Archangel

by Paul Watkins

  “ ’Morning, Mr. Gabriel,” said Coltrane.

  Gabriel smiled. He was lost in thought. As he had set out into the silence of the forest these past few days, there was no sense of having won. Instead, he felt only the vastness of the work in which he was involved. It spread beyond the boundaries of the Algonquin. It spread across the world. The struggle was so much larger than he was that he knew he might never be able to grasp it in his mind, but that did not matter. The vastness was what made it sacred.

  “The leaves are changing in the Algonquin,” Dodge said to Gabriel. “Must be pretty out there now.”

  Gabriel was jolted from his thoughts. “I always did like the Algonquin at this time of year,” he said, tipping milk from a pitcher into his coffee. It was only then, as he watched the white swirl into the black, that he realized what he had said. Now they would guess he was no stranger to this town. For an instant, the mask of Adam Gabriel slipped away.

  “Yes,” said Coltrane absentmindedly. He was thinking about the interview. He didn’t know what he would say.

  But Dodge was looking hard at Gabriel. He had seen the mask slip, and now he understood. A moment passed and Dodge said nothing. He nodded slowly, as if greeting Gabriel for the first time. Then he turned away.

  Gabriel knew the gift that Dodge had made him, but there was no way to thank him for it. Both men knew that. There was only the quiet that followed. And in that silence the mask returned to the face of Adam Gabriel. It would stay there the rest of his life. The ghost of his old self shuffled past and through the wall and away. The sound it made was like the sweeping of a broom.

  Linda Church walked down the logging road. Her trenchcoat snapped in the breeze. Coltrane walked beside her. He kept his head down against the wind. The camera operator struggled in front of them, walking backward. He moved in a waddling shuffle to keep the camera steady on his shoulder. His right eye was squashed against the rubber lens-protector and his left remained crunched shut against the sunlight.

  Linda Church talked as rapidly as she walked, almost choking herself at the end of her sentences because she did not pause to breathe. “It appears that your time is running out for logging the Algonquin,” she said. “Why don’t you send crews back in here to continue the cutting?”

  “Because there will be no more logging in the Algonquin, or clear-cutting anywhere else on Mackenzie Company land.”

  “So what will happen to the logging industry in this town?”

  “I don’t know, but if we don’t change the way things are being run now, in fifty years there won’t be a logging industry here at all. We are going back to the old methods for a while. It was a less destructive way. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

  “Do you think Jonah Mackenzie will recover?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Linda Church stopped walking. She tightened the belt of her trenchcoat. “There seems to be a lot you don’t know, Mr. Coltrane.”

  He looked her up and down, his old confidence returning. “That’s the best place to start, don’t you think?”

  When Coltrane reached home after the interview, Clara ran up the driveway to meet him. Her hair was corncobbed with curlers. He could tell from the look on her face that something was wrong.

  “That bear is back!” she shouted and opened the door and climbed into the truck. “It’s out in the cornfield again. But, Victor, I’ve been thinking. Before you go getting angry—”

  “Goddamnit!” Coltrane roared. He jammed the accelerator to the floor and roared down the drive.

  “Why don’t we just leave the bear alone? Just let it go.” Clara was pleading with him.

  Coltrane skidded into the farmyard, cut the engine and ran into the house. When he ran out, he was carrying his Springfield rifle. He climbed up the ladder that led to the top of the barn.

  “Please, Victor!” Clara called to him.

  “Get in the house!” he shouted down. He sat on the roof of his barn, thirty feet above the ground. It was evening, but heat from the day still rippled off the roof. He peered across the purple-topped cornfields. All he could think about was killing the bear. For weeks now, thoughts of vengeance had filled his imagination. In his dreams, Coltrane had slaughtered the bear so many times that if he did not kill it now he knew the animal would haunt him the rest of his life.

  Clara raised her arms and let them drop against her blue-and-white checked apron. “Please,” she said again, knowing it would do no good. Then she walked back inside the house.

  The corn shuddered as something large moved through the rows. “I got you now, you big fucker,” Coltrane said. He unslung the Springfield from his shoulder. The tall cornstalks moved again. Coltrane fired a round into the middle of the rustling. The roar of the explosion turned to a high-pitched shriek in his ears and then there was only a single ringing note, like the sound on a television when the channel has signed off for the night. He popped out the empty case and chambered a new one. The empty finger of brass bounced off the roof and flickered down into the barnyard.

  He fired again at the same place, and again and again, his lungs full of cordite and his eyelashes flicking off sweat. In his mind, each bullet plowed into the black shag of the bear. He had begun to think that No Ears might never be killed. He saw himself in a fight against all that was evil, and all that was evil was balled into that monster’s black hide. When his bullets were gone, Coltrane lowered the gun and set it down on the copper strip. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand and squinted into the cornfield.

  The screen door creaked open and banged shut on its spring hinge. Clara was back in the farmyard. “Will you stop this?” she yelled up. “I am tired of you making war on that poor bear!”

  “I don’t even know anymore if he is a bear,” Coltrane shouted down. He scanned the field. A breeze tousled the corn tops and the whole field seemed to be moving. He reached into his pockets and grabbed a handful of loose ammunition. The brass cartridges rattled together.

