by Mike Bond
Another reason she wouldn’t leave, she said, was her biology and chemistry students at Eagle Mountain High, as no new teacher would come here because of the turbine noise. “My Grandma taught in a one-room schoolhouse in the Wyoming mining fields… she used to say she’d had far more influence on those kids than most teachers today. For me, it used to be like that here. Now the kids are so whacked out on turbine noise they’re unruly, have ADD, don’t study at night… You see the new Gallup poll?” she said, that way she has of changing subjects.
“Life’s too short to watch TV.”
“Maine is next to last nationwide in the trust citizens have for their Legislators.”
“Next to last?” Despite all the news about corrupt legislators this was a new low. “Who’s last?”
“Illinois. Six governors jailed for corruption, fifteen hundred elected officials, mostly Democrats, so far indicted. Governor Blagojevich, fourteen years in the pen for trying to buy a US Senate seat… We could’ve told them you can buy a Senate seat much cheaper in Maine. With no fear of indictments.”
A thud of claws at the door and Lexie leaped up. “It’s Lobo!”
But when she opened the door it was a huge gray tomcat. “Max!” she cried, “Where’ve you been?”
He stalked in, the size of a small pitbull, just one ear and a single eye with which he examined me balefully. He also had, I was soon to learn, the temperament of a wolverine, but according to Lexie could be a sweetheart and lie purring on your chest for hours. Though if you moved him he might kill you.
“You’ve been gone for days!” she sat on the floor hugging him and scratching under his chin while he rubbed his forehead against her chin and purred like a locomotive. “He hates the turbines,” she said, “hardly ever comes home… Oh Max it’s so good to see you!”
He meowed like a tiger I’d once heard in Honolulu Zoo. “Yes, yes,” she said, “I’ll get you some.” She rummaged in the freezer for a hunk of ground venison and popped it in the microwave. “He doesn’t like cat crunchies,” she explained as Max came over to check me out, turned round and sprayed my leg.
“Oh my God!” Lexie laughed. “He’s never done that!”
I gave him a mild push with one toe and he lashed it whiplike with his claws and ambled to the pail of milk Lexie had put down. “He normally only sprays the TV and Lobo’s dinner,” Lexie said.
We humans sometimes shared our Paleolithic abodes with cave lions and saber tooth tigers, but I couldn’t tell from which of these lineages Max had descended. “It’s because he doesn’t know you,” Lexie added as she topped our glasses with more gin.
When the venison was thawed she put it on a platter and Max dug into that for a while, switching between it and the milk like a gourmet between filet mignon and Margaux, growling and flicking his ropelike tail.
“Why do you feed him?” I said. “He could clearly kill his own deer…”
“He’s just a kitten, even afraid of birds. Used to sleep on our bed, before the wind project. Better than a heating pad… I don’t know where he stays now…far from the turbines…”
After he’d eaten he popped up on her lap and purred radiantly while she scratched behind his ears. He scanned me with a more benevolent eye, and I decided maybe he was going to let me stay.
A few minutes later comes another thump at the door and in rumbles Lobo, a large black-brown wolf dog with a white belly. Lexie rubbed her down with a towel while she panted happily, shook snow everywhere, licked Lexie’s face, sniffed me and licked mine too.
Lexie fed her a tray of hamburger, peas and rice which she gulped down, tail still wagging. She shook snow one more time then scratched at the door and Lexie let her out into the swirling gale.
“Sometimes,” Lexie sat down again, “I think, since this all happened, that when people aren’t supposed to be together… bad things happen to them.”
“Even if you hadn’t been with Bucky, he’d still’ve come back here. These bastards still would’ve built the turbines.”
“No, no, that’s not true. He came back here because of me. Otherwise he would’ve stayed with you guys.” Meaning SF.
“So?”
“He came back… Because of you.”
I looked at her drawn face, wondered at its paleness. This effervescent, brilliant young woman was rotting away and I didn’t know why. “Nonsense.”
“He wanted to get me far away. So I’d forget you.”
