KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  He cocked his head frowning, a this guy is crazy look. “I don’t shoot at people. Not lately.”

  So we’d got into Afghanistan, all that. Turns out we’d both been in Kunar Province at the same time, he with the Rangers and I with SF, in that nasty nest of ruthless mountains and homicidal Islamic tribesmen that we called N2KL and “Enemy Central” where so many of our friends died for absolutely nothing. I didn’t tell him about shooting the burning girl and if he’d heard of it said nothing. “So what makes you think I shot at you?” he said.

  I explained him how I’d tracked the shooter’s snowmobile back to Missalonkee Hard Riders, not adding that I’d broken in and taken the membership list. “Lots of people use that trail,” he’d said. “Why me?”

  I didn’t want to mention Mitchell or that Lexie had helped pick him out. “Don and Viv, they suggested it might be you.”

  “Those crazy fuckers. I feel bad for them though they brought it on themselves.”

  This interested me, since I was a still a suspect. “How?”

  “Tearing the community apart, taking money from the wind power crooks.”

  “You ever hear of Abigail Dalt?”

  He thought, shook his head. He had the kind of direct answers that made you trust him, a truculent self-awareness that forbid deceit. It made me like him despite his innate hostility.

  “I’m out on fifty grand bail,” I said. “I won’t finger you, but how we going to get me out of this?”

  He chuckled, rubbed his mouth with a massive grease-stained hand. “Let’s pin it on Griver.” He laughed, shook his head. “Hey Dor,” he called to his wife in the living room where she was knitting. “Suppose we can say Dawson Griver shot out the turbines?”

  She came into the kitchen, tousled his hair. “Don’t you even dream of going there.”

  He chuckled again. “Just joking.”

  His wife reached down for Rosie who shook her head and held onto Titus like he was a life raft in a storm. “C’mon honey, time for jammies.”

  Titus smiled down at her. “You go with Momma now.”

  “Who’s Griver?” I said.

  Doris folded Rosie in her arms. “Dawson Griver? Our local nut case, got out of the crazy bin when they cut the funding…” She buried her face in Rosie’s neck and blew, making Rosie giggle.

  “So how we going to solve this?” I repeated, having a personal interest in finding a solution.

  “Let’s blame it on the enviro hippies,” Titus said.

  “But they’re the ones who want the damn turbines,” Doris put in.

  “Fuck it,” Titus snickered. “Blame them anyway.”

  This made me think of Abigail’s dead husband. “Too bad we couldn’t blame it on Ronnie Dalt.”

  “Who’s that?” Titus said, giving his wife’s thigh an affectionate squeeze as she left the room.

  “An enviro guy, used to be in favor of turbines, supposedly changed sides.”

  “Blame it on him anyway.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Titus raised his brows. “Too bad. Shit, we could’ve used him.”

  I took a deep breath. This wasn’t getting anywhere. Titus saw me, nodded. “Before they nail you, I’ll admit it.”

  I liked him too much for this, shook my head. “We’ll find a way.”

  “Maybe another wind company did it – they’re all at each other’s throats. Maybe Green Dividends – Mafia scumbags that own the garbage business in Boston, they’re building windmills all over Maine… Hell, there’s American Renewables out of Texas, they’ve come up here and bought all the legislators in three counties… They all want to kill each other…”

  Rosie slippered into the kitchen to him and raised her arms. “Up!”

  He took her in his beefy arms, kissed the top of her head, glanced at me. “You stay put, I gotta read Rosie a story, be right back.”

  When he was gone I scanned the kitchen, small and homey, the tiled counters and hand-crafted cabinets, the linoleum floor and old maple table where I sat with the bottle of Shipyard that Titus had given me, the propane cookstove, the chipped porcelain sink and softly humming refrigerator, and it all seemed shelter in a storm, something Titus and Doris had built with their own hands, as he had mentioned, and now were being driven from it by tax-dodging multi-millionaires and their political servants, for whom this little island of a family had no significance whatsoever.

  Doris came in holding her knitting to her chest and sat in Titus’ chair. “How old is Rosie?” I said.

  “Two. Going on eighteen.”

