Archangel (31 page)

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.