Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  “That’s unfortunate,” he said very quietly. Mackenzie felt old just then. Older than he was. He wished it hadn’t come to this. He left without waiting for a nod or any words of confirmation, leaning heavily on the ball of his ivory-topped cane. On his way out he smiled at Madeleine, as if to show that there were no hard feelings. The truth was that there were no feelings at all. He had barged through the stages of anger—from migraine tension in the back of his neck to threats that would not be carried out, to threats that would, to the seeing-red rage, to violence, and suddenly through all the heat of those angers to a place that was cold, where all emotion seemed lost.

  A minute after Mackenzie had left, Gabriel appeared at the door. “I came to thank you for not turning me in.”

  “I don’t know if what you’re doing is right.” Madeleine walked to the window and drew down the blinds. “I just don’t know anymore if it’s wrong. I used to think that if we could gather together enough concerned people …”

  “I used to think that,” he said. “I believed it, too. But after a while I realized that everyone’s concerned. Nobody wants the wilderness destroyed. Of course, if it’s their own dam they want built, or their own contract for a housing development, they don’t give a shit about the wilderness. But as a general rule, as long as it doesn’t cost them anything, they’re all for the wilderness. As for the rest of the world, the truth is so bad, they can’t even stand to hear about it. They throw a few bottles into a yellow garbage can every week and they think they’re saving the world. But concerned citizens aren’t going to save the wilderness. Radicals are. At least that’s what they’ll call us until they figure out we are right. So until then radicals are what we’ll stay.”

  She heard the urgency in his words. It was the voice of someone who might do anything. “Who’s ‘we’?” she asked.

  “Well, I thought … I thought you might help me.”

  “I don’t want to break the law,” Madeleine said. “Any more than I already have. That seems like taking a step backward instead of forward.”

  “In terms of technology and development, saving the wilderness means taking a step backward. People aren’t used to doing that. They’re only used to going forward.”

  “But the only law I’ve ever broken was to park illegally outside Mackenzie’s mill!”

  “Whose law are you talking about?” Gabriel leaned over the desk. He caught the faint smell of her soap. Her perfume. He didn’t know what it was. It distracted him and he had to force his thoughts back on track. “Most great changes in the world have involved breaking laws that existed at the time. It’s not just laws. It’s reason. How we see things. How we see ourselves in the universe.”

  “This isn’t the universe,” she said. “It’s just a little logging town in northern Maine.”

  “It doesn’t matter where we are. What counts is that every leap forward in our civilization has come after we’ve been shaken out of the order that we’ve imposed on the world. Copernicus: that the earth isn’t the center of the universe. Darwin: that we are descended from apes. Didn’t their theories seem unthinkable at the time?”

  “Tell that to Mackenzie.” Madeleine shook her head at the hopelessness of it.

  “Tell that to every major religion on the face of the earth! Tell it to all the laissez-faire individualists. Tell it to the American Dream. People have been tortured and crucified for saying less than what I’ve just said.”

  Madeleine shook her head. “Maybe he’ll call me a witch and burn me at the stake.”

  “Don’t laugh. He might be planning something even worse. You have to be careful. We have to be careful.”

  “Mackenzie offered to leave a thousand acres of the Algonquin standing if I could get the spiking to stop. He’s made a real offer. Neither of us can just ignore it.”

  Gabriel sat in silence for a while. It was as if he saw before him the entire mechanism of his thoughts. A thousand acres. He looked across at Madeleine and voices inside begged him to reclaim his old life. Set the whole struggle aside. Sometimes it was too hard living out in the black-and-white world of the extremist, where identity was what a person did and nothing else mattered at all.

  She was waiting for his answer.

  “Not enough,” Gabriel said, and was struck by the finality of his own words. “If I stopped now, it would only be proof that the Forest Sentinel was involved.”

  “This is all sacred to you, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Of course it’s sacred.” For a moment he looked confused, as if he did not understand why she had asked the question. “I mean, I guess every cause is sacred.”

