KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  She pulled up a chair, list in one hand, yellow pad and red pen in the other. One by one she explained why the other ones – people she knew – didn’t do it. Some were too old or didn’t snowmobile much anymore or were away in Florida right now. Or didn’t have hunting licenses and probably couldn’t shoot this well.

  The three she picked out were all veterans. One was a forty-seven year old retired cop from Bangor, another drove the local tow truck, and the third, Titus McKee, was a semi truck mechanic and ex-Ranger. “In one of the photos Mitchell sent he was still in uniform.” She turned her screen so I could see. “On it are three Sharpshooter medals.”

  He was a big brawny guy with a hard jaw and harder eyes. In the other two pix he was older, bearded, even more wide-shouldered and truculent. “You know anything about him?” I said.

  “I’ll call Don and Viv. Haven’t talked to them in two years.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “They were the first to sell out to WindPower. And now it’s so bad they have to leave. Serves them right.” She found a tattered phone book, peering into it.

  “Lexie, you need reading glasses.”

  “Do not.” She dialed a number. “’Lo, Don? It’s Lexie. Yeah, me. Sorry to hear you have to leave… Yeah, we hope Bucky’s getting out soon – it’s ridiculous, what they’re saying. Hey, someone was askin about Titus McKee. Ain’t he your neighbor?”

  They talked a minute more and she shut down. “Titus McKee is a local tough guy, repairs big trucks. Don says he can hit a duck on the wing with an iron sight 30-30.”

  I thought of all the shooter’s near misses snapping past my head. This was my shooter. I knew it.

  And I was going to get him.

  Maybe tonight.

  ABOUT 30 SNOWMOBILES were parked in front of the Missalonkee Hard Riders club for the February members’ meeting. In the quarter moonlight they all looked dark.

  It was 19:21. Lexie’d dropped me off beyond Jane’s on the snowmobile trail, and I’d walked the hard crust all the way to the clubhouse in less than an hour. When I reached the ridge above the clubhouse I’d made myself a nice snow hole and crawled inside to watch the fun.

  I could see directly into the main room, the picnic tables, metal chairs and the long desk at the front. The sweet smells of oak smoke and baked beans and the melody of “Penny Lane” drifted uphill on the wind. Inside, people in snowmobile boots moved back and forth carrying paper plates and beer cans, finding seats around the picnic tables, talking and laughing.

  The bathtub was full of beer cans and ice. There were about twenty liquor bottles on the long desk, piles of plastic glasses and paper plates. “Penny Lane” finished and “All You Need Is Love” started with a trumpet blare.

  After a while I slid out of my hole and circled west around the clubhouse to the snowmobiles in front. Watching the door I began to check out their registration stickers with my penlight. About halfway through I found Titus McKee’s. It was a deep cherry color, almost black.

  I stifled the urge to sabotage it. First of all, he might not be the shooter. And second, why warn him somebody doesn’t like him?

  Crossing round the back I eased toward the small window behind the woodstove. Sparks and cinders were dropping from the top of the flue onto the snow.

  At the table nearest the window, with a plate of beans and hot dogs and two cans of Miller Lite, sat Titus McKee.

  “You can’t even come out to piss!” said a voice behind me, “but you run into some peeping tom.”

  Three big guys, open-fisted, smelling of beer. With the Beatles so loud I hadn’t heard them. Caught in a corner of the building, pinned between them. “I was thinking of joining,” I said. “Came up to have a look before I went inside.”

  “You was thinking of joining,” the middle one said cheerfully. “Who asked you, fuckface, to join us?”

  The one on the right had something long and heavy in his right hand, a baseball bat. Even punching the other two in the gut I couldn’t break past him.

  I leaped at the guy with the bat knocking him down and sprinted for the woods dragging the middle guy on my back till I elbowed him off, the third guy coming after me, one of them yelling for the people inside as I plunged and scrambled downhill through deep snow, my pursuer and the rumble of snowmobiles behind me.

