by Paul Doiron
The Barters’ farmhouse was a rambling red brick affair with flaking white trim and rusted metal gutters. The dirt driveway up to the house led through an orchard of skeletal apple trees, and off to one side was a rolling hayfield in which various targets had been set up for rifle and archery practice. A ragged line of spruces ran along the back of the field, then crept in close behind the outbuildings.
A child was waiting for me in the drive. Her hair was a wild red tangle.
She couldn’t have been older than five. The temperature was twenty-eight degrees, but she was wearing dirty pink shorts and a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon mouse. Her lips were stained purple, as if she had just finished eating a Popsicle.
The girl watched me with enormous pale eyes as I got out of my truck.
“Sweetheart,” I said in my softest voice. “Is your daddy home?”
The words that came out of her mouth sounded old beyond her years: “Yeah, but he’s passed out. Ma’s around back, though.”
I followed the girl around the house and through a maze of scratchy bushes. Along the way, we encountered a mute toddler dressed in a denim jumpsuit and seated in a circle of petrified mud. Two more kids, a boy and a girl, both a little older, met us around the corner of the barn. Every one of them had kinky red hair. They all fell in behind us, forming a procession of sorts.
At a henhouse, three more people stood waiting. One I took to be Mrs. Barter. She was about the size and shape of a rain barrel, and she was dressed in a flowered cotton sundress with a frayed hem. Her hair was mostly gathered up in a faded kerchief, but a single gray-and-red strand had escaped confinement and now hung across her forehead. She had a cigarette clenched between her thin lips and an expression that looked as if she was barely holding in a belly laugh. A freckle-faced girl stood beside her, clutching a baby swaddled up so tightly, I couldn’t be sure if it was a child or a doll. She had the beginnings of her mother’s build—just give her another five years—but was dressed in shorts and a halter top. She, too, was smoking a cigarette. The last of the three was a scrawny, rusty-headed boy, maybe twelve years old, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and jeans and holding a Daisy pellet gun. None of them seemed to realize it was a mid-March day with a windchill in the teens.
“Watch out, kids, it’s the game warden come to take you good-for-nothings to jail,” said Mrs. Barter unhelpfully.
The henhouse was a rectangle of dry dirt as large as a boxcar, with a chicken-wire fence about four feet high around it. In the back, an outhouse had been repurposed to provide the hens some shelter. Inside the pen, there were two dozen or so Rhode Island Reds. They all seemed to be engaged in the act of pecking one another’s rear ends. The sour, grainy smell of chicken shit hung in the frozen air.
“I’m looking for your husband, Mrs. Barter.”
“You’re new around here, ain’t you? What happened to that bumfuck Devoe?”
“Warden Devoe was transferred to Washington County.”
“Good riddance.” She took the cigarette from her lips, squashed it against the fence post, and tossed the butt into the pen, where it was quickly snapped up by one of the chickens. “Will you look at those goddamned birdbrains? It’s like they got nothing better to do than peck each other in the ass.”
“Can you tell me where your husband is, Mrs. Barter?”
“Oh, he’s inside, sleeping it off. Give me a minute to finish with these chickens, and I’ll get him.”
“I shot a fox,” said the red-haired boy. He pointed to the nearest tree line. “It came out of them woods. I bet it had rabies.”
“Hold on, kids. Let me tell the story,” said his mother.
I glanced at my watch. “If you could just get your husband, Mrs. Barter.”
“This fox thing is pretty fucking funny, though.”
Her son, Travis, she said, was out with his pellet gun, breaking beer bottles, when the fox walked right past him. That’s how they guessed it was rabid.
“A person can get rabies,” remarked the teenage girl with the baby. “You start foaming at the mouth. They give you this big-ass shot in the stomach for it.”
“Now, the fox wandered right up to the henhouse as if no one else was around,” continued the mother.
“That’s when I shot it,” said Travis, puffing up his chest.
“Well, that fox took off like its tail was on fire,” said Wanda Barter with a broken smile. “Then we look inside the pen, and damn it if my rooster t’weren’t lying there dead! Davy Crockett, Jr., there killed Foghorn Leghorn!”
