Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  He wrote a letter to Mackenzie, spelling out the words in capital letters. He told Mackenzie how much spiking had been done and asked him to stop all clear-cutting in the Algonquin, listing the reasons of old growth and the preserve that the Algonquin was to become. When Gabriel had finished the letter, he put it in an envelope, which he took from the middle of a box of fifty, and stuck a 32-cent stamp with an American flag on it onto the envelope. Then he posted the letter in a mailbox on the main street, next to the tourist information hut where campers signed for their fire permits. No one was in the hut, since it was after five, and he made sure no cars passed him as he dropped the letter in. Gabriel knew that the letter was probably a useless gesture, and that the other, harsher measures that he was prepared to carry out would most likely have to be done. But he felt he had to try.

  Sometime that night, as Gabriel lay sleeping in his rusty-springed bed, the old nightmare came toward him, like wind across the water. He heard the thunder of the blazing oil spigots. The same gasps of dehydration rasped from his throat. His lips were so chapped that they felt like dried grass rustling together. He felt as if his teeth were coming loose. He wondered if he might be dying.

  Suddenly, Gabriel had the sensation of standing up out of his body. He tried to prevent it, clenching his muscles as if to rein back with bands of physical strength something that was not physical at all. The shadowy image of himself set out across the sand, while his body stayed behind like the husk of a beetle on some old windowsill. He followed the chalky path of recent footsteps over the blackened earth.

  I’m dead, he thought, as he reached a place where a man sat cross-legged by himself, while clouds of thick smoke billowed past. The man looked up. His face was painted half yellow and half black, the line drawn down the bridge of his nose. Shiny creosote black on the bottom, as if he had gouged tar from the soil and smeared it on his skin. The other side was an angry sulfur yellow, like the flames that rushed from the spigots until they vanished into smoke. At the man’s feet was a drawing, made with a finger in the sand, of a circle divided into quarters by a cross inside. In the top right quarter was a crooked line, like a lightning bolt.

  Before Gabriel could ask what this meant, he opened his eyes and found himself in the red house again. The Hudson’s Bay blanket was pulled up to his throat. He smelled smoke and the sleep slithered out of his body, leaving him cold and wide awake. He swung out of bed and walked out onto his porch, catching sight of the clock in his kitchen as he walked by. It was five in the morning.

  It was not the incense smell of burning pine or birch. Instead, this was the peppery-sweet stench of flaming oil. He knew then that this was what had led him to the dream. Smoke was rising from behind the gas station across the road. It muddied the sky like fountain-pen ink dropped into clear water. Gabriel ran over, feeling the jagged gravel against the pads of his bare feet. A breeze off the lake tousled the leaves of the sugar maple in his garden, green to white to green.

  Gabriel couldn’t see the owner in the station office. There was only the metal desk cluttered with pink receipts, the grubby candy-bar machine and calendars with beaming, long-toothed girls. Oliver Clemson, the owner, sat in the cold shadow of the back of his garage, wrestling with his German shepherd. The dog kept raising its paws and slapping at Clemson. Clemson had his fist in the dog’s mouth and the dog clamped down without force, making soft growling noises that Clemson growled back, as if they had their own growly language.

  The smoke was coming from a fifty-gallon oil drum. Ashes coughed into the air and scattered.

  Gabriel looked around at the oil-patched earth, rusted machine parts and worn-out tires in a stack against the garage wall. “What are you burning there?”

  Clemson and the dog stopped playing and looked at Gabriel. “Just some rags.”

  Turn away, said the voice of caution in Gabriel’s head. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t make enemies. Every rule of camouflage will be broken if you open your mouth. But Gabriel couldn’t help himself. “You’re messing up my clear blue sky,” he said.

  “I am?” Clemson asked. Even the dog looked puzzled.

  “You just shouldn’t be burning this stuff. It’s a fire hazard. You could set your whole yard burning.” Too late, said the voices. The damage is already done.

