It is often said that there are two Maines. There is the Maine of the summer tourists, the Maine of lobster rolls and ice cream, of yachts and boat clubs, a Maine that occupies a neat strip of coastline about as far north as Bar Harbor, with high hopes and property prices to match, apart from those towns without the good looks or good fortune to attract the tourist dollar, or those that have seen their industries fade and die, marooning them in a lake of prosperity. The rest of Maine derisively refers to the inhabitants of this region as “flatlanders” or, in even darker moments, dismisses them entirely as residents of “Northern Massachusetts.”
The other Maine is very different. It is a Maine primarily of forests, not ocean, dominated by “the County,” or Aroostook, which has always seemed a separate entity due to its sheer size, if nothing else. It is northern and inland, rural and conservative, and its heart is the Great North Woods.
But those woods had begun to change. The big paper companies, once the backbone of the economy, were slowly relinquishing their hold on the land, recognizing that there was more money in property than raising and cutting trees. Plum Creek, the nation’s largest paper company, which owned nearly five hundred thousand acres around Moosehead Lake, had earmarked thousands of those acres for a massive commercial development of RV parks, houses, rental cabins, and an industrial park. For those in the south, it represented the despoiling of the state’s greatest area of natural beauty; but for those in the other Maine, it meant jobs and money and an influx of new blood into dying communities.
The reality was that the forest canopy hid the fastest-growing poverty rate in the nation. Towns were shrinking, schools were getting smaller, and the bright young hopes of the future were leaving for York and Cumberland, for Boston and New York. When the mills shut down, high-paying jobs were replaced by minimum-wage labor. Tax revenues fell. Crime, domestic violence, and substance abuse increased. Long Pond, once bigger than Jackman, had virtually died with the closure of its mill. Up in Washington County, almost within sight of the summer playground of Bar Harbor, one in five people lived in poverty. In Somerset, where Jackman lay, it was one in six, and a steady stream of people made their way to Youth and Family Services in Skowhegan, seeking food and clothing. In some areas, there was a waiting list of years for a Section 8 voucher, at a time when rural rental assistance and funding for Section 8 was steadily falling.
Yet Jackman, oddly, had prospered in recent years, in part because of the events of 9/11. Its population had fallen rapidly during the 1990s, and half of its housing units had been vacant. The town still had its lumber mill, but the changing nature of tourism meant that those who now headed north came in camper vans, or rented cabins and cooked for themselves, leaving little money in the town. Then the planes hit, and suddenly Jackman found itself on the front line of the fight to secure the nation’s borders. U.S. Customs and Border Protection doubled its manpower, house prices shot up, and, all things considered, Jackman was now in a better position than it had been for a long time. But even by Maine standards, Jackman remained remote. The nearest courthouse was in Skowhegan, sixty miles to the south, and the cops had to come up to Jackman from Bingham, almost forty miles away. It was, in its strange way, a lawless place.
Just as we came out of Solon, the Kennebec appeared before us. There was a sign by the side of the road. It read: “Welcome to Moose River Valley. If you don’t stop, smile on the way through.”
I looked at Louis.
“You’re not smiling,” I said.
“That’s ’cause we’re stopping.”
I guessed that statement could be taken a number of ways.
• • •
We didn’t head into Jackman that night. Instead, we pulled off the road a little way outside town. There was an inn on a small hill, with motel-style rooms, a tiny bar beside the reception area, and a restaurant with long benches designed to feed the hunters who gave it a reason to exist in winter. Angel had already checked in, although he was nowhere to be seen. I went to my room, which was simply furnished and had a small kitchen area in one corner. There was underfloor heating. It was stiflingly hot. I turned off the heating, ignoring the warning that it would take twelve hours for the system to warm the room to its maximum again, then went back to the main building.
Angel was at the bar, a beer before him. He was sitting on a stool, reading a newspaper. He didn’t acknowledge me, although he saw me enter. There were two men to his left. One of them looked at Angel and whispered to his friend. They laughed unpleasantly, and something told me that this exchange had been going on for a time. I drifted closer. The one who had spoken was muscular and wanted people to know it. He wore a tight green T-shirt crisscrossed by the suspenders attached to his orange hunter’s oilskins. His head was closely shaved, but the ghost of his widow’s peak stood out like an arrow upon his forehead. His friend was smaller and heavier, his T-shirt worn bigger and looser to hide his gut. His beard looked like an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the weakness of his chin. Everything about him spoke of concealment, of his awareness of his failings. Although he was grinning, his eyes flicked uneasily from Angel to his colleague, as though the pleasure he was taking in the casual tormenting of another was tinged by relief that he was not the victim this time, a relief qualified by the knowledge that the muscular man could turn just as easily on him, and if he did so, it would probably not be for the first time.
