Dodge burst into the Loon’s Watch bar. The local pair of barstool residents turned to look at him—Frampton and Barnegat, both bleary-eyed from alcohol. Dodge scanned the room until he saw Coltrane sitting in the corner. Then he walked across, as calmly as he could so as not to draw attention.
Coltrane’s table had a video game built into it. There was only one video table at the Loon’s Watch, and Coltrane claimed it whenever he walked in. The surface of this table was a plastic screen, scratched into opaqueness by beer mugs. Underneath, the video game acted itself out in awkward microdot spasms. It was an old game, the late-seventies graphics clumsy. The sound effects were tiny grunts and squeaks. On a level below the table was a slot for putting money in and red buttons for firing at the aliens.
“I found him,” said Dodge. His cheeks were burnished from the cold.
Coltrane wasn’t listening. He had wiped the beer sweat from the tabletop and stuck a quarter into the video game. He jabbed at the red FIRE button, killing aliens for three minutes until they shot him down with their grunting, squeaking spaceships. At last, Coltrane looked up at Dodge, radish-faced from the effort. “I can’t do this stupid game.”
Dodge sat down. “I think I found our guy,” he said again.
Coltrane had pulled another quarter from his pocket. He was about to fight the aliens again, as if to kill them off forever, but Dodge’s words snapped him out of it. “What did you just say?”
“It’s like we thought. Wilbur Hazard.” Dodge lowered his voice. Barnegat and his friend had fallen silent, both doing their best to listen in.
“How come you’re so sure?” Coltrane stood. He wished he could tell Dodge the truth, but the job at the mill was the only one he’d ever had. He was five years from retirement. He could not bring himself to throw all that away. Still, he hated himself for being a coward. If there had been no one else in this bar but him, Coltrane would have taken his mug and smashed it through the table screen onto the grunting aliens in their Day-Glo spaceships.
“We need to start now,” Dodge said.
“We?” Coltrane’s voice rose on the word. “Oh, no. This isn’t my job.”
“I need your help, Victor. Won’t you help me?”
Billy Frampton’s large eyes seemed to swivel like radar dishes toward where the two men sat.
“Sit down a minute, Marcus,” Coltrane told him. “We need to talk more.”
“We have to go now.” Dodge’s whisper hissed across the table. “Please, Victor. I need your help.”
“Let me go tell Mackenzie, at least.”
They were facing each other now. The video-game table flashed beneath them.
“All right,” said Dodge. “I’ll meet you at the station in fifteen minutes.” He walked out quickly and the sound of the police car’s engine rumbled through the walls of the bar.
Coltrane realized that Barnegat and Frampton were staring at him. Barnegat was a worker at the mill and resented Coltrane’s promotion to foreman. He wore a black wool watch cap all year round and sported a stubby mustache, the same color as the cap. He’d grown the mustache because he had been slashed in the face during a knife fight and his upper lip had never healed. Billy Frampton, half-dead and mean, had been retired from logging for almost a decade. He had the sad eyes of a bloodhound and a way of sucking at his teeth whenever he got ready to speak. He wore a dirty toupee that sometimes stayed in his hard hat when he took the hat off his head. Frampton lived in an old shop on the main street. He put curtains in the windows so people couldn’t see into his living room, but sometimes he drew them back to let in the light and sat in his rocking chair, watching people watching him.
Suddenly Coltrane had the strange feeling that everything around him had become two-dimensional. But the wilderness outside had three dimensions now. Soon he would be going out there, against every instinct in his body. And then it would be too late forever to tell Dodge that he knew who had spiked the tree. Coltrane walked out of the bar. He kept his eye on the two men, wanting them to know that they were being watched.
By the time Coltrane left the room, sweat was running down Frampton’s face. “Goddamn that man,” he said. “He can make you think you done something wrong even when you’re just sitting there sucking in air.” Frampton blinked his eyes very hard when he talked, as if whatever he said was a constant source of amazement to him.
Barnegat didn’t answer. He was thinking about the $10,000 reward that Mackenzie had posted. “That Hazard boy is ten thousand dollars’ worth of fool running around in the forest,” he whispered. “Be a shame to let the bears get him first.”
Frampton understood. He had been thinking the same thing. “I’ll meet you at the logging road in half an hour.” He reached a finger under his toupee and scratched. The furry pancake shifted as if it were alive. “We got to bring guns.” He talked too loudly. He had been raised by an uncle named Johann Kaslaka, who had been blown through a hedge by an artillery burst during the invasion of France in 1918. The blast had shattered Kaslaka’s eardrums, leaving him mostly deaf, and to compensate, Kaslaka always raised his voice when talking, as if people could hear him as faintly as he heard them. The result of this was that he caused listeners to wince at his lung-emptying shouts, turned heads in every quiet room and so confused the street dogs of Abenaki Junction that they barked at him whenever he walked past. The habit spread to Billy Frampton, who had never lost it, even though he tried.
Barnegat set his hand on Frampton’s shoulder. “You’re too old for this, Billy.”
Frampton stared at the hand until Barnegat took it away. “I ain’t too fucking old. I could still pop the eyes out of your head.”
“All right, Billy,” Barnegat said slowly. “Whatever you say.” He was tired of taking orders from Frampton. The old man had nothing left but his foul mouth to exert any kind of authority. Tonight I will teach him some respect, thought Barnegat. “We head straight up the middle to the tracks.” He drew a line through a puddle of spilled beer on the bar top to mark the path they would take through the Algonquin.
