What the hell is that?” Barnegat sat behind the wheel of a Mackenzie Company truck as it bumped along the logging road. The truck was a two-ton Magirus, painted hunter green with a red stripe, the Mackenzie Company colors. It was dawn. The sun shined brassy through the mist.
Coltrane sat beside him. He looked up at the sound of Barnegat’s voice. Coltrane had been studying a blueprint map of this section of the Algonquin, checking which wooded areas were to be cut over the next few days. He smoked a Lucky Strike. Every now and then, he held the cigarette out the window and let wind chip off ash that had gathered at the tip. “What the hell is what?” All he saw was mist and trees and the road.
Barnegat pointed at something up ahead. He wore his black wool watch cap pulled down over his ears and heavy-rimmed glasses, with fingerprint-smudged lenses. He had kept to himself lately, unsure whether to approach Mackenzie for the $10,000 reward, or to stay silent and hope that this whole business blew over. “There’s writing on those trees.”
Coltrane saw it now. “Stop the truck,” he said quickly.
“What is it?” Barnegat’s arms were slung across the giant steering wheel.
“I said stop the fucking truck!”
The truck shifted down, stopped and then backed up. The loggers sitting in the rear had also noticed the writing. They had parked their pickups and cars at the edge of the Algonquin and were hitching a ride in, not wanting to risk getting stuck in mud or smashing the undersides of their machines when their wheels sank into ruts. The loggers sat side by side on benches bolted to the floor. They wore T-shirts, hard hats and jeans. Some had flannel shirts tied around their waists. Their greasy-handled Kubota saws were locked in a rack at the front, chain blades pointing at the sky. When the truck came to a halt, they jumped off. In the grainy morning light, they walked past the huge letters and into the forest, silently treading by the banded trees, wide-eyed at the hostility that seemed to meet them.
“Back in the truck!” yelled Coltrane. Then again, when nobody moved, “Back in the goddamned truck!”
They piled onto the Magirus.
Coltrane climbed into the cab and slammed the door.
“Where to?” Barnegat asked. He did not look at Coltrane, but stared straight ahead. Barnegat would not have traded places with Coltrane when he brought this news to Mackenzie, not even for the $10,000.
“To the mill. Straight to the mill.”
The truck turned around and drove out of the forest. It stopped at the main road to let the loggers get out and start up their own vehicles. Then they left for the mill in a convoy of over thirty cars and pickup trucks, kicking up dust like a cavalry charge.
Mackenzie heard the mass of engines long before they arrived. He looked up from his fax machine and then walked to the window. He saw the convoy, and felt something splinter inside him. Engines quit one after the other. The men gathered on the lot, reaching for cigarettes in the pockets of their vests or under their hard hats or bummed off friends. Lighters clicked open and burned. Nervous eyes flicked up to where Mackenzie stood in the business office. Most of the loggers never went inside except to buy a soda from the machine or collect their paychecks.
Coltrane walked toward the business office, shoulders hunched like a man walking into the rain.
Mackenzie started down the stairs. He stepped out into the lot as Coltrane was about to enter the building. The two men began to talk.
Barnegat stood at the back of the crowd. The only movement around him was the rising smoke of cigarettes. Coltrane and Mackenzie were standing very close together. He couldn’t hear what they said. Coltrane began wiping his hands on his chest. Barnegat had seen him do this before, and knew it was a sign of nervousness. Mackenzie listened, his head lowering slowly until he was staring at the ground. Then Coltrane folded his arms and looked down at his boots. Barnegat felt as if he were the one who had set all this in motion, in that moment when the butt of his rifle connected with the back of Hazard’s head. Sooner or later, he told himself, you will pay for it. Worry rushed through him like the onset of a fever, freezing and burning and crawling all over his skin.
That afternoon teams of loggers moved through the woods carrying metal detectors and cans of spray paint. They fanned the detectors across tree trunks in the area where trees had been marked. In the first three hours, they found twelve spikes. These they painted with two broad yellow bands. The rest they painted with a single blue band, to show the trees were safe for cutting.
Mackenzie shifted logging operations away from the spiked area. Some loggers refused to cut in there, even if every tree was covered by metal detectors and sprayed. They did not trust the detectors, and most of them had seen what had happened to Pfeiffer, even though Mackenzie assured them that the chance of actually being injured was minimal. Rumors slithered through the lumberyard that it would be only a matter of time before new trees were spiked.
Mackenzie sent for Coltrane. While he waited, he rolled a silver dollar back and forth over his knuckles. His eyes stayed fixed on the slowly turning coin. Except for the mechanical motion of one hand, Mackenzie remained as still as a man who has rested his foot on a landmine and knows it, realizing that the slightest movement will trigger the device. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts, setting them in one last rank of order before the explosion. Then he heard Coltrane’s boots in the hallway. “Come in and sit down,” he said.
Coltrane was uneasy as he shut the door behind him, as if blocking an escape route he would need.
Mackenzie let his breath trail out. “Who’s doing this to me?” he asked. “What have I done to deserve it?” He ran his hand across the dull, rough-edged steel of the tree spikes he had collected on his desk. “I have been honest, decent, kind and loyal to the people of this town.” With the knife edge of his palm, Mackenzie chopped the thought where it hovered in front of his face. “I have done nothing to make people hate me. But how can I fight an enemy who won’t show his face? I refuse to allow fifty dollars’ worth of bridge spikes to ruin an operation worth millions. In years to come, Coltrane”—Mackenzie snatched up the nails and held them like daggers in the air—“it won’t be this tree-spiking that people talk about. Instead, it will be how much I made these criminals pay for what they’ve done. And if the law won’t make them pay, then I will.”
Coltrane said nothing. He missed his wife and his dogs.
“Madeleine has something to do with it,” continued Mackenzie. “She and all the fucking granola people who read that newspaper of hers. They’re all too shit scared to do anything until somebody else does it first. And isn’t it the biggest fucking irony that I’m the one who had the balls to start it?” He looked up at Coltrane, who had no answer. “You see, those people have no spine. They stick with something as long as it’s trendy and then they drop it and move on to something else. I bet that as soon as they decided they were going to be environmentalists and protect our resources, as if they even knew what our resources are, I bet they all threw away their old clothes and went out and bought new ones with goddamned SAVE THE WORLD slogans on them. How’s that for protecting our resources?” Mackenzie fell silent. He sat red-faced and out of breath, the nails still raised in the air.
