I looked at the place through my binoculars. The exterior told me nothing. Just a cabin by a small lake in the middle of nowhere. "I see what you mean. What's up behind there?"
"Woods," she said, looking at me like I was an idiot.
"I can see that. But if you went back far enough, you'd have to hit a road or something eventually. No?"
"I guess you would," she said thoughtfully. "Do you think you could come in from the back?"
"It's an idea."
"It might be a long walk. Okay, turn around, go on back the way we came."
* * *
The road we took was unpaved, and it seemed almost like a tunnel of pale greens and quick patches of yellow. Tall fir, spruce, and hemlock filtered out most of the sunlight. When we first turned onto the road we passed a sign warning us that the next twenty-eight miles were seasonal and unmaintained, and I slowed the Subaru down to keep it from rattling apart. There were no power lines or phone lines, either, no houses, no other cars. In one spot a small creek covered the road with a couple of inches of ginger alecolored water. We were nine miles in from the sign when she had me stop.
"Find a place to pull over," she said. "You'll need to get right off the road because logging trucks come through here sometimes, and they don't go slow. How about over there, past those oak trees? Did you bring some bug dope with you?"
"I got OFF. That okay? It's behind the seat."
"That's good for this time of year," she said. "The spring is another story, though. How about a compass?"
"Nope."
"Didn't think so. Native Americans such as myself, we don't need no stinking compass. City boy like you, you should probably pick one up." I was trying to figure out if she was yanking my chain when she started laughing. "Come on, Coyote," she said, shaking her head. "Bring your glasses and bug dope."
* * *
My first trip through that place was hell. In an old-growth forest, the trees are huge, ancient, and therefore very tall. They shut out most of the light, which means nothing much grows on the forest floor unless one of the giants goes down. When that happens there is a riot of competition among various plant forms until one of them wins and fills up the hole in the canopy overhead, at which time the rest of the undergrowth dies off again. Mrs. Johnson told me all that while I did my best to follow her through the second-growth forest, which was choked with a tangle of fucking puckerbushes that all seemed to have it in for me personally, doing their best to scratch my face or arms or trip me and knock me on my ass. The bushes liked her better than me, they must have, because she didn't have the same problems with them, even though she was broader of beam than I was. She just moved resolutely forward in her calm unhurried fashion while I tried to keep up. "You should have brought boots," she said after I stepped in a wet spot and filled my sneakers with mud.
Once we got through the first half mile or so, we got past the marshy section, and the going got marginally easier. She stopped to point out different things: piles of furry brown marbles she said were deer shit, scratch marks on a tree she said were made by a black bear, and a bird she identified as an eastern towhee, but I missed it. By that time, I don't think I would have cared if the entire population of
Sibley
had been sitting in the same tree wearing ID tags. I just wanted a beer, and a nice bug-free tavern to drink it in. I promised myself never to come here in the springtime.
After what seemed to be untold hours of struggle, we finally made it through the slough of despond and up over the steep ridge of fucking aggravation and we were sitting halfway down a wooded hillside, looking through binoculars at that same cabin by the lake. We were probably five hundred yards away from the place. The long driveway I'd seen from the road that morning dead-ended at the cabin, and below us, at the foot of the ridge behind the cabin, there was a rusting U-Haul truck, sunk to its axles into the ground. I watched the cabin through the glasses, but there was no sign of life.
"What's with the truck," I asked her.
She shrugged. "The story I heard was that somebody stole it years and years ago and left it right there. Are you going down there?"
"No. Not right now. Those two guys might live in Brooklyn, okay, but they won't be all that easy to sneak up on. I'm gonna have to think about how to do this, and then come back."
"All right," she said.
* * *
The trip back to the Subaru wasn't as bad, I guess because I'd been through it all once already and I wasn't slogging into the unknown. I don't know why that makes it easier, but it does. It was still a relief, though, when we got back to the Subaru.
"Do you think you can find this place again? Here, where we parked?"