Lazarus stood in front of them now. He drummed his fingers on the counter, eyebrows raised, asking them without words if they wanted more beer.
Frampton slid the dull gray tankard across the counter. Most nights he drank eleven beers, grimly and steadily. Tonight he had drunk only four. “Goddamnit, old man,” he snapped at Lazarus, “how come you’re always staring at me as if you’re looking for an excuse to bust open my head?”
“Maybe I am,” said Lazarus quietly, “and maybe I found one.” Then he walked away. He sat at the end of the bar and thought about winter, just to get himself pissed off.
“Hunting season’s coming early this year,” said Barnegat. “I swear I’m going to tag me some meat before the sun comes up.”
When the men tramped out into the dark, Lazarus eased himself off his stool and began to mop down the copper bar top with a chamois cloth. “Do you want another cup of coffee?” he called into the shadows of the room. The bar lights were shining in his face and Lazarus could not see anyone, but he knew a man was there.
At first there was no reply and Lazarus breathed in to ask again, but then the man appeared suddenly, as if walking out of another dimension. It was Gabriel. He had heard everything. He set his coffee cup down on the wet copper of the bar. “What was that all about?” he asked.
Lazarus fetched the coffeepot and poured him some more. The coffee was thick and dark like old motor oil. “They’re fixing to kill a man tonight.”
Gabriel sipped his coffee and said nothing.
Lazarus fetched a cup and poured out some for himself. “Sometimes I think that people in this town are never more than a dozen words away from killing each other. There’s times I look at this town and it seems like the painted backdrop of some movie, and behind it all the claims we make about being civilized don’t mean anything. The instincts are still there to make us savages. It don’t take much to bring them to the surface.”
The bar door swung open and a woman walked in. A gust of cool night air followed her and vanished in the heat of the room. She carried a bulging leather mail satchel and a bundle of papers in her arms. She nodded at Lazarus.
“Hello, Madeleine,” said Lazarús. He pulled at one earlobe, as if suddenly self-conscious about the condition of his bar. He began to wash glasses that were already clean.
“I just need some coffee. I’m going to be up all night with this stuff.” Madeleine set her bundle on the countertop. The pile slid to one side, fanning the documents like a giant pack of playing cards. From the satchel, she took a small thermos and handed it over to Lazarus.
“Here’s another coffee drinker.” Lazarus nodded at Gabriel while he rinsed out the thermos. “Seems like nobody ever wants to sleep in this town.”
Gabriel had glanced at Madeleine when she walked in, but he had glanced away again. Now he turned to face her. He smiled uncertainly, embarrassed at the forced introduction.
Madeleine stared at him. She did not smile back. She gave him a look that made it clear he was a stranger.
Gabriel peered down into his coffee. He had noticed her intelligent face and the curve of her hips in her jeans, and he did not blame her for staring at him with the narrowed eyes and clenched jaw of someone who is suspicious. In her place, he might have done the same. Gabriel felt a tightness in his chest, and raised his head and saw his own tired eyes in the mirror behind the bar. He thought of all the avenues of possibility that he might once have imagined with this woman, even if it came to nothing more than a glance which showed that they both knew the possibility, no matter that it would remain a dream. He could have none of that now. All need for companionship had been replaced by the fear of discovery. Even if she did want to know, he could tell this woman nothing about who he really was. All he could do was envelop her in lies, and the closer he might come, the more lies he would have to weave around her. And the more he might care about her, the more he would detest himself for lying. He felt the trap in which he’d caught himself. If he liked her, he would not lie to her, and if he didn’t lie to her, she would have nothing to do with him.
Gabrel knew what he was. He knew the destruction he would bring to the lives of people in this town. And he knew that the extremity of his beliefs and what he was prepared to do to act them out was only the first step in a long series of steps that he believed in absolutely. He had accepted the price of that, which was to become like a machine. Not feel loneliness. But far away inside himself was the old Gabriel, nameless now, and waiting patiently but always less patiently for the time when the two sides of this man might somehow merge.
Gabriel was in a war. Any other name for it fell short. And part of the war was with himself, to keep in place the mask that he now wore. It seemed a fragile thing, and even the thought of being close to this stranger seemed to Gabriel to reveal in the bar’s mirror his old face. He hoped that no one else could see it.
Lazarus filled the thermos with coffee and handed it back to Madeleine, who paid for it with a pocket full of change. Before she turned to leave, she looked at Gabriel again. This time she did smile, but it was a smile that gave nothing away.
When Madeleine had gone, Gabriel gulped down the last of his coffee. He tapped the rim of the cup to show he wanted some more.
Lazarus filled the cup and set the coffeepot down on the counter. The bar-top copper rippled blue from the heat. “You ought not to drink that stuff so late at night.”
“I don’t sleep much, anyway.”
“No,” said Lazarus, as if he had known in advance.
Gabriel put a crumpled dollar bill on the counter. There was something in the old man’s voice that both bothered and comforted him. There was a softness to the way he spoke which Gabriel had not heard before. It was the first faint offering of acceptance of Gabriel’s presence here. But it bothered Gabriel, because Lazarus talked as if he knew more than he was letting on. Maybe Lazarus knew everything. Gabriel glanced up and caught Lazarus’s eye, searching for some blink of recognition, but it was too dark to tell. It’s just nerves, Gabriel thought to himself. It’s just the coffee jabbering in my head. But Gabriel knew it could just as easily have been himself out there in the woods that night and running for his life, instead of that poor man Wilbur Hazard.
