the Poacher's Son (2010) (3 page)

"Mike says you work at a sporting lodge," she said.

"I do some guiding over to Rum Pond. I don't suppose you like to fish."

"We're headed over to Rangeley tonight," I said.

"Yeah?" He looked over my head into the crowd.

"We're going to start at the Kennebago and then fish the Magalloway."

"Sounds good," he said absently.

Sarah and I turned around in our seats to see what he was looking at. At the bar a stumpy man with a shaved head and a bushy black goatee was staring at us. He wore a camouflage T-shirt stretched tight across his thick chest. There was a strange smile--almost a smirk--on his face. He raised a glass of beer in our direction.

My father pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. "I'll be right back."

We watched him shoulder his way through a group of tie-dyed Appalachian Trail hikers waiting to be served beer. He stepped right up to the man with the shaved head and put a hand on his shoulder and said something. The man's smile vanished. After half a minute or so with my father in his face, he put down his glass and left the room.

"Who's your dad talking to?" asked Sarah.

"I have no idea."

"Your dad looks a little like Paul Newman--if he hadn't had a bath in a while. He's got that beautiful wild man quality. I bet there are a lot of women who want to tame him."

I didn't know how to respond to her. I liked to think I had no illusions about my father, but it always annoyed me whenever anyone else criticized him. He could be crude and petty, but I also believed that he was a better man than anyone gave him credit for being. I knew he'd been badly scarred by the war, and so I made allowances for his drinking and his silences, consoling myself with the knowledge that I alone understood him.

My father returned with our drinks. He'd brought me a whiskey despite what I'd said.

"Who's that guy you were talking to?" I asked. "The one with the shaved head?"

"Nobody." He downed half his whiskey in a gulp. "Just a paranoid militia freak. So, you got a job lined up or what?"

For the past few weeks, ever since I knew we were coming here, I'd imagined him asking that question and I'd imagined myself answering it. I put my beer bottle down and took a deep breath. "I'm applying to the Maine Warden Service."

He looked me full in the face, his eyes glassy from the liquor. "You're fucking kidding."

"No," I said. "I'm not."

He threw back his head and gave a loud laugh. "They're not going to take
you
."

"Why not?"

"You're too smart. Why do you want to waste your education on those pricks?"

Sarah said, "He'll probably apply to law school after a few years."

I stared at her, but she avoided my eyes. Sarah still hadn't come to terms with the financial ramifications of my decision. Her dad, back in Connecticut, had lost a fortune when the dotcom bubble burst. One of her great fears in life was remaining poor while all our college friends became successful doctors, lawyers, and bankers.

"Law school," my father said. "Now there's an idea. We need a lawyer in this fucked-up family." He reached in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He offered one to Sarah, but she waved her hand at it as if it were a hornet.

"You can't smoke in here," I said, but he ignored me.

"What about you, honey, you taking a vow of poverty, too?"

She stiffened in her chair. It hadn't taken my dad long to find her tender spot. "I'm getting a master's in education at the University of Maine while I teach at a private school."

"A teacher." He lit the cigarette with a shiny Zippo lighter like the one he brought back from Vietnam. "Wish I had one as pretty as you when I was a kid."

Sarah excused herself to use the bathroom. We both watched her walk away. When he turned back to me, he was grinning again and shaking his head. "A game warden, huh?"

"That's right."

"Well, it's your life, I guess." He finished his beer. "What's your mom say about this?"

"I haven't told her yet."

"You're afraid she'll be pissed. I'm glad I didn't pay for your
college, is all I can say. So how's my buddy Neil?" He said my stepfather's name like it was a ridiculous word. My parents had been divorced for more than a decade, but somehow my father, who'd probably gone through dozens of women himself in the interval, was still jealous.

"The same, I guess."

"So that Sarah is a good-looking girl. How serious are you two?"

"Pretty serious."

"Do you love her?"

"Yeah," I said. "I think I do."

"You
think
you do? That's a pussy answer. What I'm asking is, would you die for her?"

Now it was my turn to be dumbfounded. "What kind of question is that?"

"It's the
only
question."

I would have asked him what the hell he meant, but across the crowded bar I saw Sarah waiting to use the ladies' room. Three guys in leather jackets and denim were standing around, but she was ignoring them.

My father turned to see what I was looking at. "You better go over there."

"She can take care of herself."

"So you're just going to let them talk to her like that?"

"Like what?"

He leaned back in his chair, appraising me. In his mind there could be only one reason for not going over there: He thought I was afraid.

I downed the whiskey, feeling the liquor scald the back of my throat. Slowly I rose to my feet.

I felt him watching me as I crossed the room.

Sarah was next in line for the bathroom. The three bikers had closed partially around her, and now she was speaking with them.
Two were huge, fat in the gut, with arms as thick around as my calves. But it was the smallest one, half a foot shorter than me, who saw me coming. He had a blond beard and a red bandanna knotted around his head and he was wearing sunglasses despite the hour and darkness of the room. I knew it was the short ones who always have something to prove.

"You all right?" I asked Sarah.

"I'm fine," she said.

"Doesn't look that way."

Her eyes blazed at me. "Sit down, Mike. I'll be right there."

I couldn't believe she was pissed off at me for trying to rescue her, but she was.

"Yeah,
Mike
," said the short one, tilting his head up at me. "Go have a seat."

I saw my face distorted in the dark mirrors of his sunglasses. The jukebox was blasting Guns N' Roses's "Sweet Child O' Mine." I felt the thudding bass line shake the wood floor beneath my feet.

"OK, guys, that's enough," said Sarah. But they weren't listening to her anymore.