  “But it’s also personal, isn’t it? You grew up here. Your father was fired by Mackenzie.”

  “Every cause is personal. But what am I supposed to do? Nothing? Because I can find a personal reason for being involved in this struggle for the wilderness, does that mean I don’t have the right to play a role in its defense? We’re a part of the wild. When we defend the Algonquin, we’re defending a part of ourselves. That’s the most sacred cause there’s ever been. Don’t you see?” Gabriel was desperate for her to understand. Even if she wouldn’t join him, he wanted her at least to understand.

  “This is it,” Mackenzie said to himself as he stepped into the Range Rover. It was morning and the mist was heavy in the tall grass. Soon the sun would burn it off, and the heat of the day would rise in blurry sails from the baked roads. Mackenzie held up a letter he had just pulled from his mailbox and waggled it. There would be no more trouble from Madeleine. She had finally come to her senses and accepted his offer.

  While he drove, Mackenzie held the steering wheel in one hand and the letter in the other. He read it in a murmur that sounded like his stomach rumbling. It was not from Madeleine. It was the letter that Gabriel had written, stating that two thousand trees had been spiked in the Algonquin. The words reached him like shouts from the page.

  Mackenzie did not go straight to work. He motored up the logging road to the Algonquin, swinging his body into the turns, bony fingers in a bloodless grip upon the wheel. He passed a work crew who stopped their chain-sawing to watch him hurtle by. They ducked away from the shower of pebbles that his Range Rover kicked up. Mackenzie drove into an area of woods where the logging had not yet begun. Then he stopped the car and jumped out.

  The silence of the forest swept around him.

  Mackenzie made his way over the drainage ditch, clawing out handfuls of tall grass as he dragged his artificial leg down and up the embankment. He needed to be alone and it had been a long time since he’d walked among the trees. He had grown used to seeing the forest as a single thing, a mass, but now suddenly the details of it made him dizzy. The vast complexity of each branch, the texture of the bark and the way, when he bent down and dug his hands into the soft earth, he could see how generations of pine needles had become the black soil. He felt the coolness of the air beneath the sheltering trees. He stumped back to the car. He did not want to see anymore. I’m becoming my own enemy, he thought.

  Back inside the Range Rover, Mackenzie turned on the engine and then the air-conditioning and the radio. He looked at the letter again, staring so hard at the words that they seemed to scatter across the page. He felt so certain that it was Madeleine who had sent it, or who had caused it to be sent, that he decided he would not even bother handing it in to the police. In fact, he thought, considering what I am about to do, it’s best if Dodge doesn’t see this letter.

  Mackenzie began to feel very tired. He didn’t have the strength he used to have. Voices in his head asked if he shouldn’t just give in. You could stand to lose just once, the voices told him. For every person who says publicly they do not like what you’re doing to the Algonquin, there are fifty who think the same but do not speak. There’s some sense to what the letter says—what use was a clear-cut wilderness? What right do you have to cut so far beyond the point of the forest’s recovery? These forgiving, soft-voiced reasons bulged into his head like the
ballooning veins of an aneurysm.

  Mackenzie heaved them aside. He wiped away all thoughts of weakness. Nothing more would be left to chance. He picked up his car phone and put a call through to American Airlines. He booked himself on a plane to New York, leaving from Portland the next morning. As he spoke to the booking agent, the phone tucked under his chin, he tore Gabriel’s letter into so many pieces that when he let them go out the window, the shreds slipped from his hands like the petals of a crushed white flower.

  Half a mile up the road, Dodge and Coltrane stepped out from the canopy of trees. They had been patrolling the woods since well before sunrise. Their clothes were dusted white and the dust was in the corners of their eyes and the corners of their mouths and when they swallowed, they could taste it. Their canteens were empty. Pine needles had gone down their collars and were scratchy between their bare necks and their shirts. Everywhere they went in the Algonquin, through each dark stand of pine, they felt as if they were being watched.

