Archangel (42 page)

“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.”