until he was standing in front of the house where he had spent the first sixteen years of his life. The sun was hidden behind its chimney and threw bolts of gold across the shingle roof and into the sky. A FOR RENT sign hung on the door. The house was still painted red, although its color was faded now and in places the white undercoat showed through. The porch sagged like every other porch in town. The house seemed to have exhaled and forgotten to breathe in. He was sad that the house had fallen so badly into disrepair. He thought of how hard his parents had worked to keep it up. The flowerbeds his mother had planted in the garden were gone now, and it had obviously been years since anyone replaced the damaged cedar shingles on the roof, the way his father had done every spring, the new wood dappling the roof until it faded silvery like the rest. The garden had become a cemetery of old lawnmowers and car fenders, bedsprings and busted chairs, and car engines gouged from their chassis and a truck filled so full with old magazines that anyone who opened its door would be buried under a yellow avalanche of National Geographies.
A man walked out onto the porch. He stood in the shadows, as if frightened of the light. He wore brown trousers with clip-on suspenders over a thin white T-shirt. He had hemmed the trousers himself. Pink thread inched across the brown polyester. “You come about the room?” He let the last word trail in a Down East drawl.
“The room,” Gabriel echoed. “Yes.” It was not the same man who had bought the house from his parents. Gabriel wondered how many times it had been sold since then.
The man stepped into the light, squinting through round-framed glasses, his mouth crooked with the effort. His neck was deep-trenched with age and reddened from the sun. It had the tough, grooved dullness of elephant hide. Gabriel recognized him now. Booker Lazarus. He was famous in Abenaki Junction. Lazarus used to live in a cabin on the outskirts of town, collecting junk from the dump and selling it to tourists as antiques. The wooden fence in front of the cabin had been a barricade of hubcaps, chrome-plated bull’s-eyes winking at people who drove past. Now, scanning the junk heap, it seemed to Gabriel that Lazarus had scaled down his operations.
Lazarus clumped down the steps and shuffled toward Gabriel through the dust. “I don’t recognize you, boy.” He pulled at his earlobe and edged closer, as if he might recognize Gabriel through smell if not by sight.
“No, sir.” Gabriel felt relieved. If Lazarus, the nosiest man in town, didn’t recognize him, then perhaps nobody would. Gabriel searched each pale trench of Lazarus’s leathery neck where the sun had not reached, the moon-surface of his nose and his pendulous earlobes. The old man’s hazelnut eyes were almost lost in the pouchy skin of his face.
“It’s the bottom floor that’s for rent. I got antiques stored upstairs.” Lazarus waved his hand at the dusty windows on the second floor. “Things too valuable to be leaving them outside. I used to have more. Lots more. And you know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened to my antiques. They took them away. Council did. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth. Council, with that old bastard Jonah Mackenzie leading the pack. Said it was a health hazard. Said it was ugly and ruining the tourist trade. What tourist trade? I don’t know. I tell you, those fuckers.” He smacked his lips on the curse. They were honey in the old man’s mouth. “I was going to retire on that money. Go to Florida and buy a condo in Delray Beach. But now look. I’m up here where I always been and I’m not leaving here before I die.” The way Lazarus saw it, they had condemned him to death. Condemned him to the ache in his joints when the winter clamped down on the north like the hatch on a submarine. To eucalyptus-smelling liniments and everything gone fuzzy in the distance as his eyes gave up on him like binoculars going slowly out of focus. To the fact that he had to work as the bartender at the Loon’s Watch bar when he would have preferred to be one of its customers. It had gotten so that Lazarus blamed the people of Abenaki Junction for the very fact of his old age, as if the pile of blunt-bladed lawnmowers and beat-up refrigerators and all things broken and rusted would have guaranteed him eternal youth.
“Fuck!” he would say as he sat in the bathtub and watched the ripples of sound fan out from his ivory-haired chest.
“Fuck!” He shouted it in his sleep and woke himself up. The value of his treasures had exploded in his head and come to rest in the rafters of financial possibility.
“Fuck!” He wrapped his lips around the curse and spat it out like the brown juice of Red Man plug tobacco and found it pleasant. Lazarus wondered where his antiques were now. They wouldn’t tell him. They just showed up with Dumpsters and piled the stuff in, a job that took two days. He wanted to kill them, but all he did was learn to swear. He had written to the television program Focus America, hoping they might do an exposé. “But the bastards didn’t write back!” he told his friend Benny Mott. Told him so many times that Mott asked Lazarus please to shut his face about it.
“Bastards!” Lazarus was too old to make war on Abenaki Junction anywhere but in his head. He saved a special place of rage for Jonah Mackenzie, head of the council in the year they removed his antiques, and on whose shoulders Lazarus had heaped the blame.
Every year since then, Lazarus had watched the steely-skied approach of winter riding like a cavalry charge down from the north. He stuck holiday brochures of palm trees and beaches on his refrigerator door, and tortured himself with dreams of coconuts and sand the texture of flour between his toes, the way he’d heard it was on the beaches of Tulum in Mexico.
Lazarus told all this to Gabriel, keeping him trapped on the saddle-backed porch for over an hour. But he was grateful for the listener. He knocked thirty dollars off the rent, which put it down to $220 a month.
Gabriel paid the first two months in advance in crumpled hundred-dollar bills. After Lazarus had gone back to the small shack he owned at the other edge of town, Gabriel wandered through the house. He walked into the pool of sunlight bleeding through the kitchen window. He remembered the space, the precise feeling of enclosure within its walls. But the rest—the bare floors that he had known only under carpeting, the light fixtures now only bulbs like upside-down mushrooms growing from the ceiling, the dust, the dump-scavenged furniture—none of this sent any pulse of familiarity through his blood.
The staircase to the second story was blocked by a door that had been sealed with a heavy bronze padlock. Gabriel’s bedroom was where the old den had been. He sat on an old bed frame, springs tracking his movements with squeaks and groans, even when he breathed. The tinsel from some ancient Christmas party still hung in the corner of the room. It was no party that he could recall. Besides, he thought, my mother would have taken down all the tinsel. The Christmas parties he remembered were surrounded by the stabbing cold of winter in northern Maine. One Christmas Eve, he went to scatter salt on the sidewalk outside too soon after taking a shower. By the time he returned
to the house, his hair had frozen almost solid and felt brittle on his head like threads of glass. The stars were sharper in the winter night, and the northern lights, like the rosy wings of angels, billowed in the sky. Added to the rumble of the logging trucks was the high-pitched whine of snowmobiles, laying their wide, ribbed tracks through the snow.
Now dust filtered a khaki light through the old window blinds. The room was warm and musty, and for a moment seemed less real to Gabriel than these powerfully returning pictures of his past. For a long time after that, he sat very still in the old house, until the medicine-bottle blue of twilight sky pressed hard against the windows and the trees outside faded, becoming two-dimensional in the dark. Quietly he sang to himself, just to hear a human voice, while the ghost of his childhood ran laughing from room to empty room.
“What job?”
Benny Mott squinted at Gabriel. He pulled on his oil-splattered signal-orange raincoat and sat down in his Putt-Putt machine.
As Gabriel stood there, the Putt-Putt’s engine burbled quietly, like something blowing bubbles underwater. Mott was hump-shouldered like an ox. Age had crumpled his skin. His hands were so muscular and worn that the fingerprints had almost disappeared. He scowled without meaning to. He had never married, and years of living alone had left him without the desire ever to comb his hair or talk much or be polite when he did talk. Mott had been working so long on the railroad that he smelled like the railroad—of iron, rust and oil.
“The job in the paper.”