Archangel (30 page)

But this shriek was like nothing anyone had heard before. One of the huge circular saws had bitten into a ten-inch nail, hammered by Gabriel into a tree above the line where the metal detectors had reached. Sparks sprayed like fireworks across the cutting room. The jagged edges of the saw bent sideways and the jolt threw the main piston of the saw’s engine. The machine howled and crashed as its insides broke apart and gear wheels spun without connecting.

Coltrane was so shocked by the noise that at first he did not move. Then his senses returned and he ran to the greasy black
ALL STOP
button that cut power to the mill. Engines throughout the building hummed deeper and deeper until Coltrane could see the mangled shark-teeth cutting edge of the saw as it finally quit spinning. The conveyor belt stopped. The bark grinder stopped. All sound disappeared. Then came the clatter of workers running toward the cutting room.

Mackenzie had been in his office, on the phone to a trucking company in Bangor. When he heard the noise, he hunched over his desk, teeth bared, as if the blade of the saw were about to carve its way through his office wall. He replaced the receiver without saying another word and stamped down the main staircase into the logging yard. No one had to tell him what had happened. He walked from machine to machine. On a chalkboard in his head, he drew a series of numbers. It would cost $3,500 to replace the ruined parts.

Mill workers stood around, crowding doorways and blotting out the daylight. Coltrane waited with a shorn-off piece of the nail between his thumb and first two fingers. He prepared himself for the detonation of Mackenzie’s rage. “We must have missed one of the spikes with our metal detector,” he said quietly when Mackenzie reached him.

“Anybody hurt?” Mackenzie asked.

“No, sir. It’s just the saw blade and the motor.”

“Do we have a spare blade in stock?”

“There’s one in the back.” Coltrane jerked his chin in the direction of the storehouse.

“Well, replace it, and get the spare motor that’s out there, too. Make sure to pass all the logs under a metal detector again. Get the place running.”

Coltrane felt like a man in a bunker into which a grenade had been thrown. The time had passed for the explosion, and he was slowly beginning to realize that the bomb would not go off. Coltrane did not understand it. He did not trust the silence and the illusion of Mackenzie’s calm. It seemed more threatening than the eruption he’d expected.

Mackenzie walked back to his office and shut the door. He sat with his hands neatly folded on the blotter in front of him. His lungs were filled with the sour lumberyard smell, like that of old beer left out after a party. It came from tons of woodchips dumped in a pile by the roadside. The pile steamed all year long, melting the snow that fell around it from October to late March. “Sal Ungaro,” he said. “Sal Ungaro.” He repeated the name as if it were an incantation, like summoning the devil from the letters on a Ouija board.

At the other end of town, Madeleine Cody stood in the middle of the street. She had been frozen by the noise, as if giant fingernails had
scraped down a blackboard. What reached her next was not a sound but a lack of sound. Across the street, she saw Lazarus in the doorway of the Loon’s Watch bar, a steel beer keg in his arms. He seemed to have forgotten about its weight. His mouth hung slightly open in his concentrated efforts to hear through this sudden stillness. There were others, waiting and listening. After a few minutes, they began to filter back inside.

Madeleine caught sight of Gabriel standing outside the station house. He was watching her. He did not look afraid, as if he had resigned himself to whatever choice she made. He just watched her, waiting to see what she’d do. Madeleine turned and walked on, finding her way home on instinct alone, swerving like a long-distance driver with each curve of the road, but miles away inside her head.

To hell with a clean fight, thought Mackenzie. To hell with all the gentlemanly rules of war. He paced back and forth in front of his fireplace. “What if it’s one of those terrorist groups? The kind that set off bombs?” he asked Alicia.

“I’m sure Dodge has a handle on it.” Alicia knew that nothing anybody said would make sense to him anymore. It was late at night, and he often talked wildly when he was tired.

“But Dodge is just one man. With a thousand of him, I could conquer the whole damn world, but I’ve only got one!”

“I don’t think you’re being fair.”

“Fair? Why are you always waving that word in my face? Nothing in business is based on fairness! The only time people are fair is when it’s profitable!”

“Don’t shout at me. You can’t win arguments just by making noise.”

“I’m not shouting!” Mackenzie clenched his hands into fists. Then he began to speak more quietly. “I just don’t think I can get this solved by relying on the law.” Even though he sometimes pretended not to listen to her, Mackenzie balanced everything Alicia said, and thought carefully before proceeding. He considered her his equal in most things. And in the things in which they were not equal, he knew she far outclassed him. “I might have to hire some people.”

“What kind of people?”

“People who will clear these bastards out of the woods. People who don’t fancy-dance around.” He breathed out violently. “You know.”

“You mean you’re going to be calling that old friend of yours. Ungaro. The one who does shady bits and pieces for foreign governments.” She remembered Ungaro from their days at college. He was always at the parties, usually alone and standing with his back to the wall, shit-grinning at some joke inside his head.

“I might give old Sal a call. Might have to.”

Don’t use his first name to me, thought Alicia. Don’t call him “old Sal.” Don’t try to humanize him. I’ve seen the man. I’ve seen the damage he does. She didn’t have to say any of this to Mackenzie, because Mackenzie knew it well enough himself. Ungaro would get the job done, but it would be like unleashing a pack of dogs who wouldn’t come back when you called them. “I can’t believe you’re considering this,” she said.