“Get home fast,” Lazarus told Gabriel as he walked out. “And lock the door and load up your gun if you have one. And make yourself another pot of coffee. It ain’t worth sleeping tonight anyway. By the time those boys are finished in the woods, this place will be hell above ground.”
Before Coltrane knocked on Mackenzie’s door, he sat in his car across the road and smoked a cigarette to calm his nerves. It seemed to be the fastest-burning cigarette he had ever smoked. After only a few puffs, the butt had burned down so low that it looked as if he had made a fire by rubbing his thumb and index finger together. He flicked the cigarette out the window and then walked across the road. He rang the doorbell several times before Alicia let him in.
“I heard you the first time,” she said, laughing, but her eyes were serious.
Coltrane breathed in the beeswax-and-lemon smell of polished wood. “Dodge thinks he knows who did it,” Coltrane said. “The nail. He thinks he knows.”
The expression changed on her face. It was no longer reservedly polite. Now her gaze was fixed. “I’ll get Jonah. Please do sit down.” She vanished up the stairs.
Coltrane watched her go, silently admiring how out of place her gracefulness appeared in Abenaki Junction. She seemed to him like some rare and tropical plant growing in among the pines.
Mackenzie came down wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. His skin was red from sitting in a bath. Alicia followed him with a bathrobe, but he shook it off. Steam curled up from his skin.
Coltrane found himself looking down at his shoes in the presence of this mostly naked man.
“Alicia says you found someone.” Mackenzie’s gray chest hair clung in tight, angry curls to his body. He squinted at Coltrane, asking him without words, What the hell are you talking about?
“Well, Dodge saw him going into the Algonquin this evening. He’s going to try to find him and wants me to help.”
“Who is it?” Mackenzie was pug-faced with indignation.
“Wilbur Hazard. That city boy.”
“Hazard?” Mackenzie looked as if he had bitten into a piece of rotten fruit. “Hazard?” he asked again.
“I came right by to tell you. Tell you both.” Coltrane glanced at Alicia, to show he was talking to her as well.
“And Dodge wants you to help?” Mackenzie raked his fingers through his chest hair.
“I’ll go in there and help.” Coltrane stressed the word. He meant, I’ll go in there and fuck everything up on purpose, so nobody gets hurt.
“I think Victor needs to set out as soon as he can, dear.” Alicia took hold of her husband’s arm.
Mackenzie did not answer. He allowed himself to be led away upstairs. It never occurred to him that Alicia might know about him and Mary and the identity of Hazard’s father. He had never seen a flicker of suspicion on her face. But if he had looked her in the eye just then, he would have seen from the pity in her expression that she did know. She had known for a long while, and had forgiven him, although it had taken time. It was between him and Mary, this thing that had happened so far in the past. Alicia did not feel a part of it. Emotions had filtered down the way they always do in the end, and it seemed to her that each had made a separate peace. She pitied her husband now, because she knew he would never mention his pain to her and she could never tell him that she knew. Better to let it go. The punishment Mackenzie had dealt himself over the years had been hard enough to bear. No one judged Jonah Mackenzie more harshly than he judged himself, and if he thought she knew, the judgment would only be harsher. She did not want that. Didn’t want to hurt him, or for anyone to be hurt by this. In her mind, all debts had been paid. Alicia hoped it wasn’t true about Hazard spiking the tree. It would bring scandal to that fractured little family, which deserved it less than others she could name.
Coltrane stood for a moment by himself in the hallway, not sure what to do next. Then he left without saying good-bye. Five minutes later, he met Dodge at the station and the two of them headed for the forest. Coltrane drove. Dodge knew he liked to drive the patrol car, feeling the power of its supercharged engine. So now Dodge sat beside him, slipping new .357 bullets into the chamber of his revolver. At first they didn’t speak. Then, a few miles down the road, Coltrane suddenly jerked the steering wheel to one side. The police car swerved onto the shoulder. Gravel and dust kicked up behind them. A truck with a gun rack behind its seat sped past, the driver craning his neck around to see why they had stopped so suddenly.
“This guy could be anywhere in the Algonquin, in places nobody’s even seen before. It’s crazy going in now. We need to set out in daylight.” Coltrane looked out the car window. The darkness seemed almost solid, leaning with force against the glass.
Dodge brushed a hand over the stubble of his end-of-the-day beard. “It probably wouldn’t hurt to get some troopers up from Skowhegan to help with the search. I bet they could send us a few.”
“No,” said Coltrane hurriedly. “We know the Algonquin as well as any logger in the Mackenzie Company. You and I been stalking around there since we were kids. Longer than Hazard, any road. We’ll find him. We don’t need Skowhegan people for that. Ten men and the bear will hear you coming, but only two and you can come up close for the kill.” Coltrane flinched at a sudden and viciously returning memory. It was from years before, when he had shot a bear at a place called the Narrows, where Pogansett Lake flowed into Crescent Pond. The water ran fast there, and bears would sometimes come to scoop fish from the rapids. They were trout mostly, rainbows and browns. What jolted Coltrane was the image of the bear after his first bullet had struck. He shot the animal at fifty yards with a 30-06 hollow-point. The bear rocked from the hit and stood up, furious at the sudden pain. It was five feet tall. The pads of its paws looked to Coltrane like light-brown pillows in the black fluff of its fur. Then the bear looked down at its chest and saw, in the cold air, a jet of vaporized breath coming from the hole punched into its lungs. Coltrane saw all fierceness leave the bear’s face. Instead, there seemed to be a look of disappointment. That it had no chance to fight. That whatever had just happened was the end. Coltrane saw the dull downcasting of its eyes. He would never forgive himself for killing that bear. He did not know why. It was hunting season when he shot it. He had a license. It was legal. But this made no difference to the way he felt. The bear had not deserved to die, just as Hazard didn’t now. Tears jumped into Coltrane’s eyes and he wiped them away fast with his fur-tufted knuckles. He had not cried in years. Please God, he thought, don’t let that man get hurt.
