the Poacher's Son (2010) (11 page)

"I was scared," said the old man. "I looked out my window and
all I see are soldiers. You didn't give me no chance to explain myself. I figured you was going to burn me out--like Waco. This is my property, and the Constitution says I have the Second Amendment."

"This isn't your property," said the sheriff. "This property belongs to Wendigo Timber. You're squatting here illegally."

His eyes blazed. "It's my home! They can't take it. I won't let them."

"So you agree with what Bowditch did--killing that man from Wendigo Timber? Maybe you helped him do it."

Bickford paused, mouth open. Then he wiped his runny nose and looked away. "I didn't do nothing. It was an accident. Just like I said."

"What's going to happen to him?" I asked Lieutenant Malcomb. The adrenaline had left me and I was crashing fast--I felt like the blood in my arms and legs was transmuting to lead.

"It's up to the attorney general, but I'd say he's facing a mess of charges--misdemeanor and felony--from obstruction of justice to accessory to homicide after the fact. Plus we're going to have a look in his freezer as soon as Hatch is done taking tire tracks, so that's not counting poaching violations."

I shivered. "It doesn't seem like he knows what he's saying. The guy's clearly brain injured."

"Don't be fooled," said the lieutenant. "He knows right from wrong. Anyway, that's not for us to decide."

"Does the major know which officer fired at the cabin?"

"One of the sheriff's men."

"That second shot nearly hit me."

He looked at me hard. "What you did, Mike--running up like that--was the stupidest thing I've seen in a long time. I'd be even more pissed except for the fact you probably saved that man's life."

I didn't feel particularly noble. I'd been trying to save my father, not Wallace Bickford. I looked up at the cabin, which was lit up
now from the inside as the state police evidence technicians searched it for signs of my father having been there. "I didn't exactly follow what the sheriff was saying about Bickford being a squatter."

"He built this cabin without permission a decade ago, but APP never made him move it."

"You mean they just let him squat here."

"Bickford used to work for APP. Letting him stay here was cheaper than a lawsuit. Whose fault do you think it was that a tree fell on that poor man's head?"

And now Wendigo Timber had bought the land from Atlantic Pulp & Paper, and like all the legal leaseholders, Wallace Bickford was facing eviction from his home. Was it possible that he killed Shipman and Brodeur for just that reason? And what did it say about my father that he sought out this brain-damaged man and basically stole his four-wheeler? It certainly didn't look good that he'd put Bickford at risk. On the other hand, I told myself, being desperate didn't necessarily make him a murderer. He did what he needed to do to escape.

"I'm going to see how they're doing with those tire tracks," said the lieutenant.

I started to follow him, but Malcomb held up his hand. "Sorry, Bowditch. It's a crime scene now and it's off limits for you. Why don't you take my truck back to the hatchery?"

There was a different mood at the command post. The faces were longer, the energy had drained out of most of the bodies, but still the search continued. In his plane Charley Stevens called in locations where he saw headlights, but this was August in the Maine woods and ATV riders were commonplace across the region. Unless the task force got lucky, there was no way to pick him out. It was only a matter of time until the search was suspended, at least for the night. I sat in the corner and ate a ham sandwich.

I wondered what kind of luck Kathy was having with our bear
trap. She'd probably just checked it for the first time or would be checking it soon. I considered calling her, but I didn't have the heart to face her questions.

"Hey, Bowditch." I looked up into a cherub face atop a deputy's paunchy body. He had a big bandage on his forehead and a cut on his lip. The name tag above his belly said
TWOMBLEY
. For some reason he was now handing me a cell phone. "It's your lieutenant."

I pressed the phone to my ear. "Sir?"

"I want you to go home, Bowditch. I spoke with Carter and there's nothing more for you to do here tonight. The sheriff said one of his men will give you a ride back to Skowhegan."

"I'd prefer to stay."

"If anything breaks, we'll get you back up here. But we're looking at a new timetable for this thing now. We'll talk again in the morning."

"Lieutenant--"

The cherubic deputy held out his hand for his phone. "Let's go," he said.

I followed Twombley to a patrol car and we got going. "I heard what happened, this morning," I said. "How are you holding up?"

"How the fuck do you think I'm holding up?"

I knew then that I was in for a long ride back to Skowhegan.

After what Twombley had been through, I was surprised the sheriff hadn't sent him home earlier--or at least to the hospital. I could only assume that he'd insisted on taking part in the manhunt in order to repair his damaged reputation. At the command post I'd heard more than one officer laughing about the embarrassing predicament my dad had left him in. He already had a new nickname: Treehugger.

I studied the deputy's battered profile. There was something familiar about it. "So why did you drive out to Rum Pond?" I asked.

"What?"

"The sheriff said you went out there on your own authority. What evidence did you have on my dad?"

He glanced over at me for the first time. "Go fuck yourself."

Outside the roadblock TV news vans were drawn up. I saw spotlights trained on reporters' incandescent faces. Cameras turned in our direction as we made our way through the gauntlet of stopped traffic. Reflexively I raised my hand to conceal my face.

What would I tell my mother? I'd scarcely thought of her at all. But Detective Soctomah would be calling her soon, and she was guaranteed to freak out, afraid my dad was going to drag her reputation through the mud. If they gunned him down tomorrow, her first concern would be that her friends would see her name in the newspapers. How could she bear her neighbors knowing that she'd once been poor white trash, married to such a violent man?

I leaned my head against the glass.

Some time later I was awakened by gunshots. I sat up with a start. Twombley was looking over at me, smirking. I'd been dreaming. We were cruising past the brightly lit shopping plazas outside of Skowhegan. That was when I remembered that pink face. Twombley was the deputy who had arrested my dad two years ago at the Dead River Inn, the one who made him kneel in broken glass. So they had a history together. He'd pegged my father as a likely murderer and decided to bring him in without proof.