In a moment it had all changed. I reached out for her, not in lust or love but condolence. She brushed my hand away. “I’ve made my bed.” She stood. “And now I’m lying in it.”
“You and Bucky…”
She gave me a consoling look, that I should be the last to know. “What started out as fun – I thought I could change him – after a while wasn’t fun anymore. And then it became duty. For us both.”
She stood arms crossed in the middle of the kitchen on the worn black-and-white chessboard linoleum, and I had a crazy vision of Joan of Arc on the pyre. “So I told myself I’ll live like my Mom does,” she said. “Forty years, her and my Dad. What started out as love became annoyance then hate and now’s a sort of grim compromise till death.”
I thought of my own Pa and Mom, the intensity of their caring for each other. “It doesn’t have to be like that.”
She looked at me fiercely. “It doesn’t?” Lips crimped she faced away then back at me, tears like jewels in her eyes. “Oh Sam why’d you have to shoot that woman?” She crossed to the window. “Going to blizzard all night.” She looked back at me. “I’ll never give Bucky up. Not now.”
“Nor will I.” I sensed we’d crossed some Rubicon I’d always regret. The absolute impossibility of saving Bucky, of saving Maine, crashed in on me. Not since prison have I felt such presentiment of failure.
I stood behind her massaging her shoulders where the neck joins, all those hard tendons that pull the shoulders and head apart, the raw pain of modern life.
I could feel what she felt, through my palms and the undersides of my fingers. Could touch the pain. Soothe it, release it, soften the muscles, ligaments and tendons and draw the pain away.
I kissed her forehead. We stood for an instant cheek to cheek the way we had so many times, her lithe form matched to mine. She stepped back, looked at me steadily. “I think I married Bucky because it was the closest I could get to you.”
I repeated almost what she’d said before: “Look where it got you.”
She watched me. “You were in for twenty years. What was I supposed to do?”
“I told you not to wait.”
“I didn’t.”
Not bothering to put on my coat I went out across the barnyard to the bunkhouse, shut the door behind me and flicked on the light. Snow had drifted under the door and around the window sash. The fire in the woodstove was out. Without undressing I climbed under the frigid blankets and tried to sleep.
Already I was tired of winter. But in five weeks I’d be in Tahiti for the Tsunami.
So whatever I did for Bucky had to be done by then.
Flicking on my headlamp I opened The Maine Woods from Lexie’s bookcase. It relates Thoreau’s three 1850s explorations in a birch bark canoe of the great wilds of northern Maine, guided by the Indian Joe Polis, crossing lakes, wandering the primeval forest and running rivers and rapids. One day they put ashore on Moosehead Lake to climb Mount Kineo,
The clouds breaking away a little, we had a glorious wild view, as we ascended, of the broad lake with its fluctuating surface and numerous forest-clad islands, extending beyond our sight both north and south, and the boundless forest… and enveloping nameless mountains in succession…
This “glorious wild view” that was soon to be destroyed by thousands of industrial wind turbines all around Moosehead Lake, the wildest and most beautiful great lake in the eastern US.
Unless we could save it. How?
Claws scratched the plank door. I got up and cracked it open, snow blasting in. A white-clad
Lobo looked up at me encouragingly. “Where you been?” I said as she squeezed in, shook snow everywhere and took over the bed. I climbed in and shoved her huge weight aside. “You have to learn to share,” I said. “Just like everybody else.”
I could swear Lobo snickered. At my naïveté, no doubt.
Alibi
RONNIE DALT HAD BEEN SHOT late one night as he crossed the parking lot of his office at Maine Environmental Resources in Augusta. He was struck by a single bullet from a large caliber rifle fired from a line of trees uphill from the parking lot, at the edge of a small park. The bullet had hit the wallet in Dalt’s chest pocket, mushroomed and torn through his chest, pulverizing his heart and one lobe of his left lung.
The angle of fire was such that the bullet exited his body and buried itself in the parking lot, easy to find.
Supposedly Dalt had been dead by the time he hit the ground, but that’s unlikely. From what I’ve seen the brain continues to register till it runs out of oxygen, which can take a minute or two, depending on blood loss. I’ve seen “dead” men look me in the eye and have watched their consciousness fade till it’s as dead as the rest of them.