“Tomorrow, then,” Dodge said with a gravelly voice, “We’ll set out at six A.M. to track him down.” He knew he couldn’t find Hazard on his own, and Coltrane wasn’t going anywhere but home. He felt the kind of disappointment in his friend that was so bad he couldn’t even mention it.
Coltrane swung the car out onto the road and headed back toward town. It seemed that each joint of his spine was in the grip of a small and angry fist. He knew what Dodge was thinking. The worst thing one man can think of another. The automatic gears changed smoothly as he stepped hard on the pedal. The two men sat in silence. Yellow road dividers slipped away under them like the musical torpedoes of the aliens, born and trapped and dying inside the plastic universe of their game table at the Loon’s Watch bar.
Dodge dropped Coltrane off at his house. Then he got back out on the road but did not head for home. He had one more place to go.
He drove to the house of Mary the Clock. He reached the royal-blue door and knocked on it with three heavy thumps of his fist.
“Well, it’s Mr. Dodge,” said Mary, spying on him through the keyhole. “Mine eyes have seen the glory.” Then she opened the door and laughed. Happy to see him. She was still dressed, despite the lateness of the hour. Without inviting him in, she turned and walked back into the house. She moved with the steady poise of a girl who has been taught to walk with a Bible balanced on her head. Her eyelashes were so dark around her green eyes that it looked as if she wore makeup, but she didn’t. In a few years, her beauty would leave her. She would still be beautiful, but in the way that people would think of her as old first and beautiful afterward. For now, she kept her beauty in the bright green eyes and unwrinkled smile and the hair that ran halfway down her back. She did not have the leering grin Dodge would have painted on an imagined crazy person. Instead, her smile seemed absentminded, as if she were constantly off visiting happy memories. Dodge wondered sometimes whether people were so busy feeling sorry for Mary that they failed to see she was sorry for them, too. She seemed to hold some precious secret in her mind, something so valuable that even to hold on to it excused her from the logic of the crowd.
Mary walked into the kitchen, which was mostly taken up by a table. It was draped with a red-and-white checked cloth, reminding Dodge of an Italian restaurant. Old Christmas cards still stood propped on a shelf above the fireplace. In the corner he could see the Christmas tree, its needles long since dead and the ornaments dangling on bare branches. Dodge knew it was a fire-code violation and he should have said something, but he let it go. He scanned the walls for signs of positive insanity. Pictures hanging upside down. Backward devil-writing in the dust on the windows. There was none of that.
“Take your place,” she told him, and pointed to a metal frame chair with coarse red upholstery. Dodge sat down in it. The chair was narrow and uncomfortable. At the base of its steel-tube legs were holes for attaching it to the ground. There was an ashtray in one of the arms. Suddenly Dodge knew what this was—a chair taken from an airliner. He looked down and saw a printed plastic sign on the chair frame. YOUR LIFE JACKET IS UNDER YOUR SEAT. Dodge could not help bending down to peer under the seat and see if the life jacket was there. It was.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Mary asked him, holding out an empty cup as if to show that this was where the drink would go. “I’m going to have some.”
Dodge snapped upright, dizzy with the rush of blood from his head. “I’m OK for now, thank you.” He waited for a moment while the chips of light from his dizziness spun around like bumblebees in flight and then vanished. “Mary, you probably know why I’m here.”
“Nope.” She smiled vacantly.
“Do you know about your son spiking those trees in the Algonquin?”
“Wilbur works at the restaurant.” Mary put on the kettle for tea. “All the livelong day.”
“Yes, but he’s been going into the woods, Mary. And driving nails into trees, we believe. We told you a man was killed the other day. We came by asking about it. Do you remember?”
“Yes.” She spoke as if she couldn’t quite be sure. “I want a pony.”
“I saw your son running into the woods this evening. He didn’t stop when I asked him to.”
“Yes.” Mary let the word sift into the air as if she were breathing out smoke.
“So is there anything you can tell us that might help? Wilbur’s just going to get hurt if he keeps running away.” Dodge tapped his fingers lightly on the tablecloth, feeling the hard wood beneath.
“No one would hurt Wilbur.” She laughed to show the stupidity of his suggestion. “He said he would come back, but I don’t know where from.”
“When will he come home?”
“When he’s ready.” Mary shrugged. “And we must reason not the need.” The kettle was boiling now. She started to prepare the tea.
Dodge could not bring himself to be impatient with the woman. He wished he could tell her how much trouble Wilbur was in, but he doubted it would do any good. In the end, he thought, she might be better off not knowing.
Dodge didn’t sleep that night. Instead, he stashed himself in a children’s playground across the road from Mary’s house. There was a swing set in the park, its chains rusted and creaking in the night breeze. Children had not played here in a while. Weeds climbed up through the sand. Dodge smoked a cigarette, hand cupped over the flame to hide it. He knew he had to be patient. Hazard will return, Dodge told himself. It’s the nature of the beast.
Barnegat and Frampton met at the logging road. Each carried a rifle. There was no moon, only a vast fan of stars above the trees. The road was a pale river running into the blackness of the forest.