“I ought to be going,” said Coltrane.
When Mackenzie was alone again, he struggled to think of a plan. The Algonquin was too big a place to patrol. Dodge couldn’t handle it on his own and he couldn’t spare his own loggers. They were working too hard as it was. It had to be something different. War against anyone who dared make war on him.
“Mackenzie’s coming!” Martha the police switchboard operator yelled at Dodge over the row of rubber trolls arranged on her desk. She had been collecting them for years. They all had different uniforms and different-colored hair.
Mackenzie was talking even before he made it through the door. He swung his body in violent jerks toward them, the artificial leg dragging in the dirt and his cane jabbed so hard into the ground that the heavy wood bowed with the pressure. “What are you doing sitting here? Why aren’t you out catching bad guys?”
Dodge stood. “I’m making patrols through there several times a night, Mr. Mackenzie.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Well, you said you didn’t want us bringing people up from Skowhegan, and seeing as it’s your operation …”
“Damn right it is! And I got enough bad press with that Forest Sentinel dogging my ass. Bring Skowhegan people in and pretty soon the whole world is going to be in my face.”
“We could try bringing in some US Forestry Service personnel. They might agree to patrol the woods on foot.”
“No. For the same reason.” He rapped his knuckles on Dodge’s desk. “If they come, we’ll all have more problems than before.” There were other reasons Mackenzie did not want this. He was afraid the Forestry Service would have something to say about his clear-cutting methods, particularly the way he had been bulldozing some of the slopes of Seneca Mountain. The streams and lakes were silting up at a rate that surprised even him.
“There’s only me here, Mr. Mackenzie. Victor Coltrane’s been helping but …”
“It’s not enough!” Mackenzie spat the words out, then spun on his heel and left.
Martha took off her headphones and set them gently on the desk in front of her. “What was he going on about? He knows you can’t do more than you’re already doing and he doesn’t want you bringing in help from outside.”
“I don’t know what he’s up to.” Dodge leaned back and ran his fingers through his short-cropped hair. “It’s like he was warning us or something.”
Madeleine was in her darkroom, printing the pictures she had made of the clear-cut a few days before. She planned to release a special edition because of the spiked trees that had just been discovered. She knew people would draw a link between her paper and the spiking, and she wanted to make clear that she had nothing to do with it. The incident had sent a new tremor through the town, as if Abenaki Junction had just come under siege. Madeleine believed that Hazard had done the work, and wondered how many trees he had spiked before he died. But she wondered why. Hazard had never said anything to her about wanting to stop Mackenzie. She had never even seen him with a copy of the Forest Sentinel.
In the ghoulish red of the darkroom lights, she slid each 8×10 sheet of Ilford paper into a developing tray. Then with a pair of rubber-tipped tongs she tapped the paper back and forth in the liquid until the print began to appear. She bent down over the tray as the smoky images emerged. As soon as the picture was complete, she slid the paper into a stop bath to prevent overdeveloping.
The camera had captured it perfectly. The clear-cut ground looked like photos she had seen of battlefields in World War I. The landscape was so completely empty of life that the only things that could have survived the cutting had either fled or were hiding underground, the way the soldiers had done in their trenches, huddling from the shriek and blast of artillery fire.
While she printed another picture, she found herself thinking about what Jonah Mackenzie had told her—that she saw everything through the world of her camera lens, where everything was compacted and idealized. The lens did do that. She could not deny it. These neatly bordered pictures made the Algonquin seem more graspable, less overwhelming in its vastness.
A jagged barricade of torn-up tree stumps filled the picture. Behind it stood the uncut pines. Rising above them was the humped back of Seneca Mountain. She slid the print into the stop bath and at that moment she noticed a figure standing at the edge of the woods. She bent down, the fumes of the stop bath burning in her nostrils. Maybe it’s just a tree, she thought. But she looked again and realized she had been right the first time.
A man stood watching her. He carried some kind of satchel. She could just make out the features of his face. It took her a few seconds to recognize him as the one she had seen in the Loon’s Watch bar a while ago and since then each morning coming out of the Four Seasons while she was on her way to work. He was new in town, the one who had just taken Benny Mott’s old job. Mott had called to cancel the want ad in her paper only a few days before. And Lazarus had called to say his house had been rented by a man named Adam Gabriel. This area of clear-cut was a long way from the tracks. It was close by the area that had been spiked. She had no doubt what he was doing there.
Her first reaction was to call the police. She walked out of the darkroom and into the harsh light of her office. She breathed out the acetic-acid fumes, which passed across her lips with the staleness of old tobacco smoke. She picked up the phone but then she paused and did not dial the number.
Madeleine was thinking of the way Wilbur Hazard had been treated in Abenaki Junction—always as a stranger. And now this new man had arrived in town and within a few days she was calling on the police to ransack his apartment and take him down to the station. It was not illegal to go walking in the woods. She realized she was thinking with the same paranoia that she usually blamed on Mackenzie.
Madeleine decided she would talk to him herself. She waited until the end of the workday and then walked down to the old train station. She was sitting on the bench outside when the Putt-Putt rolled out of the woods, its burbling engine audible long before she could see the machine.
Gabriel recognized the woman. She was the one he had met in the bar. He knew she ran the Forest Sentinel. He had often seen her on her way to work, but he had stayed away from her, even if she was the person in town most likely to understand what he was doing. It was not a chance he could afford to take. He bottled up his worry and by the time he climbed from the Putt-Putt he was smiling. “That’s a good place to catch the sun.” Gabriel nodded at where she was sitting.
Madeleine looked at the bench as if she had never seen it before. Then she turned to face him. “I want to talk to you,” she said.
He sat down on the bench with her. “All right,” he said cautiously.
She pulled the photo from her satchel.
It took a second for Gabriel to see the figure in the picture and a few more seconds before he recognized it as himself. Those weren’t binoculars after all, he thought. Now he looked at her. “You said you wanted to talk to me.”
