Bad Little Falls (5 page)

Rivard stepped forward, so that he practically loomed over the boy. “I’m Sergeant Rivard and this is Warden Bowditch.”

The invocation of my name caused the boy to turn in his chair and look me flat in the eyes. His pupils were tiny black dots.

“I’d appreciate your looking at me when I talk to you,” Rivard said.

The kid paused just long enough to make the point that he was doing so because it suited him and not because it was a command.

The itching I was feeling started to burn. The
Scared Straight
approach had its uses, I supposed, but as a rule, I didn’t believe in humiliating children, even gargantuan ones.

Standing beside me, Mandelbaum shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then back again. He could sense that, despite my sergeant’s earlier assurances, something here wasn’t on the up-and-up. He lowered his head, trying to catch the kid’s almost catatonic gaze. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call your folks, Barney?”

“No, suh.”

“We’ve had some break-ins over at Bog Pond,” Rivard said. “You know where that is?”

It was a lake in Township Nineteen, not far from Doc Larrabee’s house, I realized.

“Yes, suh,” said Barney Beal.

“You ever go snowmobiling over that way with your friends?” Rivard asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“We have witnesses who said they saw you riding your sled on the pond last Friday night. You and your friends.”

“That sounds like an accusation,” said Mandelbaum.

“It ain’t illegal to go sleddin’,” Beal said.

“But it is illegal to break into someone’s cabin to steal the satellite TV chips,” Rivard said. “We know it was you who broke into those camps, Beal.”

Mandelbaum held up both of his narrow hands. “That’s enough! Don’t answer any more questions, Barney.”

“We’re talking about a Class D felony, Mr. Mandelbaum. That’s punishable by a year in jail.”

“In which case, Barney should have an attorney present, as well as his parents.” The vice principal turned to the boy. “I apologize for bringing you in here. I never should have agreed to this conversation.”

Beal raised his chin. “Can I go now?”

“Yes,” I said, scratching the itchy place over my heart. “You can go back to class.”

Beal lurched to his feet so abruptly, he kicked the chair over.

The boy reached down with his long arm and lifted it as it were made of balsa wood. He set the chair delicately into place. I made a note to myself, in case I ever encountered him again, that this teenager was as strong as the Hulk.

“We’ll be watching you, Beal,” Rivard said. “You won’t know it, but we will.”

For the first time, the faintest trace of a smile appeared on the boy’s pimply face.

“Yes, suh,” he said on his way out the door.

Mandelbaum waited until the boy was out of earshot before laying into us. “You lied to me,” he said. “You came in here and you lied. You told me Barney wasn’t a suspect in any crimes.”

“Those weren’t the exact words we used,” Rivard said. “What I said was, we wanted him to help us out with some information.”

“That’s—sophistry! You have no right to bully my students. These are good kids here. Yes, some of them have some problems. There’s poverty and addiction. But just because Barney Beal comes from a broken family—just because he has a tattoo—doesn’t mean you can treat him like a thug. Not without evidence.”

“How long have you worked here, Mr. Mandelbaum?” Rivard asked.

“This is my second year. Why?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“So because I’m not a Maine native, I’m a second-class citizen who will never understand this place?”

“Basically, yes.”

“We apologize for the intrusion, Mr. Mandelbaum.” I pulled my gloves from my coat pockets. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready to hit the road, Sergeant.”

I could feel Rivard’s eyes boring into my back as I left the room.

I’d never missed Kathy Frost so much in my life.

*   *   *

When I was in high school, I was the straightest of straight arrows. All my teachers adored me, and the football coach made me a team captain despite my limitations as a tight end and linebacker.

The only serious trouble I ever got into was a single fistfight. After school one day, I came across a kid who looked almost exactly like Barney Beal bullying a nerdy freshman, and I ordered him to knock it off. When the bully told me where I could shove my advice, I coldcocked him in the nose. Our fight was long and vicious, and by the time the phys ed coach pulled us apart, we both needed stitches.