  Clemson pushed his dog gently aside. The animal went to sit by its doghouse, dragging the chain leash. The chain jingled over the concrete. Clemson filled a tin bucket with water and poured it into the drum. Gray ash mushroomed out and Clemson stood back from the cloud. The water hissed.

  Gabriel wished he could have explained to the stubbly-chinned gas-station owner why it was that he could not stand to see this funeral-pyre smoke, or breathe in this smell that he knew he would be coughing up for days.

  “I got to get rid of them somehow,” Clemson said, the bucket dangling in his hand, “and the garbage men won’t take them.”

  “The town should recycle them.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t.” Clemson had no wish to offend this half-dressed man. He tried never to offend anyone, and putting out the fire was no great inconvenience. He knew this guy worked in Benny Mott’s old job, so he could burn the stuff later, when the man was out on the tracks.

  Gabriel thanked him and went back to his house. “Big mistake,” he said quietly to himself, and wondered how many lives he had left.

  Each night Coltrane lay in the hospital, he was woken by something that lunged at him out of the darkness. He would snap awake and lie staring at the pattern of rain on the ceiling, projected through the orange glow of streetlamps. At first, he didn’t know what this thing could be, but in time he came to recognize it. The thing was Hazard, a memory of him at least, and the fraction of time that it took for Hazard to plunge the knife into Coltrane’s stomach. It was all seen in a strange and reddish light, as if through a smear of his own blood. Night after night, Hazard lunged at him and the sleep was wrenched from Coltrane’s mind as the blade flashed on a screen behind his eyes. In time, the nightmare would grow dull with repetition, but for now he had no choice but to endure it.

  After ten days, Coltrane returned from the hospital. His middle was wrapped in bandages, which made him walk with an unnaturally straight back. The expression on his face was one of nervous caution, as if he were treading on mirror-thin sheets of ice, which might at any second break and drag him under the ground. Coltrane had been in pain so long that he could no longer recall what it felt like not to be. The scar was purple and the marks of stitches showed like train tracks drawn by a child across his nipple and down toward his navel. He hoped he would never see another hospital again. It was the smell that stayed with him. A reek of dead things preserved. The stench kept reappearing in his nostrils, as if those people at the hospital had left something inside him and he was burping it up like a bad meal.

  Clara had waited until her husband reached home before telling him about No Ears and what had happened to the dogs. As he listened, Coltrane hung his head. There was no sound except the quiet wheezing of his breath. First thing next morning, he climbed into his truck and drove to town. He stopped beside Mackenzie’s house and got out and banged on the door.

  After a minute, Mackenzie leaned out the window above him. “What the hell’s the matter? It’s six-thirty in the morning! Is that you, Victor?”

  “No Ears is back!” he shouted.

  “Who is it, Jonah?” Alicia looked up bleary-eyed from her pillow.

  Mackenzie ducked inside. “It’s Victor Coltrane. I think he’s hysterical.” Mackenzie stuck his head back out the window. “Who’s back? What are you saying?”

  “No Ears. The bear that mauled Gil Kobick. It killed my dogs.”

  “No Ears?” Mackenzie recalled the squads of men who had gone into the woods to hunt the bear. “But that was years ago.”

  “Ask him in,” Alicia called behind him. “Tell him he must come in and sit down.”

  “He’s back,” said Coltrane again.

&n
bsp; “Why don’t you come inside, Victor?” Mackenzie glanced at the old paint on his windowsill. He reminded himself to get it repainted. “Because it’s your damn fault is why!”

  “What the hell do you mean, it’s my fault?” He stopped thinking about the windowsill.

  “You can’t cut down the Algonquin! That’s where No Ears lives. You’ve gone and set him loose again.” Coltrane clenched his hands against his stomach. It hurt to talk. He thought his stitches might tear out.

  “It’s not a ghost we’re talking about, Victor. It’s some ratty-furred old bear.”

  “I’m telling you, Jonah. You woke up that beast and now we’re all going to pay for it.”

  Alicia appeared beside Mackenzie. “Will you come in for some breakfast, Victor?”