“That’s you.” She did not take her eyes from him. Her face was grim.
He nodded. “I was on my lunch break.”
“No you weren’t. No that far into the woods. You were spiking those trees. Finishing off the work you started with your friend Wilbur Hazard.”
“I never met that guy,” said Gabriel quietly.
“All right. Even if that’s true, why did you spike those trees?”
Gabriel looked at her and his gaze faltered. He could tell she already knew. He didn’t want to insult her by lying. The photo was proof enough.
“Why?” she asked again.
He leaned back against the sun-warmed boards of the station building. The house of lies he had built for himself was coming apart already. Was it worth it? he asked himself. A hundred trees among millions? Was it worth what will happen to me now? He turned to face her, feeling the old paint on the walls crumble as he rolled the back of his head across the board. He felt a roughness in his throat. In all of the imagined endings to his struggle, he had never pictured himself sitting on a bench with a beautiful woman. “Have you already gone to the police?”
“No. I wanted to be sure it was you.”
Gabriel sighed and stared at the scuffed toes of his boots. “Not with that photo you didn’t. You were already sure. You just wanted to find out why.”
She realized he was right. She took the photo from his lap and put it back in the satchel.
“What are you going to do?” Not since he had stood, oil-coated and delirious with his hands in the air, before the commandos in Kuwait did he feel his fate so much in someone else’s hands.
“I don’t know,” she said. She could not tell whether this man and what he had done against Mackenzie was the embodiment of all the ideals for which she had worked or whether he was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. “I’ve never resorted to …”
Gabriel cut her off. “Violence?” He had suddenly stopped looking frightened, the way he had been only a second before.
“Exactly,” she said.
He was staring out into the trees beyond the tracks, his face dirty with sweat and dust. “What are you trying to accomplish with your newspaper?” Then, before she could answer that question, he fired another at her. “Isn’t it one of your main objectives to stop Mackenzie from cutting down the Algonquin? I mean, after all, if the Algonquin goes, you’ll be writing an environmental newspaper in the middle of a wasteland.”
“Of course.” It was the first time she had ever heard someone in Abenaki Junction speak out passionately against the clear-cutting. “I’d give my front teeth to stop him.”
“Is that all? Just a couple of teeth?”
Madeleine watched him closely. He did not have the wild-eyed look she would have painted on the face of a radical. He looked strangely calm, considering the things he was saying. It was as if he had worked out all avenues of possibility long ago. In that, he reminded Madeleine of herself. She wanted to tell him about about the gradual process that she had begun here years ago, about the tortoise and the hare, but she could sense just from the tone of his voice that his ideals had been fixed for a long time. There would be no room to convince him of anything except what he already believed. “Why this place?” she asked him. “Why here?”
Gabriel didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he turned to her, head tilted to one side and eyes narrowed with curiosity. “Do I seem familiar to you?” he asked.
She looked at the slight upward curve of his upper lip and the russet in his hair. Slowly she shook her head. “No.”
“I used to live here. A long time ago.” Gabriel told her who he was. In the last few minutes, he had remembered Madeleine. He recalled how she had been on the fringe of groups at school, always so outspoken that few children her age felt comfortable with her. She seemed to have more patience for ideas than for people. Time has treated you well, he thought as he looked at her. Better than it treated me. “I could use your help,” he said. “If you honestly want Mackenzie stopped, you’ll see this is the only way it can be done. If we had all the time in the world, it would be different. But we have only a couple of months.” Gabriel had lived for so many days in the intense loneliness of his forged identity that suddenly to be requesting help from this woman uncovered instincts he thought he had buried for good.
“You mean go into the woods and spike trees with you?”
“Well, you could start by not turning me in.” He watched her closely. Even though she was a stranger, it was one of the few times in Gabriel’s life that he had met someone with whom he had so much in common that there was almost no need to talk. His eyes were dry from staring.
Madeleine was surprised at herself that she did not immediately refuse his request. The softness of his voice was persuasive. He had a gentle face. He was not what she had expected.
“I respect what you do,” said Gabriel. “It does a lot of good. It does all the good in the world, because from reading your paper and others like it, people will eventually understand how big the problem is. But it’s not happening quickly enough. Mackenzie is out there in the Algonquin destroying life we don’t even know exists yet. If you don’t act against this clear-cutting, and I mean act, all you and your newspaper will be is the chronicler of the last days of the Algonquin Wilderness. I need you to help me.” He paused for a moment. “To help me, please.”
“I have to think about this,” she said. She stood and heaved her satchel onto her shoulder. “I can’t make you any promises.”
Gabriel nodded. It was more than he had expected. He raised his hands a few inches from his lap and let them drop again.
Madeleine saw his gesture of helplessness. She realized how alone he seemed, but he was not a stranger to her either. What this man was doing now in the Algonquin, she herself had thought of doing many times before. And now she asked herself if the only reason she had stopped short of spiking the trees was fear or some high ideal of non-violence. This man could not answer that for her. She would have to find it out for herself.
Madeleine walked away. In the light of sunset, shadows stretched across the road. TV aerials threw shapes like the branches of dead trees across the dust. She had gone only a few hundred feet when a metallic shriek came from the direction of the sawmill. It sent birds racing from the telephone wires.
Over the years, the people of Abenaki Junction had grown used to the whine of Mackenzie’s band saws and the thump of the bark stripper as it bounced over uneven logs. They heard the constant humming of conveyor belts as wood was cut into planks and fed out to the lumberyard, where the planks were sorted by size and placed into different stalls. Forklift drivers carried the stacked planks into a storage house the size of a small airplane hangar. People set their watches by Mackenzie’s noon lunch whistle. During the week, they no longer noticed the noise, the way a person stops hearing the tick of a clock in a room, but they would notice the silence if ever the band saws stopped running. They felt the rumble of logging trucks coasting down the hill that led to Skowhegan, scattering old wood chips like brown confetti, and the punched-out hiss of air brakes kicking in at the steepest part of the hill. By the time anyone from Abenaki Junction came to work at the mill, the sounds of its operation were so familiar that the only difference was a slight increase in volume as they set foot inside the logging compound.
