Archangel (35 page)

He drank deeply from his canteen. It was a canvas-covered one that Mott had left. Printed on it was the pine-tree emblem of the US Forestry Service. The water was cold but metallic-tasting.

Then something moved.

It was not far away, perhaps thirty yards, at the edge of his vision before the trees became a solid wall. A large bear. The animal raised its head and sniffed the breeze, nose bobbing up and down. Its coat was shiny. The bear knew something was not right. It looked around, but couldn’t see far through the trees. It kept sniffing the air. Then slowly it moved away in the direction of the farm.

Gabriel raised himself off the ground. He slapped the dust from his clothes. Then he sprayed the trees with red bands and was done for the day. He headed back toward the tracks and across the logging road. There was the sound of a logging truck in the distance. Just as he reached the sunlit part of the road, where the angle of the trees made no shadow, he saw the twin exhaust stacks of a truck jut like
horns over a rise in the road. Then came the cab of the truck. The wind had played a trick on him. The truck was much closer than he thought. Gabriel had no time to think whether the driver of the truck had seen him. He sprinted across the road into the shadows.

The truck powered down a gear as it climbed the slope.

Gabriel hurdled the drainage ditch. Suddenly he slipped and felt a thump on the back of his skull as his head struck the ground. It blinded him for a second. Spoked wheels of sunlight glinted down through the trees.

The truck howled nearer, down another gear. Its chassis bounced on a pothole and the sound was like a gunshot.

Gabriel rolled, the thumping pain in his head shifting as he stood. He ran into the woods, not looking back. The truck seemed to be plowing after him into the woods. He moved with arms flailing like a drowning swimmer, swatting the branches away. At last exhaustion grabbed him and he dropped.

The truck was just visible. It rumbled in neutral. The cab was towing an empty flatbed.

Gabriel crawled behind a tree. He peered through the filter of branches as the cab’s door opened and a man jumped down. He walked out in front of his truck and seemed to be staring directly at the place where Gabriel was hiding. The man had on a black watch cap. He wore his blue jeans tucked into tan leather work boots and his shirt was blue-and-black plaid, untucked and trailing down to his thighs. The man unzipped his fly and pissed into the drainage ditch. He sang a song that Gabriel either did not know or was being sung too badly for him to recognize. The man didn’t sing the words. Instead, he made a noise like a guitar—
dar-nar-nar-nar-nar
—until he had finished his business. He bowed his legs slightly as he zipped up his fly. Then he fished a crumpled cigarette from his pocket.

Gabriel waited while the man smoked and picked his dirty nails. The smell of tobacco and pine sap drifted across the road and mixed in his lungs. Gabriel looked at his watch and realized that the VIA train was due down from the north in one hour, and would smash into his Putt-Putt if he didn’t reach it in time. On the sharp bends that led into Abenaki Junction, even a small collision could derail the entire train. He broke out in a sweat that covered his whole body.

Five minutes later, the man stubbed out his cigarette and left. The
dust from the truck had not even begun to settle before Gabriel was running for the tracks. As he ran, he pulled the liquid-filled compass from his pocket and took a bearing. He reached the tracks a hundred feet away from the Putt-Putt, ran to it, threw in his duffel bag and started the machine. He swiveled the seat around so that he was facing back toward town, took hold of the second set of gears and drove, leaning into the turns with the Putt-Putt’s engine racing.

He heard it then. The train’s whistle back in the woods. Depending on the wind’s direction, it could have been ten minutes away or it could have been two.

The Putt-Putt wouldn’t go any faster. Gabriel knew the train would never be able to slow down in time. Images ricocheted through his mind of what would be left of him and the Putt-Putt after the VIA train had struck.

He sped across the Narrow River bridge and heard the whistle again, a high moan echoing off the Pogansett. With the heel of his hand, Gabriel pushed the red handle of the accelerator hard against the control panel.

He passed the Booths’ cabin, with its white walls and green trim, on his left. Some people were there now, but he didn’t recognize them. He saw a tall woman with blond hair wearing shorts and a bikini top and a man in khakis and a dark-green shirt. Both waved at the Putt-Putt. Gabriel was too frantic to wave back and he saw the look of disappointment on their faces when he did not return their greeting. He could not think about that now. He craned around in his seat and saw the snub mountain of the VIA engine as it rounded a bend in the distance. The whistle blew again. Gabriel bent farther forward, like a sprinter leaning into the finish tape of a race, as if that might make the creaky-motored Putt-Putt go any faster.

