KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  I was beginning to like this woman. She hadn’t bothered to say goodbye, certainly no kiss in a half-parted bathrobe through the open door. She had apparently just fucked his brains out and left him to his fate.

  With that in mind I waited. And yes, at 8:41 she was out the door in a gray wool coat, furry indigo scarf and tall black boots. She hustles round the house to the barn which was itself a Victorian masterpiece, from which she backs a white Saab, the iconic Maine car till it went iconically bankrupt. I grind Bucky’s truck carefully into first and off we go in gay pursuit.

  Up the hill we rattle where my ancestor Elias used to bring the family cow to graze each morning then across his pasture where the freeway now howls its incessant wrath, past a rocky pine-forested ridge that got dynamited to build the Augusta “Maul”, and down a back street past a Sherman tank at the American Legion Hall to a parking lot behind the State Capitol – a 1930’s Mussolini-ish gray granite block in which the concept of beauty is entirely absent.

  Trying to look nonchalant and legislative I follow her into this monstrous edifice but there’s cops and a body scanner that she prances through and picks up her keys and iPhone and I head back out to Bucky’s 150. Being numb with cold and wanting a few Country Kitchen doughnuts and coffee I drive to the closest café and try to figure what next.

  The café windows were steamy and the linoleum table top was cracked. The walls were stained, the chairs worn, the floor aged and discolored. But it was sort of clean, Clap-ton on the speakers, and the coffee was strong. And there’s no way to beat a Country Kitchen doughnut, except in Paris maybe. And like the French who have pastries and coffee for breakfast, if we all converted to donuts and coffee perhaps like the French we would grow thin, live longer, and have a better sex life.

  But this wasn’t getting me anywhere to helping Bucky. I had a shock wondering maybe I wasn’t doing enough to free him. Because if he went down for the long haul then Lexie and I could pick up where we’d left off. It was a cold thought, and I hated myself for it, for even imagining it might be true.

  Not the way you treat the asshole who saved your life.

  The only way I could be with Lexie was if we got Bucky out, then we’d all be free to do what we chose. It seemed impossible.

  Then I actually had an idea.

  I FEAR THE LAW but reminded myself I’d done my time and got freed and both cases dismissed. In reality I wasn’t a former jailbird at all. But the law doesn’t play by reality.

  So I didn’t want my ID recorded (they’d notice the Hawaii driver’s license). Because the first rule of a strategic life is be invisible even when you don’t need to be. Though something was telling me I needed to be that now.

  I drove back to the Capitol wondering how to elude security, wandered the grounds, sat on a bench, feeling camera eyes on me. Tourist-like I ambled back inside and discovered the basement cafeteria was accessible without going through security. It was warm and smelled of lots of good things so I had another coffee, drowsed a bit, and woke when people started coming in, all chatter and high heels, trays slapping down on the counter rails. It was 11:32, the first wave for lunch.

  What were the chances Abigail would come in? What was I going to do if she did?

  Then she came in.

  Scoundrels

  SHE WORE tall black boots and a plaid cashmere skirt that ended above her knees, a yellow silk blouse part unbuttoned and thin enough you could see the pale bra beneath it. She had long auburn hair and an insolent sexy walk that looked unintentional, and she moved from her hips like a dancer. She bought a sandwich on dark bread and a coffee and as she walked past I said “Abigail?” and she slowed and glanced down.

  “I’ve met you somewhere,” I said, dumbly.

  She looked me over. “I don’t think so.”

  “Here, maybe, some political function –”

  “Everything here is a political function. But I remember faces…”

  I stood. “Pono Hawkins. I can’t remember where but know I’ve met you. You were working for some Senator…”

  She took this in. “I can’t place your accent.”

  “Hawaii. You been there?”

  She shook her head.

  “So we met here,” I persevered. “Somewhere?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Visiting family.” I thought of Bucky. “And friends.” I gestured at my table. “Can you sit a moment?”

