by Paul Watkins
Shelby thought how desperate Mackenzie had seemed, and how clumsily the man had tried to hide it. He wondered what kind of woman it was who could be running this paper and doing so much else on the side that she could send a man like Mackenzie out of control. Shelby had no doubt that the man was out of control, because that was when people like Mackenzie, who valued control above all other things, called for people like him. He knew the questions that Mackenzie had wanted to ask. Everyone thought the same thing when they met him. He was more surprised than anyone at how a bright Virginia boy like himself could end up in a job like this. At the University of Rhode Island, he had planned to study Ocean Sciences at the University’s Bay Campus after his undergraduate work. The only way he could afford his time in school was to sign up for five years of military service after graduation.
Now, sitting in his car in the quiet Abenaki Junction street, Shelby wondered if, should his former self come walking down the street, that man would even recognize the person he became on the night he parachuted onto an airfield in Panama as a member of a Special Forces unit. He remembered how, on landing, he had become separated from the rest of his squad and run for the first piece of cover he could find, diving into a drainage ditch and feeling his bare hands sink into jellylike mud at the bottom. His eyes were stinging from the oil that filmed the ditch water. He could taste it in his spit. It raked at his throat like steel wool.
A Panamanian truck with a searchlight mounted on the back drove around the airfield. It seemed to plow up the ground with its harshly glaring beam. The truck stopped a hundred yards down the runway and began to play its light back and forth across the ditch water.
Shelby remembered taking the rounded bottle-shaped charge of a 40mm rocket-propelled grenade from his assault pack. He fitted it into the grenade tube under the barrel of his M-16.
His eyes felt as if they were on fire. They had never been the same since. Even now, as the memory returned, Shelby took his hands off the steering wheel of the Civic, closed his eyes and touched his fingertips against his lids to stop the pain.
When the Panamanian truck was fifteen yards away, Shelby had a strange feeling of standing outside himself, as if from a hundred feet up in the air, looking down without concern for the men in the truck or for the spidery shape that crouched in the ditch. He wondered at the time if this meant he was about to die, and already his soul was leaving his body, knowing what his heart did not yet know.
He undid the safety on his rifle and stood, the crumpled rainbows of oil making him slip. The truck was huge, almost on top of him. Shelby fired from the hip, and the round seemed to fly out slowly, hissing and wobbling through the air. The RPG splashed through the truck’s windshield, and in the explosion that followed Shelby was thrown back by a wall of heat and concussion. Then he was under the ditch water. When he rose to the surface, the ditch was burning in patches of ignited oil. The truck was only the frame of a truck now. It roared with flames and sank down on the melting rubber of its tires. Ammunition exploded like a string of Chinese firecrackers.
Shelby felt his soul returning to his body. Suddenly he was whole again, and clinging to the earth. He lay there for a long time, watching the last yellow-orange flames burn out on the surface of the ditch water. He heard waves break and the clatter of seashells being dragged back down with the tide. When he raised his head from the ditch, he saw a pile of smoldering rags. One of the men who had been inside the truck. The body was whole, but shrunk into something almost baby size and leering like a gargoyle torn from the stonework of a church. The breath of its burning blew past him. He remembered the smell, and how for one disgusting moment it had reminded him of food.
The next thing he recalled clearly was standing in a chow line three days later, when all the fighting had finished, while army cooks slapped spoonfuls of scrambled egg and beans into the mess tin in his outstretched hand. In one of his pockets, he felt what he thought were dried apricots, which had been part of his rations when he landed at the airfield. But when he pulled them out into the light, he saw instead that they were human ears. He had no recollection of how they came to be there and felt none of the fury that would have driven him to take these gruesome souvenirs.