  “So I noticed. You have other kids?” I asked, knowing they did.

  “Three older girls, they’re with their grandfolks, getting away from the turbines.” She said nothing, then, “We had another one last year… I was pregnant… He didn’t make it.”

  I felt cold and empty inside. “I’m sorry.” Feeling stupid for saying it.

  “The turbine infrasound makes cows abort. So maybe people too…”

  “Bastards.” What else could I say?

  “We have to leave. But now the house is worthless…”

  Same old story. I nodded uphill. “Maybe they’ll stop.”

  She shook her head. “They won’t ever stop. Not till they’ve chased us all out.”

  I wanted to console her somehow. “There’s more and more people fighting this.”

  “That won’t matter. What people want doesn’t matter any more.”

  WHEN I GOT back to Lexie’s the turbine fires were out, the two wind towers spiring into the sky like dead skyscrapers with blackened tops, the fire engines and cop cars gone.

  “How’d they put them out?” I asked her.

  She looked up from a biology lesson plan. “Choppers came and sprayed something.”

  “So our world is silent for a while.”

  “There’s still all those others along the rest of the ridge,” she snapped, as if I were being irrationally positive. “What’d Titus say?”

  I started to tell her, stopped. If she didn’t know she couldn’t be charged with withholding evidence. “He doesn’t have any idea.”

  “He the one shot at you?”

  “Doesn’t seem so.”

  She scowled at me, aware I was keeping something from her. I imagined her suddenly as if she and I were old, long-married, with all the deep love and casual irritations that can bring, and again my heart ached for what we’d lost and now could never have.

  She went into the hall, came back with a FedEx envelope. “This came for you.”

  A false return address. Smyrna. I opened it and a Belgian driver’s license, a Visa and Amex cards fell out, all in the name of Pierre Van Brughe. “The new me.”

  She looked doubtful. “Hope they work.”

  I stood. “Going for a walk.”

  “You do that.”

  Lobo got up from her bed by the woodstove, shook herself, wagged her tail. “Okay, love,” I said, “let’s do it.”

  Lobo running ahead down the snowbound lane gave me a moment’s intimation of bliss, that magnificent joy animals evoke when given a chance at freedom, an ecstasy we poor humans long ago lost. And so we keep at our subterranean ways while slaughtering wild animals – wolves, geese, elephants, whales and thousands of others – who live at a far deeper emotional and spiritual level than we.

  The knife-cold wind cut my nostrils, Lobo’s breath a dancing cloud round her head, my own breath freezing on my cheeks, the air a razor blade down my lungs – it was time to confess: this is how to live.

  I wondered what that meant then understood: when you’re deep in life you’re in touch with all that matters.

  I challenge any guy in bed with an exciting woman to disagree that that’s bliss, or for her to disagree, for sex is lovely. Or a bear atop a rocky crag pensively watching a sunset, a porpoise soaring bright-eyed through green golden waves, a young eagle reaching high as she can fly…

  So when I see it in other creatures I’m reminded it’s often lacking
in me. That magic moment when everything makes sense, and the entire universe is in concert with what you want… Epiphany.

  And no matter how much I worried I was deep in life, despite Abigail’s perilous absence and the cops wanting me for Murder One, despite Pa dying in Waipio while I couldn’t leave Maine to be with him, despite trying to free Bucky and help the Lexie and Titus and the thousands of other Mainers whose lives and homelands are being wrecked by industrial wind, while trying to get deep inside every interesting woman I meet and loving every day of snow and sun, and trying to live like Lobo, in the now.

  But it can be a pain in the ass, living in the now.

  Atop the mountain a huge Hyundai excavator crouched over a pit surrounded by tall mounds of dirt. Strange, it hadn’t been there before. At the edge I looked down.

  Thousands of birds, many thousands, in a pit maybe twenty feet wide and twenty deep, mutilated bloody corpses and chunks of feathers and bones. Bats, too, with tiny out-spread wings. You couldn’t tell, really, what most of them were, here and there a Canada goose, two golden eagles side by side, lots of crows and blue jays, cardinals, a few loons lower down, tons of fluffy chickadees, bats, wrens, sparrows and other little ones.

