by Norman Green
I hadn’t bothered to think of a scam to run on her, and I couldn’t think of one now. “Not exactly.” She took a seat across from me and waited. “You know Taylor Bookman?”
She nodded. “Sure.”
“He told me to ask for your son.”
“Didn’t think you looked like a rich white man after a trout.”
“There are two guys up here somewhere,” I told her. “Two Russians, gangsters from Brooklyn. I’ve got something they want, and I can’t let them have it. Plus, I think they’re holding a friend of mine against his will. They were staying in a motel down in Calais, but they moved. They’re supposed to be in a cabin near here, but I don’t know more than that.”
“Why don’t you go to the police? Won’t they help you?”
“I haven’t had much luck with the police in the past.” That was sure as hell the truth. “I think I need to find out more information before I involve cops.”
The expression on her face never changed, but her voice did, just a little bit. “Did Taylor Bookman tell you that my son could help you do something to these men?”
I shook my head. “Not my style. No, what I’d like to do is see if there’s some way I could steal my friend away from them, let them think he got loose on his own. That way, they’d have to go chase him and leave me alone.”
“A coyote,” she said, “and not a wolf. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. Well, Chris won’t be home until next week. I tell you what, if you pay me his day rate, I’ll help you find them, but if you do something bad, I’ll help Bookman find you. Deal?”
“Bookman was the one who sent me here to begin with.” She waited, said nothing. “Deal,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “First I’ll have to make a few phone calls, just to find out where they are. Do you have some quarters for the pay phone?”
“I got a cell phone in the car.”
“You get a signal up here?” She sounded surprised.
“It comes and goes. We might need to stand outside.”
“All right,” she said.
We went out to the Subaru. I had my binoculars and a Stokes Field Guide on the front seat. “Coyote,” she said. “Are you a birder?”
“I’m just learning,” I told her. I figured out what it was about her speech, she used the proper words and diction and all that, but she did it like a person who has learned English as a second language. No slang at all, and no street, but there was the vague presence of another tongue underneath it all, another world, another life.
She picked up the glasses and scanned the woods around her house. “Aren’t we all,” she said. “Where’s your notebook? Did you get a grosbeak yet?”
“I don’t have a notebook. Where do you see a grosbeak?”
“You have to have a notebook. You need to know the date, the time of day, was it raining, was the bird in flight, what color were the primaries, how about the secondaries and coverts? What color were the feet, and the beak? You can’t remember all that.” She handed me the glasses. “Right over there in those alders. Three feet off the ground on a branch, black head and back, red throat, white belly. Male rose-breasted grosbeak.”
I found him, half hidden in the brush. “God, he’s beautiful.” I handed the glasses back to her. “You are really good.”
She shook her head. “This is my home ground. I saw him at one of the feeders out back. I knew he had to be around here somewhere. Did you find that phone?”
I came reluctantly back to the real world. “Yeah, I got it.”
She leaned her butt on the hood and made a series of phone calls. She could have been calling her grandmother in Texas for all I knew, because while she would greet in English whoever answered—“Hello, Willie,” she said to the first one—the rest of the conversation was in what I assumed was her native tongue. When she was done she shut the phone off and handed it back to me. “Handy little gadget,” she said. “Well, Coyote, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, I know where they’re staying. The bad news is, it won’t be easy for you to get close. Get in, I’ll show you the place.”
We took off. She leafed through my field guide while I drove, following her directions. She hardly looked out the window. She reminded me of Hobart, in the way she seemed to be of this place. I wondered what that must be like, to have some special part of the world where you belonged. “So tell me,” I asked her. “You live up here your whole life?”
“No,” she said. “I used to live in Queens, back before my husband got killed.”
I almost drove off the road. “No shit! Queens?”
She smiled then, but I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was evaluating me. “Do you think I’m like a tree, planted up here?”
“Hey, I didn’t mean nothing, I’m just surprised, that’s all. What made you pick a place like Queens?”