  Death Sentence

  ICOULDN’T OUTRUN them. And with their headlights they’d easily pick up my thigh-deep trail and run me down. I scrambled left through blowdown maples and ash, a maze of crisscrossed trunks no snowmobile could get through, ran down to the stream and raced up its icy slippery moss-frozen bed to a bridge as the last of the machines snarled downhill on my trail.

  Three snowmobiles still sat in front of the clubhouse. The lights were bright inside, people moving, a guy with a phone to his ear. I ducked along the front of the clubhouse, picked the oldest snowmobile as most likely to have a standard ignition I could wire.

  The clubhouse door swung open and I dove back in the hemlocks. It was a woman in a stocking hat. She stood still, listening. “They’re still chasing him,” she called, and went back inside.

  But she was wrong: some of the snowmobiles were coming back up the mountain.

  I cut the wires, twisted them back and forth with cold-deadened fingers till finally it caught in a blare of burnt oil. Not switching on the headlights I gassed out of the parking lot and fast downhill toward Route 220, two guys running down the snowmobile track after me.

  The track was crowned, high and icy, and I kept hitting the cutbank of ice and rock and spinning nearly off the track on the other side, trying to glance back and judge the distance of the headlights racing after me.

  This machine’s tread was ragged too, didn’t cut into the ice. I pushed it harder, testing the edge of how fast it’d go with jumping the track and smashing into the trees. The noise was enormous, filled the night and added to the terror and the knowledge of my mistake.

  The headlights were coming up fast behind me – they were more powerful machines than mine – funny how you think these thoughts in instants while your brain is trying to figure what to do – and I cut left off the snowmobile trail into dark timber.

  It was thick spruce and hemlock with low nasty boughs ripping my face as I hunted a way through them, hearing now the roars of my pursuers, their lights flitting across the trunks.

  I drove into a deep hemlock thicket, boughs and sapling snapping, needles in my face, out the other side and skittered downslope and across a deep brook, engine choking as we climbed the other bank through brambles and willows across Route 220 and on the far shoulder to the Wilson Corner stoplight, stowed the bike behind the Irving station and waited at the crosswalk.

  Snowmobile headlights were racing along the shoulder toward me. The light was green, cars and trucks flashing through. The headlights got nearer; three snowmobiles followed my tracks into the Irving station. The three guys dismounted and followed my machine’s track around back.

  If I ran across the highway into the woods they’d quickly run me down.

  The light turned red, bloodying the frozen road. A logging truck down-geared to a shuddering stop beside me, brakes hissing and valves rattling. I walked back alongside the truck to its rear, jumped up on a slippery frozen log and scrambled forward to a niche between a huge pile of young logs.

  The light turned green. The trucker ground into low first and chug-chugged down the road working up the gears, and as we curved away I saw the three guys get on their machines and head back the way they’d come.

  Now my problem was how to get off this truck. Often a logging truck will go a hundred miles before it stops again, particularly at night with few folks on the road, and if the mill is far away.

  But these skinny frozen logs, when I felt and smelled and saw them, were all hardwoods so probably headed for the firewood market, to a local wood seller who would cut and split the logs and either sell them green or store them till next fall and call them dry.

  It�
�d been minus eighteen when Lexie’d dropped me off, so now with the wind chill from the truck doing sixty down Route 220 , it had to be minus fifty in my niche. But I couldn’t move, fearing the trucker had a rear camera focused on his load, would see any motion.

  The wind wailed past, digging into my ribs, my frozen cheeks, hands, elbows and feet. My phone rang like a messenger from another world, then again and again, but I let it go, too cold to move, not daring to open my coat. Strips of torn bark writhed along the dead trunks and lashed my face, the truck trailer groaned and the tires rumbled under the tons of trees, the trunks cracked and shifted around me. But despite all that had just happened it was sad to lie among these young lives sacrificed to heat human homes and thicken the atmosphere with CO2 and soot.

  I began to wonder if I might have got away from the snowmobilers only to freeze to death on this truck. But that wouldn’t happen – I could always crawl forward till he saw me, or could bang on the cab roof.