After coming back to the States, he received an early discharge from the service. He tried to make his way back into the ranks of old college friends, but it was as if a curtain had been drawn down between them. Too much had happened to him and, it seemed to Shelby, not enough to the friends he left behind. They helped him find jobs, but he didn’t want to work and he didn’t even want the kindness that went with their offerings. Time pushed past him. It was a simple fact, like the fact of dying, and he could not explain it to people who had planned out their lives around houses and cars and what vacations they would take. Shelby looked around and what he saw were people who were not dead but lifeless nonetheless. Wind just rustling the dried-out tongues in their mouths.
Then Shelby met Mr. Salvatore Ungaro. Or rather, Ungaro met Shelby. Tracked him down from God knows where, which, now that Shelby knew Ungaro well, did not surprise him at all. He had been working for Ungaro ever since. Some of the jobs were legal. Most weren’t.
Sitting silently now in this car in the blue-sky Maine afternoon, Shelby felt as if his senses had been chiseled away until the only ones remaining were those that kept him alive. Shelby didn’t know where the rest of him had gone. One day, perhaps, those lost fragments would belong to him again. Then he would go back to the world in which he used to live. But for now Shelby lived where he was comfortable—out in the dark, where things made sense to him.
At a quarter past five, a woman walked out of the Forest Sentinel office. Madeleine. Mackenzie had told him her name. She looked as if she had a lot on her mind. She was so far from the kind of person he had imagined would unhinge a man like Mackenzie that Shelby waited several minutes more, expecting someone else to emerge from the office. But no one did, and by now he had lost sight of the woman, so he could not follow her home.
There were instincts Shelby had come to trust since he began working for Ungaro. They told him when it was dangerous, who to trust and who not, and when he was on the right path. Now these instincts muttered to him. They told him that this woman was either very good at what she did, or she had nothing to do with Mackenzie’s troubles. Shelby knew this job would take longer than he’d expected.
A bird shrieked in the trees above him.
Gabriel dropped down to his knees. His eyes struggled to refocus. Nothing. He had been spiking pines out in the woods near Coltrane’s farm. Gabriel chose the areas at random, sometimes walking two or three miles into the woods and not following any trails so that he could lead people away from the idea that the railroad tracks were being used to deliver the spikes. Gabriel knew that these areas would be found eventually. It was not important that they be found all at once. In fact it was important that they weren’t. He wanted to give the impression of many people working at the same time. He began to use the helix nails that Swain had left him. They were shorter than the bridge spikes, but twisted in such a way that once the heads were clipped off they could never be removed. They were harder to work into the wood, and the heads of his hammers were becoming badly dented. Even though he wore gloves, his hands were patched with calluses that bulged off the level of his palms.
Light filtered down through the trees, touching the ground only in places where white birches reached up their slim and bony trunks. There was no more sound. After a few minutes, Gabriel’s breathing became regular again. He had come to rely on birdsong to warn him of anyone’s approach. A great stillness had entered his body since he’d started working on the tracks. He could ride the rails now almost without thinking, his body swaying in and out of the turns. On clear mornings, his eyes narrowed automatically as he passed the sun-reflecting ponds. Now he knew the many shades of green, from the pale reeds beneath the Narrow River bridge to the dullness of the new pine needles. The green of wild strawberry leaves and the gr
een of loganberry bushes. Green of mold on fallen trees and brassy green of the sky before it rained. And all these greens had facets of other greens in the different lights of day and shadow. He knew them all without thinking, as he moved through the wilderness without sound, relying as much on instincts that he didn’t understand as on those he did, beyond all sight and smell and hearing.
He drank deeply from his canteen. It was a canvas-covered one that Mott had left. Printed on it was the pine-tree emblem of the US Forestry Service. The water was cold but metallic-tasting.
Then something moved.
It was not far away, perhaps thirty yards, at the edge of his vision before the trees became a solid wall. A large bear. The animal raised its head and sniffed the breeze, nose bobbing up and down. Its coat was shiny. The bear knew something was not right. It looked around, but couldn’t see far through the trees. It kept sniffing the air. Then slowly it moved away in the direction of the farm.