"Yeah. Little over nine miles in on this road, just past this stand of oaks."
She smiled her crooked smile. "Not bad, Coyote. Have you ever used a compass before?"
"No."
"Okay, here's what you do. This is your direction, right here." She drew a line in the dirt with her foot, glanced up at the sun. "East-northeast, more or less. That's the line between here and that cabin back there. Okay? So you stand here, you line up your compass so the needle points at north on the scale, and that will tell you exactly what direction this really is."
"Okay. Stand like this, find north, then follow that direction. Right?"
"Almost right. What you do, you go one or two degrees to the south of this line, okay, that way, when you hit that ridge we were on, you know you have to go left a little ways."
"Oh. Very smart."
"You do the same thing coming back. Go one or two degrees one way or the other, so when you hit this road you'll know which direction you need to turn. Otherwise what happens, you might get close to where you want to go but you won't be able to see it, and then when you wander around looking for it, you get lost. Getting lost in the woods up in here could be fatal."
"Ouch. Okay."
"Suppose you do get lost. Try to follow the water. That little swamp we went through turns into a creek, that's the creek that's washing out the road back there. Do you remember when we drove through that?"
"Yeah, I remember."
"Even if you don't find this road, keep following the water and eventually you'll come to a road or a river or something."
"Okay."
"Do I need to worry about you, Coyote? If something happened to you in here, it might bother me a little bit."
I took my soggy sneakers and socks off and threw them into the back of the Subaru. "I'll be fine," I told her.
* * *
It was late afternoon by the time I got back to Calais. I stopped at a sporting goods place and picked up a compass, some dry socks, and a pair of waterproof hiking boots. I was starting to look at that kind of stuff with a different eye. Before that I'd always looked at a sporting goods store as the kind of place you bought a jersey with John Starks's name on it, but I didn't see anything like that in this place. This was the kind of place that sold you stuff you needed to do things, not to go watch someone else do them. I wandered around in there for a while, trying to think if there was anything else I would need. I already had a hunting knife. I looked at the pistols for a while, but I settled for a vest instead. It was a mesh kind of thing, I guess it was intended for fishermen, and it had a lot of pockets. I thought long and hard about a pistol, though. There are a couple of problems with pistols. One is that they tend to make you overconfidentit's easy to forget that the thing is just a gun, it's not a magic wand that will get you out of trouble if you wave it around. Another is that having a pistol greatly magnifies the chances you'll get shot yourself. I didn't know that I really wanted to shoot anybody, and I sure as shit didn't want anybody shooting me.
There was a young guy working in the place, he looked like Maine's version of a juvenile hard-ass. He wore his hair greased back, he had a few chin whiskers trying to pass for a goatee, and he wore a Leatherman knife clamped to his belt. I palmed him a ten, asked him if he knew where I could buy a few M-80s.
"Whatcha need them for?" he wanted to know.
"I might need them for a distraction, that's all. Nothing to get anybody in trouble."
"Awright," he said, and he gave me a guy's name and directions to his house. He glanced at his watch, a big black one with a lot of buttons on it. "He won't be home from work for another hour or so. His brother ain't working, though, see if he'll give 'em to you. His brother's name is Vince."
* * *
It took me an hour to find the place, and then Vince spent the next ten minutes professing not to know what the hell I was talking about. I finally had to wave a fifty in the guy's face. Fifty bucks for a couple of firecrackers, Vince must have thought I was the biggest dope in the state. At the very least, he thought he had a fish on the line, because he tried to sell me all the other ordnance he had. Again I was tempted to go for something more serious, but in the end I thanked him for his kindness, took my M-80s and left.
I followed the directions in reverse to find my way from Vince's brother's house back to Calais. There was probably a quicker way to get where I was going, but it was getting dark and I couldn't find anything on the map. I didn't want to get lost.