“We split the money in half,” announced Frampton. Barnegat said nothing to disagree, so he assumed it was all right. He had spoken only to break the silence, which seemed to pace around them as if it were alive. He knew the woods by day, but it occurred to him only as he stepped creaky-kneed from his car that the wilderness at night was part of a different universe. He thought back to his stool at the bar and the gum-fuzzing beer he had left in his mug, and he wished he hadn’t come along. But it was too late now to show fear.
They walked up the road, the sound of their footsteps on the gravel drowning out everything but the running-water murmur of wind through the tops of the pines.
As the minutes went by, they met nothing and felt braver. Their eyes grew used to the dark and now they could make out the individual pines instead of the tarlike wall of night that seemed to rise sheer from the edges of the road.
Frampton held his rifle tight against his chest. The gun was the most valuable thing he owned. It was an antique Winchester 30-30 Goldenboy. For the past three years, he had been paying off the loan he took out to buy it. He saved money by not going to the dentist. Instead, he pulled three of his own rotten teeth with a pliers, having first glued pieces of leather to the gripping steel. Early in the year he had slipped while fly-fishing in felt-soled boots down by the railroad bridge that crossed a corner of Pogansett Lake. He trod between two rocks and fell, twisting his arm, which broke above the elbow. Too angry about the cost of a doctor’s bill to feel the pain, Frampton set his own arm right where he stood, waist-deep in the stream, fly rod clamped between his teeth. He still had that fly rod, teeth marks etched into the graphite. He didn’t go to a barber, figuring he had little enough hair to worry about anyway. Whenever it grew too long, he would light a candle and burn the ends. Then he would rub out the fire with his clawed fingers. Sometimes when he picked up the Goldenboy he wondered if it had been worth it. As he looked at the polished brass barrel and burnished cherrywood stock, he would remember the foul, metallic smell of his burned hair and the orangy crumbs that clung to his wool clothes like little spiders. “You figure Hazard’ll come quietly?” Frampton asked.
“I hope not,” Barnegat said. “I hope he puts up a fight, so we can fuck him up and pay him back for Pfeiffer.” Barnegat had not liked Pfeiffer and had never spoken to him except with the condescension of an old hand talking to a newcomer. But none of that mattered now.
The two men began to turn their thoughts from money to vengeance. They unshouldered their guns and slid bullets into the breeches. They sensed the particular never-to-be-mentioned thrill of men who feel justified in bringing violence to a weaker enemy. The more they thought of Pfeiffer, the more angry they became. Barnegat had seen the way he died, and Frampton had seen other accidents, which he assembled in his head until they matched the level of atrocity that Barnegat described.
Frampton reached into his pocket and took out a half-crushed packet of Camels. He shook it until a cigarette slid from the end and put it in his mouth. He was just reaching for his lighter when Barnegat slapped the white stick from between his lips.
“I can tell you don’t know shit about hunting.”
“I been hunting all my life.” Frampton talked back with as much bluster as he could manage against a man he almost loved.
“And I seen how much you get each season, too. Alls you do is sit there in the bushes drinking peppermint schnapps and catching cold. That cigarette will show up like a flashlight in the dark.” Barnegat ground the fallen cigarette into the road as if it were burning and he needed to put out the fire.
“What do you know about it anyway?” said Frampton, angry to have been humiliated. “I know about killing. I shot a man once. It was the only man I killed in World War Two. I fired at a lot of people, but this one I know I got. It was a German who at first I thought was dead. He was lying in a ditch and he was wounded. All bloody in the legs from some machine-gun burst. He pulled a pistol as I was walking past along a muddy road. I don’t know if he meant to shoot me or not. But I saw the gun and I let him have it with my Thompson. Then saw it was no man at all. It was just a kid. Maybe seventeen years old. It was some Waffen SS recruit in dappled sniper camouflage. But I was crazy angry at the time. I ripped the zinc identification disk from around that boy’s neck. And I still got it.” Frampton reached into his shirt and pulled out the tag, which hung around his neck on an old leather cord. “I went home and put it on before I came out here. I can still read his name: Sebastian Westland.” Of all the hauntings he had brought home from the war, the sight of that young man haunted him the most. Now Frampton wore the disk as a talisman against the fear that had clouded his thoughts.
Barnegat snorted. He was fed up with Frampton. His usual eleven beers made him jovial, but having only four had sharpened his temper. He had been wondering if there was any way he could get out of sharing Mackenzie’s reward money once they had got hold of Hazard. That was why Barnegat stayed up front, so he could be the first to track him down. And he decided that, for Hazard, there would be no coming quietly. That had been dismissed without discussion. Both men planned to beat Wilbur Hazard close to death, and then drag him into town like a shot deer and make sure everyone saw what vengeance they had taken on the son of Mary the Clock.
They passed the yellow police tape around the place where Pfeiffer had been killed. It rustled in the breeze as the men moved quickly by. After an hour, they reached the railroad tracks. They sat down on the creosote-smelling slabs of the track spacers and rested their guns against the rails. The sweat began to cool on their backs.
Frampton had given up hope that they would find Hazard. One by one, he snuffed out the daydreams of all the things he would buy with his share of the money, far more than his share ever could. The truth was he cared less about the money than the adventure. Lately, he had felt himself drifting apart from Barnegat, and he saw it as only a matter of time before Barnegat’s jokes about everyone else in town would include him. He would be fuel for all Barnegat’s private chuckling and then there would be nothing for him but to leave. This walk in the night had saved him. Even if they came out empty-handed, Frampton knew they would be brothers again, the way it had been in the beginning. He needed Barnegat’s friendship more than he could ever admit without ruining it. Frampton had no other friends in town. Everyone else had grown tired of his drinking and the way it made him crazy. He wished he were drunk now, as he didn’t feel like taking a swing at Wilbur Hazard, least of all with precious Goldenboy.