  So I lay there in the howling darkness realizing how lucky I was.

  I WAS EVEN LUCKIER ten minutes later when he pulls up at a bar called The Ro..dway in big red slanted letters on the roof and the “a” missing. A parking lot of pickups and trailer trucks, a few Subarus, Saabs and Volvos from the other side of the social divide, country music blaring out the door and it felt like heaven inside in the heat and smells and sounds of life.

  The clock said ten-thirty and the place was full, lots of tough-looking logger types and cute mean-looking women. Lots of tattoos. So I felt right at home standing by the heat vent with my triple Tanqueray martini in a beer glass.

  Two cops come in while I’m calling Lexie. I head for the back while the cops talk to the bartenders and as they turn to scan the crowd I duck into the men’s room.

  But they would check this too, I realized, so knocked on the women’s. No answer. I went in and locked the door hoping they were less likely to look here.

  A minute later they did open the men’s room door and go in. Then their voices trickled away and I cautiously stepped outside. No one.

  My phone beeped. Lexie. “What happened?” she said. “We got cut off.”

  “Yeah we did,” I said, aching to be there, in that warm kitchen, with an old friend. Aching to be safe.

  SHE PICKED ME UP in half an hour. Despite all my peregrinations I was only eighteen miles from her place, having gone first south to the snowmobilers then north on the logging truck. I sat by her woodstove basking in its heat, trying to figure what to do next.

  “Your face’s all tore up,” she said.

  “From driving through those hemlocks.” I shivered; it didn’t seem possible I’d escaped. “But what would they’ve done,” I wondered, “if they’d caught me? What’s the penalty for looking in a window? When I could’ve said I was lost and hoping to get warm?”

  “With the cops already wanting you? You crazy?”

  “I’m no closer to having a chat with Titus McKee.”

  “You should ask Mitchell to run a check on him.”

  My phone rang again. Oh yeah, I remembered. It had rung many times during my trip with the logs. “This may be him,” I said.

  It was Pa.

  “CANCER,” he says. “I got a few weeks. A month, maybe.”

  Oh Jesus Christ. What can I do to make this not happen? “Oh fucking Jesus, Pa.”

  “Agent Orange, just like all the other guys. Gets you sooner or later.”

  “What kind of cancer?”

  “Pancreas. I didn’t wanna tell you. But figured you’d be pissed I didn’t.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow night, Pa.”

  “Screw that. You take care of your friend, there, that guy in prison.”

  “He’s impossible. I’ve given up on him.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’ll tell you about it when I get there.”

  “Funny, me and the other guys who made it through the war, years later we all get killed by our own weapons… Like stepping on an old Claymore.”

  “Tomorrow by sunset,” I said. “Just leave the light on.”

  LEXIE GOT ME a 06:45 Delta flight from Portland to Atlanta and another arriving Kona at 17:42. I’d leave Bucky’s truck in long term parking at PWM and didn’t give a damn what C. Hart had said about staying in Maine.

  So Lexie and I sat there at the kitchen table not saying much. Remembering our history of unhappy separations.

  When we’d been together five years ago, before my second Afghanistan tour and then my first stretch, we went one week to Waipio to see Pa. He was instantly delighted by this smart, amazingly hot woman, and she fell for his scratchy voice and rough, ironic strength. We had a wonderful time with his weed and cane liquor and eating fresh opakapaka off the rocks, doused in Pa’s fresh lime, with fresh lettuce, leeks and tomatoes from his garden and papayas, passion fruit and mangoes from his trees, talking and talking, going back in the past, trying to share and understand life.

  Lying later that night beside Lexie in the camp bed on Pa’s thatched veranda I wondered what Pa dreamed of, alone in that back bedroom under the eaves, why he’d never married again. With Lexie all warm and silky-skinned against me I couldn’t imagine living alone, wondered about the life Pa and Ma had had till she died.