But this shriek was like nothing anyone had heard before. One of the huge circular saws had bitten into a ten-inch nail, hammered by Gabriel into a tree above the line where the metal detectors had reached. Sparks sprayed like fireworks across the cutting room. The jagged edges of the saw bent sideways and the jolt threw the main piston of the saw’s engine. The machine howled and crashed as its insides broke apart and gear wheels spun without connecting.
Coltrane was so shocked by the noise that at first he did not move. Then his senses returned and he ran to the greasy black ALL STOP button that cut power to the mill. Engines throughout the building hummed deeper and deeper until Coltrane could see the mangled shark-teeth cutting edge of the saw as it finally quit spinning. The conveyor belt stopped. The bark grinder stopped. All sound disappeared. Then came the clatter of workers running toward the cutting room.
Mackenzie had been in his office, on the phone to a trucking company in Bangor. When he heard the noise, he hunched over his desk, teeth bared, as if the blade of the saw were about to carve its way through his office wall. He replaced the receiver without saying another word and stamped down the main staircase into the logging yard. No one had to tell him what had happened. He walked from machine to machine. On a chalkboard in his head, he drew a series of numbers. It would cost $3,500 to replace the ruined parts.
Mill workers stood around, crowding doorways and blotting out the daylight. Coltrane waited with a shorn-off piece of the nail between his thumb and first two fingers. He prepared himself for the detonation of Mackenzie’s rage. “We must have missed one of the spikes with our metal detector,” he said quietly when Mackenzie reached him.
“Anybody hurt?” Mackenzie asked.
“No, sir. It’s just the saw blade and the motor.”
“Do we have a spare blade in stock?”
“There’s one in the back.” Coltrane jerked his chin in the direction of the storehouse.
“Well, replace it, and get the spare motor that’s out there, too. Make sure to pass all the logs under a metal detector again. Get the place running.”
Coltrane felt like a man in a bunker into which a grenade had been thrown. The time had passed for the explosion, and he was slowly beginning to realize that the bomb would not go off. Coltrane did not understand it. He did not trust the silence and the illusion of Mackenzie’s calm. It seemed more threatening than the eruption he’d expected.
Mackenzie walked back to his office and shut the door. He sat with his hands neatly folded on the blotter in front of him. His lungs were filled with the sour lumberyard smell, like that of old beer left out after a party. It came from tons of woodchips dumped in a pile by the roadside. The pile steamed all year long, melting the snow that fell around it from October to late March. “Sal Ungaro,” he said. “Sal Ungaro.” He repeated the name as if it were an incantation, like summoning the devil from the letters on a Ouija board.
At the other end of town, Madeleine Cody stood in the middle of the street. She had been frozen by the noise, as if giant fingernails had scraped down a blackboard. What reached her next was not a sound but a lack of sound. Across the street, she saw Lazarus in the doorway of the Loon’s Watch bar, a steel beer keg in his arms. He seemed to have forgotten about its weight. His mouth hung slightly open in his concentrated efforts to hear through this sudden stillness. There were others, waiting and listening. After a few minutes, they began to filter back inside.
Madeleine caught sight of Gabriel standing outside the station house. He was watching her. He did not look afraid, as if he had resigned himself to whatever choice she made. He just watched her, waiting to see what she’d do. Madeleine turned and walked on, finding her way home on instinct alone, swerving like a long-distance driver with each curve of the road, but miles away inside her head.
To hell with a clean fight, thought Mackenzie. To hell with all the gentlemanly rules of war. He paced back and forth in front of his fireplace. “What if it’s one of those terrorist groups? The kind that set off bombs?” he asked Alicia.
“I’m sure Dodge has a handle on it.” Alicia knew that nothing anybody said would make sense to him anymore. It was late at night, and he often talked wildly when he was tired.
“But Dodge is just one man. With a thousand of him, I could conquer the whole damn world, but I’ve only got one!”
“I don’t think you’re being fair.”
“Fair? Why are you always waving that word in my face? Nothing in business is based on fairness! The only time people are fair is when it’s profitable!”
“Don’t shout at me. You can’t win arguments just by making noise.”
“I’m not shouting!” Mackenzie clenched his hands into fists. Then he began to speak more quietly. “I just don’t think I can get this solved by relying on the law.” Even though he sometimes pretended not to listen to her, Mackenzie balanced everything Alicia said, and thought carefully before proceeding. He considered her his equal in most things. And in the things in which they were not equal, he knew she far outclassed him. “I might have to hire some people.”
“What kind of people?”
“People who will clear these bastards out of the woods. People who don’t fancy-dance around.” He breathed out violently. “You know.”
“You mean you’re going to be calling that old friend of yours. Ungaro. The one who does shady bits and pieces for foreign governments.” She remembered Ungaro from their days at college. He was always at the parties, usually alone and standing with his back to the wall, shit-grinning at some joke inside his head.
“I might give old Sal a call. Might have to.”
Don’t use his first name to me, thought Alicia. Don’t call him “old Sal.” Don’t try to humanize him. I’ve seen the man. I’ve seen the damage he does. She didn’t have to say any of this to Mackenzie, because Mackenzie knew it well enough himself. Ungaro would get the job done, but it would be like unleashing a pack of dogs who wouldn’t come back when you called them. “I can’t believe you’re considering this,” she said.
“Jesus, Alicia! I can hardly believe it either. But extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures.” The idea had walked into Mackenzie’s head and now it wouldn’t leave. It jabbered at him like the red-tailed squirrels in the trees.
“What if you try to contact these tree-spiking people and reach some kind of compromise?” Alicia thought of her talk with Madeleine. She didn’t want to be the go-between, but they were both so stubborn that she knew it might be the only way.
“I refuse to negotiate with terrorists.” Mackenzie’s voice had reached an ugly calm.
“Well, maybe you should ask yourself why people might do this. Maybe you should think twice about clear-cutting the Algonquin. You have to remember that your father did things differently. He kept up a sustainable yield.” It was always dangerous for her to bring up the topic of his father. Sometimes he would simply ignore her. Other times he would explode. There was never any telling what nerves would be struck. She had never known anyone so driven to succeed by the memory of a dead man. It was as if everything her husband did was somehow to gain the approval of his father. But since the man was long gone, the approval never came, and Jonah Mackenzie just kept working harder and harder, as if to bridge the gap between life and death itself.