Shooting an unarmed person is a nauseating and life-destroying act – not just their life but yours too. For just as there are no good people who stay in politics because it sucks the good out of them, there are no good people who have executed others – it takes you halfway down the road to Hell.
Apparently the rifle’s muzzle blast had attracted no notice, given the time, with most folks in bed and in an area of Augusta where trucks and motorcycles gear down to climb the hill. Plus the shooter probably had a suppressor on his barrel which would have minimized the sound.
So Ronnie’s half-frozen corpse wasn’t found till 06:10 next morning when the snowplow came to clear the new six inches that had fallen during the night. Due to the chilled corpse it had been near-impossible, apparently, to determine time of death, but it had probably been after 22:00.
When the cops dug the mushroomed slug out of Ronnie’s parking lot they sent it to the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network lab at Mass State Police in Maynard, where a computer program matched its barrel striations with the slugs taken from the turbines Bucky’d shot out. It identified all three as Barnes 180-grain solid copper slugs, fired from ASYM casings like the one the police found in the snow where the shooter had stood. And since Bucky’d already said he’d shot the three turbines it was an obvious step to charge him with Ronnie’s death too.
The .308 is one of the most common high-power cartridges, from which the NATO 7.62x5 mm round was developed, as in the M16 and other military rifles. There are endless variations on bullet size and composition, and I didn’t yet know enough about the Barnes bullet dug from the parking lot to determine what it was. Or how sure that the bullet which killed Ronnie had really been from the same gun Bucky used to shoot out his three turbines.
Under normal circumstances there would be endless problems with this scenario. Simple criteria could be established: bullet size, and other “class characteristics” like whether the rifling is left-hand or right-hand, on the distance between grooves, and perhaps markings unique to that barrel.
But any bullet hitting a wallet, traversing a body and burying itself in asphalt was going to be seriously deformed, and thus its striations difficult to analyze. Moreover, how could they prove that a bullet badly mushroomed by smashing into a steel turbine still showed the striations necessary to identify it?
That apparently wasn’t a problem in Ronnie’s shooting, because the police had found a casing where Ronnie Dalt was shot. Which Bucky never would have done. And it was the same as the ASYM casing they’d found where Bucky’d shot out the turbines, where again he would have, knowing Bucky, picked up his empties.
I checked the closet where Bucky kept his guns and ammo and found two boxes of ASYM .308s. And what was unusual about the Barnes bullets, I soon noticed, were the three rings cut into the bullet’s shank, that would make them very easy to identify.
I shut down my computer and went outside to think, came back. “Show me,” I said to Lexie, “where Bucky hid the gun.”
SNOWSHOEING ACROSS the pasture we took turns breaking trail but the snow was so deep we were soon exhausted. It got even harder climbing the mountain, though Lobo ploughed through the snow as if it were hardly there.
The bare-boughed beech, maple and birch trees threw shadows like prison bars across the snow. With each upward step you slid halfway back. The snowshoes grew heavier when snow piled atop them; you had to whack them against trees to shake it off. They were ancient, bent willow and rawhide, the way the Penobscots had made them. “We should be wearing orange,” I said, looking for an excuse to take a breather.
“Nobody hunts this mountain any more.” Lexie was out of breath too. “Not since the turbines. Deer’ve gone. Moose too. Infrasound.”
“When we go back,” I took a another breath. “We’re gonna find you another place to live.”
She’d knelt to tighten a snowshoe strap, looked up at me. “No way.”
“It’s driving you crazy. I’ve never seen you look so bad. Even the dog and cat…”
She stood, eyes on mine. “I’m not moving. Not till Bucky’s free.”
“What if he doesn’t get free?”
“We’ll see about that.” She turned and pushed up the mountain.
