Coltrane had suspicions. They invaded his mind. He was thinking so hard that he barely saw the woods around him as he bumped along the logging road, driving a dirty yellow CAT backhoe. He reached a place that was out of sight of logging crews and slowed the engine to a stop. Then he engaged the backhoe and raised it up and down. The shovel operated, but not the way it should. Its movements were uneven and the controls felt watery in his hand. Coltrane wrapped his right hand around the black ball of the gearshift stick and put the engine in neutral. He climbed down and examined the joints of the hoe, but couldn’t find anything wrong.
Then he climbed on again and put the engine in reverse. He backed up fast, and something was wrong here, too, in the high-pitched whine of the machine. The engine was not handling properly. It slipped. The gears were grinding.
Coltrane stopped the backhoe once more and got out. He stood before the machine, kneading the rough pads of his fingers deep into the bristle of his chin. An idea spread like wings behind his eyes and he breathed out slowly, hoping it wasn’t true. He went to the oil-distributor cap and checked the oil level. The oil was fine, the amber color not yet turned coffee brown with dirt. He pulled the dipstick, wiped it on his sleeve and checked the oil again. This time the stick had picked up some flecks of white grit. Carefully, he put the rod back into the distributor and closed the cap. Then he took out a penknife and dug gently into one of the zerk points on the backhoe. He gouged out some of the joint-lubricating grease and rolled it in his fingers. He could feel the grit in there, too.
There was no expression on Coltrane’s face. His eyes were unfocused. He wiped the grease onto his brown Carhart jacket and unclipped the walkie-talkie from his waist. He raised it to his mouth, then sighed and lowered it for a second. His lips moved without sound as he rehearsed what he was going to say. Then he began to speak. “Barnegat? Barnegat, can you hear me? This is Coltrane.” He let go of the red TALK button and static purred in his ear.
“Go ahead.”
“Are you with the road grader right now?” Coltrane could smell old smoke on the mouthpiece of the walkie-talkie.
“Ya.”
“Well, tell the driver to quit working on it until I get there. All right? Tell them to quit now.” Static punctuated his words.
“We already did.”
“You did? Why?”
“Something wrong with it.”
Coltrane’s arm dropped to his side and he stared for a while without seeing at the wall of trees before him.
Barnegat’s metallic-fuzzy voice came back to him. “What’s going on?”
“They got us good this time, Barnegat.”
“But I can’t find anything wrong with the machine.”
“Check the grease in the zerk points. Then check the oil a bunch of times. See what comes up.”
“You’re kidding me. Somebody silted the oil?”
“Worse than that. They used silicone grit. A real thorough job, by the look of it.”
“Then I guess we’re out of business, Mr. Coltrane.”
Coltrane shut off his walkie-talkie. He clipped it back onto his belt. It was hot now, so he took off his jacket and set it on the ground where the bulk of the machine formed shade on the road. Then he sat down in the shadows, with his back against the huge tire of the backhoe. The rubber was warm and Coltrane felt the heat soak through his shirt. He knew that if a couple of machines had been damaged, then probably all of them had. If the grit had been in the engines for more than a few days, they would have to be junked. Coltrane doubted it would be possible to get hold of equipment from another logging company, not since Mackenzie had put all the local ones out of business. It would take months for any insurance claims to come through, and Mackenzie could not afford to buy new machines, not at such short notice and with so much money sunk into the Algonquin deal. Maybe he could rent more stuff, Coltrane thought, but what company is going to rent its gear out to a mill whose operation is being sabotaged?
For the first time in his adult life, Coltrane was sure he would be fired from his job. It was not the nightmare he had once imagined. In fact, he felt relieved. With the burning down of the Forest Sentinel, the last arguments of support for Mackenzie among the loggers had begun to come apart. It wouldn’t be long now before they called a general strike. Wind hissed through the tops of the trees. Coltrane folded his hands on his chest and closed his eyes, taking his last calm breaths before he faced Mackenzie again. It was only then he realized that, all through the forest, the sound of the chain saws had quit.
It took three days for flatbed trucks to tow away the last of the Mackenzie Company’s machines. Mackenzie ordered the cutting to continue, saying the logs should lie where they fell.
The sawmill was down to one cutting blade, and new blades were on order.
First Mackenzie had told Coltrane he was fired. Then he called Coltrane back into the office and told him he was hired again. “It’s got to be somebody’s fault!”