  She paused then put down her tray. “I’ll be right back.” She got one of those little Half-n-Half cups from the condiments, sat and looked into my eyes. Hers were violet and unblinking. “I don’t remember you.”

  “I’m even getting your last name… Dale? Dalt?”

  Her face hardened. “That’s not my name anymore.”

  I took a chance. “What is it now?”

  The light in her eyes dimmed, and for an instant she looked lethal. Then her smile was like sun breaking through low clouds. “So if you knew me by that name, it was a while ago.” She glanced down at her tray. “I must join my friends.” Her hand darted across the table. “Pleased to meet you, Mr.?”

  “Most folks call me Pono.”

  “Pono?”

  “Hawaiian for doing the right thing, in accord with goodness in the world.”

  “My,” she lifted her tray, “you must be very busy.”

  “I’m trying to remember…”

  “I don’t forget faces. Or voices. I’ve never seen you before.”

  What more could I say? That I knew about her dead husband? About her? That would ruin everything. But she was leaving, I had to do something. “Please talk to me again? I’ll meet you anywhere you like, anytime –”

  Her eyes checked the room. “What’s this really about?”

  “I’m mystified too. That I can’t remember where we met. But I know we did.”

  She turned to go. “Abigail!” I called. She halted, glanced back. I wrote my name and number on a napkin; she took it and walked away.

  ROUTE 202 between Augusta and Lewiston is one of those typical Maine high-speed two-lane highways affording glimpses of stunning landscapes between used car lots, rusty junkyards, hick piles, trailer subdivisions, closed restaurants, strip malls, clearcuts, shuttered gas stations, isolated homes and a general economy that has, in every sense, gone south.

  Once a thriving textile manufacturing town on the banks of the Androscoggin River, Lewiston like many Maine mill towns has spent the last fifty years sinking further and further into decay as its industry departed for the southern states then for even cheaper and more toxic locations like Bangladesh, China and Honduras. The vast brick textile mills remain, some nearly a quarter mile long and several stories high, beautiful and empty, prey to pyromaniacs and urban renewal.

  In the midst of this, among lovely Victorian homes and second-hand stores is the Bates campus, rolling lawns and simple architecture, one of America’s best small colleges with an astonishing list of prominent alumni and an unwavering dedication to the humanities. Not that the humanities are much in vogue any more.

  Why was I here? To see a Bates journalism professor named Thurston Donnelly, who’d once had a student named Sylvia Gordon. A few months ago I’d gone out to surf early one morning on Oahu and bumped into Sylvia. She was wearing near-transparent red underwear, face down in the waves, very cold and very dead.

  I’d nearly lost my life and risked a life prison sentence to find who killed her and why. She’d been an investigative journalist on the track of a big and very crooked wind power story when she died. Even though I’d never known her alive, I’d fallen in love with her beautiful mind, unflagging determination and magnificent humanity.

  I was hoping Thurston Donnelly might give me a few clues to what was happening with wind power in Maine. Given that the Wind Mafia folks who’d killed Sylvia in Hawaii were still alive and well in Maine. In fact they were running the Legislature, and I thought maybe Professor Donnelly could explain me why.

  Rotund, with a chubby
face, merry small eyes and a smile that was pinched yet kindly, he was hardly who I’d expected. As he spoke he tugged often at his full gray beard, and in his voice was a reflective kindness that reminded me of photos of rabbis in Auschwitz caring for their flock when they knew they were all doomed.

  “She was one of my favorite students, Sylvia.” His voice skipped a beat, the way folks who’ve had a stroke sometimes do. “She had this most piercing mind, yet she was so kind and unassuming…” He pushed himself up in his armchair. “She had no idea what a remarkable person she was.” He looked out the window at the driving snow. “It’s sad to speak of her in the past tense… She came from Hawaii, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of course.” Strangely he reached out and patted my hand. I didn’t feel transgressed upon. But it pained my heart to be digging Sylvia out of the grave with our words. “We got the bastards that did it.”

  “Did it?”

  “Killed her. The scum working for the wind companies.”

