Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  Dodge waded through the crowd, which poured past him and out into the street. He swept them aside with the motion of a swimmer. He kept moving forward until he found the crumpled-up body of Madeleine. She was lying under a chair. He picked her up, searching in panic for the wound.

  She opened her eyes and her hands grasped his arms and then he knew she had only been taking cover. “Stay,” he shouted, and even with the shout, his words barely reached her over the chaos in the hall.

  Dodge jumped onto the stage and saw Mackenzie. The old man was gasping in a way that reminded Dodge of a landed fish. Alicia Mackenzie crouched over him, hands pressed down on his wrists as if they were wrestling and she had won. Dodge began telling people to step aside. But they did not hear him, so he pushed them away, gently at first, but using force when they did nothing more than totter and return to their hypnotized staring.

  Then a vicious, clattering bell sounded through the hall. It shocked Dodge so much that he ducked down behind the podium and was going for his gun before he realized that the sound came from an alarm clock and that he was crouching in a puddle of Mackenzie’s blood. It soaked through the fabric of his trousers at the knee.

  It was Mary the Clock, and the Big Ben that rested against the ledge of her breasts was already dying as the spring wound down. She was just sitting there in the front row, hands resting on her lap, crying.

  Mackenzie had heard the bell, too. He looked across at Mary’s tearstained face and thought how hard he had tried to keep secret what had happened between them. Too late, he thought, to put things right. The clock’s bell rattled to a stop.

  Alicia’s face appeared over him again.

  “I was going to make it all better,” Mackenzie said. “You would have been so proud of me.” Then he closed his eyes, and for the second time in his life he began to pray. He prayed to the angel who had watched him all these years, always flying just above the trees. He prayed not even with words, but with one half-formed idea that he might find his way back from this chaos that war-danced all around him, so he could have another chance to put things right.

  “Please, Mrs. Mackenzie.” Dodge took hold of Alicia’s forearm, the bones so thin he felt as if he would break them if he gripped with any force. “Call an ambulance!” he shouted into the crowd. He took off his jacket, balled it up and rested it beneath Mackenzie’s head. Then he loosened the old man’s tie, took a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the tatters of Mackenzie’s hand. Luminous white sticks of bone jutted from the skin and the delicate trenches of his handprints disappeared into the crater where the basin of his palm had been. The white cloth covered it up. Blood dyed it red. Dodge knotted the bandage, then unbuttoned Mackenzie’s shirt to see where the bullet had entered.

  Alicia sat on the floor. “Get up!” she told her husband. “Jonah! Get up!” Then she held her hand to her ears, as if she could no longer stand the sound of her own voice.

  Dodge pulled back the soggy red mess of cloth that had been Mackenzie’s shirt. The bullet had gone in high on the right side of the chest. He slid his hand under Mackenzie’s shoulder, feeling for the torn skin of an exit wound, but there was none.

  Mackenzie breathed in shallow gasps. His skin was green, as if a layer of jade lay just beneath the flesh and glimmered through. His pupils were great black disks. “Save my speech,” he croaked at Dodge. He waved his arm toward the scattered sheets of paper. “You read it to them.”

  Dodge did not understand Mackenzie’s slurred words. He kept his hand pressed against the thumbnail-sized wound. Blood had seeped across Mackenzie’s stomach and stained his white chest hair and the band of his boxer shorts. Dodge could feel the blood welding his hand to Mackenzie’s chest. He did not feel sick about this now, but had a prickling sensation along his scalp that told him he would be sick about it later and probably for a long time.

  The pain had left Mackenzie now. His head was filled with the gibberish of fever dreams. For a moment, he forgot why he was lying there. Then he recalled that he had been shot. This knowledge, reappearing suddenly as if for the first time, did not frighten him. Mackenzie felt so far removed from himself that it was as if the shock of the bullet had jolted his soul half out of his body. Now Mackenzie saw himself the way people see images through a pair of broken binoculars: two identical but slightly overlapping images. Mackenzie recalled something his father had told him just before he passed away. The man had said he just wanted to sleep for a long time, as if it were not death that he approached, but dreams.