“It would be the fault of whoever had the authority to post guards on the machinery.” Coltrane spoke in a low and even tone.
“And who’s that?”
“You, sir.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Coltrane.”
“No, sir.”
Mackenzie launched himself out of his chair and went to stand by the window. “People are starting to say I’m whipped, aren’t they?”
“No.”
“Well, what the hell are they saying? I never heard so much whispering in all my life.”
“They’re wondering if you had anything to do with the newspaper burning down.” That’s it, Coltrane thought to himself. I just went too far. I’m going down the pipe just like that other foreman did.
“And where’s a piece of news like that come from?”
“Well, it’s hard to say.”
“Fucking wilderness people. Madeleine was just in there smoking marijuana and torched the fucking place. Of course they’re going to blame me! Everybody always does!”
“But is it true, sir?” Coltrane waited for Mackenzie to turn around. He was tired of staring at the back of the old man’s head.
“What?”
“About the fire?”
Mackenzie was staring at his hands, the way the veins zigzagged under his skin. “Let’s just get hypothetical here for a moment. What if it was true, Coltrane? I always treated you right. I let you do your job and you let me do mine. Now, I always think of my employees first. That newspaper was getting in the way of our industry. It’s jobs we’re talking about here. Jobs and opportunity. Jesus Christ, we’re living out the American Dream here, aren’t we? It doesn’t matter who burned that paper down. The only thing that matters now is that it’s gone. So get out there and start cutting those trees. I don’t care if they’re lying on the ground six months. I don’t care if we have to dig them out of the snow this winter. If we cut them, they’re ours. Now tell everyone to get back to work.” He walked over to Coltrane and gave him a slap on the shoulder. “We’ll still show them. By the first snowfall, there won’t be a single tree standing!”
Coltrane turned around and walked out.
“OK!” Mackenzie called after him, the way a coach calls out to a player going onto the field. Then he walked back to his window and looked down into the yard.
A small crowd had gathered there. Cigarette smoke rose from the jumble of khaki jackets and frayed work shirts and baseball hats.
Coltrane spoke to them, shaking his head. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged. Then, as a new thought occurred to him, he pulled his hands out and shook them to make his point. It looked as if he were shaking change from a piggy bank.
As Coltrane spoke, the mill workers looked up at Mackenzie’s office.
Mackenzie’s first instinct when he saw them look his way was to duck from their line of sight. But he stayed where he was, because he knew he couldn’t hide.
Coltrane was shrugging again.
“Tell them it’s about jobs,” Mackenzie muttered. “Make them see.”
Coltrane held up one finger and then another, listing off points.
“Tell them it’s legal,” Mackenzie whispered.
The men began walking toward the gates. They talked among themselves.
Mackenzie felt bile spill into the back of his throat. He stumped downstairs and out into the yard. From behind the tinted windows of his office, he had not realized how bright it was outside. Now he was almost blinded in the glare.
The men were walking to their trucks. Doors slammed and engines coughed into motion.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Mackenzie shouted at the workers. “You taking a fucking holiday?” Then he spun around to face Coltrane, walking stick raised as if to jab him with the nickel tip. “You better do something about this!”
The tough hide of Coltrane’s face was red from all the talking he had done. “It isn’t right, what you’re doing in the Algonquin. Not with it being declared a preserve. And people feel you are responsible for the newspaper burning down. They just need some answers from you, sir.”
“And who are you? The fucking pope all of a sudden? Eh? Are you afraid to go back in the woods?” He gave Coltrane a shove and then immediately wished he had not. It was one of those short shoves that start fights, and Mackenzie knew Coltrane would not fight him.
Coltrane stepped backward from the shove. Then he steadied himself. Now it’s you who went too far, he thought.
But Mackenzie hadn’t finished. “You’ve got enough wilderness in this state already. It would take you weeks even to hike through it all. How much more do you want? And what the hell do you care about a beatnik who is trying to take away your jobs with her fucking newspaper?”
The lumbermen stood watching in silence, cigarettes burning unsmoked in their hands.
Mackenzie’s voice rose to a howl. “One of these days, you’ll realize that everything I did, I did for you! If this mill closes, I’m still set for life. I don’t have what I don’t need. But what about you? If you go out those gates, I don’t want you coming back. You think hard about this. Because one way or another, those trees are coming down. I’ll bring the Canadians down. I’ll bring the Japanese in here if I have to. One way or another, gentlemen!”