“It must have ricocheted off the fox,” said the boy.
“Mrs. Barter,” I said impatiently. “If you’ve got a rabid fox around here, you’d better keep your kids inside, at least for the time being.”
“You ever try to keep a child indoors in the middle of springtime?”
Springtime? My nose was getting frostbitten. “Can you go inside and get your husband for me?”
She turned to her teenage daughter, the one with the baby. “Let me have one of your smokes first.”
That was when I heard an ATV engine growl on the far side of the house. Before I could take two steps, it was already racing away, the sound receding into the distance as it rocketed up one of the fire roads that stretched all the way from the farm to Hank Varnum’s property.
One of the children must have sneaked away to alert him.
“I guess Calvin woke up,” said Wanda Barter, blowing cigarette smoke through the gap in her teeth. “Too bad you missed him. If you want to leave a card, he’ll call you back.”
There was no other word for it: I’d just been outfoxed.
6
In the Gospels, Jesus says, “The poor will always be with you.”
I didn’t realize He was speaking about me personally.
Until my mother divorced my father and spirited me away to suburbia like a stolen child out of Irish folklore, I lived in a series of leaky backwoods shacks and rusted mobile homes that were anything but mobile. All my clothes were hand-me-downs from strangers, and they were always too long or too short. At the time, I thought everyone ate day-old bread from bakery thrift outlets and shopped at stores that illegally traded food stamps for cigarettes, beer, and lottery tickets.
So what I’d found at Calvin Barter’s house was like a bad trip down memory lane.
The Drisko residence was a rat of a different color. A father and son duo who were so close in age and appearance that they seemed more like twins, Dave and Donnie Drisko were ardent four-wheeling enthusiasts, frequent guests of the Knox County Jail, and self-taught martial artists. Nor were they above scavenging a dead deer from the side of a road. My gut told me that if Barter wasn’t the ATV villain harassing Hank Varnum, then it was probably the Drisko boys.
Their trailer was located at the dead end of a dirt road no sane person would dare travel. The property was walled with a makeshift fence, topped with barbed wire. The boards bore all the usual warnings about vicious dogs and the probability of trespassers being shot—although the Driskos were actually too cheap to buy real signs. Instead, they’d just spray-painted their fuck-off sentiments on the fence itself. The warning about the dog was legitimate. They owned a brindle pit bull that lived its entire existence on a rope spiked to the ground. As I drove up, it surged so fiercely against its collar that I thought its head would pop off.
I chose discretion over valor and laid on my horn. I rested my elbow against the wheel until one of the Driskos—father, son, who knew?—finally opened the door. He was, of course, shirtless.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell do you want?”
I rolled down the window. “Can you restrain your dog, Mr. Drisko? I’d like to have a word with you.”
“You got a warrant?”
“I’m not here to arrest you.” Technically, this was true. Of course, if I found evidence of a crime, that might change. “I just want to ask you a question.”
“All right! All right! Lemme bring Vicky around back.”
Drisko—I’d begun thinking it must be Dave, the father—seemed in a surprisingly obliging mood. He dragged the dog forcibly around the trailer to some spot beyond my ability to see. I waited a moment, just to be safe, before getting out of the truck.
A flatbed pickup was parked inside the fence, right beside a beat-up Chevy Monte Carlo and two mud-splattered ATVs. I took the occasion of Drisko’s absence to inspect the bed of the truck. The wood bore recent bloodstains—the cold weather had preserved the redness of the hemoglobin—and frozen hunks of deer hair. Bingo, I thought. This gave me cause to search the curtilage.
Dave Drisko reappeared a moment later. He was scrawny as hell, with a black mustache and heavy bangs that fell so far down his forehead that he was constantly pushing his hair away to see out from under them. He looked like a runt, but at the Harpoon Bar in Seal Cove, the Driskos were known as the meanest drunks and dirtiest fighters in town.
“Your dog’s name is Vicky?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know. She’s named after that football guy, Michael Vick.”
