Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

We drove for about twenty minutes on greasy back roads until we came to a two-story frame house, set back about a hundred feet from the roadside snowbanks. It had once been white with red shutters, but the clapboards were rotting and the paint had begun to flake. A poorly carpentered ramp-assembled out of two-by-fours, plywood, and asphalt shingles-angled up to the front door. The windows were heavily curtained and dark; they reminded me of an addict’s hollow eyes.

The entire place was snowed in. No plow had cleared the drive; no shovel had liberated the door.

“Do you need a hand shoveling out?” I asked.

She unlocked the door and dropped down to the ground. “No, thanks.”

“You sure?”

“We don’t need anyone’s help. Come on, Lucas.”

Jamie pushed down the passenger seat and the boy slid through the opening. As he did, he gave me the strangest look, and my immediate thought was: That kid just stole something from my truck. I turned around to see what might be missing as his mother slammed the door.

I watched the two of them labor up the snowy driveway, plodding along through snow as deep as the boy’s waist, until they reached the ramp. Then Jamie stopped and looked back at my idling truck. I saw her mutter something to her son and then she came trudging in my direction.

In spite of myself, I felt a buoyant sensation in my chest.

Jamie came around to the driver’s side. I rolled down the window.

“I want to apologize,” she said. “It’s been a bad night. I know you were just trying to be helpful. I’m sorry to be such a royal queen bitch.”

I smiled back at her. “When you’re a game warden, getting yelled at goes with the job,” I said.

“I bet it does.”

“If you want to grab your extra car keys, I can take you back into Machias to get your van.”

She laughed her pretty laugh. “I’ve left my sister alone too long as it is. I got a friend who can drive me later. But thanks for the offer. What’s your name anyway?”

“Bowditch.”

She rolled her eyes. “Your first name.”

“Mike,” I said.

FEBRUARY 14

A game warden came through the hospital door. At first I thought he was a ranger, on account of his uniform, but he says rangers only work in parks. That ain’t the way it is in NORTHWEST PASSAGE.

I wonder if the warden’s the one who found Uncle P.

The game warden comes up to me and says that Ma asked him to check on me. He is tall and has a crew cut and a scar on his head.

I ask him if I can see his gun, and he gives me a lecture about how guns ain’t toys.

He don’t know that I got a rifle! It ain’t mine really, but it will be now if Prester dies. He showed me how to shoot beer cans from the picnic table once, but Ma made him stop.

I ask the warden for money for a Coke, and he gives me the money. Ha!

Then he starts asking me all these questions about Randle, which means Randle’s DEAD, because he ain’t here in the hospital. If he was in jail, they could interrogate him themselves.

Yes!!!

He asks me how I know Randle is a drug lord, but I don’t tell him about the secret stash in the sewing room.

Instead I tell him, “I’m a detective.”

Then Ma comes out of the emergency and she’s crying and crying because she’s seen Uncle Prester.

I guess he ain’t dead.

The game warden likes Ma! He’s all nervous and stuttering. But she don’t seem to notice because she is freaking out. She freaks out a lot now that Randle ain’t giving her those pills. She used to get all dopey before and would fall asleep all over the house.

Now she’s like a different person.

The warden is giving us a ride home because Ma lost the keys! She used to lose shit all the time.

You can see the warden has a crush on Ma, which is why he offered to give us a ride. He keeps looking over at her when she’s looking out the window.

Ma says she and Dad ain’t never getting back together-never, ever. Maybe the warden will become her new boyfriend now that Randle’s dead. That would be kind of cool, I guess. He could show me how to shoot a pistol and solve crimes and stuff. I could be like his deputy.

His truck is really cool. It’s got a shotgun rack and GPS and police radio and everything.

There’s some binoculars on the floor.

They’d be good for spying and stuff. I bet I could hide them under my vest if I zip it up good…

Lucas didn’t realize he’d dropped his notebook when he stole my binoculars, and it took me days to notice they were missing. It took me even longer to unlock the secrets that he kept in his weird journal, although I understood from the start that he was a child used to keeping secrets. Lucas didn’t exactly remind me of myself at that age-I’d always been athletic and big enough to scare away bullies-but there was something in his obsessive scribbling and the intensity of his stare that seemed disconcertingly familiar. My parents’ violent marriage had also forced me inward in certain ways. Perhaps it was my own sad dreaminess that I saw reflected in Lucas Sewall’s eyeglasses.

Or maybe it was just his miserable circumstances.

After leaving my dad, my mother had dated a couple of hardened assholes-a bartender named Rick and a builder (also, unfortunately) named Mike-handsome, confident guys who couldn’t disguise their disdain for my existence. I was my mother’s baggage and not necessarily worth the high cost of bedding her. Fortunately, my mom chose loneliness over the false comfort of a strong man’s arms. But that choice never seem preordained at the time. Instead of marrying an affluent tax attorney, she might easily have ended up with her own Randall Cates, and what would have become of us then?

I drove down the road a ways until I came to a Department of Transportation maintenance lot. Plow trucks had been exiting and entering the facility during the blizzard, reloading with sand and salt brine to spray on the roads, but at the moment all was quiet. I parked beside a snowbank and let my engine idle.

“You’ll be all right once you get laid,” Kathy Frost had said.

If I closed my eyes, I could picture Jamie Sewall’s full lips, and I felt an all-too-familiar stirring. Sarah had been the last woman I’d slept with. There were nights after we’d broken up when I’d thought about going out to bars with some of the other single wardens and cops, but I’d become worried about my growing thirst for alcohol. Then the Maine Warden Service had seen fit to transfer me to the wilds of Washington County, where the term nightlife referred to the sorts of creatures that got into your garbage cans at three in the morning.

A couple of years earlier, I had been so reckless-so driven by self-destructive impulses-that I might have called Jamie’s house that very instant to ask her on a date. But I had been working hard to keep my emotions under control. Avoiding a romantic entanglement with the ex-girlfriend of the local drug dealer seemed like a good first step in that direction.

Feeling both virtuous and blue-balled, I telephoned Sergeant Rivard and got his voice mail. I left a long-winded message, telling him about my conversation with the sheriff and our visit to the hospital, and asking him to call me with news. Then I started off in the direction of my unheated little trailer. There was a hardware store along the way where I could buy some new fuses for the electrical box, and I needed to get some milk and frozen burritos, too.

I glanced at my wristwatch. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. I’d been awake and on the go for more than thirty hours. No wonder my brain felt like Muhammad Ali’s punching bag.

The date, I noticed, was February 14: Valentine’s Day.

There was a four-door pickup, a silver Chevy Avalanche, emblazoned with the logo of the Call of the Wild Guide Service and Game Ranch, parked in my dooryard.