It was as if Barnegat had read Frampton’s mind. He leaned across with a pewter drinking flask in his hand.
Frampton took Barnegat’s hand in both of his and slapped the back of Barnegat’s palm in thanks. Frampton carefully unscrewed the pewter cap and let it dangle on its tiny chain. Then he took a slug and felt the taste of peppermint schnapps run stinging across his tongue. It was like liquid candy cane, and he knew he would need to drink the whole flask and then more if he was to feel the hypnotized rage he needed to face Hazard. At least it might be enough to take the pain of walking from his joints. Frampton had not complained about the length of the walk and the weight of the rifle, but his hipbones were so sore that he doubted whether he’d be able to stand again when they decided to move on. Instead, he’d been worrying about Hazard. He didn’t trust Barnegat to be any good in a fight, and he didn’t know Hazard well enough to feel sure that two of them against one of him would put the odds in their favor. The son of a crazy lady, he was thinking. I never did like the look of him. Frampton quietly envisioned a massacre, with himself as one of the victims. He stared at his boots and prepared to die.
Barnegat walked to the other side of the tracks. A moment later came the rough sputter of him pissing on the pale stone track bedding. Then the noise stopped. “Hey!” he whispered.
“You get something caught in your fly?” Frampton didn’t look up from his boots. He reached across and took another drink of the schnapps.
“It’s a light!” Barnegat rasped. “Someone’s got a fire going.”
Frampton felt his heart jump in his chest. He closed his hands around the dew-smeared stock of his gun, and crawled to where Barnegat crouched.
The fire was a bubble of marmalade light deep in the woods. Trees between the fire and the men seemed to shift in the sway of the flames. Someone stirred the ashes. Sparks rose into the sky.
“We’ll make too much noise if both of us go in.” Frampton could no longer hide his fear. He rested his forehead on the cold iron of a rail and in his mind he cursed his cowardice.
“I’ll go.” Barnegat was not afraid. He suddenly felt more brave and ready for a fight than he ever had before. He had no idea where his courage had come from, but suddenly it was there like a transfusion running through him. He fanned his eyes across the cowering man and thought, When this is over, nobody’s getting any money except me. And there’ll be no more bowing down to you and hearing about how you could pop my eyes out if you wanted to. When we get back to town, things will be different, and they will stay that way. Then he crawled down the embankment, through the oily water in the ditch and into the woods, carrying his rifle in the crook of his elbow.
Wilbur Hazard sat as close to the fire as he could, arms around his knees, rocking slowly back and forth. The cold had sunk into his bones. Beside him was his backpack, in which he carried a hammer, nails, a saw and three glass mason jars. For the past few weeks, he had been sneaking into the Algonquin and cutting down trees to make himself a cabin. He didn’t know who the land belonged to. He only knew it wasn’t his, and so he had to keep his cabin a secret. That was half the thrill of building it. It would be his hideaway. He had studied a book about cabin building and learned how to notch the logs so they would fit together. Instead of windows, he was going to cut a window space but fill the gap with old mason jars, which he could bring into the woods a few at a time. He would caulk the jars and logs with moss and dirt and pine sap, the way prospectors had done in Alaska in the last century. He had gently lifted the moss from rocks on the crest of Seneca Mountain and set it right side up on the wood so it could continue to grow. For this he used a long-bladed Gerber knife, which he kept in a sheath at his waist. With the Gerber, he could reach into each crevice of the stone. The cabin was three-quarters built. The only thing it didn’t have was a door, and the windows still needed a few more jars.
But now that policeman had ruined everything. He had run from Officer Dodge with no sense of where he was going. Only to get away. He wished now that he had stayed, because in the past few minutes of sitting by the fire it had finally occurred to him that Dodge was looking for the tree spiker, not for him. Hazard had first assumed that someone had found the cabin and reported him. He didn’t know how he could get himself out of this mess, and he didn’t know if they would believe him, even if he told the truth. I’m the son of a lady everyone thinks is crazy, thought Hazard.
In his frustration, he picked up a stick and whacked the fire, sending shreds of ember up into the trees. He raised his head to watch them and saw pine branches shimmering like copper above him. If I could only get to Mr. Mackenzie, he thought, I could explain it to him and he would understand. Mr. Mackenzie is fair. He’s a straight dealer. People will do what he says. He had never met Mackenzie before, but knew he was the most influential man in town. This was Hazard’s only plan. As soon as it grew light, he would make his way to the mill and plead his case to the man who had everyone’s respect.
He didn’t hear Barnegat behind him. All he heard was the thump of the rifle butt striking the back of his head and the pain that closed around his face as if someone had put his hands in front of his eyes. He pitched forward into the fire and embers fell into his mouth.
Then a hand grabbed the material of his coat and yanked him from the blinding light and pain. Hazard smelled the bitter reek of his own torched hair. Burns laid raw his cheeks and lips and forehead. A man was standing over him. Hazard couldn’t see who it was, but he could see the raised gun, the brass butt plate aimed at his face. He tried to talk but couldn’t. His mouth was filled with blood.
“Time’s up,” the man said.