Afterward, the vice principal had confronted me in her plush office, not so much with anger as with hurt and disbelief. It was as if I had broken her heart in some way. I was such a great kid, she said. Out of what dark place had this violence suddenly come?

“I don’t know,” I said, lying.

The truth was that rage was twisted into my genetic code. It was my father’s enduring birthright. Every day I fought to deny the existence of my simmering anger, to push it back inside my dark heart.

At the hospital, my mother looked at my fierce eyes and wounded jaw with horror, fearful that I had begun some lycanthropic transformation. Her greatest worry was that I was destined to become a bloodthirsty creature like her ex-husband. After the divorce, she did everything she could to keep me away from my dad. She’d moved us from the North Woods to the Portland suburbs. She discouraged me from talking to him on the phone. She even frowned on my own hunting and fishing pursuits, worried I was becoming increasingly like my old man.

My mother now spent her winters in Naples, Florida, and we spoke less and less. My choice of a dangerous profession had seemingly confirmed her worst fears, and I think she fully expected that some night the telephone would ring and it would be Colonel Harkavy, telling her that I had been shot in the head by a Down East poacher. It was better not to think of me in that case, to pretend her doomed son no longer existed, to protect herself from future grief.

*   *   *

I waited for Rivard in the frigid parking lot, literally blowing off steam. Every shimmer of breath was visible in the air for several seconds before being swept away on the breeze. If anything, the sky looked even more ominous than when we’d arrived, but perhaps it was just my miserable mood.

My sergeant didn’t speak until we were on the road again. “You could have backed me up in there.”

“Mandelbaum was right. You lied to him.”

“The guy’s living in a dream world. Beal is the one who robbed those cabins. Him and his buddies. Did you see his pupils? They were microscopic. The kid was high on Oxy or God knows what.”

“If you’re so sure he’s robbing cabins to buy drugs,” I said, “you should turn your evidence over to the sheriff’s office or the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency. It’s their job to investigate that shit, not ours.”

Rivard kept his eyes on the road, but he rolled his head around on his neck as if it were crimped. “I was trying to send that punk a message.”

“I think you failed, Marc.”

He turned his head, and once again I was confronted by my distorted reflection in his sunglasses. The anger I saw in my features stopped me cold. I felt like Henry Jekyll looking into the face of his other self.

“You’ve got a lot to learn,” Rivard said.

“So you keep telling me.”

He flicked on the windshield wipers.

I’d been so consumed with my grievances that I hadn’t noticed it was beginning to snow.

FEBRUARY 13

They sent us home early on account of the snow. Erick says there’s a big blizzard coming. The Storm of the Century, he says.

On the bus I kept thinking about the White Owl, wondering if she’d come to my window like she did the last time it snowed.

The bus came around the corner and I saw Randle’s new car in front of the house and I got a sick feeling in my stomach like I ate too much peanut brittle.

Ma’s van was there, too—but she don’t usually get home till after 2. That’s when her shift ends.

Randle’s always got some new car. This one’s a black Grand Am.

After the bus left, I wondered if Randle and Prester shot a coyote like they said they was going to. I wondered if they had it in the backseat.

All I did was look in the window!

Suddenly Randle came out the door, yelling F this and F that and telling me to get away from the car. His face was all weird and scary from his new tattoo.

He HIT me!

Right in the side of the head. I fell over and everything! My whole backpack spilled onto the ground. When I touched my head, there was BLOOD!

Ma came out screaming. Don’t touch him! Leave him alone!

She ain’t afraid of Randle. She gave him a shove, but he just pushed her into a snowbank. Then he called her the C word.

If you touch my son again, I’m gonna kill you! Ma said. I never seen her so mad.

F you, Jamie, Randle said. Come on, Prester.

Uncle P didn’t even try to help us up or anything. He just did what Randle told him to do, same as always.

Randle peeled rubber all the way up the road.

Ma helped me pick up my stuff. I’ll never let him hurt you again, Lucas, she told me.

I heard that one before.

She knew what I was thinking. I mean it this time, she said.

6

It scarcely seemed possible, but my day went downhill from there.

