Bad Little Falls (2 page)

Doc glanced at me and gestured in the direction of the gate, hundreds of yards away through thick snow and dense pines. “I’d say it’s time for us to go, Warden.”

“Gladly.”

Brogan, of course, had to have the last word.

“Hey, Bowditch,” he said. “You’re not going to last long around here if you don’t cut people some slack.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said.

*   *   *

When we got back to the road, I half expected to find my tires slashed, but no one had molested the vehicle in our absence. My “new” truck, a standard-issue green GMC Sierra, was actually older than the pickup I’d been assigned in Sennebec. It seemed like all of my equipment here was shabbier than what I’d been issued before. Maybe being given obsolescent gear was part of my punishment.

Doc Larrabee drew his shoulder belt tight across his chest. When he exhaled, I caught the sweet smell of bourbon on his breath. “Well, that episode was definitely one for my book,” he said.

I started the engine and turned the wheel east, in the direction of Calais—pronounced
Callus
in this part of the world—on the Canadian border. “I can’t believe that idiot brought a zebra to Maine.”

The veterinarian rubbed his mittens together. “Joe’s not as dumb as he looks. He’s smart about looking after his own interests. And like most bullies, he has an eye for a person’s weak spot. Those men who work for him are all terrified of pissing him off.”

Doc’s description of Brogan reminded me a lot of my own father. Jack Bowditch had always been the scariest guy in whatever town he’d happened to be living. Out in the sticks, where people live far from their neighbors and are leery of reporting misdeeds to the authorities out of fear of violent retribution, a reputation for ruthlessness can get a man most anything he wants.

“My new supervisor warned me about Brogan,” I said.

“How is Sergeant Rivard?”

As big a prick as ever, I wanted to say.

Like me, Marc Rivard had been transferred from the affluent south to dirt-poor Washington County some time back, and he was still bitter about his circumstances. Unlike me, he had subsequently earned a promotion and was now in the position of off-loading his frustrations on the nine district wardens under his supervision.

“Sergeant Rivard has a unique approach to his job,” I said.

Doc removed his glasses and wiped them with a snotty-looking handkerchief. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Did you impregnate the commissioner’s daughter or something? You must have pissed off some eminence down in Augusta to get stationed out here in the williwags.”

I found it hard to believe Doc was truly ignorant of my notorious history. If he read the newspapers at all, he must have known about the manhunt for my father two years ago and he would have heard that I’d shot a murderer in self-defense back in Sennebec last March. Maybe he didn’t realize how deeply I’d embarrassed the attorney general’s office in the process. In the opinion of the new administration in Augusta, I had become a public-relations nightmare. And if Colonel Harkavy couldn’t force me to resign, he could at least sweep me under the rug.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“I’d enjoy hearing it sometime,” Doc said. “I might be misreading your social calendar, but I’m guessing you don’t get many dinner invitations. Why don’t you come over tomorrow night and I’ll cook you my widely praised coq au vin. After Helen died, I had to learn how to feed myself, and thanks to Julia Child, I became quite the French chef.”

I didn’t much feel like socializing these days, and the idea of eating dinner alone at this old man’s house made me squirmy, I’m not ashamed to admit.

The veterinarian must have sensed my discomfort. “Maybe I’ll invite Kendrick over, too,” he said. “He’s a professor down to the University of Maine at Machias and runs the Primitive Ways survival camp. Kevin’s a musher, a dogsled racer. He and his malamutes have raced in the Iditarod up in Alaska a couple of times and finished in the money. He’s had a pretty unusual life and is something of a living legend around here. He knows these woods better than the local squirrels.”

Kendrick’s name was familiar to me. My friend, the retired chief warden pilot, Charley Stevens, had mentioned the professor as someone worth getting to know in my new district. My one consolation in being transferred Down East was that it moved me closer to Charley and his wife, Ora, who had recently purchased a house near Grand Lake Stream, an hour’s drive north of my new base in Whitney.

I tried to put Doc off, but he was persistent.

By the time I dropped the veterinarian at his doorstep, we had agreed that I would join him for dinner the following evening.

*   *   *

I took my time driving home. It wasn’t like I had anyone waiting for me in bed.

The moon was nearly full, so I paused for a while atop Breakneck Hill and gazed out across the snowy barrens, which extended as far as the eye could see. Washington County is the wild-blueberry capital of the world. During the never-ending winter, the rolling hills become covered with deep drifts of snow. In places, boulders jut up through the crust. At night, the slopes look almost like a lunar landscape, if you can imagine twisted pines on the moon and a looming cell tower blinking red above the Sea of Tranquillity.

I switched on the dome light and reached for the birthday card I’d tucked between the front seats. It had arrived in my mail that morning, just a week late. The picture showed a cartoon cat hugging a cartoon dog.

To a purrfect friend,
it read.

Sarah had always given me ironic cards—the sappier the better—so why should it be any different now that our relationship was over? She’d handwritten a note in purple ink inside:

Dear Mike,

I hope things are well and that you’re enjoying the winter Down East. Do you have any time to ski or ice fish? How are Charley and Ora doing? I know it’s not your way to do something special for yourself, but it would make me happy to think of you having some fun with friends today. Life is busy here in D.C., but it’s stimulating work and I’m meeting lots of fascinating people. One of these days we should catch up—it’s been so long since we talked.

xoxo

S.

I didn’t really want to speak with my ex-girlfriend. Sarah and I were finished forever as a couple, and probably finished as friends, no matter what her birthday card said. A year earlier, she had become pregnant with my child, a condition she had hidden from me until she miscarried. The fact that she had concealed her pregnancy proved that she would never overcome her doubts about my fitness to be a husband and father. We had broken up by mutual agreement over the summer, before I’d received my transfer to the North Pole. She was now living in Washington, D.C., working for the national office of the Head Start program. Sometimes I pictured her going out for drinks with people our own age—with
men
our own age—while I was stuck in the wilds of eastern Maine, fielding dinner invitations from elderly veterinarians.

