Paul Doiron: Bad Little Falls

The last time I saw Lucas Sewall, he left a school notebook under the passenger seat of my truck.

It was a curious document. The boy had drawn disturbing images on the covers-pictures of vampire women and giant owls with bloodstained beaks. The inside pages were crammed with his indecipherable handwriting, words so small you needed a magnifying glass to read them. There were maps labeled with cryptic directions to “lightning trees” and “old Injun caves” and hieroglyphs that might have been messages in secret code or just meaningless scribbles. With a compulsive liar like Lucas, you never knew whether you were dealing with fact or fiction.

The dated diary entries were especially hard to unravel. Between his other weird jottings, the kid had seemingly kept a careful record of the tragic events in Township Nineteen, as if he had anticipated that his eyewitness account might one day prove useful in a court of law. But who knows what was going on in that oversize head of his? In my short acquaintance with him, I learned Lucas Sewall was a deeply damaged child who believed in manipulating adults, settling scores, and tying up loose ends. Sometimes I wondered whether he didn’t see the notebook as his last will and testament, with me in the role of executor.

The first entry was dated three nights before the fatal snowstorm:

FEBRUARY 12

Randle came around last night drunker than usual and made us leave the house again so he could get at his stash of drugs without us knowing where he’d hid them. Ma didn’t want to let him in, but Randle had the Glock he bought off that Mexican in Milbridge and said he’d use it this time if we didn’t wait outside in the dooryard while he got his pills and powder. We had trouble bringing Aunt Tammi down the ramp on account of her wheelchair not having good grippy-ness on the ice and snow. Ma said we should at least wait inside the car, where we could run the blower, only she’d forgotten the keys on the kitchen table. That just made her more pissed off than she already was. We could’ve waited in Randle’s car except that Uncle Prester was passed out in the shotgun seat and he smelt like he’d puked himself, which wouldn’t be the first time. Randle was inside the house a long time, making shadows behind the curtains. When he came out, Ma said they were broken up forever and she didn’t like him hiding his drugs in her house for the cops to find. That got Randle all exercised. He said if she ever ratted on him, she’d be sorry, and he said that went double for the Boy Genius. Randle didn’t figure that I’d already found his stupid drugs stuffed behind the insulation in the sewing room… easiest place in the world to find, on account of the pink dust all over the floor. He didn’t know what I did to the pills, neither… and wasn’t he in for a wicked surprise when someone swallowed one of them Oxycottons? I would pay GOOD money to see Randle get his ass kicked.

As it happened, Lucas didn’t have long to wait.

Two days later, his mother’s ex-boyfriend was dead and his uncle Prester lay in a hospital bed with blackened claws where his fingers and toes had once been.

The zebra had frozen to death beneath a pine tree.

The animal lay on its side in a snowbank with its striped legs rigidly extended and its lips pulled back from its yellow teeth in a horsey grimace, as if, in its final moments on earth, it had grasped the punch line of some cosmic joke.

The owner of the game ranch had called the local veterinarian in a last-ditch effort to resuscitate the hypothermic zebra, and Doc Larrabee had brought me along because he needed a witness to back up this crazy story down at the Crawford Lake Club. It didn’t matter that I was the new game warden in District 58 and a flatlander to boot.

Doc knelt in the snow beside the equine. He had removed his buckskin mitten and was rubbing his palm across the dead animal’s thinly haired haunches. The frost melted beneath the warmth of his hand.

“You understand that a zebra is a creature of sub-Saharan Africa?” he asked Joe Brogan.

“Yeah,” the ranch owner said sourly.

“It is well adapted to life on the equatorial savanna-as opposed to the boreal forest of Maine, I mean.”

“I understand that!”

Brogan wore a beaver hat that might once have been fashionable on the streets of Saint Petersburg. His face was also furry. A single brown eyebrow extended across the bridge of his nose, and a luxuriant beard grew thickly down his throat before disappearing, like a shy animal, inside the collar of his wool shirt.

A small crowd of men had met us outside the gate of the Call of the Wild Guide Service and Game Ranch. They were big bearded men wearing camouflage parkas, synthetic snowmobile pants, and heavy pack boots. Now I could see their bulky silhouettes lurking in the shadows of the pines and smell their cigarettes drifting on the crisp February air. The ill will carrying downwind in my direction was as pungent as tobacco smoke.

The guides at Call of the Wild did some conventional outfitting in the fat spruce land outside the ranch’s barbed wire-leading hunters in pursuit of deer, bear, coyote, and moose-but Brogan had built his business on a practice that animal rights activists termed “canned hunting.” He owned miles of fenced timber, which he had stocked with the oddest menagerie of animals imaginable. The sign outside his gate

advertised the services offered: RUSSIAN BOAR, BUFFALO HUNTS, RED STAG, ELK HUNTS, AND FALLOW DEER HUNTS.

The zebra hadn’t survived long enough to make it onto the sign.

At Call of the Wild, hunters paid thousands of dollars to sit on thermal fanny warmers in protected tree stands and take potshots at exotic creatures. According to a strange loophole in Maine law, what happened on game ranches was generally not the concern of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, for which I worked; rather, it was under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture. The state basically viewed these places as farms and the foreign animals as livestock. In my mind, the entire setup was a disgrace and an embarrassment to sportsmen.

The Warden Service had just transferred me from midcoast Maine to the unpeopled hinterlands of Washington County. I’d gotten into some administrative trouble down south the previous spring and summer-not the first time for such things, and unlikely to be the last. My commanding officer never came right out and said I was being exiled to Siberia, but when you are reassigned to the easternmost county in the United States-a place known for its epidemic drug abuse, multigenerational unemployment, and long tradition of violent poaching-it’s pretty clear your career isn’t on the rise.

While Doc Larrabee examined the carcass, I documented the travesty with my Nikon.

“What are you taking pictures for?” Brogan asked.

“Souvenirs,” I said.

Brogan and I had already locked antlers a week earlier. I’d issued a criminal summons to one of his coyote-hunting guides, a meathead named Billy Cronk, when one of his clients discharged a firearm within a hundred yards of a residence on posted property. Given the unemployment rate in these parts, losing your commercial guiding license was a pretty big deal. On the other hand, Cronk’s customer could’ve killed the old woman who lived in that house, and in my book, that was an even bigger deal.

I glanced around at the cigarette-lit faces. “Where’s Billy tonight?”

Brogan spat a brown stream of tobacco juice at my feet. “None of your fucking business.”

My former supervisor had given me some advice before I was transferred to the boondocks. “Play it tough,” Sgt. Kathy Frost had said. “When you’re assigned to a new district, you need to come on strong, or people will think you’re a pussy. Especially way Down East, where they eat wardens for breakfast.”