They drove away in the dust.
Mackenzie turned to Coltrane, his face twisted with anger. “So what did you tell them?” Before Coltrane could reply, Mackenzie shouted, “I don’t even want to know. Just get the fuck out of here.”
“You’re falling apart,” Coltrane said quietly.
A memory returned to Mackenzie. It was a picture of his father. The thought came rolling like a bowling ball down the corridors of his mind until it seemed to crash into his skull behind the eyes. His father had told him never to explode in anger. To take it home and sleep on it and see in the morning if it was worth the trouble that explosions always cause. Mackenzie could not recall the exact words his father had used, but he remembered the lesson, and with it came a strange light that he knew belonged in his father’s study, the sun glancing off the coffee-dark mission-oak furniture. Before the memory retreated again, Mackenzie saw his father at his desk, turned sideways and staring at the bookshelf, his eagle-beak nose profiled against the blurry diamond panes of his study window. His hands were raised, fingertips touching. That was the picture. Those were the words that came with it. Then it disappeared, and Mackenzie found himself gone from staring deep inside himself to staring outward, into the hard light of the lumberyard.
Coltrane was walking away, jacket slung over his shoulder. He clicked open his lighter and lit a Lucky Strike.
“Fuck all of you,” Mackenzie said, without bothering to raise his voice. He walked across to his car and drove out into the wilderness down the empty logging roads. He drove until the road ended in a berm of dirt and stacked white birch trees, rotting in the sun. He climbed out and moved along the side of the car, hands sweeping through the film of dust, dragging the heel of his artificial leg. He fetched a chain saw from the trunk of the Range Rover and carried it into the woods. He jammed the blade against the ground, using the saw as a walking stick, until he was under the trees and the air was still and cooler than it was near the road. He pulled the cord and started up the chain saw, diving the blade into the nearest pine. Mackenzie had not cut down a tree since the night he lost his leg. Now he dared it to fall on him, the way the last had done. The tree began to creak and then it fell, swishing through the branches of other pines until it thumped against the earth. He didn’t wait, but attacked another tree. His street shoes barely gripped the soil. The saw was heavy in his hands, drawing sweat from his palms and splashing down from his armpits across his ribs and soaking into the band of his underwear. The blond spray of sawdust blinded him, and he had to keep stopping to gouge it out of his eyes. The smell of spilled sap was all around him. He wore no ear protectors, and the roaring of the saw made him deaf. He watched another tree fall, the last pale splinters giving way and throwing pine needles into the air like green confetti. Tree after tree he dared to fall on him. He dared the chain saw to break and snake back and rip up his head as it had done to Pfeiffer. He challenged the one talisman that had shielded him through his life: that he had once gathered from somewhere inside him the strength to mutilate himself so horribly and crawl to safety, past all barriers of pain and shock, only to stay alive. Never far from his thoughts was the idea that he could do it all again if he had to, and if he’d been able to saw off his own leg, he did not need to fear anything. Not even death. Mackenzie had never spoken this aloud. Never dared to put it into words, because it was the last ditch of his power and to speak it would have been to diminish the great hold it had on him. Sweat was still running off him. It trickled out of his cuffs. He was powdered with sawdust. What frightened him now was that his talisman might fail him, that the great reservoir of strength in which he had believed had long ago dried up and left him weak. After the seventh tree, he swung around, not even bothering to watch the pine fall, and his smooth-soled shoes slid out from under him. He dropped and the saw bounced off the ground, its jagged chain still spinning, and when Mackenzie hit the ground he closed his eyes, because the last thing he saw was the blade and his hands stubbornly gripping the handle. He lay there for a second, the air thick with sawdust all around him, and he realized he was safe. The saw had bounced away from him and lay at the end of his arm, still clasped in his bloodless, knotted fingers.
Mackenzie rolled onto his back in time to see an eagle fly over, cast its shadow on the polished green hood of his car and then swerve suddenly, wide wings flexed, and swoop past where he lay. As it passed directly above him, Mackenzie swore it was no bird, but some man cloaked in wings—the unforgiving angel who had watched him all these years and judged him as harshly as he judged himself. He craned his neck to see where the bird had gone, but could see only the highway of blue sky in the path he had cut through the forest.