  Mackenzie’s Range Rover came rumbling toward them, sending up dust so thick it seemed to erase everything it passed. The Range Rover drew alongside them. Mackenzie powered down his window and stuck his head out. The dust cloud billowed past him and filtered into the trees. “Gentlemen!” he called. “How goes the war?”

  Dodge and Coltrane squinted at the man. The cheerfulness in Mackenzie’s voice was something they had not heard since before Pfeiffer’s death and not very often before that.

  “We found another bunch of spiked trees, sir.” Coltrane found it difficult to speak with all the dust clogged in his windpipe. He reached instinctively for his canteen, but then remembered it was empty. His fingers glanced off the metal.

  “Well.” Mackenzie grinned. “Can’t get them all.”

  “We’ll be continuing the patrol later this afternoon,” Dodge said, to fend off the charge of inefficiency he felt sure was coming.

  “Right.” Mackenzie nodded. He barely seemed interested. “Truly, gentlemen”—he scanned them both with his pale-blue eyes—“you don’t have a chance of finding these people, do you?”

  Coltrane stepped forward, boots shuffling in the dirt. “They’ll slip up sooner or later. Alls we got to do is catch one of them.”

  “How many of them do you think there are?”

  “We don’t know,” Dodge said. “Do you?”

  “No, and that’s my point. We know nothing about them. The only suspect you had was that guy who took over from Benny Mott.”

  “We kept an eye on him.” Dodge made his case. “He doesn’t go out at night. He doesn’t leave town. I talked to him and he didn’t seem nervous. I even searched the depot when he wasn’t there. There’s nothing suspicious.”

  “Has he been doing his job?”

  “According to the comptroller in St. Johns, he’s been doing as good as Mott.”

  “Mott.” Mackenzie curled his lips around the word as if it were an obscenity. It was nothing personal. At that moment, he just needed to insult someone. “Anyway,” Mackenzie said, “that’s a dead lead.”

  “We think it’s more likely to be someone local. Someone who knows the woods.” Coltrane needed to rest. It had been a long day. He wanted to sit down right where he was and let Dodge and Mackenzie carry on the conversation without him.

  “What about Lazarus? He hates everybody.” Mackenzie smiled at his own suggestion—the idea of Booker Lazarus running through the woods.

  Dodge breathed out sharply through his nose. He knew Mackenzie was just making a joke of it. “Lazarus doesn’t have the strength to hammer in even one of those nails.”

  Mackenzie nodded, grinning. “You want a ride back to your car?” Mackenzie made the offer because he felt he had to, and he let his voice show it.

  “No, sir.” Dodge shook his head.

  When the Range Rover had gone and its dust was settling, Coltrane turned to Dodge. “How come you didn’t take the ride? It’s a mile and a half to the patrol car.”

  “I don’t want to ride with him. Do you?”

  “I guess not.” The sun had gone behind a cloud. In the softer light, Coltrane let the muscles around his eyes relax. Sweat-fused dust crumbled from his crow’s-feet wrinkles.

  “I tell you, Victor, we’re fighting on the wrong damn side this time.” Dodge strode off down the road.

  Coltrane shuffled after him through the dust. He had never heard such anger in Dodge’s voice. He knew Dodge was right. He just didn’t know what to do about it.

  At two in the morning, Mackenzie lay restless on his bed. It was always at night that doubt would creep around him. He thought of what Alicia had said about Ungaro. Then he thought about his father, and wondered what the old man would have done.

  Abraham Mackenzie had been a compact little man, creaky-boned in winter, looking half-dehydrated and oiling himself each night like the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz with the heavy cream he drank before he went to bed. The man had lived by codes that made no sense to anyone but him, harsh rules with penalties for breaking them. Abraham never taught these rules. He just pointed out when they had been broken. Years after Abraham’s death, Mackenzie would hear one of these maxims and cringe.

  Of all the symbols of his father’s life, none had frightened Mackenzie more than the image of the blood eagle. Abraham invoked this image as a threat against himself, like someone drawing down a curse, whenever his business was failing. He said it came from the time of the Vikings. “They chose their leaders for many reasons,” Abraham told Mackenzie, “but the greatest reason was for their luck. And when the luck ran out, they turned the old leaders into blood eagles.” That was all he would say about it.

