Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (18 page)

Doug and Jack avoided each other for a couple hours until Doug pulled limbs away from a big pine Jack was still bucking, and they started getting in each other's way. The chain caught Jack's pants and cut open the cloth below the knee, leaving a thin red slice in the skin.

Jack shut the saw off and motioned for Pete to come gas up. Pete filled his three-quarters full before the can went dry.

“I thought I told you to bring up the full can of gas,” Jack said. He couldn't speak to Doug without tension and frustration boiling in his voice.

“That is the full can,” Doug said. “The other one's empty.”

“What happened to all the gas?” Jack said, and looked at the pile of scorched limbs where Doug had started the fire. “You didn't dump that whole can onto the pile? Tell me you didn't.”

“I didn't either.”

“Then what happened to all the friggin' gas?”

Doug knitted his brow and ground his jaw.

“I don't know,” he whined, his face twisting like a child's until an idea seemed to come over him. “I'll go get some more,” he said. “That store's just a few miles down the road. Five minutes. Faster'n you guys burn through a tank.”

He smiled at Pete and nodded a few times, as if they had some prearranged agreement.

Jack mulled it over for a moment, sitting on his heels and pulling his finger through the pine needles. “Arright,” he said. “Hurry up. Couple hours before dark.”

“I need the keys.”

Jack dug the keys out of his pocket and handed them over.

“I ain't got no money.”

“Course you ain't,” Jack said and pulled out a twenty.

Doug took off running down the hill, and they started up the saws. Either because Doug was gone or because the air was warm or because the wood was perfect, they worked faster than they ever had before, the trees tumbling and blocking up into neat symmetrical piles, the sky opening up more with every minute. A great spruce slammed into the ground and shivered. Pete loved to see them go down. It felt like progress. Maybe this was how the people who first came here, the pioneers, felt, when everything was covered with trees. With the logs spread out, some in piles and some lying where they had fallen, it was hard to tell how many cords they had cut. Jack worked tirelessly, even frantically, the sweat running down the channels on his narrow back as if it were summer already.

Pete was hot, too; the salt dripped down into the corners of his mouth. After a long winter of cutting in
five below, it was finally spring, and for the first time since the accident, Pete felt there was a shot for him. He thought about Portland again, allowing himself to imagine the people he would meet at bars. He would have to go to bars, because there was nowhere else to meet people. He wouldn't mention Vaughn or Jen or any of it when he got there. He would be the person he decided to be.

He had more than just his own life to get away from. Pete's father had been ambitious—at least that was how Pete's religious mother described it. Obsessed, Pete would say, with becoming principal of the high school. For years he had talked of little else, encouraging Pete's mother to befriend the wives of people on the school board and getting her to host parties for them. When the long-time principal, Mr. Cunningham, retired four years after he was supposed to, his father finally had what he knew would be his one shot. He wasn't even interviewed, though, and in retaliation, he gave an angry speech at a school assembly. His father never seemed obviously drunk after that, but his eyes were always watery and stunned, fixing on one object in the room after another as if he might spot at any moment the door through which he would flee. Pete's father was no doubt driven by the shame of what had happened to his own father, who was caught embezzling thousands of dollars from the American Legion Post where he had been the treasurer for years. His wife, Pete's grandmother, had to sell the car she had bought after thirty-five years
of nursing, in order to pay back her husband's debt. All of this happened, as everything did, in full view of the whole town.

Pete didn't realize it had started to rain until his saw quit. The sky had turned matte gray and the woods had darkened in the shadows. Jack worked on as the rain soaked his hair, and eventually his saw quit, too. Then it started to sleet. Pete found his wet T-shirt on a pile of wood and pulled it over his head. Jack walked toward him lugging the chain saw. His face was drawn and narrow, his mouth hanging open with steam pouring out.

“We bucked a lot of board today,” he said, grinning. He didn't seem to grasp yet that it was sleeting, and that it was cold. “Where's Doug?” he said, setting the saw down and scanning the woods.