  For the first time that night he’d talked about a woman in Nam, long before Ma. He and the guys had been in the boonies “wasting gooks” (that’s what Seals did, and that’s what it was called back then), and he was crazy from losing friends and killing so many people.

  On weekend R&R in Hué he met a young Vietnamese teacher. They made love the whole weekend, almost without stopping. She was as crazy from the war as he was. For the next three months he wangled R&R whenever he could, took dangerous missions and stayed on point and on LPs just so he could get back to her sooner.

  And when Tet hit he spent a week fighting and killing and watching hundreds of young Americans – and many thousands of Vietnamese – die for a absolutely no reason at all. And realized the human race is simply insane and he wanted to marry her and go back to Hawaii and try to forget everything. But when he got to her place the whole neighborhood had been leveled by our thousand-pounders, and yes, a survivor said, her blood and gristle was somewhere out there under the rubble.

  “So,” I said after a while, “you and Ma?”

  “Listen,” he leans forward, that way of his. “There’s more than one magnificent woman out there, there’s millions of them –”

  “So why you ain’t married again?”

  “Fuck that, Sam. I never wanted anyone else. Not after your Ma.”

  “So there ain’t millions of em out there.”

  “Jesus Christ.” He gives me his low look. “Will you stop bein a lawyer?”

  “All I want to know, Pa, is how to live.”

  “That,” he grins at Lexie, “you gotta find out for yourself.”

  I thought a moment. “What was her name, this woman who died?”

  He said nothing a while, then, “Germaine.”

  “If you’d married her I never’d been born.”

  “Yeah,” he’d grinned, back to his old self, “there is that.”

  Now I glanced across the table at Lexie in this wintry Maine kitchen with its rustling woodstove, the pitiless night outside the snow-glazed windows, seeing her as she’d been that tropical night in Pa’s Waipio bungalow, her still-girlish earnest charm, her young sexual fire blazing like a steel mill, her slender fingers and kindly face, and I wanted so bad for all three of us to be back there, before Pa had cancer, before my last Afghanistan tour and the trial and jail and getting free and another trial and more jail, back before Bucky sent me to prison then talked Lexie into Maine, and the best reason to save Bucky now was to show him that other people aren’t like him.

  “I’m really going to miss you,” she said, our fingers twined. “Jesus Christ I am.”

  “And God I you too.” The fear of ending back Inside made me crave her even more. If I didn’t go to the bu
nkhouse now we were going to make love, out of the sorrow of what was happening, to heal a cleft far too deep. “I’ll tell Pa your latest.”

  “Jesus,” she sniffed, “don’t do that.”

  I stood, stiff from the night’s horrible chase and my travels on the logging truck, my head spinning with pain and weariness. Pa was dying. That was all that mattered. One way or the other I was going to get there.

  “Maybe you should let the cops know. That your Dad’s dying and you need to get there.”

  “They won’t let me leave, Lexie –”

  “We’ll get a court order.”

  “By that time Pa’ll be dead.”

  “But what if they’ve already put out a bulletin on you – like to TSA?”

  “Then I’m fucked.”

  “Yeah, you are. So maybe they didn’t put out a bulletin–”

  “We’ll know tomorrow, won’t we?”

  Painkillers

  NOBODY ARRESTED me at the vast and empty Portland airport. Two hours later we were in Atlanta, having traversed an unending spectacle of housing developments, industrial zones and highways, all under a blanket of snow and ice. Soon, it seemed, there’d be nowhere left in North America for humans or animals to escape to.

  Atlanta was another planet. Corridors of people, shops and food. Ships passing in the night, we humans, looking down or ahead, each on our private voyage toward death.

  These were the kind of thoughts I was having sitting in my mini-seat on the Airbus 330 to Hawaii, contracting my knees so as not to bump the seat in front of me, keeping my elbow to my side of the narrow elbow rest, watching out the window at the unending undulating heartlands of America. They seemed good, honest, and full of hard-working, caring people, giving me the feeling we all have about our country: We have something good here, something true, let’s cherish and protect it.