“My husband was a steelworker. We moved down to the city so he could find work. We thought we could save up some money. Get ahead.”
“What happened?”
“One night on his way home from work, someone pushed him in front of the subway train. Take the left up past that gas station.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry to hear that.”
She shrugged. “Are you religious, Coyote?”
“No.”
“Neither am I, but it would be nice if one of them was right, though, wouldn’t it? Left again, right up ahead there.”
It was about a half hour’s ride from her house. “Pull over here.” We were on a narrow two-lane road, forest on one side, fields on the other, sloping gently away from us. There didn’t seem to be a farmer attached to the fields, they were pastures with no cows, growing tall yellow grasses that swayed with the rhythm of the morning breeze. More of those rock walls. In the field closest to us there was an iron farming implement of some kind rusting away, looked like something you’d tow behind a horse or a tractor to scrape the dirt into rows. A pair of ruts in the grass ran down the edge of the field next to a rock wall, leading down toward a narrow lake that was maybe three quarters of a mile away. “Down there,” she said. “There’s a cabin on the far side. That little road you’re looking at is the only way in. I don’t think you could get in there without them seeing you. There isn’t even anyplace you could hide this little truck and walk in.”
I looked at the place through my binoculars. The exterior told me nothing. Just a cabin by a small lake in the middle of nowhere. “I see what you mean. What’s up behind there?”
“Woods,” she said, looking at me like I was an idiot.
“I can see that. But if you went back far enough, you’d have to hit a road or something eventually. No?”
“I guess you would,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you think you could come in from the back?”
“It’s an idea.”
“It might be a long walk. Okay, turn around, go on back the way we came.”
The road we took was unpaved, and it seemed almost like a tunnel of pale greens and quick patches of yellow. Tall fir, spruce, and hemlock filtered out most of the sunlight. When we first turned onto the road we passed a sign warning us that the next twenty-eight miles were seasonal and unmaintained, and I slowed the Subaru down to keep it from rattling apart. There were no power lines or phone lines, either, no houses, no other cars. In one spot a small creek covered the road with a couple of inches of ginger ale–colored water. We were nine miles in from the sign when she had me stop.
“Find a place to pull over,” she said. “You’ll need to get right off the road because logging trucks come through here sometimes, and they don’t go slow. How about over there, past those oak trees? Did you bring some bug dope with you?”
“I got OFF. That okay? It’s behind the seat.”
“That’s good for this time of year,” she said. “The spring is another story, though. How about a compass?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t think so. Native Americans such as myself, we don’t need no stinking compass. City boy lik
e you, you should probably pick one up.” I was trying to figure out if she was yanking my chain when she started laughing. “Come on, Coyote,” she said, shaking her head. “Bring your glasses and bug dope.”
My first trip through that place was hell. In an old-growth forest, the trees are huge, ancient, and therefore very tall. They shut out most of the light, which means nothing much grows on the forest floor unless one of the giants goes down. When that happens there is a riot of competition among various plant forms until one of them wins and fills up the hole in the canopy overhead, at which time the rest of the undergrowth dies off again. Mrs. Johnson told me all that while I did my best to follow her through the second-growth forest, which was choked with a tangle of fucking puckerbushes that all seemed to have it in for me personally, doing their best to scratch my face or arms or trip me and knock me on my ass. The bushes liked her better than me, they must have, because she didn’t have the same problems with them, even though she was broader of beam than I was. She just moved resolutely forward in her calm unhurried fashion while I tried to keep up. “You should have brought boots,” she said after I stepped in a wet spot and filled my sneakers with mud.
Once we got through the first half mile or so, we got past the marshy section, and the going got marginally easier. She stopped to point out different things: piles of furry brown marbles she said were deer shit, scratch marks on a tree she said were made by a black bear, and a bird she identified as an eastern towhee, but I missed it. By that time, I don’t think I would have cared if the entire population of Sibley had been sitting in the same tree wearing ID tags. I just wanted a beer, and a nice bug-free tavern to drink it in. I promised myself never to come here in the springtime.