  Again he glanced out the window though the picture was the same. “That won’t bring her back.”

  “That’s the worst part.” Despite myself I glanced out the window too, wanting to change the subject. “Does it always snow like this?”

  “Not usually in summer.”

  “Why does anyone live here? Christ you can’t even take a leak for fear your dick’ll freeze…”

  “It’s lovely in spring.”

  “Yeah, with the black flies.”

  He glanced at me over folded fingers. “So why are you here?”

  “Half my family’s from here since three hundred years ago when it was a bloody wilderness. I visited my uncle several summers here, a winter once.” I sat back. “Can you explain me the situation, how the wind industry got so powerful here?”

  “It snuck in through the back door. And now it’s taking over the state.” He sighed. “It’s hard for Mainers to realize they’re being screwed. Because Mainers tend to be honest and fair with each other, we assume our elected officials are fair with us too. But they’re giving Maine the shaft and walking away with millions. And the environmental groups too, they don’t really understand electricity or economics or biology, but they’re getting lots of money from the wind companies and they’ve got lots of fine ideas they never challenge – like do these damn windmills do any good, which of course they don’t… And the worst part is they’re taking funding from solutions that would work, like rooftop solar.”

  “Somebody in Hawaii once said pro-wind folks are like people who don’t believe in evolution: no matter how many facts you give them they won’t listen.”

  “It is a religion, this pro-wind thing. Like Islam. And like Islam it relies on faith, not knowledge.” He went to the window, stared at the wailing snow. “And like Islam it’s poisoning our world.”

  THE GIST of what Professor Donnelly explained was the industrial wind companies target states whose lawmakers they can buy cheaply, usually those with rural populations, hopefully impoverished.

  He added that the nationwide State Integrity Investigation just ranked Maine 46th in government ethics and gave it an F for corruption. “There are absolutely no rules governing how much money a legislator can take in bribes, and no limits on how much state money they can appropriate for their own use.”

  So these scoundrels shoved the Wind Law through a sleepy Legislature as an emergency measure. With no way to reduce the resulting catastrophe, and with no environmental analysis or citizen input allowed. Most Legislators, including the committee that drafted it, have since admitted they never read it, that it was totally a product of the industrial wind developers and their “green” allies.

  “In essence,” he said, “Maine is an oligarchy.”

  “What’s that?” I says, not wanting to miss something.

  “When a state or country is governed by very few.”

  Now, he went on, all the southern New England states whose residents don’t want windmills near them – Heavens No!!! – are ganging up to dynamite, clearcut and devastate the magnificent wild ridges and peaks of Maine with thousands of howling turbines to send a trickle of power across thousand-mile transmission swaths to their power-greedy homes.

  “Ever hear of Aarhus?” He spelled it. “It’s a United Nations resolution that you can’t build a wind project without local approval and environmental review.”

  “That’s all people here are asking for!”

  He smiled. “But the US won’t sign it.”

  “Like we say in Hawaii,” I told him. “Follow the money.”

  ON MY WAY to Abigail’s Mitchell calls. “It’s a black or dark green snowmobile. Probably a Yamaha, can’t be sure.”

  “You got satpix?”

  “But the cloud cover came in. Your snowmobile went north along the ridge then down a long hairpin trail toward a big old house –”

  “Jane’s farm.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Then what?”

  “Before it got to the road it took another snowmobile trail west, then the clouds came in and I lost it.”

  THAT NIGHT outside Abigail’s the white Saab rumbles uphill and swings into the driveway. A black Dodge Ramcharger on high wheels slides in behind her. A tall heavyset bearded guy gets out and they go in the house. The upstairs light flicks on.

  Lexie once told me that the size of a guy’s truck is often inversely proportional to the size of his privates. “Like they say in Texas,” she added, “big hat, no cattle? So it’s big truck, little dick.” A large truck, she’d said, especially on fat tires, is also related to the tendency to hit women, carry a handgun, watch lots of TV sports, and have the amazingly idiotic idea that men are tougher and more important than women.