“Do you ever let her inside?”
“Hell no. She’d eat us!” He wrapped his wiry arms around himself. “Yeesh, it’s a cold one, ain’t it?”
“Pretty cold.”
“You want a cup of Sanka or something?”
I’d never been invited into the Drisko lair before, so the invitation raised my guard. Maybe I should have called in my location to Dispatch beforehand, but Drisko was being uncharacteristically amenable, and I didn’t want to spook him. And so, I proceeded into the heart of darkness.
Imagine a bonfire fueled entirely by tobacco, smoldering cigarettes stacked twelve feet high. That was the equivalent amount of smoke I encountered within the Driskos’ mobile home. Five minutes cooped up inside and I would have come down with life-threatening emphysema. The home itself was not the worst I’d visited—the carpet was no more beer-stained, the furniture no more ripped, the dirty dishes no more scattered. But a cockroach could have lived like a king there.
Donnie Drisko (also shirtless) was sprawled on the couch in front of an improbably large-screened plasma TV set. In my experience, the poorest people always seemed to find money for cigarettes, booze, and home electronics. The movie he was watching seemed to be a poorly filmed documentary on mammary glands of the largest kind.
The younger Drisko raised his shaggy head. He, too, had a wimpy mustache and pants that hung below the band of his tighty whities. If forced to guess, I would have said the father was somewhere in his late thirties and the son somewhere in his early twenties, but I might have been off the mark by years.
“Hey, it’s Warden Bowden. How’s it hanging, man?”
“Bowditch,” I said, correcting him. “How are you doing, Donnie?”
“I’m cool. Just mellowing out.”
“You want some Sanka?” Dave asked from the kitchenette. “Maybe a splash of coffee brandy?”
“I’m fine, Dave.” I positioned myself against a plastic-paneled wall, keeping both father and son in view. But honestly, there wasn’t a hint of hostility or suspicion about them. The vibe in the room was one of elation, fueled no doubt by coffee brandy. “Donnie, you mind pausing the movie there for a second?”
“No problemo.”
“So what brings you to our neck of the woods on this fine morning?” asked Drisko the Elder.
“I thought you might be able to help me with something. You guys ever go wheeling over near Hank Varnum’s property?”
“Hell no. That land’s posted,” said Dave, lighting another American Eagle.
“We don’t ride on posted land,” agreed his son.
“Then you wouldn’t know who cut down two of Hank’s big oak trees, one on either side of the trail.”
The Driskos looked at each other as if they were about to burst out giggling. “Hell, man, it could be anyone,” said Donnie from the couch. “You’ve got all kinds of lowlifes around here. You talk to Calvin Barter? Now that dude’s a shitbag.”
My throat and lungs were beginning to convulse from the smoke. I hadn’t expected to get anything useful from the Driskos on the Varnum front, so I changed gears. “I’ll check up on Barter. So tell me: What did you guys do with the deer?”
I could see Dave Drisko’s pectoral muscles tighten. “What deer?”
“The one you picked up last night on Parker Point Road.”
The two Driskos stared at each other, and I could easily believe they were communicating telepathically, like two space aliens from a rogue planet. “You lost us there, Warden,” Dave offered at last.
“You guys were listening to the scanner and you heard that a woman hit a deer on Parker Point. So you jumped in your truck and shot over there to grab it before the cops arrived.”
“Must have been someone else,” said Dave.
“We were watching movies all night,” Donnie volunteered from the couch.
“So it’s just a coincidence I found fresh deer blood and hair on your truck?”
Again, the Driskos engaged in the Vulcan mind meld. I waited for them to get their stories straight via ESP. “I thought you said you wasn’t here to pinch us,” muttered Dave.
“And I won’t arrest you if you come clean about what really happened last night.” I peeled back a brittle window shade to look behind their mobile home. It was unlikely they had the deer suspended from a tree in the backyard, but criminals tend to have walnut-sized brains. I glimpsed a couple of plywood sheds in the curtilage (the yard, essentially) that could have hidden any number of things. “Was the woman still at the accident scene when you guys arrived?”