Mackenzie avoided the topic of his father. “It has something to do with this damn Forest Sentinel. I know it does. If I could stop that little paper from spewing out all Madeleine’s gossip, I know I’d stop the trouble. But she’s not going to take my offer. If she were, she’d have done it already.”
“So talk to Madeleine. Don’t just try to buy her out and shut her up that way. Understand a little better what the environmental movement is all about. It’s not just the Algonquin. And it’s not just Madeleine, either. Your own loggers are afraid that you’ll wipe out their jobs in a decade.”
“That forest belongs to me, Alicia! I paid for it and it’s mine. It’s an investment. In order to get my money back, I have to cut down the trees.”
She got up and stared down at him. “Ask yourself what it means that you’re thinking of bringing Sal Ungaro into this. Are you just going to turn this forest into a combat zone? Your ability to hire someone to take care of your dirty work doesn’t prove that you were right.”
No, thought Mackenzie. But I’m the one left standing at the end.
The next day, in the space of fifteen minutes, even before the early-morning sun had untangled itself from the treeline, five out of seven circular blades at the mill struck nails and were put out of action.
The whole plant shut down.
Coltrane said nothing. When the fifth blade crashed, he just punched the grimed and sawdust-coated emergency ALL STOP button one more time. Then he took off his hard hat and kicked it like a football out into the mountains of logs that lay in the compound, still waiting to be cut and bleeding sap like honey. All of the logs that broke the saws had been checked in the forest for nails before they were cut, so he knew these had been double-spiked. The loggers must have checked each tree for just one nail. Either that, or they had been spiked after cutting.
The plank stackers and machine operators stood waiting, as if they were parts of the same broken machinery and their power had also been shut down. Everyone at the company, even the secretaries far above the cutting floor, weighed the possibility of anger slung in their direction.
For a few minutes, while the sawdust settled and curious eyes peered at the crippled teeth of the saw blades, Coltrane stood motionless on the loading ramp, as if waiting for his hard hat to come boomeranging back to him from its place among the logs. He was balancing in his mind whether to go on or to give up. He knew he might take the fall for this. Be the sacrificial goat. Then Coltrane caught sight of people watching him from the cutting floor and the administrative office. Eyes glinted softly from every shadow of the compound. All waiting.
“Get the metal detectors!” Coltrane called to them.
There was no hesitation. Loggers were almost fighting over who got to use the detectors, while the rest followed behind with pliers and chisels to dig out nails once they were found. Soon the lumberyard was humming with talk and the ear-grating bleep of detectors finding metal in the logs. Then came the whack of chisels digging into wood and the whispering shush of spray cans painting bright-orange splats over the spots where the nails had been. Soon the logs were polka-dotted with paint. No one stopped to think about the work that lay ahead of them.
On the other side of town, Dodge had heard the saw blades crash. He had been waiting at the old station depot for over an hour. He wanted to question the man who’d taken Mott’s place, although no one he talked to said the man seemed suspicious, including Mott. Dodge knocked on the depot door, and because the place was not locked, he walked inside. The depot looked bare now and reminded him of when he was a little boy, catching the train west to Montreal with his mother. He remembered snow piled up so high that it blocked the light from the windows and the smell of hot cider spiced with cinnamon and cloves, stewing in a pot and given out free in tin mugs by the Stationmaster, a man named Adler. And on the last day that the passenger train stopped in town, Mr. Adler got on that train with a suitcase, waved good-bye and never came back.
Gabriel was working on the tracks up by the Canadian border. Out there, he felt as if he had reached the end of the world, and that only a few miles away the polar ice was nudging against the land. He felt the strange seduction of routine. There was no sense of heroics as he set out each morning; there was only the fatigue of walking the tracks with the rolling stride he had adapted for moving along the ties. Automatically he reached into the pocket of his canvas Filson vest and pulled out a spray can of fluorescent paint to mark any place where a pin had come loose on the rails. All he had been thinking about was whether Madeleine would help him or whether this would be his last day under the open sky for years to come.
As Gabriel rode home, he listened to a portable radio that Mott had left behind. Its best reception was on a French-Canadian station that played cowboy songs in French. Gabriel sang along, inventing words to replace the lyrics, which he could not understand. Rounding the last bend in the tracks, the Putt-Putt’s engine racing, he saw Dodge’s police car parked at the depot. Bile tipped into his stomach. She brought in the police after all, he thought, and suddenly he knew how Swain had felt. That sense of being too tired to run. Of having no place to go. He was glad that he had spiked another hundred trees that day. It would be his parting shot. Swain had told him to expect rough treatment from the police, and even rougher if the loggers got to him first. The more he resisted, the more he would be beaten. If they caught him out in the woods after all the damage he’d done, there was a fair chance they would kill him, the way they had tried to kill Hazard. As soon as Gabriel stopped the engine, he climbed out with his hard hat in his hands, like a man come to ask for a job. “What can I do for you?”
Dodge walked out of the shadows. “I just wanted to know if you’d seen anybody walking on the tracks these past few days. You know, we’ve had a little trouble with some trees being spiked.”
“I did hear about that,” said Gabriel. It dawned on him that Madeleine had not gone to the police. He felt relief like nervous laughter in his throat and had to choke it back. He wanted to find Madeleine as soon as he could and thank her. Perhaps she had even decided to help him. The great cage of his loneliness was suddenly gone, even if he knew it would return.
Gabriel recognized Dodge. They had been in school together for a while, although they had barely known each other because they were two grades apart. They had crossed paths several times since Gabriel had returned to Abenaki Junction, and Gabriel had waited for the sharp stare of recognition to pass across Dodge’s face. But there was none. It made Gabriel both relieved and sad to think that he had vanished from Dodge’s thoughts.
“Where did you hear about the spikings?” Dodge walked to within a few feet of Gabriel, deliberately too close for comfort. He knew that to get answers from a person, he sometimes had to make them ill at ease.
“They practically have it on the menu at the Four Seasons.”
Dodge smiled, but Gabriel’s face stayed serious. Dodge sat down on the station-house bench, remembering how he had once sat here when his feet didn’t touch the ground. “So you haven’t seen anybody on the tracks lately?”