  “No!” he shouted. Then he breathed out and seemed to have no energy left. “No, thank you.” He climbed into his beaten-up truck. Mackenzie appeared at the door in his bathrobe and called to him, but Coltrane did not respond. He drove back into the hills. There was no sense in trying to make Mackenzie understand. He felt a fool for even trying.

  Mackenzie watched the truck until it was out of sight.

  Alicia appeared beside him. “Do you think it was No Ears that killed his dogs?”

  He turned to Alicia. “It could have been any old bear.”

  “But any old bear doesn’t come down from the woods this time of year and kill dogs.”

  “Not usually, I’ll admit. I think Coltrane’s just gone crazy is all.” But then Mackenzie remembered seeing Harry Crowe at the police station the morning after Kobick’s death. Crowe sat in a plastic chair while Dodge typed out a report. Crowe had pulled out his revolver and would not let it go. The gun was empty but Crowe would not put it down. It was his last useless and stubborn defense against the bear. All that lay between him and the madness of a person who has seen too much blood in one life.

  Alicia was thinking to herself that the woods had always belonged to No Ears, and it did not matter whether the animal’s heart was still beating or whether all that remained was a toothless skull patched with the stains of fallen leaves. “I think if that bear is still alive, it must have lived in agony.”

  Good, Mackenzie thought. Then let it live. Let the pain come down on it like rain.

  Over the next few days, people stopped Coltrane in the street and in the stores and bought him beer he was not supposed to drink at the Loon’s Watch and treated him like a hero. But Coltrane didn’t feel like a hero. He had allowed a man to swat a loaded shotgun out of his hands. And he had hunted down a man who did not deserve to be hunted. He had kept silent about the tree spike, in the greatest act of cowardice of his life. I deserved to get that knife in my gut, he told himself. And now No Ears has come back. My dogs are gone. He took it as a warning from above. I ought to be dead instead of Hazard, he thought, and imagined setting the barrel of a rifle in his mouth, big toe of his right foot hooked against the trigger. The blued steel clunked against his teeth. The idea seemed so real that it shocked him, as if it were already done and all that remained was for him to go through the motions, whether he wanted to or not. Sweat beaded up on Coltrane’s face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  He found himself wanting things to be as they were before. Back to normal. The unchanging objects that once had meant nothing to him, he now used like talismans against what his life had become. The badger-bristle shaving brush hanging upside down on its dulled copper stand in his bathroom cabinet. A stuffed bear with a brave but crumpled face, which he had bought at a flea market because he felt sorry for it, sitting among old lampshades and chipped crockery. His old aluminum coffeepot. Coltrane ran his fingers over these objects the way a blind person would, releasing the magic of the talismans they had become. One day he would let them return to what they were before. Just the coffeepot. Just the crumple-faced bear. Just the shaving brush. But until then he felt each day as if he were waking up in someone else’s body. His own face seemed foreign to him now. Coltrane used to think he knew how much he could take. Until then, his life had run along the clear train-track lines of knowing where his limits stood. He never thought of what would happen if those limits were breached, like the tide coming over a breakwater. He assumed he would simply be dead.

  Maybe I am already dead, he thought. Everything had the muffled feeling of being in a dream. In his frustration, Coltrane took his penknife from the desk drawer, opened the blade and slid the tip deep under his thumbnail, not trusting anything but pain to tell him this was not real. His nerves shrieked in long burning branches up his arm and into his shoulder, anchoring him to the world.

  “I saw that,” Clara said, “and all you had to do was ask me and I could have told you. This is where you really are, sweetie. In the land of flesh and bone.”

  CHAPTER 10

  What the hell is that?” Barnegat sat behind the wheel of a Mackenzie Company truck as it bumped along the logging road. The truck was a two-ton Magirus, painted hunter green with a red stripe, the Mackenzie Company colors. It was dawn. The sun shined brassy through the mist.