  Dodge sat on the floor with Mackenzie’s gray-topped head in his lap. Looking at him, a man who had seemed at all times indestructible, Dodge was struck by how flimsily the old man’s life was anchored to his body. He marked Mackenzie’s breathing as if it were the ticking of a clock. Sweat collected on Dodge’s forehead and leaked into his eyes. He tried to move his hand to reach for a handkerchief, but his fingers had blood-bonded to Mackenzie’s wound.

  The paramedic team arrived from the fire station in their wide-axle ambulance, flashing red and yellow and blue lights like giant Christmas-tree baubles racked up on its roof. A moment later, Twitch Duvall burst from the little room onto the stage, swinging the steel suitcases containing his medical equipment.

  Dodge stood back while Twitch measured Mackenzie’s blood pressure. He wrapped the band around Mackenzie’s arm. The short gasps of the blood-pressure gauge were like Mackenzie’s own breaths as Twitch pumped air into the armband. He shined a penlight in the old man’s eyes, then hooked an IV into Mackenzie’s arm with a long needle that slid into his flesh as if it had no more substance than smoke. Twitch and Dodge lifted Mackenzie onto a stretcher and carried him out to the ambulance. As soon as it was gone, Dodge went back inside the hall to find Madeleine. A few people remained, sitting stunned in their chairs, as if they expected the meeting to continue. The television crew was also there. They sat in a huddle, smoking cigarettes. But Madeleine was gone. Dodge heard someone calling him. It was Linda Church.

  “Is Mr. Mackenzie dead?” she called to him.

  “I don’t know.” Dodge started walking out of the hall.

  “Can we interview you for a moment?”

  The huddle of TV crewpeople began to stir, throwing their cigarettes on the floor and stepping on them.

  “Not at the moment,” Dodge said. “I’m going to be closing up the hall now. So you’ve got fifteen minutes to pack the stuff or I’ll have to leave it locked in here until after the investigation. All right?”

  Linda Church breathed out sharply through her nose and dropped her hands to her side. The crew began packing up.

  Outside, people moved through the streets like sleepwalkers. Their voices filled the air with muttering. Dodge looked from face to face, searching for Madeleine.

  Shelby sprinted to his car and jammed the key in the ignition. Then he stopped. He turned off the ignition and felt the car shake and be still. There was still one job to finish. Gabriel. In Shelby’s mind, the man’s time had come and gone. His death and shallow grave in some nameless muddy place were overdue.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was morning. Shelby lay in the shadow of the trees, in sight of if the steel railroad bridge. The only things he carried with him now were the Glock and a hunting rifle with a telescopic sight. He knew Gabriel had gone in with the Putt-Putt that morning, and that the VIA train was due to pass by at twilight, so Gabriel had to come out before then.

  Shelby lay there all day. By midafternoon his eyes felt dried out from staring across the swampy ground that led down to the river. He had already memorized each girder of the bridge, the color of the metal and the way the reeds at the base of the structure all seemed to bow toward the water. He watched a dragonfly making right-angle turns in the air above the tall grass. The movements were hypnotic. He felt himself drifting off to sleep, so from a small plastic bottle he took a capsule filled with powdered guarana and swallowed it. A few minutes later, the concentrated caffeine crashed through his bo
dy. He knew he wouldn’t be sleeping for a long time now.

  Crickets chirped by the tracks, which clicked and sighed in the heat haze. Sun caught on the green-glass insulator caps of the old telegraph poles. Shelby lined them up in his gunsights. On any other day, he would have used them all for target practice. As the afternoon went by, forest shadows stretched across the water and into the woods on the other bank. The air quickly lost its warmth. Shelby rolled onto his back and buttoned up his jacket. He flexed his hands to make sure his fingers did not grow numb.