I could imagine what had happened next. "So what did he do--taunt you from the backseat? Is that how you ran off the road?"

He kept his eyes on the road, as if he hadn't heard me.

I continued: "What happened next? You went around to drag him out of the car, and he knocked you down? How did he get your gun away from you?"

"Fuck you."

I noticed his holster was still empty, but now that I thought about it, I remembered seeing him at the standoff--that evil baby
face. He'd been carrying a shotgun. "I bet you're the one who fired, too. Back at Bickford's cabin."

His answer was another smirk.

"A little trigger happy, aren't you?"

We pulled into the parking lot of the Somerset County Jail. My truck shined green beneath the streetlights.

"Ride's over," he said.

I got out and started walking away.

He shouted at me through his window: "You better hope someone finds him before I do."

Afterward, driving home to Sennebec, I stopped to remove a dead porcupine from the middle of the road. I parked my truck so that the spotlight illuminated the animal, turned on my flashing blue lights, and got out. Using a pair of heavy gloves I kept in my truck for occasions like this one, I lifted the carcass carefully, avoiding the barbed quills and dripping blood. I set the porcupine in the bed of my truck to dispose of later in an old sandpit near my house--a place that had become, in the eight months since I'd finished my training period and been assigned to this district, a mass grave for porcupines, skunks, crows, gulls, woodchucks, raccoons, foxes, vultures, and deer.

Quills stuck in the heavy canvas and leather of my gloves, and the palms were black and sticky with blood. I sat behind the wheel of my truck a moment, the window rolled down, the engine silent, and found that when I removed the gloves, my hands were shaking uncontrollably. I thought about all the dead animals I saw in the course of a day: a dead porcupine lying in a darkened road, dead trout in a fisherman's creel, a dead deer lashed to the luggage rack of a late-model Chevrolet. Why had I chosen to spend so much time in the company of death?

Headlights approached from the opposite direction, coming fast
at first, then slowing almost to a crawl as they drew near. As the car passed me, I saw a man behind the wheel, a woman next to him, kids up late in the backseat. They all had their eyes focused on the red smear in the road. They wanted to know what had died there. They were curious, and they couldn't help themselves.

I couldn't fault them. It was human nature.

A
s a kid, I probably ate more deer meat than I did hamburger.

For the first part of my life, I lived with my mom and sometimes my dad in a series of house trailers and backwoods shacks in the hardscrabble farmland of western Maine. We moved a lot, every year or so. Sometimes more often than that. My father would get fired from a job at a sawmill or a well-drilling company, and then we would have to move again. We lived under power lines that hummed in the night and beside stinking landfills of old automobile tires. Each trailer seemed a little shabbier than the one we rented before. My mother used to say we were "downwardly mobile."

She was a reckless, dark-eyed beauty, the youngest of five kids, who'd grown up as the center of attention in her household and lived life without ever taking precautions against possible misfortune.

Six months after my dad got her pregnant, they were married in a big Catholic wedding down in Madison, where she insisted on wearing white. The wedding pictures only showed her from the chest up. She looked happy enough, though.

I don't know whether she ever loved him. God knows he didn't make it easy for her. My impression of my father during that time is of a fatalistic young guy, wounded in body and soul, who couldn't believe the good luck that had come his way in the form of this gorgeous girl, who knew from having been to war that good luck never
lasts, and so went about sort of preemptively destroying his luck before it could go bad on him.

Somehow their marriage lasted nine whole years. It survived a couple of miscarriages and lots of 2 a.m. visits by the police. By the end, which is when my memories are sharpest, they were fighting constantly. My mom knew she wanted a better life--she was educating herself, taking adult ed classes at the high school and reading constantly--and she was sick of being broke all the time. They argued about not having money to buy groceries or heating oil, about my dad's binge drinking, about how he disappeared for days without telling her where he was going or where he'd been.

He never struck her, no matter how much she screamed or spat or slapped at him, but this only seemed to make her all the madder. As it was, his face during those battles just about glowed red with rage. If he had come home drunk one night and cut our throats with a kitchen knife and set fire to the trailer and shot himself in the temple with his .22 pistol, it probably wouldn't have surprised any of our neighbors. Those sorts of domestic holocausts are regular enough occurrences in isolated north-country towns as to be almost predictable.

The forest was his escape. Whenever things got too hot at home, he disappeared into the woods with a rifle or a fly rod and we wouldn't see him again for days. Then he'd return with a skipper buck he'd shot for the freezer or a knapsack full of trout. Peace offerings.

My dad said he was a poacher out of necessity; he took game whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself because he was too proud to accept food stamps. That's what he said, anyway.

During the legal deer season in November he would spend days following the hoofprints of a big buck along oak ridges and down into dark valleys where icy creeks ran fast through thickets of cedar and tamarack. He never fired until he had the best possible shot on
the biggest buck he was likely to see that year. Then he would spend hours dragging his gutted, 200-pound trophy out of the forest.

I can't remember a single Thanksgiving when we didn't have a dead buck hanging in the trees outside our trailer, within view of the road. My dad said he hung the carcass outside to age the deer meat and give it a rich, gamey taste. But I knew he did it to prove to the men who lived in the neighboring houses--the same rough-and-tumble crowd he worked with at the sawmill and drank with at the Red Stallion in Carrabassett--that he was a better hunter than they were and, therefore, to his way of thinking, and mine, more of a man. A dead deer in a tree was just the way he chose to advertise himself.