It was then that Jonah Mackenzie had a vision of his own death. Not one concrete image. Instead, it had a quality of light. White. Yellow. It dropped from the clear sky like crystalline splinters of sun, broken into the hard lasers of each primary color. It was a feeling of certainty. The experience was strangely familiar, as if this news had been brought to him long before but somehow he’d forgotten it. From the silence that followed, stilling even the breeze through the tops of the pines and the razzing hum of cicadas, it seemed to Mackenzie as if every living thing in the forest had felt the shock of this vision and was hushed by it. Even the forest itself, for which Mackenzie had shown no pity in his life, seemed to be pitying him. Death walked toward him at a steady pace, and as it drew closer Mackenzie felt the swirling emptiness that surrounded it.
“Wealth dies,” Mackenzie found himself muttering, eyes tightly shut. “People die. The only thing that never dies is the verdict on each person dead.”
The vision slowly faded, as if whatever it was had traveled through him and past him and carried away with it the savage waking-dream. Mackenzie climbed to his feet, one metal and one bone, and staggered back to his car. Then he drove home and got drunk by himself in his study on the smoky burn of Islay whiskey, staying up until late in the night. He offered no explanation to Alicia. If he did not mention it, the thing might not be real. But even if the promise of it had not been true, the vision itself would never leave him. Not even in the pendulum rocking of his skull as he raised the decanter to his mouth and drank the fiery liquid, blue night winking off the crystal.
Coltrane put in a call to New York. It was the first time he had used his phone in months. He had made up his mind what to do. Days had passed since he walked out of the Mackenzie mill. Each morning at five, he swung himself out of bed and got halfway to the sink to shave before he remembered that he didn’t have a job. The perfectly rationed energy that had seen him through the days began to smolder in him. He sat confused in a chair in his kitchen, watching Clara go about her day and fuss over him, but he was beyond any help she could give. Slowly his confusion began to distill. He knew what had to be done, as much for himself as to put right some of what had happened.
He made an appointment to see Linda Church, producer of a television program called Focus America. Her assistant was clipped and rude on the phone, the way people are rude to door-to-door salespeople. On the day, Coltrane put on a pair of Florsheim shoes and a jacket and a tie, none of which he had worn in years. The shoes were so old and out of use that they had curled up at the toes and made him walk as if he were on rockers. He told Clara where he was going. He had expected that she might try to talk him out of it, but she did not. She seemed to have a better idea than he did about what he would accomplish with his trip. Coltrane took the bus to Portland and from Portland down to Boston. Then he boarded an Amtrak train and headed south.
Eight hours later, Coltrane left the train at Penn Station in New York. It was his first time in the city. He walked out through the low-roofed corridors, past a gift shop where mechanical toy dogs yipped and wandered around the dirty floor as if they were looking for something. Past one man wearing the pink plastic wristband of a hospital patient. The man was dressed in army-surplus clothes and stalked invisible enemies, shooting them down with a gun made from his fingers. Others stood beside closed shops, talking to themselves and swinging their heads from side to side. Coltrane rode up the escalator, past a flower seller and a legless Vietnam vet holding out a paper cup for change. “I suffered for you,” the man said. “I suffered for all of you fuckers.”
Before Coltrane stepped into the cab, he stood looking around at the chinks of blue sky above the buildings and the cars and the sky-reflecting windows. He was trying to figure out how he would explain this place to Clara. Not just describe it. Explain it. It would not be enough to talk about the legless man or the way he found himself taking shallow breaths so as not to cough on the fumes. There was something else. Some discord that he felt beyond all senses he could name. He realized it would be hard to explain to these people what was being lost in the place he had come from, because it was already gone from here. He understood then that this was the source of the discord, not all the things that were here but the things that were not. It would not make a difference if they drove out to a forest for a week or so each year. The thunder of the city would not have left their bones by the time it came to leave again. If Coltrane had known this in advance, he would not have come to the city. He would have lived out his life feeling like a coward for not having tried, but he had come this far and he had nothing left to lose.
Ten minutes later, Coltrane climbed out of a cab at the entrance to the Focus America studios on Forty-fourth Street and went inside. The guard at the front desk called his name upstairs. He was on time, but was made to wait in a little room with seafoam-green walls and magazines fanned out like playing cards on glass tables. Eventually, an assistant showed him in. She was petite and wore a short cherry-red dress. He followed her past many booths with papers stacked on desks and phones ringing, to a room with a view.
