The Poacher's Son Read online

  I cracked open the beer and toasted Bud Thompson and Mike Bowditch-two womenless men dousing our loneliness with alcohol. Except that unlike Thompson, I had chosen to be alone. An empty house was what I’d wanted all along, even if it had taken Sarah years to realize it.

  She’d hung in there with me from Colby College, where we’d met, through the Maine Criminal Justice Academy and the Advanced Warden Academy and my long weeks of field training. She’d toughed it out, thinking it was a phase I was going through, that eventually I’d go to law school like we’d talked about and become a prosecutor and maybe someday a judge. But it wasn’t a phase, and it was only after I had gotten posted in coastal Knox County that she realized that being a game warden was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week way of life, and for reasons neither of us fully understood, I’d chosen it over her.

  So she left.

  And I missed her-and counted the days since she’d gone away. But I was relieved, too. Relieved that I no longer had to justify my emotions to anyone else. I could spend the night alone in the woods searching for a dead pig and be content in a way that made absolutely no sense to anyone who wasn’t a game warden. With Sarah gone, I could love this solitary and morbid profession without excuses and not have to look too deeply into the dark of myself.

  That was when I noticed a small blinking light across the room.

  It hadn’t occurred to me to check my answering machine. I’d been gone only an hour and a half, and most everyone I knew had my pager number if they needed to get a hold of me. My first thought was that it had something to do with the bear. Maybe someone else had seen it outside their house, or maybe it had gotten into another pigpen.

  When I pushed play there was the raspy sound of breathing on the other end for a while before a man finally spoke: “Mike? Hello? Pick up if you’re there.” There was a long pause. Then, in the background, came a woman’s voice: “Is he there?” The man said: “No, goddamn it! He’s not home!” Followed by a disconnect.

  I didn’t recognize the woman, but the other voice was deep and monotone, just like mine, and hearing it again after two years was enough to start my pulse racing. Why was my father calling after all this time? What could he possibly want from me now?

  I stood still in the dark while the tape rewound.

  2

  My father made his living in the Maine North Woods. In the cold-weather months he cut birches and maples for logging companies, snapped the boughs off fir trees to make Christmas wreaths, and ran a trap line for beaver, muskrat, and mink. In the spring and summer he did some guiding for a hunting and fishing camp up at Rum Pond near the Canadian border. All told, I doubted he earned more than twenty grand a year-not counting whatever he brought in poaching. But it was the life he’d chosen for himself and, ultimately, none of my business.

  He’d grown up in the remote logging town of Flagstaff, the son of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and his Quebec-born wife, and from what I heard he was a gifted student and promising athlete. Vietnam changed all that. After boot camp, he joined the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and did two tours in the jungle with a long-range recon patrol unit. Then an NVA grenade sent him home with shrapnel scars across his back and shoulders. In Maine, the Purple Heart qualified him as a hero, but people in Flagstaff said they no longer recognized him as the same sweet and shy Jack Bowditch he’d once been.

  After the war he held down jobs at paper mills and trucking companies, never for very long, but long enough to convince my mother he had prospects he never really had. She left him after nine on-and-off years of marriage, moved south with me in tow, and got remarried to a better man than my father could ever be.

  What her leaving did to him, I can only guess. For years he’d functioned more or less as part of society, but after my grandparents died and my mom left, his drinking got worse and his impatience with the failings of other human beings hardened into something like contempt. Now he tended to live as far from people as possible, wherever the trees were thick.

  The last time I saw him, I got my face smashed in a backwoods bar fight.

  It was the summer after Colby. My dad didn’t show up for graduation, which was just as well, because I knew there’d be an argument if my stepfather was around, and I didn’t want them making a scene. But a few weeks later Sarah and I decided to drive to Rangeley to do some fly-fishing. She’d always wanted to meet my dad, and since he was living at Rum Pond, which was more or less on the way, I couldn’t think of a way to squirm out of it. So I gave him a call, and we arranged to get together for beers at a place called the Dead River Inn near Flagstaff.

  It turned out to be a northwoodsy sort of tavern-cedar logs, deer heads-attached to an old hotel. It wasn’t as seedy as most of my father’s watering holes, but it was a Saturday night, there were a dozen motorcycles outside, and the stares that followed Sarah through the door made me think of broken bottles and bloody fists.

  My father sat at the end of the bar with a shot of whiskey and a long-necked beer in front of him. He wore a flannel shirt and Carhartt work pants, and his boots were caked with mud. His thickly muscled body-a solid fifty pounds heavier than my own-seemed too big for the stool on which he was balanced. As always, his hair and beard were wild as if they never knew a comb. But every woman I knew seemed to find him dashingly handsome.

  “Dad,” I said. “This is Sarah Harris.”

  The way he looked her up and down, it was as if he were trying to breathe her in. Not that I could blame him. Sarah was wearing a sleeveless top and hiking shorts that showed off her tanned legs. Her short blond hair was swept back behind her ears, and her heartshaped face was shining from days in the sun.

  “Mike’s told me a lot about you,” she lied.

  “Don’t believe a word of it,” he said, taking her small hand in his rough paws.

  We found a seat at a round oak table in a dark corner of the bar. There was a little oil lamp in the center with a dancing flame that gave all our faces a golden cast. My father ordered us beers and another shot of Jim Beam for himself.

  “You want one?” he asked.

  “I’m driving.”

  He snorted. He didn’t think it was much of an excuse.

  Sarah glanced back and forth between us with a big smile. “I see where Mike gets his blue eyes.”

  “I guess the kid turned out OK,” he said with a wink. “But he didn’t get all his old man’s best parts.”

  “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 c
rude 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.

  3

  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.