"Let's go, Sarah." I reached out to take her arm, but the short one knocked it aside.

"Don't touch her," he said.

"Fuck you," I said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the big bikers swing a beer bottle up fast and felt it break against the side of my skull. My knees buckled and the next thing I knew I was down on the floor, being kicked in the face. I remember the iron taste of blood and the smell of spilled beer and the distinct sound of Sarah screaming.

Then the music died, the lights came on, and I was flat on the floor, looking up into a kaleidoscope. My vision was blurred as if I had Vaseline in my eyes.

Above me loomed my father. He had an arm wrapped around the short biker's neck and was pressing the edge of a hunting knife
against his throat. A crowd of faces, a wall of bodies circled us. The short man knew better than to fight. He let his body go limp. My father tightened his grip.

I tried to rise, but the muscles had dissolved in my arms and legs.

"Put it down, Jack!" It was the bartender, a lean, silver-haired woman with a deeply tanned face. She had a pump shotgun trained on my dad's chest.

I saw his eyes flick sideways, taking it in.

The bartender racked a shell into the chamber. "I said, 'Drop it!' "

With one motion my father shoved the biker away and dropped the knife. The man fell to his knees beside me, gasping for breath, one hand clamped to his bleeding throat.

"They attacked my kid, Sally," said my father.

"Tell it to the cops."

Five minutes later a sheriff's deputy arrived with his gun drawn. The deputy, a soft-looking guy with a face that made him look like an evil baby, made my father kneel on the broken glass. He twisted his arms behind him while he put on the handcuffs. But my father just grinned. He was having the time of his life.

More police arrived--a state trooper and an old game warden pilot I knew named Charley Stevens. They arrested my father and the three bikers on assault charges. Everyone wanted me to go in an ambulance to the hospital in Farmington, but I refused. The result was a scar on my forehead, right at the hairline, that I'd almost forgotten about until the Warden Service gave me a crew cut.

"He was just trying to help me," I told Charley Stevens.

"That may be," said the old game warden. "But he could have killed that man."

"I'll bail you out," I told my father.

He shook his head. "I'll be out before morning. It's a bullshit charge and they know it."

They led him away in handcuffs, and the next day when we went
to the county jail in Skowhegan, we learned the charges had indeed been dropped against him, just as he'd predicted. I tried to phone him afterward at Rum Pond to say thanks, but he never did return my calls.

Until now. I didn't know why my father had called me, but if he was coming back into my life after two silent years, trouble was sure to be close behind.

A
few hours later I awoke to the cackling of crows. At dawn, a gang of them took over the pines around my house, and their harsh quarreling voices roused me from sleep.

The house I was renting bordered a tidal creek that flowed through a field of green spartina grass down to the Segocket River. As the tide went out, the creek would shrink to a bed of sour-smelling mud, and great clouds of mosquitoes would rise off the salt pannes. But at high tide I could slide my canoe down into the stream and follow the water all the way to the sea.

The house was a single-story ranch that Sarah and I managed to rent cheap on account of its ramshackle condition. A lobsterman had built the place without a blueprint, making improvements and repairs as necessity dictated and his bank account allowed. When he gave us the keys, he also gave us a hammer and a roll of duct tape, saying, "Expect you'll need these from time to time."

He was right. Each rainstorm seemed to reveal a new leak in the roof. Sarah had hated the place from the start, but she refused to stoop to renting a mobile home, and on my piss-poor salary and her school stipend, it was the best we could do. Still, I always liked the old place. From the window above the kitchen sink I could watch herons and egrets hunting in the tidal creek, and at first light there was always the good smell of the sea, miles downstream.

This morning, though, I didn't hang around to enjoy the quiet. I
took a quick shower, put on a clean uniform, and made a call to my supervisor, Sergeant Kathy Frost, at her home.

Kathy was an eighteen-year veteran of the Maine Warden Service and one of the first women in the agency's history, back before affirmative action opened things up. She'd had to pass the same physical fitness test as a man to get in--bench press, sit-ups, pushups, running, and swimming. Now, in addition to being one of three sergeants supervising wardens in Division B, she oversaw the K-9 unit and was odds-on favorite to replace Lieutenant Malcomb when he retired.

This morning she sounded like she was coming down with a cold, her husky voice even huskier than usual. "I don't know if you've seen the news, but a cop got killed last night."

I felt as if I'd been punched in the gut. "Who?"

"A Somerset County deputy named Bill Brodeur."

"Oh, shit."

"You knew him?"

"We were at the academy together. What happened?"

"It was a double homicide--Brodeur and a guy from Wendigo Timber. They were shot up in Dead River Plantation."

"Dead River?" I closed my eyes and saw my father's bearded face, like the afterimage of a bright light, flash across the inside of my eyelids. When I opened them, the room seemed out of focus. "Did they get the shooter?"

"Not yet."

"So does CID have any suspects?"

"Only two hundred or so pissed-off lease holders. You know the big controversy they've got going up there? How Wendigo bought up all that timberland and is planning to kick out the camp owners? Well, there was some sort of public meeting last night, and I guess it got pretty hot. Brodeur was there as a bodyguard to this guy Shipman from Wendigo, driving him over to Sugarloaf for the night, and someone opened fire on their cruiser."

"Was Brodeur married?"

"No, but the Wendigo guy had a wife and two little boys."

It had been years since a cop was murdered in Maine. Even so, it was something you always carried with you. The possibility of it, I mean. I glanced at the answering machine. The little red light wasn't blinking anymore; my father's voice was gone, erased. What had he wanted to tell me last night?