“It’s only me out there.”
“Personally, you know”—Dodge folded his hands on his lap—“I don’t think they should be cutting down the Algonquin.”
It seemed like a trap to Gabriel. Even a clumsy trap. “I only just arrived in town,” he said, as if this would excuse him from anything.
Dodge knew he would be keeping his eye on this man for a while. He didn’t want to make him too uncomfortable for now. Dodge slapped his knees and stood. “Well, if you see anything, give me a call.”
“Yes, of course.” Gabriel waited while Dodge climbed back into the patrol car and drove away. He was suspicious that Dodge asked no more questions. That man’s not through with me yet, he thought.
A face loomed gruesomely against the window of the Forest Sentinel door. The pebbled glass seemed to make its flesh boil. The door opened and Jonah Mackenzie walked in. He wore a black-and-gray-check woolen vest, khaki trousers tucked into boots, and a plain blue wool tie that was frayed at the knot. He instantly became the center of the room. Even the walls appeared to back away. “May I talk with you?” he asked Madeleine and crumpled his face in an unenthusiastic smile.
Madeleine knew what this was about. Since her dinner with Mackenzie, she had tried not to think about his offer, but it was as if he had planted a tiny transmitter in her head that sent messages crackling through her brain. A constant and monotonous voice announced the reasons she should leave Abenaki Junction and begin again someplace else. It reminded her of when Barnegat had come back from Vietnam, out of his mind on heroin and the knowledge of Black Ops atrocities, swearing that the Vietcong had captured him and replaced one of his fillings with a miniature radio that broadcast Radio Hanoi twenty-four hours a day.
Each time Madeleine wrote about Mackenzie in the Forest Sentinel, which was almost every issue, she had expected him to come storming into her office, but this was the first time she had seen him walk into the building. She saw the familiar smile knife through his waxy cheeks. It was his perfect camouflage. He was the most pokerfaced, unreadable man she had ever encountered.
“Have you been thinking about the money?” he asked.
“Yes,” Madeleine told him. It felt like a confession. The voices were still there, hundreds of them like dirty sea-foam bubbles piled up in the corners of her mind.
“It serves us all in the end.”
“I’m not going to sell the paper, Jonah. If I were in your shoes, I might be making the same kind of offer. But I think that if you were in my shoes, you would say the same thing I’m saying now, which is thank you, but no.”
Mackenzie had prepared himself for this. He had even expected it and was glad Madeleine spoke so gracefully. People had come to him in years past and tried to buy him out, and he had sent them on their way far less politely than he was being sent now. He began to feel sorry for her, wishing he could explain that the alternative to selling the paper was a call to Sal Ungaro. Mackenzie decided to make one last effort, and came straight to the point. There had been enough slippery talk. “How much do you want?”
“Nothing. Really. It was a generous offer to begin with.” Now that she had refused, the voices were suddenly gone.
“I’ll increase the offer by five thousand dollars. That’s my limit.”
“It’s not for sale. My business isn’t worth even a third of that. You’re making fools of us both.”
“Please take the money. Let me worry about who looks a fool.” For your own good, he wanted to say. Or I will scythe you down. I will clean the slate. “Look, I know, even if you don’t, that your paper has something to do with whoever is spiking the trees.”
Madeleine drummed her fingers once on the tabletop. “If you can find one paragraph in my paper that advocates tree-spiking, I’ll give you the damn paper.”
“Well, what about this?” He yanked a neatly folded page out of his pocket. “Your last issue had a whole segment on it.”
“An explanation of what’s going on. Nothing more.”
“It’s practically a battle cry! Look, this is my final offer. Instead of buying your paper, I will offer to leave a thousand acres of the Algonquin standing. And you don’t even have to stop writing your paper. You don’t even have to leave town.”
“What do I have to do?”
“You have to stop the tree-spiking. Make it stop.” He had the thousand acres already bracketed in his mind. It was bottomland, so swampy that few trees grew there and those that did were stunted and not worth the cutting. What he hated most of all about the offer was that it made him look like someone backing down from a fight.
It was at this moment that Madeleine decided for certain she would not call Dodge and tell him about Gabriel. The things that Gabriel said had sunk into her mind. Now was not the moment for the tortoise and the hare. With so little time left, there was no other way to fight Mackenzie except with the same ruthlessness that he himself employed. She could not see herself out in the woods spiking trees, but her silence made her just as guilty as if she had hammered in the nails herself. “I can’t make it stop,” she told Mackenzie.
“That’s unfortunate,” he said very quietly. Mackenzie felt old just then. Older than he was. He wished it hadn’t come to this. He left without waiting for a nod or any words of confirmation, leaning heavily on the ball of his ivory-topped cane. On his way out he smiled at Madeleine, as if to show that there were no hard feelings. The truth was that there were no feelings at all. He had barged through the stages of anger—from migraine tension in the back of his neck to threats that would not be carried out, to threats that would, to the seeing-red rage, to violence, and suddenly through all the heat of those angers to a place that was cold, where all emotion seemed lost.
A minute after Mackenzie had left, Gabriel appeared at the door. “I came to thank you for not turning me in.”
“I don’t know if what you’re doing is right.” Madeleine walked to the window and drew down the blinds. “I just don’t know anymore if it’s wrong. I used to think that if we could gather together enough concerned people …”
“I used to think that,” he said. “I believed it, too. But after a while I realized that everyone’s concerned. Nobody wants the wilderness destroyed. Of course, if it’s their own dam they want built, or their own contract for a housing development, they don’t give a shit about the wilderness. But as a general rule, as long as it doesn’t cost them anything, they’re all for the wilderness. As for the rest of the world, the truth is so bad, they can’t even stand to hear about it. They throw a few bottles into a yellow garbage can every week and they think they’re saving the world. But concerned citizens aren’t going to save the wilderness. Radicals are. At least that’s what they’ll call us until they figure out we are right. So until then radicals are what we’ll stay.”
She heard the urgency in his words. It was the voice of someone who might do anything. “Who’s ‘we’?” she asked.
“Well, I thought … I thought you might help me.”