Gabriel raised himself off the ground. He slapped the dust from his clothes. Then he sprayed the trees with red bands and was done for the day. He headed back toward the tracks and across the logging road. There was the sound of a logging truck in the distance. Just as he reached the sunlit part of the road, where the angle of the trees made no shadow, he saw the twin exhaust stacks of a truck jut like horns over a rise in the road. Then came the cab of the truck. The wind had played a trick on him. The truck was much closer than he thought. Gabriel had no time to think whether the driver of the truck had seen him. He sprinted across the road into the shadows.
The truck powered down a gear as it climbed the slope.
Gabriel hurdled the drainage ditch. Suddenly he slipped and felt a thump on the back of his skull as his head struck the ground. It blinded him for a second. Spoked wheels of sunlight glinted down through the trees.
The truck howled nearer, down another gear. Its chassis bounced on a pothole and the sound was like a gunshot.
Gabriel rolled, the thumping pain in his head shifting as he stood. He ran into the woods, not looking back. The truck seemed to be plowing after him into the woods. He moved with arms flailing like a drowning swimmer, swatting the branches away. At last exhaustion grabbed him and he dropped.
The truck was just visible. It rumbled in neutral. The cab was towing an empty flatbed.
Gabriel crawled behind a tree. He peered through the filter of branches as the cab’s door opened and a man jumped down. He walked out in front of his truck and seemed to be staring directly at the place where Gabriel was hiding. The man had on a black watch cap. He wore his blue jeans tucked into tan leather work boots and his shirt was blue-and-black plaid, untucked and trailing down to his thighs. The man unzipped his fly and pissed into the drainage ditch. He sang a song that Gabriel either did not know or was being sung too badly for him to recognize. The man didn’t sing the words. Instead, he made a noise like a guitar—dar-nar-nar-nar-nar—until he had finished his business. He bowed his legs slightly as he zipped up his fly. Then he fished a crumpled cigarette from his pocket.
Gabriel waited while the man smoked and picked his dirty nails. The smell of tobacco and pine sap drifted across the road and mixed in his lungs. Gabriel looked at his watch and realized that the VIA train was due down from the north in one hour, and would smash into his Putt-Putt if he didn’t reach it in time. On the sharp bends that led into Abenaki Junction, even a small collision could derail the entire train. He broke out in a sweat that covered his whole body.
Five minutes later, the man stubbed out his cigarette and left. The dust from the truck had not even begun to settle before Gabriel was running for the tracks. As he ran, he pulled the liquid-filled compass from his pocket and took a bearing. He reached the tracks a hundred feet away from the Putt-Putt, ran to it, threw in his duffel bag and started the machine. He swiveled the seat around so that he was facing back toward town, took hold of the second set of gears and drove, leaning into the turns with the Putt-Putt’s engine racing.
He heard it then. The train’s whistle back in the woods. Depending on the wind’s direction, it could have been ten minutes away or it could have been two.
The Putt-Putt wouldn’t go any faster. Gabriel knew the train would never be able to slow down in time. Images ricocheted through his mind of what would be left of him and the Putt-Putt after the VIA train had struck.
He sped across the Narrow River bridge and heard the whistle again, a high moan echoing off the Pogansett. With the heel of his hand, Gabriel pushed the red handle of the accelerator hard against the control panel.
He passed the Booths’ cabin, with its white walls and green trim, on his left. Some people were there now, but he didn’t recognize them. He saw a tall woman with blond hair wearing shorts and a bikini top and a man in khakis and a dark-green shirt. Both waved at the Putt-Putt. Gabriel was too frantic to wave back and he saw the look of disappointment on their faces when he did not return their greeting. He could not think about that now. He craned around in his seat and saw the snub mountain of the VIA engine as it rounded a bend in the distance. The whistle blew again. Gabriel bent farther forward, like a sprinter leaning into the finish tape of a race, as if that might make the creaky-motored Putt-Putt go any faster.
The fallen-in shacks at the edge of town snapped past. The jabber of birds rose screeching into his ears and faded.