A bald man with an earring walked out carrying a file and Coltrane stepped back to let him pass. Then he found himself looking at a very tall, pale-skinned woman, whose silvery hair was parted severely down the middle. She wore a dark blue suit with gold buttons. This was Linda Church. Focus America uncovered scandals and schemes, people jailed unjustly and cases of political corruption. On the TV at the Loon’s Watch, Coltrane had seen people run away from Linda Church as she and her camera crew ambushed them outside office buildings and chased them down streets in a flurry of trenchcoats and wiring, bawling out questions as she went.
“Mr. Coltrane.” She cleared some papers off her desk, as if to find a place where she could rest her hands. She told him with her movements that she had no time for chat.
“Yes, that’s right.” He undid the front button on his jacket and sat down in the chair opposite her desk. The toes of his shoes were still curled up. He planted his feet hard on the floor.
“So you have a story for us.” She talked almost without moving her lips.
“I believe so.” For days, Coltrane had thought about little else but the moment when he would explain his story to her. Now that he was here, his words and everything around him seemed pillowed in an anesthetic fuzziness.
She tipped in her chair. It looked for a moment as if she was about to pitch backward out the window and into the crawling traffic ten floors below. “We normally have a policy about doing stories that involve personal vendettas.”
“It’s always personal,” said Coltrane. He had become uneasy in the waiting room, but now he began to gather himself together. “If it weren’t personal, I wouldn’t be here. And if it weren’t more than personal, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”
The black dots of her pupils seemed to freeze. “I suppose you could see it that way,” she said.
Coltrane explained the Algonquin deal, and told her what would be left of the wilderness by the time Mackenzie had finished with it. She took some notes with a fat black Mont Blanc fountain pen on a yellow legal pad. Not looking up. Lips pressed bloodlessly together. Then she sat back and set the pen down on the desk. “I don’t believe a person would put himself in danger just to save a bunch of trees.”
“It’s not just the trees.” Coltrane allowed his voice to rise in the soundproofed white walls of the office. “It’s the wilderness. It’s where you come from,” he said. “And when it’s gone, even if you haven’t ever seen the wilderness, a part of you goes with it.”
“Really.” She smiled at him. It was the kiss-off smile. “I just don’t think it has the kind of appeal that we’re looking for.”
Coltrane nodded, to say thank you and good-bye. He stood and felt a hard pinch in his stomach where his scar was still healing. A quiet groan worked its way out of his throat. He pressed one hand to the scar and with the other he propped himself up against the desk. “Jesus,” he whispered.
“Are you all right?” Linda Church stood. “Do you want me to call someone?”
“No.” It hurt to talk. “I got stabbed a while ago and sometimes when I stand too fast, the hurt comes back.” He looked up, straining his neck to meet her eye. “It goes away in a bit.”
“My God, who stabbed you?”
“It was out in the forest. It was a guy some people thought was spiking trees. But it wasn’t him.”
“What happened to the man?”
“My best friend shot him in the face. After that, he got hit by a train, but by then I think he was already dead.” Coltrane lowered himself back into the chair. “If I could just sit here for a minute.”
Linda Church also sat. She unscrewed the cap of her pen and made another note. “And have there been any other deaths?”
“Ayuh. There was James Pfeiffer. That was what started it all.”
“What happened to him?” She was writing it down.
“Chain saw.”
The phone rang. Linda Church picked up the receiver, listened for a second and then said, “Not now.” She hung up. “Chain saw, did you say?” Her eyes were narrowed almost shut.
Coltrane nodded. The pain was going now.
“Mr. Coltrane, I think maybe we could work with you on this. Now tell me again from the start.”
One hour later, Coltrane walked out into the street. Linda Church had said she would be looking into it further. She had made him promise to go on camera with what he had said and Coltrane had agreed. He took the next train north. It was night when he left New York. For a long time, Coltrane looked out at streetlamps rushing past like fireflies. As he watched the lights go by, Coltrane thought back to when he watched the fireworks exploding over Pogansett Lake every Fourth of July. The glittering and falling stars always amazed him, as if he were witnessing the creation of another universe. He felt the same sense of wonder at being involved in something that was larger than he was, something he could never fully understand and was not meant to. He kept his face pressed to the window, not wanting to miss a single light, and the train carried him on into the dark.
