Archangel (13 page)

“The room,” Gabriel echoed. “Yes.” It was not the same man who had bought the house from his parents. Gabriel wondered how many times it had been sold since then.

The man stepped into the light, squinting through round-framed glasses, his mouth crooked with the effort. His neck was deep-trenched with age and reddened from the sun. It had the tough, grooved dullness of elephant hide. Gabriel recognized him now. Booker Lazarus. He was famous in Abenaki Junction. Lazarus used to live in a cabin on the outskirts of town, collecting junk from the dump and selling it to tourists as antiques. The wooden fence in front of the cabin had been a barricade of hubcaps, chrome-plated bull’s-eyes winking at people who drove past. Now, scanning the junk heap, it seemed to Gabriel that Lazarus had scaled down his operations.

Lazarus clumped down the steps and shuffled toward Gabriel through the dust. “I don’t recognize you, boy.” He pulled at his earlobe and edged closer, as if he might recognize Gabriel through smell if not by sight.

“No, sir.” Gabriel felt relieved. If Lazarus, the nosiest man in town, didn’t recognize him, then perhaps nobody would. Gabriel searched each pale trench of Lazarus’s leathery neck where the sun had not reached, the moon-surface of his nose and his pendulous earlobes. The old man’s hazelnut eyes were almost lost in the pouchy skin of his face.

“It’s the bottom floor that’s for rent. I got antiques stored upstairs.” Lazarus waved his hand at the dusty windows on the second floor. “Things too valuable to be leaving them outside. I used to have more. Lots more. And you know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened to my antiques. They took them away. Council did. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth. Council, with that old bastard Jonah Mackenzie leading the pack. Said it was a health hazard. Said it was ugly and ruining the tourist trade. What tourist trade? I don’t know. I tell you, those fuckers.” He smacked his lips on the curse. They were honey in the old man’s mouth. “I was going to retire on that money. Go to Florida and buy a condo in Delray Beach. But now look. I’m up here where I always been and I’m not leaving here before I die.” The way Lazarus saw it, they had condemned him to death. Condemned him to the ache in his joints when the winter clamped down on the north like the hatch on a submarine. To eucalyptus-smelling liniments and everything gone fuzzy in the distance as his eyes gave up on him like binoculars going slowly out of focus. To the fact that he had to work as the bartender at the Loon’s Watch bar when he would have preferred to be one of its customers. It had gotten so that Lazarus blamed the people of Abenaki Junction for the very fact of his old age, as if the pile of blunt-bladed lawnmowers and beat-up refrigerators and all things broken and rusted would have guaranteed him eternal youth.

“Fuck!” he would say as he sat in the bathtub and watched the ripples of sound fan out from his ivory-haired chest.

“Fuck!” He shouted it in his sleep and woke himself up. The value of his treasures had exploded in his head and come to rest in the rafters of financial possibility.

“Fuck!” He wrapped his lips around the curse and spat it out like the brown juice of Red Man plug tobacco and found it pleasant. Lazarus wondered where his antiques were now. They wouldn’t tell him. They just showed up with Dumpsters and piled the stuff in, a job that took two days. He wanted to kill them, but all he did was learn to swear. He had written to the television program
Focus America
, hoping they might do an exposé. “But the bastards didn’t write back!” he told his friend Benny Mott. Told him so many times that Mott asked Lazarus please to shut his face about it.

“Bastards!” Lazarus was too old to make war on Abenaki Junction anywhere but in his head. He saved a special place of rage for Jonah Mackenzie, head of the council in the year they removed his antiques, and on whose shoulders Lazarus had heaped the blame.

Every year since then, Lazarus had watched the steely-skied approach of winter riding like a cavalry charge down from the north. He stuck holiday brochures of palm trees and beaches on his refrigerator door, and tortured himself with dreams of coconuts and sand the texture of flour between his toes, the way he’d heard it was on the beaches of Tulum in Mexico.

Lazarus told all this to Gabriel, keeping him trapped on the saddle-backed porch for over an hour. But he was grateful for the listener. He knocked thirty dollars off the rent, which put it down to $220 a month.