The whistle blew again. The driver had seen him now. The moan grew longer and more urgent. The train could be slowed down a little, but not much. Not with eighty freight cars.
The siding was close. Gabriel could see the tarpaper roof of the depot. The crossing-guard bell was clanging and the railroad lights flashed red. Cars stopped behind the tracks as the red-and-white boom lowered to let the train pass.
The whistle was a constant shriek in Gabriel’s ears. He thought about jumping, but everywhere he looked there seemed to be broken bottles and old nails and stones.
The tracks were shaking with the force of the train’s approach. Gabriel could feel it, like thunder channeled through the iron rails. He looked over his shoulder and saw the massive face of the engine, the mesh grille across the windows and the light on like a door open to a furnace. It was so close it seemed to him he could smell the engine. The whistle deafened him.
He careened onto the siding, switched off the ignition and jammed his foot on the brakes. They squealed and he smelled burning. He held his hands up over his head to stop the shock. For a moment, he imagined that the train had veered onto the siding as well. The brakes were burning out. Foul smoke billowed behind him.
The Putt-Putt slammed into the buffer, which was padded with layers of old tire rubber. Gabriel sprawled across the steering wheel, the air punched out of his lungs. Everything that was not strapped down flew forward and clattered around the Putt-Putt’s cabin, raining down on him in small sharp things and broken things and splashes of lukewarm coffee from his smashed thermos flask, then jangling outside onto the ground. Gabriel looked up in time to see Alain Labouchere lean out of the side window of the engine. He was laughing. He and Benny Mott had raced this way before. They knew it was a dangerous game, but they played it anyway, and they laughed because their luck had always held. Gabriel felt too relieved to be angry. The train sped past. The clunking rhythm of its wagons. The door was open in one of them, and two hobos with scraggy beards and sunburned cheeks sat with their legs dangling down, their bundles dumped beside them. Then suddenly the train had gone. The sound of it faded away.
Gabriel felt sweat clammy as it cooled under his arms, down his sides and on his dirty face. He turned on the Putt-Putt’s ignition and was surprised to hear it start. Gabriel eased his way out of the cab like an old man with arthritis, and walked around gathering up the wrenches and oilcans and screwdrivers that had come flying out of the Putt-Putt. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed him crash into the buffer, but if anyone had, he was no longer paying attention.
By the time he reached home that evening, it was pouring. Clouds sh
redded across the top of Seneca Mountain and hung their ripped bellies down over the lake. Gabriel pulled up the hood of his Grundig raincoat. The pat-pat of water on the rubberized canvas drowned out all other sounds except that of cars passing close by him on the road, their tires hissing over the blacktop. His wrists were cold in the down-pour because the sleeves of his coat, which had once belonged to Mott, did not come down far enough.
Gabriel had almost reached his house before he realized that someone was standing by the door. He breathed in sharply and stepped back.
A person walked out of the shadows, across the creaking boards.
By the light of a streetlamp, Gabriel saw it was Madeleine. His shoulders slumped with relief. “You gave me a shock,” he said and climbed up onto the porch.
“I have some bad news,” she said. Her hair was wet and hung in ringlets across her face.
“Well, come in.” Gabriel unlocked the door and swung it open. He felt the corkscrew of worry in his stomach. She wouldn’t have come unless it was serious. Gabriel followed Madeleine into the house. Its smell was familiar to him now and he carried it in his lungs and in his clothing.
Madeleine didn’t wait for him to ask. “Mackenzie has hired a man to track you down.” She had just found this out from Alicia, who was close to panic when she had run into the Forest Sentinel office with the news. “He’s some kind of professional. I don’t know if he’s coming or whether he’s already here.”
Gabriel said nothing. He unbuttoned his raincoat and hung it on a peg by the door. Then he knelt down and unlaced his boots, which he also set by the door. He walked over to the bed and sat down. He looked dazed by the news.
Madeleine sat down beside him. “Are you all right?” she asked.