  Coltrane sat beside him. He looked up at the sound of Barnegat’s voice. Coltrane had been studying a blueprint map of this section of the Algonquin, checking which wooded areas were to be cut over the next few days. He smoked a Lucky Strike. Every now and then, he held the cigarette out the window and let wind chip off ash that had gathered at the tip. “What the hell is what?” All he saw was mist and trees and the road.

  Barnegat pointed at something up ahead. He wore his black wool watch cap pulled down over his ears and heavy-rimmed glasses, with fingerprint-smudged lenses. He had kept to himself lately, unsure whether to approach Mackenzie for the $10,000 reward, or to stay silent and hope that this whole business blew over. “There’s writing on those trees.”

  Coltrane saw it now. “Stop the truck,” he said quickly.

  “What is it?” Barnegat’s arms were slung across the giant steering wheel.

  “I said stop the fucking truck!”

  The truck shifted down, stopped and then backed up. The loggers sitting in the rear had also noticed the writing. They had parked their pickups and cars at the edge of the Algonquin and were hitching a ride in, not wanting to risk getting stuck in mud or smashing the undersides of their machines when their wheels sank into ruts. The loggers sat side by side on benches bolted to the floor. They wore T-shirts, hard hats and jeans. Some had flannel shirts tied around their waists. Their greasy-handled Kubota saws were locked in a rack at the front, chain blades pointing at the sky. When the truck came to a halt, they jumped off. In the grainy morning light, they walked past the huge letters and into the forest, silently treading by the banded trees, wide-eyed at the hostility that seemed to meet them.

  “Back in the truck!” yelled Coltrane. Then again, when nobody moved, “Back in the goddamned truck!”

  They piled onto the Magirus.

  Coltrane climbed into the cab and slammed the door.

  “Where to?” Barnegat asked. He did not look at Coltrane, but stared straight ahead. Barnegat would not have traded places with Coltrane when he brought this news to Mackenzie, not even for the $10,000.

  “To the mill. Straight to the mill.”

  The truck turned around and drove out of the forest. It stopped at the main road to let the loggers get out and start up their own vehicles. Then they left for the mill in a convoy of over thirty cars and pickup trucks, kicking up dust like a cavalry charge.

  Mackenzie heard the mass of engines long before they arrived. He looked up from his fax machine and then walked to the window. He saw the convoy, and felt something splinter inside him. Engines quit one after the other. The men gathered on the lot, reaching for cigarettes in the pockets of their vests or under their hard hats or bummed off friends. Lighters clicked open and burned. Nervous eyes flicked up to where Mackenzie stood in the business office. Most of the loggers never went inside except to buy a soda from the machine or collect their paychecks. />
  Coltrane walked toward the business office, shoulders hunched like a man walking into the rain.

  Mackenzie started down the stairs. He stepped out into the lot as Coltrane was about to enter the building. The two men began to talk.

  Barnegat stood at the back of the crowd. The only movement around him was the rising smoke of cigarettes. Coltrane and Mackenzie were standing very close together. He couldn’t hear what they said. Coltrane began wiping his hands on his chest. Barnegat had seen him do this before, and knew it was a sign of nervousness. Mackenzie listened, his head lowering slowly until he was staring at the ground. Then Coltrane folded his arms and looked down at his boots. Barnegat felt as if he were the one who had set all this in motion, in that moment when the butt of his rifle connected with the back of Hazard’s head. Sooner or later, he told himself, you will pay for it. Worry rushed through him like the onset of a fever, freezing and burning and crawling all over his skin.

  That afternoon teams of loggers moved through the woods carrying metal detectors and cans of spray paint. They fanned the detectors across tree trunks in the area where trees had been marked. In the first three hours, they found twelve spikes. These they painted with two broad yellow bands. The rest they painted with a single blue band, to show the trees were safe for cutting.

  Mackenzie shifted logging operations away from the spiked area. Some loggers refused to cut in there, even if every tree was covered by metal detectors and sprayed. They did not trust the detectors, and most of them had seen what had happened to Pfeiffer, even though Mackenzie assured them that the chance of actually being injured was minimal. Rumors slithered through the lumberyard that it would be only a matter of time before new trees were spiked.