  Mackenzie imagined a mythic red bird, painting the clouds scarlet as it flew by. How a man could be turned into this, he had no idea. This bird soared through Mackenzie’s dreams, with the same cold eyes and hard, hooked nose as his father.

  Years after Abraham’s death, he had asked an old college friend who was teaching Norse history at the University of Minnesota to find out the meaning of the blood eagle. What the friend told him was far worse than Mackenzie had imagined. As a punishment for failure, the Vikings would carve two gashes into a man’s back. Then his lungs were pulled through the gashes, to flap like red wings as his last breaths carried him off to death.

  Mackenzie remembered the day his father handed over the company. It was one week before the old man died. He had walked into his father’s study with a briefcase, ready to take the company’s insurance documents away with him. It was Indian summer. The cold had come and the maple leaves had turned all shades of red and amber and marmalade and gold. Then the chill subsided for a day, the last gasp of warm air before hard winter set in. Abraham sat at his desk in the pale sunlight, which ran like water into the crystal decanters racked up on the mantelpiece. Small copper plates hung by chains around the necks of the bottles, listing the names of the drinks. The crystal contained the light, and compressed it and then threw it from the angled sides in rainbows. The square Seth Thomas clock standing alongside the decanters struck the half hour with delicate chimes, as if the crystal itself were ringing.

  Mackenzie had never seen his father so tired. He had the white-faced look of an old golden retriever. Now that his work was over, age had flooded through and overtaken him. The years of work had ground him down until he was all foggy like a piece of sea glass. “Wealth dies,” he said. “People die. But the only thing that never dies is the judgment on how a person has spent his life.” The man’s hair hung illuminated like some shabby halo around his skull. His hands rested on the blotter of the desk in front of him, fingers crooked with age. “So how do you judge me now?”

  Mackenzie had no answer. He had never thought to judge his father. Mackenzie had always assumed it was himself who was being judged.

  All night Mackenzie could not sleep. He lay there watching the lace curtains billow in the breeze that came down off the mountain, like the drifting veils of ghosts come to his window. He kept thinking
of the blood eagle. The verdict on each person dead.

  CHAPTER 11

  On a humid July afternoon in New York City, Mackenzie walked into the air-conditioned chill of the Yale Club, across the street from Grand Central Station. He was there to meet Sal Ungaro. He went up a wide staircase, past a rail of the fence that used to ring the old Yale campus, to the large sitting room filled with the sound of rustling newspapers. The huge, yellow-curtained windows did not let in much light. The massive building opposite cut out the sun.

  Mackenzie found himself a chair and sat down. He set his trench-coat in the chair beside him. It was a deep leather chair with brass rivets and a smell of tobacco smoke sunk into the hide. After a few minutes, a man at the other end of the room stopped reading the pink pages of a Wall Street Journal and walked over to Mackenzie, not smiling, trenchcoat slung over his arm.

  Mackenzie thought it was typical of Ungaro to have arrived early. It was all about having the edge. Mackenzie could not recall a meeting with Ungaro, not a conversation or a meal or a joke told or a glance by which Ungaro did not try to gain an edge. Salvatore Ungaro had been at Yale with Mackenzie. He was a thick-necked man with heavy hands. His face was round and made rounder by the fact that he was bald. His ears were small and set back against his head like those of an angry cat. He was perpetually tanned, which almost but not quite hid the dark smudges below his eyes. They gave him the look of a man who never slept. He wore spread-collar Turnbull & Asser shirts and Hermès ties and Lobb shoes. His suits were double-breasted Gieves custom-mades, so perfectly fitted that most men who approached him immediately began to feel uncomfortable in their own clothes. It was the way Ungaro walked that let him down. He loped about as awkwardly as the artificial-legged Mackenzie. Ungaro was not muscular or tall. He had been forced at an early age to compensate for his lack of physical strength by being vicious.