Archangel (45 page)

No Ears dragged Shelby out toward the tracks, jaws still clamped into the man’s skull. Then it heard a noise and flattened itself in the undergrowth, resting on the body of the man.

Gabriel crossed the bridge in his Putt-Putt, the wobbling beam of his flashlight held out in front of him because the Putt-Putt had no lights of its own. He sang to keep himself company and did not turn to see the darkness riding the rails close behind. Gabriel was still in shock from the night before. He was unused to the silence that had met him as he worked on the tracks that day. No chain saws unzipped the air. Without Mackenzie, not only the company but the whole town had come clattering to a stop.

When Gabriel had gone, No Ears dragged the body a little farther and had just reached the railway embankment when it heard another noise, this one much louder than the first.

The three-engine, fifty-wagon VIA train appeared in the distance, the blaze of its headlight carving a path through the woods. The driver was Alain Labouchere. The last periwinkle glint of twilight always brought him peace of mind and he never tired of it, even on the lonely winter runs between St. Johns and Montreal, when ice packed up so thick on the iron grille across the train windows that he could barely see where he was going. As he crossed the bridge, he saw a shape at the side of the tracks. He couldn’t yet tell what it was.
He grabbed above his head for the train whistle. His fingers slid through the greasy red-painted iron loop and he pulled. The whistle rattled his bones and fanned out across the Algonquin. Now he could see it. A bear, balanced on its hind legs, reared above a carcass that lay hidden in the undergrowth. It looked to Labouchere as if the animal was baring its teeth at the oncoming train. He pulled the whistle again.

The bear dropped on all fours, sank its snarling face into the meat of its kill and dragged the body back into the trees. The dead thing left a sheet of blood over the green raspberry leaves.

The train drew level with the bear. Labouchere gaped down at the animal, and saw that its head was disfigured. He realized it had not been snarling, only staring at him. One of its jowls had pulled back from some old wound and never properly healed. Its eyes were not raging, the way he had imagined them to be. Only scraps of fur remained where its ears had been. Labouchere watched the bear’s curved black bayonet claws, chafed white at the tips. The animal’s chest was covered with blood. The kill lay partly buried in the muddy ground, its belly torn wide open and an orange-gray tangle of stomach half in and half out of the body. Labouchere had no idea what it could have been.

As the train passed by, Labouchere stuck his head out the window. He watched the bear until the train had rounded a corner. The black woods converged around the tracks and it was gone. Labouchere slumped back into his seat. He gunned up the massive engine and rode faster on the polished iron rails. He roared through Abenaki Junction, glancing out at the winter-beaten houses and beyond them to the sawtooth ridge of Seneca Mountain, on whose granite peak the sunlight and the moonlight were always beautiful and changing.

Dodge opened his eyes. It was dawn. Madeleine lay sleeping beside him. He felt her warm breath on his skin. In the strange honeyed light of his dreams, he had seen the Abenaki Indians with their black-and-yellow-painted faces, silent as they shadow-walked among the trees. He wondered why they had appeared to him again. Perhaps the
dream was never meant to come clear. It was a secret, caught in the path of its own revelation and not containable within the bony brackets of the mind.

“Are you scared?” she asked him.

Dodge was surprised to hear her voice. He had not known she was awake. “Scared about what?”

“About waking up here next to me?”

“No.” Then he laughed. “God, no.” One day he would tell her how many times he had imagined it. He got up and dressed and headed down to the Four Seasons. The owner had called and said there was a car with Virginia plates in the parking lot that had been there a couple of days and they wanted it removed. Dodge figured it belonged to the man who had shot Mackenzie. There were manhunts all over the state for him, but so far nothing had turned up. Dodge took the license number of the car and then walked into the restaurant. He called out, “Does anybody know who that blue Honda belongs to? I’m fixing to tow it away.”

People looked up and around. When no one stood or raised a hand, they went back to their food, and the Quebecois who had not understood put their heads together and muttered their translations to each other.

Coltrane was there, on one of the round stools at the counter. He raised his hand in greeting, eyes deep-set with fatigue but smiling. He had not slept the night before, but had driven back from Portland, where he went to see Mackenzie and Alicia. Mackenzie was still unconscious, but seeing him had reminded Coltrane so much of himself in the hospital that his voice grew thin with shock when he tried to speak with Alicia. Even his own experience did not dull the impact of seeing the old man under an oxygen tent, with one tube up his nose and another down his throat. The IV drip was like a bag of diamonds in the sunlight. In the hospital room, Alicia took from her purse the pages of Mackenzie’s speech. She had peeled them from the stage of the Woodcutter’s Lodge and read through the footprints and bloodstains that obscured the words. “I had hoped he could explain this to you,” she said to Coltrane. “But now you will have to read it yourself.”

Coltrane sat down on the floor because there were no extra chairs
in the room. He read what he could through the brown-black splatters. Then he folded up the speech and handed it back. Dried blood fell in dust to the floor.

“Can you do what he wanted to be done?” asked Alicia. She had never looked so pale. “Can you see that it’s carried out?”

“Yes, I could,” said Coltrane. “I could begin tomorrow.”