“I don’t want to break the law,” Madeleine said. “Any more than I already have. That seems like taking a step backward instead of forward.”
“In terms of technology and development, saving the wilderness means taking a step backward. People aren’t used to doing that. They’re only used to going forward.”
“But the only law I’ve ever broken was to park illegally outside Mackenzie’s mill!”
“Whose law are you talking about?” Gabriel leaned over the desk. He caught the faint smell of her soap. Her perfume. He didn’t know what it was. It distracted him and he had to force his thoughts back on track. “Most great changes in the world have involved breaking laws that existed at the time. It’s not just laws. It’s reason. How we see things. How we see ourselves in the universe.”
“This isn’t the universe,” she said. “It’s just a little logging town in northern Maine.”
“It doesn’t matter where we are. What counts is that every leap forward in our civilization has come after we’ve been shaken out of the order that we’ve imposed on the world. Copernicus: that the earth isn’t the center of the universe. Darwin: that we are descended from apes. Didn’t their theories seem unthinkable at the time?”
“Tell that to Mackenzie.” Madeleine shook her head at the hopelessness of it.
“Tell that to every major religion on the face of the earth! Tell it to all the laissez-faire individualists. Tell it to the American Dream. People have been tortured and crucified for saying less than what I’ve just said.”
Madeleine shook her head. “Maybe he’ll call me a witch and burn me at the stake.”
“Don’t laugh. He might be planning something even worse. You have to be careful. We have to be careful.”
“Mackenzie offered to leave a thousand acres of the Algonquin standing if I could get the spiking to stop. He’s made a real offer. Neither of us can just ignore it.”
Gabriel sat in silence for a while. It was as if he saw before him the entire mechanism of his thoughts. A thousand acres. He looked across at Madeleine and voices inside begged him to reclaim his old life. Set the whole struggle aside. Sometimes it was too hard living out in the black-and-white world of the extremist, where identity was what a person did and nothing else mattered at all.
She was waiting for his answer.
“Not enough,” Gabriel said, and was struck by the finality of his own words. “If I stopped now, it would only be proof that the Forest Sentinel was involved.”
“This is all sacred to you, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Of course it’s sacred.” For a moment he looked confused, as if he did not understand why she had asked the question. “I mean, I guess every cause is sacred.”
“But it’s also personal, isn’t it? You grew up here. Your father was fired by Mackenzie.”
“Every cause is personal. But what am I supposed to do? Nothing? Because I can find a personal reason for being involved in this struggle for the wilderness, does that mean I don’t have the right to play a role in its defense? We’re a part of the wild. When we defend the Algonquin, we’re defending a part of ourselves. That’s the most sacred cause there’s ever been. Don’t you see?” Gabriel was desperate for her to understand. Even if she wouldn’t join him, he wanted her at least to understand.
“This is it,” Mackenzie said to himself as he stepped into the Range Rover. It was morning and the mist was heavy in the tall grass. Soon the sun would burn it off, and the heat of the day would rise in blurry sails from the baked roads. Mackenzie held up a letter he had just pulled from his mailbox and waggled it. There would be no more trouble from Madeleine. She had finally come to her senses and accepted his offer.
While he drove, Mackenzie held the steering wheel in one hand and the letter in the other. He read it in a murmur that sounded like his stomach rumbling. It was not from Madeleine. It was the letter that Gabriel had written, stating that two thousand trees had been spiked in the Algonquin. The words reached him like shouts from the page.
Mackenzie did not go straight to work. He motored up the logging road to the Algonquin, swinging his body into the turns, bony fingers in a bloodless grip upon the wheel. He passed a work crew who stopped their chain-sawing to watch him hurtle by. They ducked away from the shower of pebbles that his Range Rover kicked up. Mackenzie drove into an area of woods where the logging had not yet begun. Then he stopped the car and jumped out.
The silence of the forest swept around him.
Mackenzie made his way over the drainage ditch, clawing out handfuls of tall grass as he dragged his artificial leg down and up the embankment. He needed to be alone and it had been a long time since he’d walked among the trees. He had grown used to seeing the forest as a single thing, a mass, but now suddenly the details of it made him dizzy. The vast complexity of each branch, the texture of the bark and the way, when he bent down and dug his hands into the soft earth, he could see how generations of pine needles had become the black soil. He felt the coolness of the air beneath the sheltering trees. He stumped back to the car. He did not want to see anymore. I’m becoming my own enemy, he thought.
Back inside the Range Rover, Mackenzie turned on the engine and then the air-conditioning and the radio. He looked at the letter again, staring so hard at the words that they seemed to scatter across the page. He felt so certain that it was Madeleine who had sent it, or who had caused it to be sent, that he decided he would not even bother handing it in to the police. In fact, he thought, considering what I am about to do, it’s best if Dodge doesn’t see this letter.
Mackenzie began to feel very tired. He didn’t have the strength he used to have. Voices in his head asked if he shouldn’t just give in. You could stand to lose just once, the voices told him. For every person who says publicly they do not like what you’re doing to the Algonquin, there are fifty who think the same but do not speak. There’s some sense to what the letter says—what use was a clear-cut wilderness? What right do you have to cut so far beyond the point of the forest’s recovery? These forgiving, soft-voiced reasons bulged into his head like the ballooning veins of an aneurysm.
Mackenzie heaved them aside. He wiped away all thoughts of weakness. Nothing more would be left to chance. He picked up his car phone and put a call through to American Airlines. He booked himself on a plane to New York, leaving from Portland the next morning. As he spoke to the booking agent, the phone tucked under his chin, he tore Gabriel’s letter into so many pieces that when he let them go out the window, the shreds slipped from his hands like the petals of a crushed white flower.
Half a mile up the road, Dodge and Coltrane stepped out from the canopy of trees. They had been patrolling the woods since well before sunrise. Their clothes were dusted white and the dust was in the corners of their eyes and the corners of their mouths and when they swallowed, they could taste it. Their canteens were empty. Pine needles had gone down their collars and were scratchy between their bare necks and their shirts. Everywhere they went in the Algonquin, through each dark stand of pine, they felt as if they were being watched.
