Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

“We apologize for the intrusion, Mr. Mandelbaum.” I pulled my gloves from my coat pockets. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready to hit the road, Sergeant.”

I could feel Rivard’s eyes boring into my back as I left the room.

I’d never missed Kathy Frost so much in my life.

When I was in high school, I was the straightest of straight arrows. All my teachers adored me, and the football coach made me a team captain despite my limitations as a tight end and linebacker.

The only serious trouble I ever got into was a single fistfight. After school one day, I came across a kid who looked almost exactly like Barney Beal bullying a nerdy freshman, and I ordered him to knock it off. When the bully told me where I could shove my advice, I coldcocked him in the nose. Our fight was long and vicious, and by the time the phys ed coach pulled us apart, we both needed stitches.

Afterward, the vice principal had confronted me in her plush office, not so much with anger as with hurt and disbelief. It was as if I had broken her heart in some way. I was such a great kid, she said. Out of what dark place had this violence suddenly come?

“I don’t know,” I said, lying.

The truth was that rage was twisted into my genetic code. It was my father’s enduring birthright. Every day I fought to deny the existence of my simmering anger, to push it back inside my dark heart.

At the hospital, my mother looked at my fierce eyes and wounded jaw with horror, fearful that I had begun some lycanthropic transformation. Her greatest worry was that I was destined to become a bloodthirsty creature like her ex-husband. After the divorce, she did everything she could to keep me away from my dad. She’d moved us from the North Woods to the Portland suburbs. She discouraged me from talking to him on the phone. She even frowned on my own hunting and fishing pursuits, worried I was becoming increasingly like my old man.

My mother now spent her winters in Naples, Florida, and we spoke less and less. My choice of a dangerous profession had seemingly confirmed her worst fears, and I think she fully expected that some night the telephone would ring and it would be Colonel Harkavy, telling her that I had been shot in the head by a Down East poacher. It was better not to think of me in that case, to pretend her doomed son no longer existed, to protect herself from future grief.

I waited for Rivard in the frigid parking lot, literally blowing off steam. Every shimmer of breath was visible in the air for several seconds before being swept away on the breeze. If anything, the sky looked even more ominous than when we’d arrived, but perhaps it was just my miserable mood.

My sergeant didn’t speak until we were on the road again. “You could have backed me up in there.”

“Mandelbaum was right. You lied to him.”

“The guy’s living in a dream world. Beal is the one who robbed those cabins. Him and his buddies. Did you see his pupils? They were microscopic. The kid was high on Oxy or God knows what.”

“If you’re so sure he’s robbing cabins to buy drugs,” I said, “you should turn your evidence over to the sheriff’s office or the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency. It’s their job to investigate that shit, not ours.”

Rivard kept his eyes on the road, but he rolled his head around on his neck as if it were crimped. “I was trying to send that punk a message.”

“I think you failed, Marc.”

He turned his head, and once again I was confronted by my distorted reflection in his sunglasses. The anger I saw in my features stopped me cold. I felt like Henry Jekyll looking into the face of his other self.

“You’ve got a lot to learn,” Rivard said.

“So you keep telling me.”

He flicked on the windshield wipers.

I’d been so consumed with my grievances that I hadn’t noticed it was beginning to snow.

FEBRUARY 13

They sent us home early on account of the snow. Erick says there’s a big blizzard coming. The Storm of the Century, he says.

On the bus I kept thinking about the White Owl, wondering if she’d come to my window like she did the last time it snowed.

The bus came around the corner and I saw Randle’s new car in front of the house and I got a sick feeling in my stomach like I ate too much peanut brittle.

Ma’s van was there, too-but she don’t usually get home till after

2. That’s when her shift ends.

Randle’s always got some new car. This one’s a black Grand Am.

After the bus left, I wondered if Randle and Prester shot a coyote like they said they was going to. I wondered if they had it in the backseat.

All I did was look in the window!

Suddenly Randle came out the door, yelling F this and F that and telling me to get away from the car. His face was all weird and scary from his new tattoo.

He HIT me!

Right in the side of the head. I fell over and everything! My whole backpack spilled onto the ground. When I touched my head, there was BLOOD!

Ma came out screaming. Don’t touch him! Leave him alone!

She ain’t afraid of Randle. She gave him a shove, but he just pushed her into a snowbank. Then he called her the C word.

If you touch my son again, I’m gonna kill you! Ma said. I never seen her so mad.

F you, Jamie, Randle said. Come on, Prester.

Uncle P didn’t even try to help us up or anything. He just did what Randle told him to do, same as always.

Randle peeled rubber all the way up the road.

Ma helped me pick up my stuff. I’ll never let him hurt you again, Lucas, she told me.

I heard that one before.

She knew what I was thinking. I mean it this time, she said.

It scarcely seemed possible, but my day went downhill from there.

After Rivard dropped me at my trailer, I discovered that the baseboard heating had gone on the fritz. I checked the fuse box, but there were no spare fuses. That meant I would have to drive down to the hardware store in Machias before my pipes froze and burst. Either that or try heating the entire building with my propane stove.

I was lacing up my wet boots again when I remembered a dusty metal box under the kitchen sink. Inside were all sorts of orphan screws and random washers, along with a handful of new electrical fuses. I had to wait half an hour for the trailer to warm up again before I dared leave.

Out on the road, the visibility was already going to hell, and it wasn’t even midday.

I’d decided to visit a gun shop-people in these parts tended to run them as home businesses-to ask the owner about “George Magoon,” but I found the door padlocked and the barred windows dark. Instead, I drove over to Snake Lake to check ice-fishing licenses. As cold as it was, I expected a few fishermen to be sitting in the warmth of their brazier-heated shacks, enjoying hot coffee or more adult beverages. But all I found out on the ice was another ghost town. Everyone but me had the good sense to hunker down inside and wait out the storm.

On the drive home to Whitney, I passed a convoy of ancient school buses inching along in the snow. The local kids were being sent home for the day. I decided to take a hint and do the same. I finished the paperwork I owed the Warden Service and watched the snowflakes fall from the tepid comfort of my trailer.

When I ventured out again for dinner, I found my personal vehicle-a 2005 Jeep Wrangler-hiding under a new white blanket. The storm had been gathering force all afternoon, and now with darkness descending, snow was both falling from the sky and being blown upward from the thickening drifts. I had outfitted my Jeep with new snow tires, but even with the studs digging into the snowpack, I was reluctant to push my luck. Creeping along at twenty-five miles per hour made me feel like a daredevil.