After what seemed to be untold hours of struggle, we finally made it through the slough of despond and up over the steep ridge of fucking aggravation and we were sitting halfway down a wooded hillside, looking through binoculars at that same cabin by the lake. We were probably five hundred yards away from the place. The long driveway I’d seen from the road that morning dead-ended at the cabin, and below us, at the foot of the ridge behind the cabin, there was a rusting U-Haul truck, sunk to its axles into the ground. I watched the cabin through the glasses, but there was no sign of life.
“What’s with the truck,” I asked her.
She shrugged. “The story I heard was that somebody stole it years and years ago and left it right there. Are you going down there?”
“No. Not right now. Those two guys might live in Brooklyn, okay, but they won’t be all that easy to sneak up on. I’m gonna have to think about how to do this, and then come back.”
“All right,” she said.
The trip back to the Subaru wasn’t as bad, I guess because I’d been through it all once already and I wasn’t slogging into the unknown. I don’t know why that makes it easier, but it does. It was still a relief, though, when we got back to the Subaru.
“Do you think you can find this place again? Here, where we parked?”
“Yeah. Little over nine miles in on this road, just past this stand of oaks.”
She smiled her crooked smile. “Not bad, Coyote. Have you ever used a compass before?”
“No.”
“Okay, here’s what you do. This is your direction, right here.” She drew a line in the dirt with her foot, glanced up at the sun. “East-northeast, more or less. That’s the line between here and that cabin back there. Okay? So you stand here, you line up your compass so the needle points at north on the scale, and that will tell you exactly what direction this really is.”
“Okay. Stand like this, find north, then follow that direction. Right?”
“Almost right. What you do, you go one or two degrees to the south of this line, okay, that way, when you hit that ridge we were on, you know you have to go left a little ways.”
“Oh. Very smart.”
“You do the same thing coming back. Go one or two degrees one way or the other, so when you hit this road you’ll know which direction you need to turn. Otherwise what happens, you might get close to where you want to go but you won’t be able to see it, and then when you wander around looking for it, you get lost. Getting lost in the woods up in here could be fatal.”
“Ouch. Okay.”
“Suppose you do get lost. Try to follow the water. That little swamp we went through turns into a creek, that’s the creek that’s washing out the road back there. Do you remember when we drove through that?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Even if you don’t find this road, keep following the water and eventually you’ll come to a road or a river or something.”
“Okay.”
“Do I need to worry about you, Coyote? If something happened to you in here, it might bother me a little bit.”
I took my soggy sneakers and socks off and threw them into the back of the Subaru. “I’ll be fine,” I told her.
It was late afternoon by the time I got back to Calais. I stopped at a sporting goods place and picked up a compass, some dry socks, and a pair of waterproof hiking boots. I was starting to look at that kind of stuff with a different eye. Before that I’d always looked at a sporting goods store as the kind of place you bought a jersey with John Starks’s name on it, but I didn’t see anything like that in this place. This was the kind of place that sold you stuff you needed to do things, not to go watch someone else do them. I wandered around in there for a while, trying to think if there was anything else I would need. I already had a hunting knife. I looked at the pistols for a while, but I settled for a vest instead. It was a mesh kind of thing, I guess it was intended for fishermen, and it had a lot of pockets. I thought long and hard about a pistol, though. There are a couple of problems with pistols. One is that they tend to make you overconfident—it’s easy to forget that the thing is just a gun, it’s not a magic wand that will get you out of trouble if you wave it around. Another is that having a pistol greatly magnifies the chances you’ll get shot yourself. I didn’t know that I really wanted to shoot anybody, and I sure as shit didn’t want anybody shooting me.