Mackenzie’s Range Rover came rumbling toward them, sending up dust so thick it seemed to erase everything it passed. The Range Rover drew alongside them. Mackenzie powered down his window and stuck his head out. The dust cloud billowed past him and filtered into the trees. “Gentlemen!” he called. “How goes the war?”
Dodge and Coltrane squinted at the man. The cheerfulness in Mackenzie’s voice was something they had not heard since before Pfeiffer’s death and not very often before that.
“We found another bunch of spiked trees, sir.” Coltrane found it difficult to speak with all the dust clogged in his windpipe. He reached instinctively for his canteen, but then remembered it was empty. His fingers glanced off the metal.
“Well.” Mackenzie grinned. “Can’t get them all.”
“We’ll be continuing the patrol later this afternoon,” Dodge said, to fend off the charge of inefficiency he felt sure was coming.
“Right.” Mackenzie nodded. He barely seemed interested. “Truly, gentlemen”—he scanned them both with his pale-blue eyes—“you don’t have a chance of finding these people, do you?”
Coltrane stepped forward, boots shuffling in the dirt. “They’ll slip up sooner or later. Alls we got to do is catch one of them.”
“How many of them do you think there are?”
“We don’t know,” Dodge said. “Do you?”
“No, and that’s my point. We know nothing about them. The only suspect you had was that guy who took over from Benny Mott.”
“We kept an eye on him.” Dodge made his case. “He doesn’t go out at night. He doesn’t leave town. I talked to him and he didn’t seem nervous. I even searched the depot when he wasn’t there. There’s nothing suspicious.”
“Has he been doing his job?”
“According to the comptroller in St. Johns, he’s been doing as good as Mott.”
“Mott.” Mackenzie curled his lips around the word as if it were an obscenity. It was nothing personal. At that moment, he just needed to insult someone. “Anyway,” Mackenzie said, “that’s a dead lead.”
“We think it’s more likely to be someone local. Someone who knows the woods.” Coltrane needed to rest. It had been a long day. He wanted to sit down right where he was and let Dodge and Mackenzie carry on the conversation without him.
“What about Lazarus? He hates everybody.” Mackenzie smiled at his own suggestion—the idea of Booker Lazarus running through the woods.
Dodge breathed out sharply through his nose. He knew Mackenzie was just making a joke of it. “Lazarus doesn’t have the strength to hammer in even one of those nails.”
Mackenzie nodded, grinning. “You want a ride back to your car?” Mackenzie made the offer because he felt he had to, and he let his voice show it.
“No, sir.” Dodge shook his head.
When the Range Rover had gone and its dust was settling, Coltrane turned to Dodge. “How come you didn’t take the ride? It’s a mile and a half to the patrol car.”
“I don’t want to ride with him. Do you?”
“I guess not.” The sun had gone behind a cloud. In the softer light, Coltrane let the muscles around his eyes relax. Sweat-fused dust crumbled from his crow’s-feet wrinkles.
“I tell you, Victor, we’re fighting on the wrong damn side this time.” Dodge strode off down the road.
Coltrane shuffled after him through the dust. He had never heard such anger in Dodge’s voice. He knew Dodge was right. He just didn’t know what to do about it.
At two in the morning, Mackenzie lay restless on his bed. It was always at night that doubt would creep around him. He thought of what Alicia had said about Ungaro. Then he thought about his father, and wondered what the old man would have done.
Abraham Mackenzie had been a compact little man, creaky-boned in winter, looking half-dehydrated and oiling himself each night like the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz with the heavy cream he drank before he went to bed. The man had lived by codes that made no sense to anyone but him, harsh rules with penalties for breaking them. Abraham never taught these rules. He just pointed out when they had been broken. Years after Abraham’s death, Mackenzie would hear one of these maxims and cringe.
Of all the symbols of his father’s life, none had frightened Mackenzie more than the image of the blood eagle. Abraham invoked this image as a threat against himself, like someone drawing down a curse, whenever his business was failing. He said it came from the time of the Vikings. “They chose their leaders for many reasons,” Abraham told Mackenzie, “but the greatest reason was for their luck. And when the luck ran out, they turned the old leaders into blood eagles.” That was all he would say about it.
Mackenzie imagined a mythic red bird, painting the clouds scarlet as it flew by. How a man could be turned into this, he had no idea. This bird soared through Mackenzie’s dreams, with the same cold eyes and hard, hooked nose as his father.
Years after Abraham’s death, he had asked an old college friend who was teaching Norse history at the University of Minnesota to find out the meaning of the blood eagle. What the friend told him was far worse than Mackenzie had imagined. As a punishment for failure, the Vikings would carve two gashes into a man’s back. Then his lungs were pulled through the gashes, to flap like red wings as his last breaths carried him off to death.
Mackenzie remembered the day his father handed over the company. It was one week before the old man died. He had walked into his father’s study with a briefcase, ready to take the company’s insurance documents away with him. It was Indian summer. The cold had come and the maple leaves had turned all shades of red and amber and marmalade and gold. Then the chill subsided for a day, the last gasp of warm air before hard winter set in. Abraham sat at his desk in the pale sunlight, which ran like water into the crystal decanters racked up on the mantelpiece. Small copper plates hung by chains around the necks of the bottles, listing the names of the drinks. The crystal contained the light, and compressed it and then threw it from the angled sides in rainbows. The square Seth Thomas clock standing alongside the decanters struck the half hour with delicate chimes, as if the crystal itself were ringing.
Mackenzie had never seen his father so tired. He had the white-faced look of an old golden retriever. Now that his work was over, age had flooded through and overtaken him. The years of work had ground him down until he was all foggy like a piece of sea glass. “Wealth dies,” he said. “People die. But the only thing that never dies is the judgment on how a person has spent his life.” The man’s hair hung illuminated like some shabby halo around his skull. His hands rested on the blotter of the desk in front of him, fingers crooked with age. “So how do you judge me now?”
Mackenzie had no answer. He had never thought to judge his father. Mackenzie had always assumed it was himself who was being judged.
All night Mackenzie could not sleep. He lay there watching the lace curtains billow in the breeze that came down off the mountain, like the drifting veils of ghosts come to his window. He kept thinking of the blood eagle. The verdict on each person dead.