Maine surprised me againthey didn't have a Star-bucks in Calais. I could understand it, though, once I thought about it for a few minutes. You will find precious few down easters willing to pay four bucks for a cup of coffee, no matter what kind of fancy shit you put in it. Sixty cents at McDonald's, bro, and that's probably pushing it. And the stuff in the pot at five-thirty in the afternoon, you gotta know it's been sitting there getting meaner and more vile since about two. It didn't matter, I bought a couple cups anyway. I figured I was going to need the boost. Normally, I might have looked around for something a little more serious, not to mention easier on the stomach, but I had wasted enough time on the M-80s already.
I had tried calling Louis on my cell phone a couple of times while I was driving around, but I kept losing the signal. I tried again in the McDonald's parking lot, but the line was busy. I gave it five minutes and tried again, got the same result. They won't worry too much, that's what I told myself. They know me by now, and they love Nicky. I was sure they wouldn't mind putting him to bed. I told myself I would call again when I got to Grand Lake Stream.
I was better prepared this time. I drove back in, watching the odometer. It wasn't hard to find the place where I'd parked the Subaru just hours earlier. I had my new boots on, and I had the vest. The M-80s and the electrical tape went in one pocket, the knife went in another, flashlight in a third, and so on. I checked the little window on my cell phone, but there was no signal. I turned the phone off and put it in a pocket. I found the mark Mrs. Johnson had made on the ground and took my sighting. East-northeast, she'd been right on the money. I coated my bucket hat with bug spray, put it on, and started out.
Even now I'd have a difficult time guessing at the distance. It had taken something like three hours to get in that morning, and the same to get back out, and that was with Mrs. Johnson leading the wayI hadn't had to stop every five minutes and look at a compass.
Guilt is funny stuff. I hadn't had a lot of experience with it before then. I mean, I'd been guilty of a lot, I admit that, but I'd never felt it much. Justice is generally what you want for the other guy. You don't want to pay the price for what you do, nobody does. When a cop pulls you over for speeding, you don't want the ticket, you want to skate. Right? It's all right for the other guy to go to jail, but they ought to let you go, send you on your way properly chastened, smarter, maybe, or at least more careful, if not more honest. The thing was, I had to admit that Rosario's ass was in a sling because of me. I could have done things different, and in retrospect, maybe I should have. Maybe I should have left Rosey's half of the money in that storeroom. I had been pissed off because he was going to try to swindle me, but how could I hold that against him? The guy was only human. I kept seeing him at that table at the VFW, looking like he was praying, and I knew I had to do something. I mean, I could have justified it, I could have talked myself out of this stupid expedition, but I didn't want to have to go around feeling lousy about whatever was gonna happen to Rosario.
And it's funny, too, because Rosey was one of those guys that have horrible problems with guilt. He came up Catholic, and when he got drunk or fucked up he would cry, and all of his pains and regrets would come flooding out of him. Me, I grew up in the machine, and I didn't have any illusions about some cosmic system of retribution that would somehow make everything come out even.
It got gradually darker as the sun sank lower in the sky, and when it hit the horizon it seemed to pick up speed, it was almost as though you could see it move, getting smaller and smaller as it dropped past the far edge of the world. Burglars do a lot of their work after the sun goes down, but the woods look a lot different in the dark. I stopped every little while to look at the compass again, and I had to slog straight through some of the obstacles that Mrs. Johnson had led me around earlier in the day. I started to worry about the flashlight, too. It was possible, if you thought about it, that my life depended on the thing. Say the batteries crap out, or the element in the bulb goes, I'm out here in the dark, and I'm fucked, with a capital fuck. That thought made me a lot more careful not to drop the light, and I only turned it on when I had to, when I needed it to see my way around something or to look at the compass. And then, you know, the woods have animals and shit, not just birds, either. Presumably the bears that made the marks Mrs. Johnson showed me were still around someplace, and they could probably hear me stomping around out there. I know that black bears are not as big as horses, okay, but I sure as hell did not want to make the acquaintance of one. I guess I hadn't needed the coffee to rev me up, after all.
