Richard Burgin - The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

“Think those tools are sterile?” he asked.

“That’s what they tell me,” I said.

“You can’t sterilize the inside. Those tools remember where they’ve been. Saving a life one day, killing someone the next,” he said. “Those tools are playing a little game with the doctors. The doctors think they control the tools, but it’s the other way around.”

“OK,” I said.

“The cop started to have some type of fit and they all came in and rushed around him and put up a movable curtain, but there was a space between the curtain panels. Right through that space I watched that saw and it bit too deep and I knew it as soon as it happened and I knew he was getting it back, getting done to him what he did to somebody.”

The drugs the nurse had given him must have relaxed him too much to make him a good roommate anymore.

“Hey,” he said. “If I asked you a question, would you tell the truth?”

“Sure,” I lied again.

He stretched his neck up toward the dark, blank TV mounted from the ceiling in the corner of the room. He lowered his voice. “Whenever I’m in the hospital, I see a man in a black suit with a hat on, inside the TV, when it ain’t on. He’s looking out at me.” The old guy paused. “Do you ever see that?”

“Yes,” I said, to help him. “Sometimes.”

“Bull,” the old guy spit. “If you saw something like that, you’d shit the bed.”

Two nurses and a doctor came into the room and began wheeling him out the next morning. I thought he was asleep, but as he passed my bed, his eyes were open.

“Watch yourself,” he said to me. “They don’t save everybody here.”

After sixty-five days, I was allowed to leave the hospital. The doctor saw me during morning rounds and signed off on my discharge paperwork. One of the blond nurses I’d flirted with stood next to me and whispered in my ear. Goodbye Mister Whoever-you-are. They’d seen enough loggers float in, the facility being so close to the Adirondacks. Sixty-five days without a visitor and no phone in my room, no calls, Paul Wagner wasn’t going to be paying any hospital bill or following up with occupational therapy. The insurance cards I vaguely referred to would never arrive and I’d sell the pain pills to my buddies, if I could make it through the day on a shot or two of straight hard booze. Paul Wagner died the minute I hit the exit door.

My truck sat in the parking lot with tiny deltas of mud near the tires, left there as the rain flowed into the lot’s sunken storm drain. A layer of dirt and fine grit covered the windows. Dirty rain, over the largest forest in the Northeast. People talked about whole lakes being ruined, far to the north, but you hear a lot of things in the woods. The toughest trick in the mountains and valleys was telling where the shot came from, what was the echo and what was the original report, what was reaching your ears and eyes. The shape of the land gave birth to lies of sound and the same was true with people. The shape of their lives led them to lie. Sometimes they had no choice. That’s what I told myself about being Paul Wagner for sixty-five days.

The truck started on the third try. It stuttered. The brakes were stiff, they groaned and creaked a little. I jammed it in gear and left. The foot-long ceramic spike that had caused some of the damage to my right arm and head after my saw hit it rolled around on the passenger’s-side floor. I was on a job and spotted a chance to make some extra money with a stand of straight maple, fifty yards off a landing site. Seven thousand dollars covered in bark and leaves. It was coming down. I ran the metal detector over the trees and nothing showed on the meter, so after the crew left, I took a saw to the lead tree in the group. Two things happened at once. The chain snapped and the saw kicked out of the cut with so much force, it broke my arm and slammed into my head, digging deep into my helmet as the chain shot one last revolution through the orange plastic housing, like a deadly silver ribbon, flashing and slicing its way to my bones. My Kevlar pants finally stopped it, but I was on the ground, bleeding.

Someone had been protecting those trees. There are only two reasons to spike trees. If you’re an environmental whacko, who doesn’t realize that loggers need to eat, too. Or to protect something you own that’s valuable. I doubt they were protecting the trees against me specifically, just people like me. Because in the world of the woods, there are a lot of people like me, who steal good timber and once it’s on the ground, it’s long past late.

The landowner and his son pulled up in a king cab rig and the old man must have puzzled out what happened right away. He grabbed a ten-pound rubber mallet out of the lock-box on the truck and hit me in the head and spine like I’ve never been hit before. I went unconscious from the pain and woke up in the hospital. The doctors thought a tree had fallen on me, that’s what the two guys who brought me in said. They left my truck in the parking lot. A broken eardrum and severely bruised spine with a possible cracked disk was thanks to that mallet. At least they left me my truck. As I drove out of the parking lot, I reached under my seat. The old forty-five I kept there was gone.

I drove around the reservoirs, south, into my own territory. The western edge of Catskill Park, the Pepacton Reservoir. Mostly Department of Environmental Protection cops, state police. If something serious happened, the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the BCI, handled it. They were the detectives of the state police. No local law. Once in a while, a Sheriff s patrol. When I got behind a long yellow school bus, with kids giving me the finger through the back emergency exit window, I realized it must be the first week of September.

My rented cabin smelled. Bad. It was chilly, because the temperature had been dropping at night and I hadn’t been there to light the fire. Ladybugs clustered on the ceiling, trying to stay warm. Two months of bills sat in the mailbox, some of them soaking wet. The phone was cut off. Before I went on the job that day, I’d meant to pay the bill. I always meant to pay all my bills, but I never did.

It looked like a good time to start skimming timber. In my honest life, I was a timber appraiser and a good one. I gave people prices based on all the usual formulas. Felling and bucking, skidding cost, making sure all the wood was merchantable, all the current stumpage rates on standing timber. Landowners needed that information for tax purposes, to make a buy or sell decision, for due-diligence valuation. Any number of reasons. I loved the job, being out in the woods, working. Weather never bothered me.

But when I was short money, truth and honesty rested outside of me. My relationship with money was more important, like most people. I would skim. Skimming timber is a nonteachable skill. In the course of evaluating standing timber, I would mark a few trees — prime trees, like tiger maple, or northern white ash — and cut them, the day before the big crew moved in. It meant working alone with a fast saw, no hangers, nothing stuck or tipped or fucked. Straight trees on the ground, limbed up and ready to go, and my buddy Dave would come in with his cherry picker and load up, maybe twenty trunks depending on the size. Off he’d go. Usually to Maine, where we knew a specialty furniture maker who always bought from us. Always no questions asked, always cash. You didn’t want to skim too much, because people noticed and you couldn’t truck it out. Most timber companies know that appraisers make a little extra money on the side and nobody kicks too much. Most timber companies hand out cash themselves, to appraisers. The difference between a hundred thousand dollar appraisal on a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars worth of wood is usually worth a thousand dollars to the timber companies. A low appraisal gives them leeway. In case some trees aren’t straight enough for high-grade lumber, or if gas prices go up, or if weather begins to eat paydays for the crew. There was more than one way to skim and all of it was dangerous, lying work.