  Fading sunlight purpled the river. All around him, the colors became muddied and gray. Shelby sat up and cradled the gun on his lap. His joints were sore from lying on the ground. He propped up the gun, elbow balanced on one knee to steady himself, and twisted his arm around the sling. It was twilight now. The time window for his target had been reduced to a few seconds. Shelby stretched his legs out and began to rub the blood back into them.

  Something crashed close by in the forest. Shelby froze. The crash came again. It was moving toward him. Something large and not caring how much noise it made. Shelby jumped to his feet. The carbonated sleep rushed through his legs. He could see nothing among the jumbled branches. The crashing was closer now. The fine swish and snap of undergrowth giving way. He heard the sound of breathing.

  Shelby leveled the gun at the darkness, but he was as good as blind. He knew he couldn’t risk a shot without sending a warning to Gabriel, if this wasn’t the man himself come stumbling into his own trap. He would have to be quieter. Shelby was just putting down the rifle and reaching for his fighting knife when the blackness hurled itself against him. He sprawled on the ground. The rifle fell from his grasp and his knife slipped from its sheath. Shelby struggled to find it in the grass. Then a shape rose up, as if the darkness itself had taken form. Shelby felt the presence of something in the air in front of him. He reached slowly inside his jacket, until his hand was on the butt of the pistol. The pads of his fingers squeezed into the handle’s gridded grip. He pulled out the heavy gun, smelling the sweat of his fear.

  Shadows plowed into his face. They hooked into his brain and his entire head seemed scattered about him like broken pottery. Something huge stood over him. He could no longer feel the gun in his hand and when he held his other hand to his face, his fingers dug through ripped flesh and scratched against the bone of his cheek. The huge thing lunged down on him. It had a smell, a rank mustiness that Shelby began to piece together in his frantic mind. It clamped down on his head and Shelby felt as if his skull had been screwed into a vise. It was some kind of animal that had grabbed hold of him. He raised his hands and sank them into the rough tangle of fur, groping for its eyes. He reached the stubs of its torn-off ears, fingers slipping through the animal’s saliva and only then knew for certain that it was a bear. Shelby started to scream. Then all the screws of the vise turned on him at once. Shelby felt the crunch of bone giving way. His throat filled with blood and the pressure behind his eyes was huge and suddenly gone. His thoughts grew vague. This darkness had become a part of him. There would be no coming back into the light.

  No Ears dragged Shelby out toward the tracks, jaws still clamped into the man’s skull. Then it heard a noise and flattened itself in the undergrowth, resting on the body of the man.

  Gabriel crossed the bridge in his Putt-Putt, the wobbling beam of his flashlight held out in front of him because the Putt-Putt had no lights of its own. He sang to keep himself company and did not turn to see the darkness riding the rails close behind. Gabriel was still in shock from the night before. He was unused to the silence that had met him as he worked on the tracks that day. No chain saws unzipped the air. Without Mackenzie, not only the company but the whole town had come clattering to a stop.

  When Gabriel had gone, No Ears dragged the body a little farther and had just reached the railway embankment when it heard another noise, this one much louder than the first.

  The three-engine, fifty-wagon VIA train appeared in the distance, the blaze of its headlight carving a path through the woods. The driver was Alain Labouchere. The last periwinkle glint of twilight always brought him peace of mind and he never tired of it, even on the lonely winter runs between St. Johns and Montreal, when ice packed up so thick on the iron grille across the train windows that he could barely see where he was going. As he crossed the bridge, he saw a shape at the side of the tracks. He couldn’t yet tell what it was. He grabbed above his head for the train whistle. His fingers slid through the greasy red-painted iron loop and he pulled. The whistle rattled his bones and fanned out across the Algonquin. Now he could see it. A bear, balanced on its hind legs, reared above a carcass that lay hidden in the undergrowth. It looked to Labouchere as if the animal was baring its teeth at the oncoming train. He pulled the whistle again.

  The bear dropped on all fours, sank its snarling face into the meat of its kill and dragged the body back into the trees. The dead thing left a sheet of blood over the green raspberry leaves.