Hazard felt the slam of the rifle into his chin and blacked out. He couldn’t tell how long. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds. When he opened his eyes, he saw he was still by the fire. Scrabbling through Hazard’s pain came the knowledge that this man was trying to kill him. He rolled over and began to crawl away. A gurgling moan pushed itself out of his throat. Then his legs were yanked out from under him and his nose hit the dirt and he felt pine needles digging into the opened flesh of his burns.
“I got him!” Barnegat yelled. He dragged Hazard a few feet back toward the fire, then stopped and rolled the man over with his boot. He shoved the barrel of the gun in Hazard’s face. “I swear to God, the only thing stopping me from killing you right now is I don’t even know what. You even fucking talk to me and I’ll shoot you.” Then Barnegat undid the top of Hazard’s rucksack, which was still strapped to his back, and began to empty out the hammers and small nails and newspaper-wrapped mason jars that Hazard had stored inside. “Look at all this shit!” He smashed the mason jars one after the other on top of Hazard’s head, hearing the glass break inside the paper wrapping. “What the hell got into you, boy? Didn’t your loopy fucking mama teach you any better? What did Pfeiffer ever do to deserve what you did to him? And worse than that, you could have fucking killed me!” He kicked Hazard in the stomach, feeling the man curl up around the blow. Then Barnegat shouldered his rifle, knowing there would be no more trouble from Hazard. He took hold of Hazard’s legs and dragged him back toward the tracks.
Frampton stood with his gun ready, wishing now that he had volunteered to go in Barnegat’s place.
“Look at this fuck!” Barnegat dragged Hazard the last few feet up the embankment and then dumped him on the tracks. He wiped the sweat off his face. “Fucking short-order cook!” He felt unstoppable. Part of him wished that Frampton would fight him now, because he would kill the old man with his bare hands.
Hazard rose up to his hands and knees. His head lolled down and he spat. His lips moved and he began to whisper.
“He’s saying something.” Frampton bent down, hands on his knees. “What are you saying, Mister?” He had drunk the last of the schnapps and felt the first flickers of uncontrollable anger igniting in his chest. He wanted to do something he could brag about later.
“I can explain,” Hazard whispered. His stomach felt loose and heavy, as if something had ruptured inside him. “It wasn’t me. I swear.”
“Don’t listen to him.” Barnegat shoved Frampton out of the way.
“Don’t push me!” Frampton walked up close to Barnegat. He had an inkling that Barnegat meant to keep all the reward money, which was what he would have done himself if he could have come up with half an excuse. “Don’t you push me, Barnegat!”
Barnegat stared at Frampton. Just give me an excuse, Barnegat was thinking. Just say something and watch what happens, you roly-poly motherfucker.
Hazard rose unsteadily to his feet. He tottered, hands held in front of him because he could barely see from under his swollen eyelids.
Frampton stood before Barnegat a moment longer. His lower lip began to curl. Then he wheeled around and knocked Hazard over with a swipe from his heavy boot.
Hazard rolled down the embankment, the sharp gravel digging into his palms and knees, and splashed into the oily ditch water. For a moment, he just floated. It seemed suddenly clear to him that he would never reach town alive. He had seen the guns they carried. He had heard the anger in their voices. There would never be a chance to explain. He knew that if he didn’t run now, he would die. While the two men were still shouting at each other, he slipped as quietly as he could through the reeds. When he reached dry ground, he stood, holding his hand to his stomach, and began to run. The light of his fire still shimmered in the distance. He ran at an angle to the flames, so the two men wouldn’t see his silhouette. The looseness in his guts was agony.
It was only a few seconds before Frampton noticed that the water in the ditch seemed much too still. He didn’t wait. He lunged down the bank. His hips complained in sharp grinding jabs halfway up his back. The second he landed in the water, he knew that Hazard was gone. He swished his hands through the water and felt nothing but the pine needles that glued themselves to the tops of his hands and his wrists. He thrashed through the reeds and walked onto dry ground, then heard Hazard’s footsteps, irregular and plodding in the distance.
“What’s going on?” Barnegat called down from the tracks.
Without replying, Frampton ran after Hazard. He knew he could make up for not volunteering earlier and now with Hazard beaten up so badly, there wouldn’t be any more fight left in the man.
“What the hell’s going on?” Barnegat’s voice echoed through the trees.
Frampton sprinted after Hazard’s dark and hunchbacked shape. He could hear the pain in Hazard’s voice each time he took a breath.
Hazard knew he was being followed, but he couldn’t go any faster. There was too much pain.
“Stop,” Frampton wheezed at the bobbing shadow ahead of him. “Make it easy on yourself.” He was gaining on Hazard now.
The trees were getting thicker. Branches lashed at Hazard’s eyes. He heard the old man’s whispering close behind. His lungs blazed as if they had been filled with embers. He could not go on.
“Stop.” The whisper rushed past Hazard’s ears.
And suddenly he did stop. He wheeled around and drew back the heel of his palm and smashed it into Frampton’s nose before the old man had time to slow down.
Frampton fell wide-eyed onto his back. He had no idea what had happened. One second he seemed to have Hazard almost in his grasp and suddenly here he was looking up at the blurry sky and blood was leaking down the back of his throat. Over the rattle of his own half-choked breath, he heard Hazard running away.
“Billy?” It was Barnegat. “Billy, where are you?”
Slowly, Frampton raised one hand and touched it to his face. He felt the bulbous lump which had taken the place of his sharp, birdlike nose. He spat blood off his lips and breathed in and howled, “He killed me!”
Barnegat came running. He found Frampton on his back and lifted him into a sitting position.