Gabriel paid the first two months in advance in crumpled hundred-dollar bills. After Lazarus had gone back to the small shack he owned at the other edge of town, Gabriel wandered through the house. He walked into the pool of sunlight bleeding through the kitchen window. He remembered the space, the precise feeling of enclosure within its walls. But the rest—the bare floors that he had known only under carpeting, the light fixtures now only bulbs like upside-down mushrooms growing from the ceiling, the dust, the dump-scavenged furniture—none of this sent any pulse of familiarity through his blood.

The staircase to the second story was blocked by a door that had been sealed with a heavy bronze padlock. Gabriel’s bedroom was where the old den had been. He sat on an old bed frame, springs tracking his movements with squeaks and groans, even when he breathed. The tinsel from some ancient Christmas party still hung in the corner of the room. It was no party that he could recall. Besides, he thought, my mother would have taken down all the tinsel. The Christmas parties he remembered were surrounded by the stabbing cold of winter in northern Maine. One Christmas Eve, he went to scatter salt on the sidewalk outside too soon after taking a shower. By the time he returned to the house, his hair had frozen almost solid and felt brittle on his head like threads of glass. The stars were sharper in the winter night, and the northern lights, like the rosy wings of angels,
billowed in the sky. Added to the rumble of the logging trucks was the high-pitched whine of snowmobiles, laying their wide, ribbed tracks through the snow.

Now dust filtered a khaki light through the old window blinds. The room was warm and musty, and for a moment seemed less real to Gabriel than these powerfully returning pictures of his past. For a long time after that, he sat very still in the old house, until the medicine-bottle blue of twilight sky pressed hard against the windows and the trees outside faded, becoming two-dimensional in the dark. Quietly he sang to himself, just to hear a human voice, while the ghost of his childhood ran laughing from room to empty room.

“What job?”

Benny Mott squinted at Gabriel. He pulled on his oil-splattered signal-orange raincoat and sat down in his Putt-Putt machine.

As Gabriel stood there, the Putt-Putt’s engine burbled quietly, like something blowing bubbles underwater. Mott was hump-shouldered like an ox. Age had crumpled his skin. His hands were so muscular and worn that the fingerprints had almost disappeared. He scowled without meaning to. He had never married, and years of living alone had left him without the desire ever to comb his hair or talk much or be polite when he did talk. Mott had been working so long on the railroad that he smelled like the railroad—of iron, rust and oil.

“The job in the paper.”

Gabriel could tell the man wanted to leave. It was only five in the morning, and the first brass blades of sunlight were stabbing through the trees. But that was when Booker Lazarus had told him to show up if he wanted to catch Mott. Even at five, he had arrived only just in time, running across the tracks toward the depot building and waving his arms like a madman.

Mott stared for a second, judging him. Then he cut the Putt-Putt’s engine. “You want that job? How bad do you want it?” He continued to stare, gathering the details of Gabriel’s face. He had been given complete control over the hiring of his replacement. Mott guessed that this was because the comptroller in St. Johns couldn’t be bothered to come down here and do the job himself.

“Well, I want the job pretty badly,” Gabriel said. He knew he was being judged and that once this man had made up his mind, there would be no way to change it. So Gabriel spoke carefully, like someone trying to guess a secret password.

“A lot of people want it.” Mott didn’t recognize the face, which was good, since he couldn’t think of anyone in town who deserved his job. Ever since the order came to retire, Mott had been leaving earlier and earlier each morning and coming out of the woods at dark to avoid anyone trying to find him. He knew someone must have tipped this man off. Probably that old fathead Booker Lazarus, he thought. “It’s long hours,” he said. “The pay is pretty much shit.”

“I figured it would be.”

“I’m retiring. The railroad’s making me retire, now that I’m sixty-five. Sixty-five,” Mott said again, as if amazed to have grown old so fast.

“Yes, sir.” Gabriel was beginning to understand the old man’s hostility. “I imagine you must want to be sure about who takes over the job.”