“He never came back,” Pete said as he started to shake. The rest of their clothes were in the truck, with Doug and the matches.

“He never came back,” Jack said flatly. As always, Pete waited for what Jack would say they should do next, and normally Jack never hesitated. Now, though, he set his jaw and stared listlessly down the hill. He looked straight up into the sky and closed his eyes as the rain and sleet hit his face. By the time he finally turned to Pete again, his cheeks had turned white.

“Jack,” Pete said.

Jack opened his mouth, looked down the hill, and moved toward the pile of brush that had burned up
with most of their gas. The fire was out, though, and the embers soaked. He turned and walked toward Pete but stopped for some reason and stepped back, as if he saw something in Pete's face that frightened him. Pete had never seen Jack misstep in the woods, but he watched now as Jack slipped on a patch of ice and hit the ground, snapping his leg against a rock. Jack made his hands into fists and held them in front of his chest. His jaw clenched and his eyes clamped shut. It was sleeting more than raining now, the temperature dropping fast. They were soaked to the skin.

“The coats, our clothes?” Jack asked but then seemed to remember.

Pete tried to picture how far it was to the intersection where Doug had gone for gas. A few miles. It wasn't far, Pete told himself. He was hazy from hours of the saw buzzing through his thoughts, and he couldn't decide if they were really in danger or not. The sun had just been out, and it was only sleet and rain. It was almost spring, not the middle of the winter, but they might be more than a few miles from the intersection.

Jack rolled over on his side. Dirt and sawdust funneled into the creases around his eyes and mouth.

“It's twisted. You walk it,” Jack said. “Down to the store at the crossing.”

“I can't leave you here,” Pete said.

“You got to. We wasted too much time already.”

The wind had swung around to the north and picked up force. On the way down the hill, Pete slipped
and fell but pulled himself up by a branch. It had been an easy climb up earlier, but now he had to lower himself from tree to tree across a field of ice. It seemed to take forever, and when he reached the road, it was impossible to get his footing on the glassy surface. Maybe someone would come along, he thought, but this was a logging road and the paper company wasn't cutting in this area anymore. There was no reason to come down this way.

He lunged forward into a sluggish jog, his joints stiff, his whole body shaking, his arms dead weight. He couldn't understand how he had gotten so cold so fast, and he slipped again, the road rising up like a fist and smacking him in the side of the head. The gray sky whirled and the ground pitched. He felt as drunk as he had been on the night of the accident, when Jen helped him out of the party and into the passenger seat. She had been drinking, too, but not as much. He passed out and didn't wake up until the car was in a spin, and he curled his arms over his head just before he shot through the front windshield and landed in the grass. Both his arms were broken in several places, and his neck hurt. After a few minutes, he managed to roll onto his knees and stand, still drunk, to walk over to the car. The wet road shimmered in the glow of the one remaining headlight. Jen leaned against the steering wheel, her face torn and smashed. She was still breathing, he could tell, from the bubbles in the blood around her busted nose. When the police found him, he was
down the road stumbling away with his broken arms flopping at his sides. Later, when they asked why he had run, he said he was going for help, but after a while, he was no longer sure. He might just have been running.

He had no idea how long he had been on the ground by the time he pushed himself back up to his knees. He was afraid of the ground's claim on him. In another hour, maybe less, it would be dark and even colder. His legs sliced forward in slow motion. In fits and starts, he managed a jog for a few minutes only to tumble down again. Panic thrummed in his chest. He wasn't far away from people, but he might as well be in the middle of the north woods. The skin of his arms was pale around the scars from the injuries.

When he finally made it up to his feet once more, he couldn't be sure which direction led to the store. The shape of the woods didn't help, the ice on the road showed no sign of his passing. The sleet pelted his eyelids. A white boulder looked familiar. He must have passed it already, but maybe when they first drove in. He took a step back from the boulder, which seemed to grow paler in the dimming light, and his arms and legs and shoulders broke into such a feverish shiver that the boulder shook out of his vision.