The big man tapped a fingertip on Angel’s newspaper.
“You okay, buddy?” he said.
“Yeah, I’m good,” said Angel.
“I’ll bet.” The man made an obscene gesture with his hand and tongue. “I’m sure you’re real good.”
He laughed loudly. His friend joined in, a puppy barking with the big dog. Angel kept his eyes on his newspaper.
“Hey, I don’t mean nothing by it,” said the man. “We’re just having a little fun, that’s all.”
“I can see that,” said Angel. “I can tell that you’re a fun guy.”
The man’s smile died as the sarcasm started to burn.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. “You got a problem?”
Angel sipped his beer, closed his paper, and sighed. His main aggressor moved in closer, his friend muscling in alongside him. Angel spread his hands wide and patted both men gently on the chest. The barman was doing his best to stay out of the affair, but I could see him watching what was taking place in the mirror above the register. He was young, but he had still seen all of this before. Guns, beer, and the smell of blood was a combination guaranteed to bring out the worst in ignorant men.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” said the first man. “I asked you a question: you got a problem, because it seems to me like you have a problem. So, do you?”
Angel seemed to consider the question. “Well,” he said, “my back aches, I’m stuck in the boonies with a bunch of crackers with guns, and I’m not always sure that I’m with the right man.”
There was momentary confusion.
“What?” said the big man.
Angel mirrored his expression, then his face cleared. “Oh,” he said. “You mean, do I have a problem with you?” He made a dismissive gesture with his right hand. “I don’t have a problem with you at all,” he said. “But my friend behind you, on the other hand, I think he may have a big problem with you.”
The larger man turned around. His buddy had already backed away, giving Louis space at the bar.
“How you doin’?” said Louis, who had entered the bar shortly after me, and had spotted what was happening just as quickly as I had done. I was now standing alongside him, but it was clear that he was the main attraction.
The two men took in Louis and weighed up their options. None of them looked good. At least one of them involved a world of hurt. The alpha male made his choice, opting for the loss of a little dignity over something that might ultimately prove terminal.
“I’m doin’ good,” he said.
“Then we all happy,” said Louis.
“I guess so.”
“Looks like they about to serve up dinner.”
“Yeah, looks like it.”
“I guess you better be getting along. Wouldn’t want to miss your vittles.”
“Uh-huh.”
He tried to slip past Louis, but came up short against his fat friend, who hadn’t moved, and was forced to elbow him out of the way. His face was growing purple with humiliation. The friend risked one more look at Louis, then trotted along after the bald man.
“Looks like you picked a good place to stay,” I said to Angel. “A little heavy on the testosterone, maybe, and you could have some trouble filling your dance card, but it’s cute.”
“You took your fucking time getting up here,” said Angel. “You know, there’s not a whole lot to do once night falls, and it gets dark like someone just threw a switch. There isn’t even a TV in the room.”
We ordered hamburgers and fries, opting not to join the parties of hunters in the next room, and moved to a table beside the bar.
“You find out anything?” I asked Angel.
“I found out that nobody wants to talk about Gilead, is what I found out. Best I could get was from some old ladies tending the cemetery. According to them, what’s left of Gilead is now on private land. A guy named Caswell bought it about fifteen years ago, along with another fifty acres of woodland around it. He lives close by. Always has. Doesn’t entertain much. Not a Rotarian. I took a trip up there. There was a sign, and a locked gate. Apparently, he doesn’t like hunters, trespassers, or salesmen.”
“Has Merrick been here?”
“If he has, then nobody saw him.”
“Only one way to find out.”
“Yeah.”
I watched the hunters eating and picked out the two men who had targeted Angel. They were seated in a corner, ignoring the others around them. The bigger man’s face was still red. There were a lot of guns around the place, and a lot of machismo to go with them. It wasn’t a good situation.
“Your friends from the bar?” I said.
Angel nodded. “Phil and Steve. From Hoboken.”
“I think it might be a good idea to send them on their way.”
“It’ll be a pleasure,” said Angel.
“By the way, how’d you know their names?”
Angel slipped his hands into his jacket pockets. They emerged holding two wallets. “Old habits . . .”
• • •
The lodge was constructed around a hollow, with the bar and reception building on the higher ground by the road, and the rooms and cabins at the bottom of the slope beyond it. It wasn’t difficult to find out where the resident homophobes were staying, as each guest was forced to carry his key on a fob cut from the trunk of a small tree. The key had been lying in front of the two guys as they taunted Angel. They were in cabin number fourteen.