When Mackenzie arrived back from work at his office the next morning, Alicia had just finished writing him a message on a pink piece of While-You-Were-Out notepaper. She wore a white dress printed with tiny red roses.
Mackenzie smiled at her. “You look good,” he said. He was feeling better today. Some of his workers had returned. He felt sure that the rest would follow soon. He would find someone to replace Coltrane, and when Shelby had finished his work, the mill could get back to business as usual. The mill would survive. The town would survive. It was one of those days when he felt sure that he had saved himself a place in heaven.
Alicia tore the piece of notepaper from the pad and stuck it on his chest. “I think you’re about to be famous,” she said.
“Why’s that?” He tried to talk and read the note at the same time. It said that Linda Church had called. There was a number for him to call back. For one confused moment, Mackenzie felt pride balloon in his chest. First, he imagined himself in front of a camera outside the Mackenzie mill, walking with Linda Church down one of his logging roads, both of them wearing trenchcoats and deep in discussion, followed by the camera crew. More pictures lined up, like anxious students, arms raised and hands waving. Then suspicion snapped him out of it. “Did she say what she wanted?”
“To talk to you about the Algonquin.” Alicia touched her dress, as if to pick the printed roses from the cloth. “Should I just call them back and say you don’t want to talk?”
“No.” The spit had dried up in his mouth. “They’d find someone else to talk to.” Mackenzie walked upstairs to his study. He went in and kicked the study door shut as he dialed the number, calling Linda Church collect.
Linda Church was polite, in a way that threatened not to be polite. She told him who she was, with the springy voice of someone stating a fact that everyone should already know. “Mr. Mackenzie, we are just fact-checking for a story.”
“Yes,” Mackenzie said. His thoughts were roller-coastering.
“Is it true, sir, that you signed a deal for logging rights to an area of forested land called the Algonquin Wilderness?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” There was the sound of a phone ringing in the background. “What we also need to know is whether you were aware that the Algonquin Wilderness is scheduled to become a protected area one month after your logging rights expire? In effect, sir, that the area in which you have disrupted or destroyed all wildlife is to become a sanctuary for what no longer exists?”
Then Mackenzie went from having no plan to having the only plan there was. “The government called me and made the offer. They said it was to become protected, but they were the ones offering me clear-cut logging rights. I assumed they would have a good idea of what they were doing.” Now he laughed. It was a deliberate and dreary chuckle. “I mean, if the wilderness-management people don’t know how to handle the wilderness, who does? You see, ma’am, my job is to cut the trees down. I have all this on paper if you need to see it.”
“Well, that’s very kind.” It was not a voice with any gratitude or trust. “Would you be prepared to talk with us about this on camera?”
“Of course. How soon can you get up here?”
“Well, perhaps within a few days. What we’re interested in, Mr. Mackenzie, is whether you see any kind of unethical conduct here.”
“I’m a businessman. I was made an offer by the government. Like I said, it was a good offer, and if I had turned it down, someone else would have picked it up. The only thing you can be sure of, ma’am, is that these trees will fall. There’s too much money in it. Too many jobs. And no amount of terrorism is going to change that.” He was angry now. The veins were thumping in his neck. “I’m the victim here!” Mackenzie shouted into the receiver. He realized in the silence that followed that she was still listening to him. He knew he might still be able to win her over to his side. Suddenly he was no longer worried. He saw the whole thing turning toward him, like a great ship coming about. “The law is being broken up here in the North Woods, Ms. Church,” he said, his voice a conspirator’s mumble, “but it’s not me who’s breaking it.” The sweat was running down Mackenzie’s face. He gripped the receiver hard. “I am grateful for the opportunity to bring this story to the American people.”
When Linda Church hung up half an hour later, Mackenzie felt the breathless stun of someone living purely off instinct. Slowly he breathed out. Then he called Ungaro’s answering service.
Ungaro called him back ten minutes later. “Hello, Jonah.” Ungaro sounded impatient. An echoing voice in the background announced a flight departure. “I’m just getting on a plane. What do you need?”
“I was wondering if you had any way of getting in touch with our friend. I had some news for him, but he’s a little hard to find.”
“Well, that’s what he’s good at.”
“So, ah, do you have a number or something?” Mackenzie scanned the racks of unread books along his study shelves.
“No. I wouldn’t even know where to start, Jonah. That whole situation is kind of on autopilot right now. It’s in motion. There isn’t anything you or I can do to stop it. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it, Jonah?”