After Rivard dropped me at my trailer, I discovered that the baseboard heating had gone on the fritz. I checked the fuse box, but there were no spare fuses. That meant I would have to drive down to the hardware store in Machias before my pipes froze and burst. Either that or try heating the entire building with my propane stove.

I was lacing up my wet boots again when I remembered a dusty metal box under the kitchen sink. Inside were all sorts of orphan screws and random washers, along with a handful of new electrical fuses. I had to wait half an hour for the trailer to warm up again before I dared leave.

Out on the road, the visibility was already going to hell, and it wasn’t even midday.

I’d decided to visit a gun shop—people in these parts tended to run them as home businesses—to ask the owner about “George Magoon,” but I found the door padlocked and the barred windows dark. Instead, I drove over to Snake Lake to check ice-fishing licenses. As cold as it was, I expected a few fishermen to be sitting in the warmth of their brazier-heated shacks, enjoying hot coffee or more adult beverages. But all I found out on the ice was another ghost town. Everyone but me had the good sense to hunker down inside and wait out the storm.

On the drive home to Whitney, I passed a convoy of ancient school buses inching along in the snow. The local kids were being sent home for the day. I decided to take a hint and do the same. I finished the paperwork I owed the Warden Service and watched the snowflakes fall from the tepid comfort of my trailer.

When I ventured out again for dinner, I found my personal vehicle—a 2005 Jeep Wrangler—hiding under a new white blanket. The storm had been gathering force all afternoon, and now with darkness descending, snow was both falling from the sky and being blown upward from the thickening drifts. I had outfitted my Jeep with new snow tires, but even with the studs digging into the snowpack, I was reluctant to push my luck. Creeping along at twenty-five miles per hour made me feel like a daredevil.

After I crossed into Township Nineteen, it occurred to me that I should’ve brought a gift of some sort. I had always relied on Sarah to take care of my manners. At twenty-six, I still had no feel for even the most basic social graces.

Even going slowly, I almost drove past Doc’s farm. His mailbox, already knocked off-kilter by a plow, sprang up like a ghostly apparition out of the frozen mist. I pressed the brake and felt the Jeep shudder and fishtail before it slid safely to a halt. When I looked again, the mailbox had disappeared into the gathering night. Peering through the flurries, I detected a fuzzy yellow glow on the hillside above me. It was Doc’s porch light. I turned the wheel and headed up what I hoped was the driveway—the paved way was indistinguishable beneath the drifts—toward the beacon.

I didn’t hear the dogs until I opened the door. Their cries were carried along on the howling wind, so that they seemed part of the storm itself. Larrabee had mentioned that he was also inviting his musher friend, Kendrick, to dinner, but I never imagined that the man would drive his sled here on a crappy night like this. I squinted into the side yard, where a few snow-laden fir trees were huddled against the cold, but I saw neither dogs nor sled. There was something eerie about that disembodied baying in the night.

I rapped hard on Doc’s side door and waited, shivering, for my host to let me in. After an eternity, he appeared. “I thought we might need to send a Saint Bernard looking for you with a cask of brandy,” he said.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“The snow’s supposed to stop later, so you should have a safer drive home.”

“Not if it keeps blowing like this.”

I stepped into the mudroom and stamped my boots to clean off the clumped snow. Doc had so many coats hanging from the hooks, there was no place for mine. After a moment, he realized my distress and said, “Let me take your parka. You can put on those moccasins, if you don’t mind removing your wet boots.”

I had never seen Doc without a coat, so this was my first gander at his spectacular belly. He looked as if he had swallowed a watermelon whole and it had lodged somewhere between his upper and lower intestines.

I sat down on a hardwood bench and began untying my laces. “Those must be Kendrick’s dogs I heard.”

“A storm like this is nothing to Kendrick. I think he’s half polar bear.”

A gray-snouted mutt came waddling on bad hips down the length of the hallway. Its tail swung slowly back and forth, and it held my gaze with two rheumy eyes. “Who’s this?” I asked, scratching its chin.