  The fir tree shadows lay long across Lexie’s snow-packed road when Lobo and I returned, stunned and silent.

  “Oh yeah,” Lexie said. “They bury them in case people come to count the dead birds. Every month they dig a new pit and hide them all.”

  THE WORLD’S OLDEST BIRD, Lexie said, is the loon. So perfectly evolved that in sixty million years it’s barely changed, this mellifluent singer of the wild Maine nights whose language Thoreau calls a dialect of our own. Each fall the loons say goodbye to their mates, leave their lakes and fly many thousands of miles to Greenland or Honduras or down the Patagonian coast even to Antarctica to spend the winter, and return next spring to their lake and mate. To raise their young who then in fall depart on the same magical, mystical and perilous adventure.

  But of course most of the loons that once filled the Maine nights with nature’s greatest symphony have been killed off, by pesticides, motor boats, fishing lures, lead shot, arsenic and sewage. And what few are left, ornithologists fear, will soon be exterminated by the wind industry.

  Not to worry, says Lexie, maybe in sixty million more years God will create another loon.

  I COULDN’T SLEEP, feeling a presentiment of great evil. An even greater evil than WindPower’s bird cemetery.

  23:50 in Maine was 18:50 in Hawaii. Time for my daily call to Pa.

  Every day he pretended to be okay. But not today. It was in his voice. Weak, for the first time. Hesitant, as if words failed him. “How’s the pain?” I said.

  “Pain? There’s not too much pain.” He cleared his throat. “They got me on… what’s the name of that shit… Morphine! Makes your brain real foggy.”

  “Who the hell’s injecting you with that?”

  “Nobody, nobody for Christ’s sake. It’s pills.” He coughed raggedly. “I gotta go.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Sit on the porch and smoke.”

  “Good idea, Pa.”

  “I’ve got the damn canoe ready… Maybe tomorrow.”

  I decided suddenly: “I’ll be there fast as I can.”

  “Don’t you dare,” he was saying as I cut off.

  With Abigail still missing, and me now on bail for the turbines Titus had shot out, plus my still being a suspect in the possible homicide of Don and Viv, there was no way I could leave Maine without proving my guilt. And leaving Erica on the hook for fifty grand.

  Even if I was under “voluntary restraint” in Maine it wasn’t voluntary. My FBI file had been flagged so any time I crossed a border, or did an out-of-Maine transaction, got picked up by a camera, or worse by a cop, I was done.

  But Pa was going fast and I wanted to see him before he launched that canoe into the unknown. The thought of him paddling alone into the Pacific to die was a sorrow I could barely deal with. But if that’s what he wanted I’d make damn sure I was with him when he did it.

  Taking Over Maine

  FIRST I had to call Erica, though the very thought was scary.

  It didn’t turn out that bad. “You don’t forfeit bail by leaving Maine,” she said hurriedly, as if I should know. “You just have to be here for your court appearance – in two weeks.”

  “I’ll be back before then.”

  “However you’re under statewide restraint as a person of interest in Abigail’s disappearance, and also for allegedly setting that fire in – what was their name’s house?”

  “Don and Viv Woodridge.”

  “Yeah, them. So if you get caught outside Maine you’ll probably be jailed when they bring you back. As your attorney I can’t recommend you do this.”

  “What if I tell them my father’s dying?”

  “They couldn’t give a shit. Get this through your head, Pono: they want you.”

  “But why?”

  “Somebody’s put the heat on. You figure it out.”

  WITH MY NEW PASSPORT, driver’s license and credit cards from Smyrna and wearing Bucky’s red wool jacket I took off for Hawaii. Lexie drove me up Highway 27 to three miles from the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. This is where a well-connected Maine engineering company with lots of hirelings in the Legislature wants to blast a cross-Maine superhighway out of the North Woods – but get this, it will be a private toll road, not be for Mainers but for Canadian trucks only, of course paid for by Maine taxpayers. One more coup de grace for what’s left of the loveliest place in eastern America. Not to worry, though, they’ll have to pay a lot to buy all those lawmakers, and won’t that money trickle down, somehow?