“Why don’t you ask her?” Dave said.
“Maybe I will.”
“Maybe you won’t.”
I met his eyes. They were as flat as two dirty old pennies. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means nobody’s going to say they saw us on Parker Point last night, because we weren’t there.”
“Then you don’t mind if I poke around. Just so I can cross you off my list.”
Dave inhaled about half his cigarette before he spoke. “Yeah, we do mind.”
I’d figured that might be the answer. “Maine law says I don’t need a warrant to search private property for illegally obtained game if I have probable cause of a wildlife violation.”
Dave called my bluff. “You’re going to have fun proving probable cause to a judge.”
“When did you get a law degree, Dave? I was unaware you were an attorney.”
“Let’s just say we know our rights.”
Donnie propped himself up on the sofa. “And you might want to watch out for Vicky while you’re in the yard. She doesn’t like strangers.”
There were a few ways for me to handle this scenario. As best I could tell, Drisko the Younger had just threatened to sic his dog on me. My instinct was to respond with a profanity, get out my Cap-Stun pepper spray, and prepare for a fight. But I suspected that my division commander wouldn’t appreciate me escalating a minor beef into a major melee. Theft of roadkill was what, a Class E misdemeanor? Besides, two against one weren’t favorable odds. For Sarah’s sake, if not my own, I decided to play the diplomat.
“I still have to take an evidence sample from your truck,” I said. Maybe the smoke was finally getting to me, but I felt a sudden urge to cough up a lung. “You’d better hope the DNA doesn’t match the blood and hair I found at the accident scene.”
Dave Drisko twirled his mustache. He couldn’t decide if I was bullshitting about the lab tests; he didn’t know whether to be worried or not. “Go right ahead.”
“We ain’t going to stop you,” said Donnie. He restarted his porn movie as I stepped outside.
His father followed me through the door, out into the frosty March morning. “You don’t mind me watching you?”
I coughed, trying to force the noxious smoke out of my system. “Just as long as you leave your dog chained.”
I returned to my patrol truck and
searched around until I found two paper bags. I plucked a few hairs from the Driskos’ flatbed and collected a shaving of frozen blood. Then I sealed, tagged, and labeled the evidence containers to put in a cooler. Eventually, I would have to fill out a chain-of-custody report when I submitted the samples for DNA testing.
Dave watched me like a starving jackal the entire time. “You’re not going to come back with a bunch of wardens and bust down our door tonight?” he asked as I was packing up to leave.
“If I do, I’ll be sure to knock.”
“Because I’ve got enough going on in the legal department right now. Human Services is saying I ain’t really disabled. They say I should be able to go back to the trap mill.”
“What’s wrong with you?” It was a question with a thousand plausible answers.
He put a hand against the small of his back. “Back pain, man. My spine’s all fucked to hell. And I got migraines like you wouldn’t believe. If they take away my disability, me and my family are screwed royally.”
Looking at him, I had no doubt that Dave Drisko could heave a truck tire ten feet in the air. I wondered where he stashed the neck brace he brought out when the social worker visited.
I could hear the feminine moans from the younger Drisko’s porn movie through the thin walls of the trailer. “What about your son? What’s Donnie doing for work these days?”
“Oh, him. He’s on disability, too.”
7
I decided to eat my lunch in the parking lot of the Montpelier museum in Thomaston. It was a fake mansion constructed to replicate the home of Gen. Henry Knox, a portly hero of the American Revolution and George Washington’s secretary of war. The museum perched atop a hillside overlooking a cement plant on one side and the St. George River on the other.
After the Revolutionary War, the Boston-born Knox had set himself up as a British-style aristocrat—one of the so-called Great Proprietors—and eventually built an empire in the Maine woods the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. His original Montpelier was one of the inspirations for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, and supposedly the character of Colonel Pyncheon was based on Knox himself. The general held his impoverished Maine “subjects” in contempt—he accused them of “idleness and dissipation”—and they responded by vandalizing his mills, burning down the homes of his agents, and even killing a few of his hired goons.