  The train drew level with the bear. Labouchere gaped down at the animal, and saw that its head was disfigured. He realized it had not been snarling, only staring at him. One of its jowls had pulled back from some old wound and never properly healed. Its eyes were not raging, the way he had imagined them to be. Only scraps of fur remained where its ears had been. Labouchere watched the bear’s curved black bayonet claws, chafed white at the tips. The animal’s chest was covered with blood. The kill lay partly buried in the muddy ground, its belly torn wide open and an orange-gray tangle of stomach half in and half out of the body. Labouchere had no idea what it could have been.

  As the train passed by, Labouchere stuck his head out the window. He watched the bear until the train had rounded a corner. The black woods converged around the tracks and it was gone. Labouchere slumped back into his seat. He gunned up the massive engine and rode faster on the polished iron rails. He roared through Abenaki Junction, glancing out at the winter-beaten houses and beyond them to the sawtooth ridge of Seneca Mountain, on whose granite peak the sunlight and the moonlight were always beautiful and changing.

  Dodge opened his eyes. It was dawn. Madeleine lay sleeping beside him. He felt her warm breath on his skin. In the strange honeyed light of his dreams, he had seen the Abenaki Indians with their black-and-yellow-painted faces, silent as they shadow-walked among the trees. He wondered why they had appeared to him again. Perhaps the dream was never meant to come clear. It was a secret, caught in the path of its own revelation and not containable within the bony brackets of the mind.

  “Are you scared?” she asked him.

  Dodge was surprised to hear her voice. He had not known she was awake. “Scared about what?”

  “About waking up here next to me?”

  “No.” Then he laughed. “God, no.” One day he would tell her how many times he had imagined it. He got up and dressed and headed down to the Four Seasons. The owner had called and said there was a car with Virginia plates in the parking lot that had been there a couple of days and they wanted it removed. Dodge figured it belonged to the man who had shot Mackenzie. There were manhunts all over the state for him, but so far nothing had turned up. Dodge took the license number of the car and then walked into the restaurant. He called out, “Does anybody know who that blue Honda belongs to? I’m fixing to tow it away.”

  People looked up and around. When no one stood or raised a hand, they went back to their food, and the Quebecois who had not understood put their heads together and muttered their translations to each other.

  Coltrane was there, on one of the round stools at the counter. He raised his hand in greeting, eyes deep-set with fatigue but smiling. He had not slept the night before, but had driven back from Portland, where he went to see Mackenzie and Alicia. Mackenzie was still unconscious, but seeing him had reminded Coltrane so much of himself in the hospital that his voice grew thin with shock when he tried to speak with Alicia. Even his own experience did not dull the impact of seeing the old man under an oxy
gen tent, with one tube up his nose and another down his throat. The IV drip was like a bag of diamonds in the sunlight. In the hospital room, Alicia took from her purse the pages of Mackenzie’s speech. She had peeled them from the stage of the Woodcutter’s Lodge and read through the footprints and bloodstains that obscured the words. “I had hoped he could explain this to you,” she said to Coltrane. “But now you will have to read it yourself.”

  Coltrane sat down on the floor because there were no extra chairs in the room. He read what he could through the brown-black splatters. Then he folded up the speech and handed it back. Dried blood fell in dust to the floor.

  “Can you do what he wanted to be done?” asked Alicia. She had never looked so pale. “Can you see that it’s carried out?”

  “Yes, I could,” said Coltrane. “I could begin tomorrow.”

  “I want Madeleine to help you. She will know how to get some of these measures started. We have to go back to the way things were before, at least for now.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m staying here for a few days. You can head back now.” Alicia smiled at him weakly. “There’s a lot of work to do.”

  Coltrane was just grabbing some breakfast before his interview with Linda Church. After that, he would head over to find Madeleine. They would talk about the work that lay ahead.

  Dodge took off his cap and sat down next to Coltrane. The waitress filled his mug from the black goldfish bowl of her coffeepot.

  Gabriel walked in and sat beside them on his usual stool. He set his tool belt on the floor.