The fallen-in shacks at the edge of town snapped past. The jabber of birds rose screeching into his ears and faded.

The whistle blew again. The driver had seen him now. The moan grew longer and more urgent. The train could be slowed down a little, but not much. Not with eighty freight cars.

The siding was close. Gabriel could see the tarpaper roof of the depot. The crossing-guard bell was clanging and the railroad lights flashed red. Cars stopped behind the tracks as the red-and-white boom lowered to let the train pass.

The whistle was a constant shriek in Gabriel’s ears. He thought about jumping, but everywhere he looked there seemed to be broken bottles and old nails and stones.

The tracks were shaking with the force of the train’s approach. Gabriel could feel it, like thunder channeled through the iron rails. He looked over his shoulder and saw the massive face of the engine, the mesh grille across the windows and the light on like a door open to a furnace. It was so close it seemed to him he could smell the engine. The whistle deafened him.

He careened onto the siding, switched off the ignition and jammed his foot on the brakes. They squealed and he smelled burning. He held his hands up over his head to stop the shock. For a moment, he imagined that the train had veered onto the siding as well. The brakes were burning out. Foul smoke billowed behind him.

The Putt-Putt slammed into the buffer, which was padded with layers of old tire rubber. Gabriel sprawled across the steering wheel, the air punched out of his lungs. Everything that was not strapped down flew forward and clattered around the Putt-Putt’s cabin, raining down on him in small sharp things and broken things and splashes of lukewarm coffee from his smashed thermos flask, then jangling outside onto the ground. Gabriel looked up in time to see Alain Labouchere lean out of the side window of the engine. He was laughing. He and Benny Mott had raced this way before. They knew it was a dangerous game, but they played it anyway, and they laughed because their luck had always held. Gabriel felt too relieved to be angry. The train sped past. The clunking rhythm of its wagons. The door was open in one of them, and two hobos with scraggy beards and sunburned cheeks sat with their legs dangling down, their bundles dumped beside them. Then suddenly the train had gone. The sound of it faded away.

Gabriel felt sweat clammy as it cooled under his arms, down his sides and on his dirty face. He turned on the Putt-Putt’s ignition and was surprised to hear it start. Gabriel eased his way out of the cab like an old man with arthritis, and walked around gathering up the wrenches and oilcans and screwdrivers that had come flying out of the Putt-Putt. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed him crash into the buffer, but if anyone had, he was no longer paying attention.

By the time he reached home that evening, it was pouring. Clouds shredded across the top of Seneca Mountain and hung their ripped bellies down over the lake. Gabriel pulled up the hood of his Grundig raincoat. The
pat-pat
of water on the rubberized canvas drowned out all other sounds except that of cars passing close by him on the road, their tires hissing over the blacktop. His wrists were cold in the down-pour because the sleeves of his coat, which had once belonged to Mott, did not come down far enough.

Gabriel had almost reached his house before he realized that someone was standing by the door. He breathed in sharply and stepped back.

A person walked out of the shadows, across the creaking boards.

By the light of a streetlamp, Gabriel saw it was Madeleine. His shoulders slumped with relief. “You gave me a shock,” he said and climbed up onto the porch.

“I have some bad news,” she said. Her hair was wet and hung in ringlets across her face.

“Well, come in.” Gabriel unlocked the door and swung it open. He felt the corkscrew of worry in his stomach. She wouldn’t have come unless it was serious. Gabriel followed Madeleine into the house. Its smell was familiar to him now and he carried it in his lungs and in his clothing.

Madeleine didn’t wait for him to ask. “Mackenzie has hired a man to track you down.” She had just found this out from Alicia, who was close to panic when she had run into the
Forest Sentinel
office with the news. “He’s some kind of professional. I don’t know if he’s coming or whether he’s already here.”

Gabriel said nothing. He unbuttoned his raincoat and hung it on a peg by the door. Then he knelt down and unlaced his boots, which he also set by the door. He walked over to the bed and sat down. He looked dazed by the news.

