Paul Doiron: The Poacher's Son

I went in headfirst, upside down and unable to right myself without the use of my arms. I scissored my legs and twisted. I felt thrashing movements around me. Bodies in the water. My foot kicked something hard. For a split second, my head broke the surface, but I couldn’t stay afloat, and I slipped back under the chop. Water rushed up my nose and into my lungs. Water burned my sinuses like acid inhaled.

Then my feet touched bottom. It was the gravel floor of the lake. I pushed off with both feet. Again my head broke the surface and again I slid back. But this time I didn’t slide completely under. The water was shallower. I felt rocks under me. I could stand.

Behind me I heard splashing. I didn’t pause to look. I struggled into the shallows. The water felt like quicksand holding me back, pulling me down. My legs had no bones in them. All I could think about was making it to the trees.

And I almost did.

My father tackled me at the water’s edge. He lunged forward out of the shallows and got me around the knees and I went down, chest first, onto the rocks. My breath exploded out of me. I rolled onto my side. He was on his knees in the water, pawing at my legs. I drove my boot into his face. He’d lost his hat and his rifle, but the.44, I could see, was still somehow tucked in his belt. He spit blood into the lake and rose up onto his feet. He stood over me, red-faced, hair plastered in a weird way across his forehead, looking like someone I had never seen before. A complete stranger.

Suddenly the Ruger was in his hand.

I waited for it. There was nothing else I could do.

Then the surf washed a canoe paddle past his legs. He must have seen the movement out of the corner of his eye because he paused and looked over his shoulder. Brenda was nowhere in sight. The canoe had drifted against the shore. It looked almost jaunty as it bounced along on the waves.

“Brenda?” he called.

There was no answer. Rain was coming down in sheets.

“Brenda?”

And, just like that, he forgot me. Calling her name, he waded back into the depths, trying to find her. He pushed at the water as if it were sand he could clear away with his hands, but it just flooded back. He dove beneath the surface and vanished for the longest time.

I remained seated on the cold stones. My heart was galloping in my chest. It didn’t occur to me to run. I wanted to see him come up with her. In spite of everything, it was what I wanted.

Finally he broke the surface.

He had her in his arms, but her head was back and her mouth was open and she wasn’t moving.

I watched him carry her out of the lake and lay her down on the hard stones. He knelt over her, with his back to me.

There was a deep red gash on her forehead above her eye. Her skin looked bleached. Her black hair spread beneath her head like a dark tangle.

He started kissing her open mouth, trying to make her breathe. Then he began pounding on her chest. I had never seen him frantic before. I had seen him angry and happy, drunk and sober, but never, visibly, afraid. Her body jerked, and her head lolled toward me, but I knew it was just the force of his hands making her move. His strength pushed water out of her lungs and up her throat, but she wouldn’t breathe. She hadn’t been underwater for more than a few minutes, but she was dead.

I leaned my back against a boulder and used the leverage to get to my feet. Wind-driven rain smacked the surface of the lake. If he was crying, I couldn’t hear him, but his shoulders were shaking.

He had come back for her. He could have stayed in Canada and might even have eluded the police there, traveling north and west, becoming in time one of those nameless men you see pumping gas in small towns or working behind the counter of roadside convenience stores, anonymous men living always one step ahead of their past. But instead he had risked capture and death to come back for her-this unbalanced, alcoholic girl who had already betrayed him at least once.

“Dad?”

He gave no indication of hearing me. Motionless as he was, he could have been another of the glacial boulders scattered along the lakeshore. When he finally arose, he never gave me a glance, just staggered off into the forest, clutching the Ruger to his chest. He crashed through the undergrowth like a wild animal and was gone, leaving me with nothing but questions.

Would the police run him to ground before he reached the Canadian border? Or, like the escaped German POW he’d told me about, would he disappear without a trace into the Maine woods, never to be seen again?

My answer arrived in the form of a single gunshot that came booming through the trees. I’d always thought of my father as the ultimate survivor. But in that, too, I was mistaken.

I cut myself loose with my jackknife.

I had a hard time pulling it from my pants pocket, but eventually I was able to get my numb fingers to grip the handle and slide it out. I dropped the knife a few times before I was finally able to saw through the cords that bound my wrist. As the circulation returned to my forearms and hands I felt first a tingling and then a dull throbbing ache.

Leaving the bodies for the police, I picked up the paddle that had washed onto the shore and then waded out to where the canoe had come to rest amid the branches of a half-sunk birch tree. I pulled the canoe onto the gravel and flipped it over to get the water out of the bottom. Then I dragged it back into the shallows and climbed in.

The wind had subsided and the rain seemed to be lightening-at least the sky was no longer so dark.

I paddled out to the Super Cub.

The pontoons of the wrecked plane jutted above the surface of the lake. Even with the breeze blowing, a diesel smell hung in the air, and floating streamers of iridescent oil showed the currents that usually moved unseen through the lake.

Up close I could see that the plane was balanced on several submerged boulders. I counted three bullet holes just in the fuselage. Peering into the water I could make out the pilot’s door hanging open, but I couldn’t see into the cockpit.

I set the paddle down in the canoe and prepared myself to dive over the side. But dread of what I would find in the cockpit froze me in place. Rain fell into my eyes, blurring my vision. I tried to wipe them clear, but it was no use. I took a deep breath and watched a seat cushion float past the bow.

That was when I noticed the little island. It was just a clump of boulders, really, that rose up from a sandbar maybe fifty yards away-between the wreckage and the opposite shore. I hadn’t noticed it before.

Something green seemed to be wedged between two of the rocks.

I lifted the paddle again and began to chop at the water. In less than a minute I had drawn close enough to the boulders to see that the shape was a man wearing a green shirt. He didn’t appear to be moving.

“Charley?”

The canoe glided closer as if pulled by a magnet. I saw the back of his head, one suntanned arm thrown over a boulder, hanging on.

“Charley?”

The wet head turned. A swollen eye opened.

“There you are,” he said, as if he had been expecting me.

He looked like hell. He had been shot in the left arm and leg. The wound to his arm was just a bloody groove where the bullet had grazed the triceps. The leg wound was something worse. The bullet had burrowed like a worm into the meat of his thigh. It had missed the femoral artery, but even so, he was losing blood at an alarming rate. The skin of his face, beneath the red-and-violet bruises, was drained of color. His pulse was weak, his breath fluttery.

“I thought you were dead.”

I’d pulled him up onto the rocks and was now trying to stanch the flow from his leg by applying pressure with both hands. Dark-looking blood leaked between my fingers.