There was a young guy working in the place, he looked like Maine’s version of a juvenile hard-ass. He wore his hair greased back, he had a few chin whiskers trying to pass for a goatee, and he wore a Leatherman knife clamped to his belt. I palmed him a ten, asked him if he knew where I could buy a few M-80s.
“Whatcha need them for?” he wanted to know.
“I might need them for a distraction, that’s all. Nothing to get anybody in trouble.”
“Awright,” he said, and he gave me a guy’s name and directions to his house. He glanced at his watch, a big black one with a lot of buttons on it. “He won’t be home from work for another hour or so. His brother ain’t working, though, see if he’ll give ’em to you. His brother’s name is Vince.”
It took me an hour to find the place, and then Vince spent the next ten minutes professing not to know what the hell I was talking about. I finally had to wave a fifty in the guy’s face. Fifty bucks for a couple of firecrackers, Vince must have thought I was the biggest dope in the state. At the very least, he thought he had a fish on the line, because he tried to sell me all the other ordnance he had. Again I was tempted to go for something more serious, but in the end I thanked him for his kindness, took my M-80s and left.
I followed the directions in reverse to find my way from Vince’s brother’s house back to Calais. There was probably a quicker way to get where I was going, but it was getting dark and I couldn’t find anything on the map. I didn’t want to get lost.
Maine surprised me again—they didn’t have a Starbucks in Calais. I could understand it, though, once I thought about it for a few minutes. You will find precious few down easters willing to pay four bucks for a cup of coffee, no matter what kind of fancy shit you put in it. Sixty cents at McDonald’s, bro, and that’s probably pushing it. And the stuff in the pot at five-thirty in the afternoon, you gotta know it’s been sitting there getting meaner an
d more vile since about two. It didn’t matter, I bought a couple cups anyway. I figured I was going to need the boost. Normally, I might have looked around for something a little more serious, not to mention easier on the stomach, but I had wasted enough time on the M-80s already.
I had tried calling Louis on my cell phone a couple of times while I was driving around, but I kept losing the signal. I tried again in the McDonald’s parking lot, but the line was busy. I gave it five minutes and tried again, got the same result. They won’t worry too much, that’s what I told myself. They know me by now, and they love Nicky. I was sure they wouldn’t mind putting him to bed. I told myself I would call again when I got to Grand Lake Stream.
I was better prepared this time. I drove back in, watching the odometer. It wasn’t hard to find the place where I’d parked the Subaru just hours earlier. I had my new boots on, and I had the vest. The M-80s and the electrical tape went in one pocket, the knife went in another, flashlight in a third, and so on. I checked the little window on my cell phone, but there was no signal. I turned the phone off and put it in a pocket. I found the mark Mrs. Johnson had made on the ground and took my sighting. East-northeast, she’d been right on the money. I coated my bucket hat with bug spray, put it on, and started out.
Even now I’d have a difficult time guessing at the distance. It had taken something like three hours to get in that morning, and the same to get back out, and that was with Mrs. Johnson leading the way—I hadn’t had to stop every five minutes and look at a compass.
Guilt is funny stuff. I hadn’t had a lot of experience with it before then. I mean, I’d been guilty of a lot, I admit that, but I’d never felt it much. Justice is generally what you want for the other guy. You don’t want to pay the price for what you do, nobody does. When a cop pulls you over for speeding, you don’t want the ticket, you want to skate. Right? It’s all right for the other guy to go to jail, but they ought to let you go, send you on your way properly chastened, smarter, maybe, or at least more careful, if not more honest. The thing was, I had to admit that Rosario’s ass was in a sling because of me. I could have done things different, and in retrospect, maybe I should have. Maybe I should have left Rosey’s half of the money in that storeroom. I had been pissed off because he was going to try to swindle me, but how could I hold that against him? The guy was only human. I kept seeing him at that table at the VFW, looking like he was praying, and I knew I had to do something. I mean, I could have justified it, I could have talked myself out of this stupid expedition, but I didn’t want to have to go around feeling lousy about whatever was gonna happen to Rosario.