“I just had some information that I thought would be useful.” Mackenzie sighed out the words. He wanted to call the whole thing off. He didn’t mind losing the money. Not at this stage of the game.
“Don’t you worry, Jonah. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
“No.” Mackenzie sighed again, and in the pause that followed, he realized that Ungaro had already hung up. “No, indeed,” he said, as the dial tone buzzed in his ear. If he could have cut his losses then and walked away, he would have done so. But the talk with Sal Ungaro had confirmed what Mackenzie feared—that it was all far beyond his control. He thought of the way Ungaro had said the word “autopilot,” of how confident he had sounded. Mackenzie felt none of that confidence. To him, the Dutch Boy had become a vast wrecking force, like a train off the rails with no way to stop except to lose momentum in the path of its destruction.
Mackenzie walked downstairs and told his wife what had happened. “What the hell am I going to do?” he asked her.
“Perhaps you should wait and see how many people show up for work today.”
“Once those TV people get through with me, it won’t matter how many show up because I’ll be finished. Besides, it was probably one of them that blew the whistle on me. What am I supposed to do? Go around to each of them and apologize? And for what? For getting them jobs they can keep? I am in the right, Alicia!”
“Are you?”
Mackenzie folded his arms. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I think there might be a difference between being in the right and in doing the right thing.”
“That’s just talk, Alicia. I have legal papers that say I can cut that land, which is what I intend to do.”
“By yourself?”
Mackenzie screwed up his face. “There’ll be people to cut those trees, even if I have to drag them in from some no-name third-world country. I don’t need this town. It’s them who need me and even in your cynical mood today, Alicia, you know that’s the truth.”
“You could hold a town meeting. Give people a chance to air their views. Give you a chance to talk back to them and make your point. Get things straightened out one way or the other. At least you would know where you stood.”
Mackenzie stayed silent for a while, trying to find something wrong with the suggestion. It would make me look good, he thought. Answer their questions before they have time to ask them. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I think that’s what I’ll do.”
The next day, he drove to the mill at his usual time. A crowd had gathered at the gates of the Mackenzie Company. Some of the people who had walked out were there, but they did not go inside the gates. Only a few lumbermen had gone to work. They moved uncertainly around the yard, as if no longer sure what jobs they were supposed to do.
A TV crew was there. Mackenzie saw two city cars. Continentals. As his Range Rover rumbled over the potholed company road, Mackenzie caught sight of the red-white-and-blue license plates on the Continentals. New York. The Focus America people had arrived even sooner than he’d thought they would. He saw a man with a camera lodged on his shoulder and a sound technician with a giant foam-covered hot-dog-shaped microphone. He was fiddling with dials on a box that he carried strapped to his waist. Then Mackenzie saw the reporter, coiled microphone line in one hand and the gray mike in the other. He recognized her. Linda Church. It was too late to panic.
The Range Rover pulled up and Mackenzie saw the crowd ooze toward him through the dust. The soundman held his microphone in the air above the bobbing heads. Linda Church advanced toward the car as if she meant to pick it up in one hand and shake Mackenzie out of it like a cookie from a jar. To Mackenzie, she looked so completely out of place here, with her just-so-tousled hair and white turtleneck sweater and green skirt and trenchcoat. She was wearing too much clothing for this summer day. Probably, he thought, because she’s one of those people who think that any place north of Boston is a permanent region of ice.
The car nudged a path through the people. Loggers peered in at Mackenzie as if they had never seen him before. He stared straight ahead and gunned the engine. Mackenzie could not hear what the people were saying, but he could hear their talking. It was a constant, beehive hum.
Linda Church came into view. Mackenzie expected her to lunge at the glass and he braced himself for the shock. But she just stood there and watched him go by. Mackenzie had the feeling he was being scanned by some machine, drinking in each thought he could no longer hold inside the bone box of his skull.
Mackenzie didn’t bother to park the Range Rover. Instead he just cut the engine once he was inside the lumberyard. He opened the door and stepped outside. The ground crunched under his feet. Then he closed the gate to keep out the crowd. It made him angry at the ones who’d walked away, leaving him to do a job he wasn’t strong enough to carry out, especially with his leg. He blamed them for making him tug at the dull gray latch, inching the rusty wheels along their dirt-filled runners.