  It was late afternoon, the air crisp, razor-cold. The lines of distant fir tops across the lonely lakes were as sharp and serrated as if they’d been cut out and pasted there.

  Near Coburn Gore I kissed Lexie goodbye and walked down a frozen logging road toward the border. The air cutting into my lungs, the nearby boughs and branches snapping from cold in the deepening dark, the hiss and twinkle of the crust under my feet, all gave a sense of peace, hopefulness, loneliness and danger.

  The border was a two-hundred-foot wide swath of herbicided clearcuts that snaked across the hills with a chain link barbed wired topped fence down the middle. I hiked for a mile or so through the woods alongside it. The night was clear and I expected there’d be cameras all along the fence line, and somebody watching on close circuit somewhere, even maybe a chopper ready to swoop down on any miscreant stupid enough as to try to cross.

  Finally I just said fuck it and walked into the clearcut, threw Bucky’s red wool jacket over the barbed wire top, climbed over, unhooked the jacket from the barbed wire and sauntered into Canada.

  Already it felt different, less uptight maybe. Try it yourself – cross the border into Canada and note how different you feel.

  I walked all night by the stars till I reached another logging road and then headed toward Sherbrooke and the highway to Montreal.

  Dawn broke with icy clarity above the treetops. It had to be close to forty below so walking fast continued to be the best option. But I was happy to be free in the moment, in the beauty of the forest, accompanied by the nattering chickadees flitting from tree to tree along my path, seemingly immune to the cold.

  After sunup I got a ride with a logger in a pickup all the way to Sherbrooke. His roaring heater quickly put me to sleep amid our desultory communications via his Québecois and my surfer French. By noon I was in Montreal Airport and at 13:20 my alter ego, Pierre Van Brughe, took off without incident on Air Canada to Vancouver, changing to another flight arriving in Honolulu at 21:40. Along the way Pierre had numerous Tanqueray martinis, avoided conversation with his neighbors, and slept, waking occasionally surprised to find himself in midair where the temperature outside was even colder than in his previous night’s wanderings.

  It was too late to catch a flight from Honolulu to the Big Isla
nd so I called Pa to say I’d be there in the morning. He seemed dazed and listless. “You gonna make it till I get there?” I said, hoping to shock him into a last bit of life.

  “Yeah,” he said, then nothing, then, “I’m glad you’re coming.” Which damn near killed me.

  In Vancouver I’d called Mitchell, who was a twenty-minute taxi ride from Honolulu airport, and it again wrecked my heart to see him when I got there, wheeling himself gallantly from room to room, happy I was there, but all I could remember was how agile he once had been, how full of towering life, before that RPG.

  We sat in his computer den with his usual bottle of vodka – now the Icelandic Reyka he’d mentioned, while his many computers hummed softly, discussing things among themselves and planning their world takeover, and I brought him up to speed on Maine, on Lexie and Bucky and Abigail and all the trouble I was in.

  “That’s what happens,” he said tangentially, “when you’re not surfing.”

  “I got the Tahiti thing in two weeks.”

  He snickered. “From what you say, not likely.” He paused, scanning his screens, came back to me. “Terrible about your Dad.”

  “You think I should do it, help him paddle out to die?”

  “It’s what he wants? There’s your answer.”

  “I’ll never be able to visit his grave… He won’t have one.”

  “Sure he will.” Mitchell nodded over his shoulder toward the ocean hiding beyond the tourist traps of Honolulu. “The Great Blue.”

  “The Great Blue,” I mused, thinking at once of what I’d thought two days before, walking in the Maine winter night with Lobo – epiphany. There seemed a connection but tired and sorrowed as I was I couldn’t find it.

  And anyway, why was I worrying about visiting my father’s grave when it was likely I be spending my life in prison?

  “Here,” Mitchell swung a screen toward me, “here’s the latest email from your wind energy friends in Maine…”

  My eyes were gritty after nearly fourteen hours flying but it came in all too clear:

  FROM: Byron Spaeth, President and CEO, WindPower, LLC

  TO: WindPower LLC Team