“I want Madeleine to help you. She will know how to get some of these measures started. We have to go back to the way things were before, at least for now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m staying here for a few days. You can head back now.” Alicia smiled at him weakly. “There’s a lot of work to do.”

Coltrane was just grabbing some breakfast before his interview with Linda Church. After that, he would head over to find Madeleine. They would talk about the work that lay ahead.

Dodge took off his cap and sat down next to Coltrane. The waitress filled his mug from the black goldfish bowl of her coffeepot.

Gabriel walked in and sat beside them on his usual stool. He set his tool belt on the floor.

“ ’Morning, Mr. Gabriel,” said Coltrane.

Gabriel smiled. He was lost in thought. As he had set out into the silence of the forest these past few days, there was no sense of having won. Instead, he felt only the vastness of the work in which he was involved. It spread beyond the boundaries of the Algonquin. It spread across the world. The struggle was so much larger than he was that he knew he might never be able to grasp it in his mind, but that did not matter. The vastness was what made it sacred.

“The leaves are changing in the Algonquin,” Dodge said to Gabriel. “Must be pretty out there now.”

Gabriel was jolted from his thoughts. “I always did like the Algonquin at this time of year,” he said, tipping milk from a pitcher into his coffee. It was only then, as he watched the white swirl into the black, that he realized what he had said. Now they would guess he was no stranger to this town. For an instant, the mask of Adam Gabriel slipped away.

“Yes,” said Coltrane absentmindedly. He was thinking about the interview. He didn’t know what he would say.

But Dodge was looking hard at Gabriel. He had seen the mask slip,
and now he understood. A moment passed and Dodge said nothing. He nodded slowly, as if greeting Gabriel for the first time. Then he turned away.

Gabriel knew the gift that Dodge had made him, but there was no way to thank him for it. Both men knew that. There was only the quiet that followed. And in that silence the mask returned to the face of Adam Gabriel. It would stay there the rest of his life. The ghost of his old self shuffled past and through the wall and away. The sound it made was like the sweeping of a broom.

Linda Church walked down the logging road. Her trenchcoat snapped in the breeze. Coltrane walked beside her. He kept his head down against the wind. The camera operator struggled in front of them, walking backward. He moved in a waddling shuffle to keep the camera steady on his shoulder. His right eye was squashed against the rubber lens-protector and his left remained crunched shut against the sunlight.

Linda Church talked as rapidly as she walked, almost choking herself at the end of her sentences because she did not pause to breathe. “It appears that your time is running out for logging the Algonquin,” she said. “Why don’t you send crews back in here to continue the cutting?”

“Because there will be no more logging in the Algonquin, or clear-cutting anywhere else on Mackenzie Company land.”

“So what will happen to the logging industry in this town?”

“I don’t know, but if we don’t change the way things are being run now, in fifty years there won’t be a logging industry here at all. We are going back to the old methods for a while. It was a less destructive way. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

“Do you think Jonah Mackenzie will recover?”

“I don’t know.”

Linda Church stopped walking. She tightened the belt of her trenchcoat. “There seems to be a lot you don’t know, Mr. Coltrane.”

He looked her up and down, his old confidence returning. “That’s the best place to start, don’t you think?”

When Coltrane reached home after the interview, Clara ran up the driveway to meet him. Her hair was corncobbed with curlers. He could tell from the look on her face that something was wrong.

“That bear is back!” she shouted and opened the door and climbed into the truck. “It’s out in the cornfield again. But, Victor, I’ve been thinking. Before you go getting angry—”

“Goddamnit!” Coltrane roared. He jammed the accelerator to the floor and roared down the drive.

“Why don’t we just leave the bear alone? Just let it go.” Clara was pleading with him.

Coltrane skidded into the farmyard, cut the engine and ran into the house. When he ran out, he was carrying his Springfield rifle. He climbed up the ladder that led to the top of the barn.

“Please, Victor!” Clara called to him.

“Get in the house!” he shouted down. He sat on the roof of his barn, thirty feet above the ground. It was evening, but heat from the day still rippled off the roof. He peered across the purple-topped cornfields. All he could think about was killing the bear. For weeks now, thoughts of vengeance had filled his imagination. In his dreams, Coltrane had slaughtered the bear so many times that if he did not kill it now he knew the animal would haunt him the rest of his life.

Clara raised her arms and let them drop against her blue-and-white checked apron. “Please,” she said again, knowing it would do no good. Then she walked back inside the house.

The corn shuddered as something large moved through the rows. “I got you now, you big fucker,” Coltrane said. He unslung the Springfield from his shoulder. The tall cornstalks moved again. Coltrane fired a round into the middle of the rustling. The roar of the explosion turned to a high-pitched shriek in his ears and then there was only a single ringing note, like the sound on a television when the channel has signed off for the night. He popped out the empty case and chambered a new one. The empty finger of brass bounced off the roof and flickered down into the barnyard.

He fired again at the same place, and again and again, his lungs full of cordite and his eyelashes flicking off sweat. In his mind, each bullet plowed into the black shag of the bear. He had begun to think that No Ears might never be killed. He saw himself in a fight against all that was evil, and all that was evil was balled into that monster’s black hide. When his bullets were gone, Coltrane lowered the gun and
set it down on the copper strip. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand and squinted into the cornfield.