Paul Doiron: Bad Little Falls

“What will you have?” Her voice was a bit rougher than that of most women her age.

I smiled back. “The usual.”

She cocked an eyebrow at me. “I don’t know what that is.”

“You will.”

She laughed and nodded, clearly an expert in deflecting flirtations. “Nice try,” she said. “What can I get you?”

“An egg McMuffin and a large coffee with cream and sugar.”

She punched the order into the computerized cash register and took my money with practiced efficiency. I watched her fill a cardboard cup with steaming coffee and then place a wrapped sandwich on a plastic tray. She didn’t make eye contact again until she slid the tray across the counter at me and said, “Are you a forest ranger?”

I tapped the badge on my chest. “Game warden.”

“My son’s really into nature and stuff. He’s reading this book about rangers that his teacher gave him.”

I glanced down at her hand but didn’t see a wedding ring. The mention of the boy seemed to be a yield signal, though. “Sometimes we do school visits,” I said with a bit of a stammer. “We have a display we take around of antlers and furs we’ve confiscated from poachers. We’ll have an exhibit at the Machias Blueberry Festival in the summer.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said with another smile, this one more polite than come-hither. She looked over my shoulder at the next person in line, indicating I should move along.

Damn, though, she was pretty.

I carried my tray to the table where Rivard was hunched over his BlackBerry. He seemed totally preoccupied by whatever text message or e-mail he was reading. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“The National Weather Service just issued a blizzard warning for tonight.”

“I thought we were just supposed to get a few inches.”

“Now it’s a foot of snow, with sixty-mile-per-hour winds.”

I thought about my soiree with Doc Larrabee, wondering if the revised forecast would be a legitimate excuse to cancel, then imagined the old widower slaving away in the kitchen in anticipation of his big dinner party. I peeled the waxed paper from the egg sandwich, took a bite, and again felt nostalgic for the home cooking at the Square Deal Diner in Sennebec.

In the plus column, this had to be the cleanest McDonald’s I’d ever seen-not a crumb anywhere.

My chest hurt. I’d strained one of my pectoral muscles doing push-ups. I massaged the muscle through the Gore-Tex fabric of my parka. Lately I had begun to feel like a convict doing life in prison: Compulsive exercising and masturbation seemed to be the available leisure activities.

At the far end of the room, the door swung open, and I saw a few of the older customers stiffen in their seats.

Two men entered the restaurant. One was fairly short and wore a watch cap, a faded denim jacket, and baggy jeans: your garden-variety Washington County hoodlum. The other guy seemed to belong to another species: Homo giganticus. He was tall, with wavy brown locks, and was dressed in a distressed-leather jacket and black cargo pants. But what you noticed all the way across the room was the Maori-style tattoo on his face. The dark spiked pattern looked like permanent war paint.

The two men swaggered to the counter. From the angle at which I was sitting, I couldn’t see the reaction of the woman at the register, but the older people at the end of the room began whispering to one another nervously, as if trouble were brewing, and I decided I’d better take a look for myself.

Rivard raised his eyes from his cell phone with surprise. “What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure.”

Before I could reach the front of the restaurant, the two men had reversed course and were being escorted out the door. The pretty young woman had the tattooed one firmly by the arm and was pulling him along, a look of utter mortification on her face. The shorter, shambling guy kept his head bowed, his eyes to the ground. As the other one passed me, though, he smiled wide, tapped his illustrated temple with two fingers in a kind of mocking salute, and said, “Top o’ the mornin’, Officer!”

The three of them exited through the double doors out into the frozen parking lot. They crossed the salted asphalt to a waiting Pontiac Grand Am. The smaller man slid immediately into the passenger seat, as if desperate to escape the wrath he knew was coming. The woman began shouting something-her words were lost through the glass walls and road noise-and shook a finger in the face of the tattooed man. He kept grinning from ear to ear.

Suddenly he thrust out a hand and lifted the McDonald’s visor from her hair. He held it above her head, playing keep-away for a few seconds, before setting the visor down at a jaunty angle on his own skull. The woman snatched it away and stormed toward the restaurant’s entrance, her hands balled into small fists at her sides.

Stepping aside as she came through the doors, I said, “Is everything OK, ma’am?”

But she refused to meet my eyes. “No, but I’ve got it under control.”

The old folks looked at me with scared and confused eyes, but there was nothing I could think to do except return to the back booth, where Rivard sat scowling.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“I thought that woman might need help.”

“If she’s with Randall Cates, she definitely needs help,” he said.

“You know that creep?”

“Everyone knows everyone around here,” my sergeant said. “But that tattoo is kind of hard to mistake.’”

“What’s his story?”

“Dealer,” Rivard said. “Oxycodone, heroin, crack, meth. Anything and everything. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency thinks he has somebody working for him across the border in New Brunswick. There’s another rumor he’s paying off someone inside the sheriff’s office, which is total bullshit, if you ask me. Last year a girl died-a student here at the university. It’s no secret who sold her the poison that killed her, but the DA couldn’t connect the dots.”

Looking through the frosted window, I could see the Grand Am still parked in its space, blue smoke rising from the tailpipe. I memorized the license plate: 766 AKG. I was wondering what the men were waiting for, when I saw Jamie emerge from behind the counter again, this time carrying a big paper bag and a tray with two coffees. She walked purposely out through the door and straight to the driver’s side window. Two big hands reached out to accept the food and coffee.

Rivard followed my gaze. “You’d think those women would learn eventually, but they never do.”

So my sergeant believed. But my own mother had escaped a youthful first marriage to a violent and abusive alcoholic, even if her later life in the suburbs didn’t turn out to be the dream she’d imagined. I’d also seen Jamie’s expression up close, and the look on her face hadn’t been one of submission, but of defiance and rage.

On the way out the door, I noticed her smiling picture posted on the wall:

JAMIE SEWALL

EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH

FEBRUARY 13

Mrs. Greenlaw gave me this book to read… NORTHWEST PASSAGE. It’s pretty cool.

RANGER ORDERS

• Have your musket clean as a whistle, hatchet scoured, sixty rounds powder and ball, and be ready to march at a minute’s warning.

• When you’re on the march, act the way you would if you were sneaking up on a deer.

• Don’t sleep beyond dawn. Dawn is when the French and Indians attack.

• If somebody’s trailing you, make a circle, come back onto your own tracks, and ambush the folks that aim to ambush you.

• Don’t stand up when the enemy’s coming against you. Kneel down. Hide behind a tree.

• Let the enemy come till he’s almost close enough to touch. Then let him have it and jump out and finish him up with your hatchet.