A half hour later the slope eased and the trees thinned. We broke out on a ridge which looked carpet-bombed. For a quarter mile across it had been clearcut, razed, and dynamited, nothing left but herbicided brush and scarred stumps. A eroding, oil-puddled dirt road had been bulldozed through it. The turbine towers rose so high their tops vanished in the clouds. I pointed at the three closest – so tall you were practically looking vertically at them – and whose blades weren’t moving. “Those the ones he shot?”
“A clip in each.”
“Damn!” I said, impressed. At over fifty stories they were nearly half the height of the Empire State Building, so it wasn’t easy for a shooter to compensate for drift and wind, particularly in a near-vertical trajectory.
“He checked out the manufacturers’ specs to see where to aim.” She turned to Lobo who sat back in the trees watching us. “It’s okay, honey,” she called, “you go home.”
With a bound Lobo raced downhill. “She won’t go any closer to the turbines,” Lexie said. “She used to love it up here…”
Beyond Bucky’s three dead towers rows of about twenty more were turning steadily, their huge blades flashing. Even from a mile away the sound was a low grinding moan, gnashing of steel and wail of huge blades spinning two hundred miles an hour.
“The wind companies,” she said, “call them bird Cuisinarts… They think it’s funny.”
“They would.”
“There he is!” she pointed upward.
I looked up seeing nothing. “Who?”
“The eagle. He’s been flying for months over the turbine that killed his mate… that one,” she pointed again.
Now I saw him. A dot atop the sky. “He hasn’t left?”
“I think he’s waiting. Hoping she’ll come back.”
“The bastards who did this,” I said, “should be jailed.”
“Jailed?” she laughed. “They have Obama’s thirty-year eagle kill permit. To kill as many eagles as they want, bald eagles, golden eagles, as well as all the other raptors, the hawks, owls, ospreys, some of them near extinction but no problem, kill them all… Over there,” she added, “that’s the turbine that took out a whole flock of Canada geese last fall. On their way south…”
“Show me where Bucky hid the rifle.”
She led me down the far side of the mountain along a streambed that had washed out with erosion from the construction above, to a low cliff in the hill. Between the white birch, yellow-barked beech and gnarled gray-brown maples the wind had scattered dead leaves on the snow. At an overhang she brushed aside snow and lifted a plywood sheet. Un
der it was a waterproof gun box that when she flipped open was empty.
“So why’d Bucky hide it here?”
“It was his Dad’s gun, a pre-’64 Winchester. Didn’t want the cops to impound it.”
“So whoever took the gun killed this guy Dalt?”
She shrugged. “Maybe somebody saw Bucky put it there – no, they couldn’t have because it was night… Maybe they stumbled on it, took it home and sold it to the one who killed him. The cops say they’ve been looking but no .308 around here’s been sold.”
“Not that they’d know.”
“Yeah, not that they’d know.”
SO WHAT was I doing? Trying to find an alibi for Bucky. Simple as that.
I wasn’t doing it for Bucky. Sure, he was SF; I’d do it for that alone. He’d do exactly the same for me. No matter we didn’t like each other.
I tend to play loose with regulations but Bucky adored them. He was, to my eyes, a duty freak. One who can’t stand to be happy. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he saluted Lexie before they made love. Or at least checked regulations for time allowed on target.
So was I doing it for Lexie? Seeing her again made me so hungry for her I would have invented any reason to be there. But it wasn’t that.
The real reason was simple: Bucky says he didn’t murder this guy Dalt. So someone else did. And they were getting away with it, too. While Bucky faced life.
That Bucky hadn’t killed him was so obvious, instinctively, that as I’d told him I didn’t need proof. And I also knew if Bucky had killed this guy, the guy had it coming, and Bucky would’ve said so.
So if Bucky didn’t kill him, who did?
Bucky’d said he went to see his Uncle Silas in Jefferson the night Dalt was killed in Augusta, over an hour apart. But the problem was when the cops talked to Silas he couldn’t remember. “He ain’t always in his head,” Bucky had said. “But what you expect – he’s ninety-seven.”
When I called Silas he didn’t seem forgetful at all. “Sure, I’m here all afternoon. C’mon down… We can talk story – isn’t that what they say in Hawaii?”