“He killed me!” Frampton wailed and gripped Barnegat’s shoulders, as if they held him at the edge of life itself. He heard the familiar clink-switch of a Zippo lighter being opened and struck and then by the oily fire’s light he saw Barnegat.
“It’s not so bad. I think it’s just your nose.”
Frampton could smell the metallic peppermint schnapps on Barnegat’s breath. “Not bad for you, maybe!”
Barnegat stood over him, staring into the dark. He knew they wouldn’t find Hazard now. He imagined hundred-dollar bills sifting through his fingers as if blown by a great wind and fluttering away, completely lost across the wilderness. He had never been so angry and so sick with disappointment. For the first time in his life, he had envisioned money whose earning he could not check off on a watch as hourly wages. Each minute of his normal life had a dollar value. The value climbed with such miserable slowness over the years that he could no longer bear to calculate how much sweat he put into the slow drag of every minute passing. It wasn’t even that the money would have changed his life. Ten thousand was a lot, but not enough to let him quit his job. What the money meant to him was the chance to see his life differently, even if only for a while. Now he looked down on half-drunk Frampton and had to stop himself from the short, precise movements of chambering bullets in his gun and blowing off the old man’s head.
The next morning, the two men sat in orange plastic chairs at the police station, while Dodge made out his report. Frampton’s face was obscured by white bandages. The corners of his eyes showed purple-yellow bruises and his lips were scabbed and split. He also had a hangover. Schnapps always did this to him. He felt as if his brain had been squeezed like a sponge. Barnegat showed no sign of change. His black watch cap was pulled down over his ears. He was gnawing on a toothpick which he had taken from a dispenser at the cash register of the Four Seasons. He switched it violently from one side of his mouth to the other.
“I’m a little stuck here, gentlemen.” Dodge’s voice was low and even. His patience had worn thin. “You say you went looking for him and he ambushed you?”
“That’s right.” Frampton’s voice was a plugged nasal hum.
“Why wouldn’t he just let you walk by?”
“Because he’s crazy. He’s a murderer.” It hurt Frampton to speak, each word another corkscrew twist into his hungover skull. But he had to talk. It was his fault that Hazard got away, since he’d kicked him into the ditch. The more distance and blame he put between himself and last night, the safer he would feel. “He’s Mary’s son. What else do you need to know?”
“Shut up, Billy.” It was Barnegat.
“You guys found him first, didn’t you?” Dodge shoved his typewriter out of the way. He would have to retype the whole report anyway once he found out the truth of what happened. “Did you ask him if he was the one who had spiked the tree?”
“Of course we didn’t ask him.” Barnegat sat back and thumped his shoulders against the wall.
“So how do you know it was him?”
“Because of all that stuff he was carrying! Because he didn’t stop when you told him to!”
“You beat the shit out of him, didn’t you?”
“Look what he did to me!” Frampton held his hands up beside his head.
“But only because he thought you were trying to kill him, right?” Dodge leaned forward across the desk. His face was creased with disgust. “Am I right?”
“The way we see it …” Frampton moved as if to stand. He felt the time had come to make a speech, although he didn’t know what he would say.
“Get out.” Dodge heaved his typewriter back to its original position.
Barnegat stood. “What are you going to do?”
“Go in there and find him myself if I have to.” Dodge wound a piece of paper into the typewriter. “Do you have any idea how hard that’s going to be now?”
“I should get that ten thousand dollars.” Barnegat didn’t care if it sounded like a threat.
“You should be going to prison for assault, Barnegat. And if Hazard presses charges, you will go.” Dodge waited calmly for Barnegat’s next move.
Barnegat walked out into the dusty parking lot. Frampton shuffled in his footsteps.
Dodge tried to keep typing, but he couldn’t see the keys. Instead, all he could see was an image of Wilbur Hazard cowering alone and in pain, out there somewhere in the wilderness.
Wilbur Hazard sat cross-legged on the dirt floor of his half-completed cabin and wept. Sunlight filtering down through the trees made beams through the mason-jar window. His eyes were swollen almost shut and everything he saw was obscured in the mesh of his eyelashes. The pain in his gut was a steady thumping nausea. He knew he needed a doctor. When he ran his nervous fingers across his stomach, he could feel bulges of torn muscle deep under the skin.
Hazard assumed that he had in fact killed Frampton last night. So in his own mind he had become what they already thought he was. He knew he couldn’t go back into town. They would be looking for him, and if they hadn’t let him talk before, there would be even less chance of that now.
He took the Gerber knife from his belt and in his misery he stabbed it over and over into the dirt. He thought about his mother and wondered if she knew what had happened to him. He thought of all the work it had taken to persuade his foster parents to tell him who she was, and how quietly and deeply disappointed he had been to find a woman so cheerfully lost in a land inside her head. It had taken months before the mother he’d invented for himself, the woman much closer to Alicia Mackenzie—tall and beautiful and sane and respected and loving—flickered and died away and he forced the blankly smiling image of Mary the Clock into her place. Hazard wished he’d never come to Abenaki Junction. The people of the town had never let him be anything but an outsider, and the speed and violence with which they came to hunt for him seemed to Hazard like the acting out of a plan that had been set in motion long ago.
Hazard decided he would wait for dusk, then head along the tracks to the old Booth cabin. He would allow himself to rest there until dark. Then he would sneak the last half mile into town, take his car and drive out and never come back. He kept his savings in bundles of cash in a strongbox in the garage. It would be enough to start again. He wondered how many times in a life a person could start over before he forgot who he was.