  “You’re crazy! You know that? You’re obsessed!”

  “I got him this time. I swear I did.” Coltrane was talking to himself.

  Then the corn exploded at the edge of the field. Coltrane saw the huge bear loping toward the trees.

  “Goddamnit!” screamed Coltrane. “Ain’t we even yet? How much more do you want from me? Didn’t I do enough to put things right?” Coltrane grabbed for his rifle. He jammed a round into the breech, half-aimed and pulled the trigger. He slid back the bolt and the empty cartridge flew up into his face. It was hot and still smoking and he cried out as the brass hit his cheek. By the time he realized he was losing his balance, it was gone. He slid backward down the roof, without even time to cry out. Then he hit the rain gutter and flipped. The rifle flew out of his hands. He heard Clara scream. The back of his barn swung up and past, and now he was falling although he had no sense of falling. It was everything else rising up to meet him. He saw the mountain of his hayrick and the cornfield, right-side up now and from the other side of the barn Clara was hollering. Then he vanished into the hay, a great rustling crunching sound all around him. Yellow dust kicked up. The sun-warmed stalks caught him softly and held him and suddenly he was not moving anymore. His brain sent out its cautious messengers down the long paths of his bones to see if they were broken. Slowly, he opened his eyes. He studied the tangled threads of straw close to his face.

  Coltrane knew he had almost been killed. The knowledge reached him in a strange, tingling warmth through his body. For a moment longer, he sat there breathing, enjoying the smooth rustle of air into his lungs. Then Clara climbed up the hayrick to find him. She was crying as she dug through the hay, and when she did, he looked up grinning, the way he had not grinned since he was a child. “Will you give it up at last?” She reached down to embrace him. “Some fights you aren’t supposed to win. That bear is just being a bear, and killing it won’t give you what you need.”

  Coltrane still sat where he had fallen, listening to the heavy-boot p
lod of his heart. At first, he did not understand what Clara meant. The bear just being a bear. The animal had been wrapped up in all his ideas of what he had done in keeping silent about Mackenzie’s spiking of the tree and the payment he had to make to live with himself again. Only the spilling of blood had allowed him to see what was real and what existed in the shadowy parallel world of his imagination. But now it was clear to him. The rage that had stockpiled itself inside him began to diffuse, and suddenly it made no sense to him. For Coltrane, it was like waking from a dream in which he did not recognize himself.

  Victor and Clara Coltrane thought back to the times just after their marriage when they had come here to lie in the hay, and how much had changed since then beyond the quiet valley of their farm. The quality of light had altered in their memories, and their surroundings seemed to fade, as if into the watery brown of an old sepia print. They saw themselves fading as well, and held on tightly to each other as they vanished into the past.

  Jonah Mackenzie lay in a coma under the clear plastic hood of an oxygen tent, looking like a man entombed in ice. The green line of his heart-rate monitor drew shark fins in the black. Where the color had been on his face, there was now only a slick and waxy sheen. In the cellophane clinging of flesh to his bones, the places that were once light had turned to gray. Mackenzie had become like a photographic negative of his old self. He was not dying with the fireball swiftness that he once imagined. Instead, death wandered slowly and patiently through his veins. It took his strength fragment by fragment, until at last nothing remained.

  Now he was moving away. The room and the hospital and the tiny bunched-together houses of the city faded quickly from his view. He forgot he had ever been born.

  Jonah Mackenzie set out into the ancient forests of an undiscovered land. He was filled with fear and wonder. Distant voices called to him, speaking the words of his prayers. They reached him in the depths of stillness, where even his heart made no sound.

  For my brother, Clive

  The author would like to thank

  Leita Hamill, Jon Karp, Amanda

  Urban, CRW, the Seltzers, Barry and Dini

  Goldsmith, Tom Perry, Jean-Isabel

  McNutt, Peddie and Lawrenceville

  for their help and support in putting

  together this book.

  ALSO BY PAUL WATKINS

  Night Over Day Over Night

  Calm at Dawn, Calm at Sunset

  In the Blue Light of African Dreams

  The Promise of Light

  Stand Before Your God

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PAUL WATKINS is thirty-one years old. In addition to being one of the best-reviewed new writers on the American literary scene, he is also one of the most colorful. The California-born son of Welsh parents, Watkins grew up on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, and was educated at Eton and Yale. His most recent book, Stand Before Your God, is a memoir about an American’s coming-of-age at a British boarding school. His widely praised first novel, Night Over Day Over Night, the story of a young SS soldier during the Battle of the Bulge, was published when its author was twenty-three, and was nominated for the Booker Prize. To research the book, Watkins hiked through the Ardennes forest, where the battle took place, and interviewed veterans of both sides. Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn, which was awarded Britain’s Encore Prize for best second novel, reflects several seasons Watkins spent working on trawlers off the New England coast. For his third novel, In the Blue Light of African Dreams, Watkins learned to fly a biplane and spent months in the Moroccan Sahara. And before he wrote The Promise of Light, he lived in the Irish towns of Lahinch and Ennistymon and drew upon a vast body of historical literature in order to study the Irish independence movement from all angles.

  Watkins lived and worked in the woods of northern Maine while researching Archangel, his sixth book. He makes his home near Princeton, New Jersey.