  But maybe this guy was different. Maybe he was so afraid he wasn’t a man he wanted the truck to prove he was? In any case I’d seen enough, started Bucky’s 150 and headed for Lexie’s farm, more reassured than ever that six weeks after her husband’s death Abigail was managing to find closure.

  Lexie had two loaves of bread rising in clay bowls when I got to the farm. She had corrected a pile of chemistry exams and was now sitting by the kitchen woodstove doing needlepoint while she talked to her sister Emily in Michigan. I don’t understand how women can do needlepoint and cook dinner and make bread and talk to their sisters and keep an eye on the fires in three stoves and make sure all the chemistry exams have been corrected and the battery chargers are connected to the two vehicles outside, while all the time they’re so laid back and easy, when for me to do any one of those things is a stress and to do two or more probably impossible. But thank God most religions preach that men are the superior sex or otherwise I’d worry.

  So that night I tell Lexie about Abigail. And that something about her seems out of sync with being a new widow.

  Lexie ruminates a while. The fire crackles, throwing out blasts of heat. Then Lexie slaps her coffee cup on the table, leaving a little tannish splash on the red and white plastic.

  “Pono,” she says, “when was the last time you got laid?”

  Oh Jesus. It’s been days, worse than staggering across the Sahara with no water. Not since a hot afternoon with Kim then a long fun night with Charity before I left Hawaii. “Little while,” I says primly, then added, to be mean, “What about you?”

  She jabs a finger at me, this beautiful bitch I’ve loved so much and who’s loved me so much then ditched me for all the right reasons. And who I’d love to make love with right now.

  “Pono,” she says, “you have to fuck this girl.”

  That was back in the good times, before terror replaced joy, and all hopes for Maine’s future and Bucky’s vanished under a well-funded hurricane of public relations, evil lawyers, credulous media, bribes, rich scoundrels and political connivance.

  Too Easy

  IT TOOK ALL MORNING to get Bucky’s old green Kawasaki snowmobile running. Even then it spit black smoke and orange flames and ran ragged as a clogge
d lawnmower. The barn was so cold I hated to take my gloves off but otherwise couldn’t clean and set the plugs and points. I washed the oil filter with gasoline and drove the truck to Cumberland Farms for a gallon of SAE 5-20 and changed the Kawasaki’s oil.

  It finally stopped refusing to start, and after it idled a few minutes I drove it to Cumberland Farms and filled it up. It was a nasty big blathering machine fit to deafen you forever and remove all the cartilage between your vertebrae.

  Back at Lexie’s I grabbed the .243 and drove the Kawasaki two miles along the roadside past Jane’s farm and up the snowmobile trail a half mile to where my shooter’s recent track came down the mountain and swung west through a willow copse and across a frozen swamp. Keeping the .243 on safety I followed my shooter’s track.

  We crossed the swamp and over a low knoll and through the young conifers of a regrowing clearcut. The Kawasaki’s noise was so all-encompassing I could hear nothing else, could not tell who was coming. So every few hundred feet I shut it off and listened, hearing only the wind in the coni- fers, the tick tick of the cooling engine and the hiss where it touched the snow.

  A mile ahead another track joined in, also going west. Then another, then two more, all more recent than my shooter’s. Often his was erased, then would appear a brief moment between the other tracks then be crushed out again as they braided back and forth, new ones coming and going.

  Ahead was a long low building, like an old roadside garage. Frayed red tarpaper walls and a rusty galvanized roof. A big hand-lettered sign, MISSALONKEE HARD RIDERS.

  The parking lot was spider-webbed with tracks and spotted with oil puddles on the flattened snow. The building was locked, but through the small windows I could see five picnic tables with chairs, a woodstove, a long table in the front, and incongruously an old clawfoot bathtub. On the wall behind the long desk hung a map showing a network of trails, ponds and lakes.

  I tried to follow my shooter’s trail another half mile but there were now too many identical tracks from similar machines.