“Damn right!” Mott’s eyes opened wide. “It’s not just any old job.”

“I’ll tell you what, sir …”

“Mott.” He did not reach out his hand to shake.

“You could take me out and if you don’t like the way I work, you can just take me back again. Or I’ll walk back. And I’ll be on my way. You don’t have to sign me up. Just see how I do.”

Mott chewed at the inside of his mouth, worried that he might be falling for some kind of trick. But if it was a trick, he couldn’t see how it worked. A smile crept into the corner of Mott’s mouth. He tried to wipe it away with his knuckles as if it were a crumb of food. “I guess I could do that. Nothing to lose by it, I guess.” He started the motor again. “Get in!” he shouted to Gabriel over the rattle and hum of the Putt-Putt. “There’s just about room for two!”

They motored out of town. Inside the Putt-Putt, Gabriel smelled gasoline and cigarettes. Soon they had passed the last shacks of old railway storage sheds, the roofs fallen in and fuzzy green with rot. They watched the pines shuffle past, half-deaf from the rapid-fire flatulence of the motor.

The Putt-Putt was a small, diesel-powered cross between a car and a go-cart, designed to fit on the rails of a train track. It had first been manufactured in the 1950s by the Bradford Supply Company in Augusta, Georgia. Very few of them remained. Trucks had taken their place, made with retractable wheels that converted the truck from road to rail use at the flip of a switch. A pin could be fitted into the steering column so that the truck would only run in a straight line, which kept it on the rails. Mott had seen these trucks as they motored past on official business. They were painted yellow, and looked like giant hornets as they barreled down the tracks. He wasn’t jealous about not having one. Instead, he considered it part of his job to wrestle with the temperamental Putt-Putt.

For eighteen years, Benny Mott had been riding up and down the tracks five days a week, checking for rail-tie spikes that had come loose or for wooden spreaders that were disintegrating. Sometimes a trainman would call in and say he had hit a moose. Then Mott would go out in the Putt-Putt and either cut up the moose to feed himself over the winter or dump a bag of quicklime on the carcass if it had been dead too long. The animal would disappear under a cloud of the white-dust and in two weeks there would be nothing left except bones and fur. Sometimes he rode back into Abenaki Junction with one giant bloody moose flank sticking out of either Putt-Putt door. There wasn’t room for much in the Putt-Putt. With the hammers and draw pinchers for removing nails, and spare nails, and spray-paint cans for marking up the ruined tracks, Mott could barely fit his body into the cab.

As long as he kept the tracks in good repair, no one minded what he did when he was out in the Putt-Putt. Some days, he would park the Putt-Putt out on the tracks beyond the town, careful to have filed a Track Occupancy Permit with the main office in St. Johns, and sit by the rails picking berries or writing a letter to his brother, who was a halibut fisherman in Alaska. Mott had a recurring dream: that the Canadians changed their train schedule and didn’t let him know. In the dream, he met an eighty-car freight train coming toward him around a corner at sixty miles an hour. It was driven by the man who had been working the train for as long as Mott had been working the rails. His name was Alain Labouchere. They had waved and smiled to
each other almost every day for eighteen years, but they had never met.

Sometimes Mott would take a break from his work and walk into the woods to sit on a soft bed of pine needles. He liked to read novels. He listened to books on tape on a Walkman. He read the newspaper. He studied encyclopedias of plants and wandered through the forest identifying species. Mott knew the peace of the North Woods. He thought of other people, ones who found happiness in jobs in which they were left alone as long as the job got done. He knew their vast contentment, untroubled by cravings for fame, or the blood-boiling Great Causes of the world. He knew these people, like himself, were the watchers and the thoughtful ones. They had learned not to be in the race.

But Mott was tired now. His body had begun to creak. He had worked long enough to earn himself a pension that, with the wages he’d made as a hunting and fishing guide in the fall and winter months, would allow him to retire. It was a sacred thing, this handing down of the job, and he wanted Gabriel to know that.