The crowd had cleared a space for Linda Church. She stood at the gate, flanked by her TV crew. The air seemed about to explode. “Mr. Mackenzie.” Her voice had a ring like struck bronze. “You really should talk to us.”
“And I will, ma’am.”
Linda Church muttered to her camera operator. A red light winked on the camera.
Mackenzie watched the cyclops eye of the lens twist as it focused on him. “You can all talk to me and I’ll hear your questions and you can hear what I have to say. Tomorrow night at the Woodcutter’s Lodge.” He grinned at them with his best worry-less smile until he thought his jaw would crack from the strain. Mackenzie had no idea what he would say to them. He had a sense of digging in, like a soldier gouging a foxhole in the soil before an artillery barrage. It was an old and familiar feeling—of not giving in or giving any ground. Mackenzie told himself he would stonewall them until he was dead. He did not know where he would find the strength to do it, but this was the only way he knew.
Some loggers turned to leave, as if they had been waiting for any excuse to go home but needed one before they could depart. Others looked at Mackenzie as if this whole thing had gone far beyond what words could set straight.
Linda Church hauled in a length of her black microphone line like someone coiling a bullwhip. “Mr. Mackenzie!” she called out in a louder voice, above the murmur of the crowd.
“I said tomorrow tonight, ma’am.” Mackenzie gave one last tug at the muscles of his jaw and then let the smile collapse.
When he reached home, he walked straight up to his study. The great silence of the place rushed in to meet him. He had lost count of the nights he spent here in his office. His father had died in this room after giving up the company. It was as if the act had somehow torn some vital organ from his father’s body, like a bee that had spent its stinger. He wished his father were here now to give him advice. Just as he reached his study, Mackenzie heard a half-choked sound coming from the other side. When he opened the door, he found Alicia sitting at his desk. Her face was blotchy with tears.
“Why are you crying?” Mackenzie asked.
She shrugged and shook her head. “I’ve just been thinking all this over. Everything you’ve done, Jonah. You used to say you would never do anything to hurt this town and that everything you did was for the good of this town. But I don’t know if that’s true anymore. You always talk about the clean sweep you like to make of things. Your tabula whatever it is.”
Mackenzie stared at her. “Rasa,” he said in a soft, choked voice. “Tabula rasa.” It hurt him to see her cry and know he was the cause of it.
“Whatever it is,” she continued. “You only ever think about knocking things down and then you build what you want in the space that’s left behind. Only first, you’ve got to destroy everything. I don’t want to be in your new world. I’d rather be swept aside with the old one. I feel as if I’ve waited half my life to tell you that, but before I didn’t know how to say it. So go ahead. You and people like you can knock the whole planet down and build it back up the way you want it to be. But it won’t be worth living in, because you and all the Sal Ungaros of this world aren’t smart enough to see what you’re destroying.”
Mackenzie continued to stare. He saw in Alicia’s words a thing he never dreamed he would see. She was pulling away from him. She no longer trusted him, and he realized suddenly that she had not trusted him for a long time.
All that night, Mackenzie sat alone in his study with the lights turned off. When Alicia asked him if he was going to bed, he was so lost in thought he couldn’t even answer her or move his dried-out, staring eyes from the blotter on his desk. He had no sense of time passing, except the pale sweep of moonlight across his bookshelf and the books he never read. Alicia had said the one truth that made a mockery of all the truths he had invented for himself. He realized it with perfect clarity, and he despised himself. He remembered lying in the woods a few days earlier, struck dumb by the certainty of his own fast-approaching death. He remembered the words he had chanted. The verdict on each person dead. Now he knew what that verdict would be, because the person he loved most had called it out. There would be only one way out of the chaos he had created. There was no time for pride or stubbornness or careful thought to covering his fast-retreating tracks. No time for strategy worked out in the smoky war room of his brain with the blind-obedient generals he had invented over the years.
He had not known until that moment what it was he would say to the town when he stood before them. But now the words unraveled in his mind more quickly than he could have spoken them. He would halt all cutting in the Algonquin. He would return to an industry of sustainable yield. He would call back Coltrane. He would start everything over again. Mackenzie found himself filled with the same sweeping energy that had accompanied all the great adventures of his life. He was filled with optimism. This would be his triumph after all. Mackenzie turned on the lamp that perched crooked-necked like a vulture on his desk. He pulled out a sheet of paper and began to write, his dry lips forming the words.