They left the table about fifteen minutes after their meal was over. By that time, Angel and Louis were gone. The two men didn’t look at me as they departed, but I could feel their anger simmering. They had drunk seven pints of beer between them during and after their meal, and it was only a matter of time before they decided to seek some form of retribution for being bested at the bar.
The temperature had dropped suddenly with nightfall. In the shaded places, that morning’s frost had not yet melted. The two men walked quickly back to their cabin, the bigger man leading, the small bearded man behind. They entered to find that their hunting rifles had been disassembled and now lay in pieces on the floor. Their bags were beside the guns, packed and locked.
To their immediate left stood Louis. Angel was seated at the table beside the stove. Phil and Steve from Hoboken took in the two men. Phil, the larger and more aggressive of the two, seemed about to say something when he saw the guns in the hands of the two visitors. He closed his mouth again.
“You know there isn’t a cabin number thirteen?” said Angel.
“What?” said Phil.
“I said, you know that there isn’t a cabin number thirteen in this place? The numbers jump from twelve to fourteen, on account of how nobody wants to be in number thirteen. But this is still the thirteenth cabin, so you’re really in number thirteen after all, which is how come you’re so unlucky.”
“Why are we unlucky?” Phil’s natural animosity was returning, beefed up with some of the Dutch courage from the bar. “All I see is two shitheads wandered into the wrong cabin and started to fuck with the wrong guys. You’re the unlucky ones. You have no idea who you’re screwing with here.”
Beside him, Steve shifted uneasily on his feet. Appearances to the contrary, he was smart enough, or sober enough, to realize that it wasn’t a good idea to rile two men with guns when you had no guns at all, at least none that could be reassembled in time to make them useful.
Angel took the wallets from his pocket and waved them at the two men.
“But we do,” he said. “We know just who you are. We know where you live, where you work. We know what your wife looks like, Steve, and we know that Phil seems to be separated from the mother of his children. Sad, Phil. Pictures of the kids, but no sign of Mommy. Still, you are kind of a prick, so it’s hard to blame her for giving you the bullet.
“You, on the other hand, know nothing about us other than the fact that we’re here now, and we got good reason to be aggrieved with you on account of your big mouths. So this is what we propose: you put your shit in your car, and you start heading south. Your buddy there can do the driving, Phil, ’cause I can tell you’ve had a few more than he has. When you’ve driven, oh, maybe a hundred miles, you stop and find yourselves a room. Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, you head back to Hoboken, and you’ll never see us again. Well, you’ll probably never see us again. You never know. We might feel the urge to visit someday. Maybe there’s a Sinatra tour we can take. Gives us an excuse to drop by and say ‘hi’ to you and Steve. Unless, of course, you’d like to give us a more pressing reason to follow you down there.”
Phil made one last play. His pigheadedness was almost admirable.
“We got friends in Jersey,” he said meaningfully.
Angel looked genuinely puzzled. His reply, when it came, could have come only from a New Yorker.
“Why would somebody boast about something like that?” he asked. “Who the fuck wants to visit Jersey anyway?”
“Man means,” said Louis, “that he got ‘friends’ in Jersey.”
“Oh,” said Angel. “Oh, I get it. Hey, we watch The Sopranos too. The bad news for you, Phil, is even if that were true, which I know it’s not, we are the kind of people that the friends in Jersey call, if you catch my drift. It’s easy to tell, if you look hard enough. You see, we have pistols. You have hunting rifles. You came here to hunt deer. We didn’t come here to hunt deer. You don’t hunt deer with a Glock. You hunt other things with a Glock, but not deer.”
Phil’s shoulders slumped. It was time to admit defeat. “Let’s go,” he said to Steve.
Angel tossed him the wallets. He and Louis watched as the two men loaded up their bags and the pieces of the rifles, minus the firing pins, which Angel had thrown into the forest. When they were done, Steve took the driver’s seat, and Phil stood at the passenger door. Angel and Louis leaned casually on the rail of the cabin, only the guns suggesting that this wasn’t merely a quartet of acquaintances exchanging final farewells.
“All of this because we were having a little fun with you at the bar,” said Phil.
“No,” said Angel. “All of this because you’re assholes.”
Phil got in the car, and they drove away. Louis waited until their lights had faded, then tapped Angel gently on the back of the hand.
“Hey,” he said, “we never get calls from Jersey.”
“I know,” said Angel. “Why would we want to talk to anyone in Jersey?”
And, their work done, they retired to bed.