I’d been struggling to find meaning in the sequence of events that had led me to this wasteland, but my prayers always seemed to disappear into the black void that stretched from horizon to horizon, and I never got any answers. All that was left to me was to accept my fate and do my job with as much dignity as I could muster.

Tonight, however, I found myself yearning to hear Sarah’s voice, even though I knew that speaking with her would make me feel more lonely and not less. Two years earlier, when we were weathering a rough patch, I had convinced myself that I was a lone wolf by nature. It was the reason why I had chosen the profession of game warden—because I secretly wanted a solitary life.

Now I knew better.

*   *   *

The moon was high and bright overhead when I arrived at my trailer on the outskirts of Whitney. I’d lived in my share of mobile homes as a child, and this one was better than most. The roof barely leaked, all but two of the electrical sockets worked, and a rolled towel pressed against the base of the door was enough to stop the snow from blowing in through the crack. My rented trailer was located down a dead-end road, far enough from the main drag that I could park my patrol truck out of sight—although every poacher, pill addict, and petty criminal within a hundred miles knew where I lived.

As I turned the truck into the plowed drive, the bright halogen bulbs swept across the front of the building. Something long and dark seemed to be affixed to the door. I couldn’t tell for sure what the black thing was until I climbed the steps with my flashlight in hand.

The object was a coyote pelt. Whoever had killed the animal had done a poor job of skinning it, because the fur stank to the heavens. A tenpenny nail had been driven through the head into the hollow metal door.

There was a note written in block letters, large enough for me to read in the moonlight: “WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.” It was signed, “GEORGE MAGOON.”

FEBRUARY 12

The moon don’t rotate, you know. All you ever see is the same side of it! There could be space aliens living up there in the shadows and we’d never know if they was planning to invade us.

Aunt Tammi don’t believe me.

What do you think that Pink Floyd song means? I ask her.

She’s knitting in her wheelchair. Which one, Lucas?

The one you’re always playing. DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.

She says it don’t mean anything. It’s just a song.

We’re all having dinner, Tammi, Uncle Prester, and me. Ma likes to eat at the table like we did when Gram and Gramp were alive and this was their house.

She always makes us say a prayer now, ever since she started going to those Don’t Drink meetings.

About halfway through dinner, Randle comes by to get Uncle Prester.

Randle’s got that scary new tattoo all over his face—the spiky one he got after Ma kicked him out before Christmas.

You don’t have to go with him, Ma tells Prester.

Yeah I do, Prester says. He seems real sad about it, though.

Randle laughs and says they’re just going coyote hunting is all.

Where’s your dogs? I ask him. He used to have a pit bull, but they don’t hunt.

Don’t need any.

You using bait, then?

Nope.

So how you going to get them?

We call them in, he says. He does a sort of wolf call then, because he likes to scare Tammi and me.

After Randle and Prester leave, I say to Ma, They ain’t going coyote hunting, are they?

She don’t answer. She just keeps washing dishes.

They got some kind of big drug deal, don’t they?

That gets her all worked up. Don’t you have homework?

I already did it, I tell her.

Don’t lie to me, Lucas.

She gives me that X-ray look. I can’t understand how she figures things sometimes.

The curtains are rolled up in my room and the moon is shining in until I yank down the shade. I don’t like seeing the full moon out my window. It reminds me of the White Owl.

3

“Who’s George Magoon?” I asked Sgt. Kathy Frost.

I’d risen early to do push-ups, burpees, and planks, and I was standing in my boxer briefs, with the cell phone clamped to one sweaty ear. The windows inside the trailer were all frosted over, but I could tell from the ashen light that the day was shaping up to be a dark one. The sun had risen brightly at dawn, but menacing clouds were already rolling in from the northwest. The forecast called for snow.

I’d reached Kathy on the road. She was heading up north for a few days, towing her Ski-Doo Renegade on a trailer behind her patrol truck. The guys in Greenville needed some extra wardens to help work snowmobilers over the Presidents’ Day weekend. There had been a fatality on Moosehead Lake five days earlier—too much booze, speed, and testosterone.

Kathy’s voice was cutting in and out. Our connection wasn’t great. “George who?”

“George Magoon. I checked the computer, but there’s no one in the area with that name.”

Kathy laughed. “I wouldn’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“George Magoon is a fictional character—like Robin Hood or Brer Rabbit. He was this wily poacher who was always outwitting the game wardens Down East. There are all kinds of tall tales about his exploits. Ask Rivard about them.”

Kathy Frost wasn’t just my former supervisor; she was the closest thing I had to a friend in the Warden Service, someone who had been a confidante to me during the tense days when my father was a fugitive in the North Woods. Kathy was also the most physically fit person I’d ever met. She was a tall, strong-limbed woman who wore her hair in a blondish bob and could bench-press her own weight. She routinely won triathlons without ever bothering to train for them.

“So you’re saying that some jackass is pulling a prank on me?” I said.

“Just be glad he didn’t nail a skunk to your door.”

“What do you know about Brogan?”

“He’s so dumb, he needs to unzip his fly to count to eleven.”

I missed Kathy’s warped sense of humor. I fancied myself a stoic, but the isolation of my new post seemed to be having an insidious effect upon me. The blank-eyed, unsmiling face I saw in the mirror each morning seemed to belong to one of those guys who sleeps under a bridge. Part of being a Maine game warden was being ready to move at a moment’s notice. But the department’s decision to transfer me out of Kathy’s division (technically, I had volunteered) was an especially cruel blow.