Madeleine sat down beside him. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He smoothed wrinkles from the red-and-black Hudson’s Bay blanket on the bed. Then he looked up suddenly. “Do you remember when they used to send up fireworks over the lake on the Fourth of July? I used to sit where I’m sitting now and watch them explode over the water.” Just then he needed to find something in common with her that was not spoken in the war talk of what their
lives had become. He wanted to fill in the huge blanks that still kept a part of them as strangers to each other. Gabriel didn’t know how he would cope with this new danger. He didn’t see how he could go on working in the forest while a man who made pain for a living was out there hunting him down. He wondered what he would have to do in order to survive the days ahead, and whether he would lose whatever remained of his humanity in the violence he felt sure was coming.

Madeleine remembered the fireworks. She had stood with the crowd at the edge of the lake and watched the great flowers of sparks spread and drop and disappear into the night sky. She understood why he would speak of something other than the danger. Madeleine recalled the way he had seemed before. All avenues of possibility mapped out. All reactions planned in advance. She was seeing him for the first time as he really was, without the mask of his ideals to shelter him.

“You could leave town,” she said. “I doubt you would be followed.”

“But this is my home.” He lifted his hands, palms up. “It was before and now it is again.”

“I think you’re in a lot of danger.”

Gabriel nodded, lower lip clamped between his teeth. Then he turned to face her. “But he’s got to catch me first,” he said, and smiled weakly.

She reached up and touched his cheek with the palm of her hand.

Gabriel felt the warmth of her brush through him, and it brought to the surface all that he had tried to hide away. She leaned toward him and he closed his arms around her, sweeping across the smoothness of her back.

Her arms were around him, too, and she felt the buckle of his belt press into her stomach and his breath across her neck and the sharpness of his unshaven chin along the delicate outline of her ear. She pressed her hands to his face and kissed him until she was dizzy behind her eyes. She ran her fingers through his hair, smelling the pine-tar soap he used, and pulled him down on top of her. The old bedsprings creaked. She had closed her eyes while she was kissing him and now she opened them again. His eyes were open, too, and so close that they were out of focus. It was then she remembered that she did not know Gabriel. All she knew was his ideals, and even if she
was in love with them, it was not enough. She realized what she had not known before. She was in love with someone else.

Gabriel watched a glassiness come to her eyes. He understood what she was thinking and sat up.

Then they were both shy and looked away.

Gabriel lay down beside her on the too-small bed and she fell asleep with her head on his chest. He smelled her hair and ran his fingers through it and imagined how it might be to lie beside her more than just this once. He was not lonely anymore, even though he knew that when she woke she would walk out and this would never happen again. Sometimes, he was thinking, you run into people and after five minutes it is as if you’ve known them all your life. But that knowledge is fragile. Something always seems to come along to make them strangers again. As close as they were, too much still lay between them. Gabriel found himself wondering if she had ever been one of the voices to call back to him when he had sung out the Old Man Tucker song in the woods however many years ago it was.

Then Gabriel’s thoughts turned to Mackenzie and the man who had been hired to track him down. It would not be long before the man found out who he was. He remembered what Swain had said about knowing when to quit, and until today he might have said the time was now. But in the moment he had raised his hands to Madeleine and said “This is my home,” he realized he would not be leaving once his work was done here. Not if he could stay. Before, he had planned to move on and exorcise this place and all its memories from his mind. But he could not do that, could not start again somewhere else.

He left Madeleine sleeping on the bed, easing her head onto a pillow, and went over to where he kept the Webley revolver. He fetched out the gun from its hiding place beneath a floorboard where, as a young man in this house, he had kept a bottle of slivovitz plum brandy, knocking back the clear and burning liquid late at night while he sat on the windowsill, feeling the breeze off the lake on his alcohol-numbered face. He unwrapped the gun from its cloth and then unpacked the bullets from their waxed-paper case. With the cloth he wiped the thin gun oil from the barrel and the grip and then wiped the bullets in the oil. He opened the gun, which cracked the way a shotgun cracks to load. Then he filled the chambers, checking each bullet
for rust as he slid it into the breech. He would carry that gun from now on and for the first time he knew he would use it. He stashed the gun in his boot by the door and went back to lie beside Madeleine.