He needed a rest, and he sat down and covered his face with his hands. The heat of a sob wouldn't come to his eyes, as it hadn't since he could remember; he bared his teeth, let out a low growl and then lay down
on the side of the road to lean his head on the ice. For Jen's parents, this would be final proof that everything he touched fell to pieces. No one would blame him for not getting up again. He stopped thinking and listened to the rain and sleet patter through the woods on either side of the road. The sound formed a blanket around his thoughts. He pictured Jen's mother hearing about his death. Her eyes would close and her upper lip would curl. She would shake her head. “Well,” she would say, nothing more, not a note of pity in her voice. He had stayed away from Jen since the accident, not because of the injuries to her face, as she and everyone else probably thought, but because he had started to believe what her parents said about him.

Pete closed his eyes, and in the white shadow flickering across the backs of his eyelids, he saw Jack's pale cheeks, as delicate as old linens. Days after Pete had moved back into his parents' house, his arms still in casts, Jack showed up at the front door. No one had asked him to come.

“You ever been to one of these?” Jack asked in the truck. Pete said no, and Jack shrugged. “Here's how it goes: everybody says they're an alcoholic, no one really thinks they are.”

Jack showed up again two days later. Even after they started working together, he showed up every other evening at six-thirty. On the trips to and from the meetings, Jack remained silent and hunched over the steering wheel like a cab driver getting paid by the
mile. Once, on the way home, Pete complained about someone in the meeting who had gone on too long, and Jack replied, “Ahhh, you're just a spoiled punk.” Pete slammed the door when he got out of the truck and thought that was it between them, but Jack was there to pick him up for work the next morning and there again for the meeting that night. Going to meetings with Jack, even after he drank, and later working for him, was an obligation Pete had wanted to escape from the start, and he suspected Jack had wanted to escape it as well. He had no idea, looking back, how it had become an obligation, but that's what it was.

He got to his feet. The shaking stopped and he thought maybe he was warming up, but his hair and arms were covered with ice. He had taken his T-shirt off again but didn't remember doing so.

He made it around a curve in the road, and saw in the distance the store and gas station. His knees would hardly bend, and though he tried to keep the store in sight, he had to look down, too, in order not to slip.

The store was closed, the windows dark. There were no cars in the lot, but a door slammed nearby and just down the road a guy stepped out of his truck and walked into a ramshackle bar with a neon Bud sign hanging in the window. Pete went to the door of the bar, but he couldn't turn the knob—his hands wouldn't grip hard enough—and his voice wouldn't work. He was feet away from getting warm but had no way inside. He swung his arm from the shoulder and tried
to pound on the door, but he could only manage to tap the surface. Desperate, he fell to his knees and collapsed with his back against the door. He could hear the beat of music from inside the bar.

Pete closed his eyes and pictured a cold gray afternoon in March five years ago when his father had decided to go out behind their house and chop more firewood, which he had ordered late so it was unsplit and green. His father set his ninth beer of the afternoon on the hood of the car and pulled the light axe out of the splitting log where it had been rusting since the fall. He muscled a three-foot-wide piece of maple off the pile, rolled it flat onto the soggy ground, raised the axe high above his head and slipped on a patch of ice, falling to one knee. The second time he raised the axe above his head, he splayed his legs for balance and brought the axe down squarely on the log. The blade sank in only a few inches; the axe was too light. He needed a maul, but even that might not be enough when the wood was green. His father placed his foot on top of the log and tugged on the axe handle until the blade popped out. After half an hour of watching his father work on the same log, Pete couldn't stand it any more, and he went upstairs. But even with his face buried in the mattress and the pillow clamped over his head, Pete still heard the thud of the axe. It seemed as if the thudding had always been there, as relentless as the ticking of a clock (he could hear it now as he banged the back of his head against the door to the
bar). He let his chin fall against his chest and he squeezed his eyes shut, but the banging continued in his thoughts: the rusted axe head rising over his father's head and crashing back down into the green wood again and again.