“Jesus, Alicia! I can hardly believe it either. But extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures.” The idea had walked into Mackenzie’s head and now it wouldn’t leave. It jabbered at him like the red-tailed squirrels in the trees.

“What if you try to contact these tree-spiking people and reach some kind of compromise?” Alicia thought of her talk with Madeleine. She didn’t want to be the go-between, but they were both so stubborn that she knew it might be the only way.

“I refuse to negotiate with terrorists.” Mackenzie’s voice had reached an ugly calm.

“Well, maybe you should ask yourself why people might do this. Maybe you should think twice about clear-cutting the Algonquin. You have to remember that your father did things differently. He kept up a sustainable yield.” It was always dangerous for her to bring up the topic of his father. Sometimes he would simply ignore her. Other times he would explode. There was never any telling what nerves would be struck. She had never known anyone so driven to succeed by the memory of a dead man. It was as if everything her husband did was somehow to gain the approval of his father. But since the man was long gone, the approval never came, and Jonah Mackenzie just kept working harder and harder, as if to bridge the gap between life and death itself.

Mackenzie avoided the topic of his father. “It has something to do
with this damn
Forest Sentinel
. I know it does. If I could stop that little paper from spewing out all Madeleine’s gossip, I know I’d stop the trouble. But she’s not going to take my offer. If she were, she’d have done it already.”

“So talk to Madeleine. Don’t just try to buy her out and shut her up that way. Understand a little better what the environmental movement is all about. It’s not just the Algonquin. And it’s not just Madeleine, either. Your own loggers are afraid that you’ll wipe out their jobs in a decade.”

“That forest belongs to me, Alicia! I paid for it and it’s mine. It’s an investment. In order to get my money back, I have to cut down the trees.”

She got up and stared down at him. “Ask yourself what it means that you’re thinking of bringing Sal Ungaro into this. Are you just going to turn this forest into a combat zone? Your ability to hire someone to take care of your dirty work doesn’t prove that you were right.”

No, thought Mackenzie. But I’m the one left standing at the end.

The next day, in the space of fifteen minutes, even before the early-morning sun had untangled itself from the treeline, five out of seven circular blades at the mill struck nails and were put out of action.

The whole plant shut down.

Coltrane said nothing. When the fifth blade crashed, he just punched the grimed and sawdust-coated emergency
ALL STOP
button one more time. Then he took off his hard hat and kicked it like a football out into the mountains of logs that lay in the compound, still waiting to be cut and bleeding sap like honey. All of the logs that broke the saws had been checked in the forest for nails before they were cut, so he knew these had been double-spiked. The loggers must have checked each tree for just one nail. Either that, or they had been spiked after cutting.

The plank stackers and machine operators stood waiting, as if they were parts of the same broken machinery and their power had also been shut down. Everyone at the company, even the secretaries far above the cutting floor, weighed the possibility of anger slung in their direction.

For a few minutes, while the sawdust settled and curious eyes peered at the crippled teeth of the saw blades, Coltrane stood motionless on the loading ramp, as if waiting for his hard hat to come boomeranging back to him from its place among the logs. He was balancing in his mind whether to go on or to give up. He knew he might take the fall for this. Be the sacrificial goat. Then Coltrane caught sight of people watching him from the cutting floor and the administrative office. Eyes glinted softly from every shadow of the compound. All waiting.

“Get the metal detectors!” Coltrane called to them.

There was no hesitation. Loggers were almost fighting over who got to use the detectors, while the rest followed behind with pliers and chisels to dig out nails once they were found. Soon the lumberyard was humming with talk and the ear-grating bleep of detectors finding metal in the logs. Then came the whack of chisels digging into wood and the whispering
shush
of spray cans painting bright-orange splats over the spots where the nails had been. Soon the logs were polka-dotted with paint. No one stopped to think about the work that lay ahead of them.

On the other side of town, Dodge had heard the saw blades crash. He had been waiting at the old station depot for over an hour. He wanted to question the man who’d taken Mott’s place, although no one he talked to said the man seemed suspicious, including Mott. Dodge knocked on the depot door, and because the place was not locked, he walked inside. The depot looked bare now and reminded him of when he was a little boy, catching the train west to Montreal with his mother. He remembered snow piled up so high that it blocked the light from the windows and the smell of hot cider spiced with cinnamon and cloves, stewing in a pot and given out free in tin mugs by the Stationmaster, a man named Adler. And on the last day that the passenger train stopped in town, Mr. Adler got on that train with a suitcase, waved good-bye and never came back.

Gabriel was working on the tracks up by the Canadian border. Out there, he felt as if he had reached the end of the world, and that only a few miles away the polar ice was nudging against the land. He felt the strange seduction of routine. There was no sense of heroics as he set out each morning; there was only the fatigue of walking the tracks with the rolling stride he had adapted for moving along the ties. Automatically
he reached into the pocket of his canvas Filson vest and pulled out a spray can of fluorescent paint to mark any place where a pin had come loose on the rails. All he had been thinking about was whether Madeleine would help him or whether this would be his last day under the open sky for years to come.