Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

“Weren’t there five of you?” I had counted five the day before.

They all looked at each other and burst into laughter. “Right you are,” Bill said, and slapped me on the back. “But I don’t think you’ll be seeing him for a while. Poor slob looked like he died.”

At the deli in town we picked up egg sandwiches, powdered doughnuts, and more coffee all around, then headed south on county 21. It wasn’t a particularly pretty drive, the highway hemmed on both sides by mucky lowland swamps, but I took it at a crawl; those wet little shoots were like moose catnip, and hardly a summer went by that some unlucky soul (nobody local; we know better) totaled his car, and sometimes himself, on this very stretch of road. A mature bull with a full antler spread is a sight to behold even when it’s nothing new to you, but it’s not the size of the thing that does the damage: it’s the geometry. Nearly all that weight is suspended four feet in the air on legs as skinny as pipe cleaners, so you catch one broadside, driving, let’s say, a late-model Ford Taurus, and before you can say “what the goddamn,” seven hundred pounds of permanently startled moose flops right over the hood and through your windshield-what the EMTs up here call “a Maine lap dance.” It doesn’t take a bull, either; even a yearling can do serious damage.

Bill was riding in the truck with me, his buddies following in Pete’s BMW. A good rule of thumb is thirty-five at dusk or dawn, and in the rearview mirror I could see pasty-faced Pete, sighing with exasperation and banging his hands on the wheel. He mouthed a sentence I heard as “Will you fucking go?” I was already thinking I maybe didn’t like him, and that I wasn’t the only one.

Beside me, Bill polished off a second doughnut and cracked the lid on a fresh cup of coffee. He lifted his eyes to the mirror and frowned.

“Oh, don’t mind him, that prissy little fuck. Doesn’t know when he’s having a good time.” He slurped his coffee and opened his window to smoke. “You mind?” I shook my head no, and he pulled out a Pall Mall from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it off the dashboard lighter.

“Oh, Pete’s all right. Just got some growing up to do. Going through a nasty divorce, too, not that that’s any excuse.” He waved his cigarette toward the roadside. “Pull off here a second, willya?”

I let the pickup glide to a halt and waited in the cab while Bill saw to his business. In the rearview, Pete and Carl Jr. shook their heads and shared a laugh at the boss’s tiny bladder. What with the smoking and the whiskey, I had Bill pegged for prostate problems for sure, not that any of us can avoid that forever.

“One more good thing about this place,” Bill growled, climbing back into the cab with his cigarette still clamped in his teeth. “Man can haul it out anywhere he has a mind.”

We drove the last ten miles without talking. The land we were passing through was typical northwest Maine scrub, pretty heavily logged though you wouldn’t know this from the highway, and laced with old logging roads that you wouldn’t find on any maps. Just past the town of Pine Stump Junction -three blocks of run-down houses, a post office hardly anybody used, and a general store that hadn’t been open for a decade-I pulled the truck off the road into a dirt parking area. A few other cars were parked at random angles: a couple of rust-streaked pickups and 4x4s I recognized, but also the usual smattering of wagons and sedans with out-of-state plates, most with expensive Swedish cargo racks pinched to their roofs and the familiar assortment of bumper stickers and window decals favored by the L.L. Bean set: PHILLIPS ACADEMY ANDOVER, ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING, MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, and my favorite, VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS. At the far corner of the lot, beside a rusty Dumpster where the locals went to watch the bears make their evening raids (Kate loved this when she was little; she called it “bear TV”), the undergrowth opened like a garden door onto a dirt trail you might not have noticed unless you were looking.

“Okay,” Bill said, “what now?”

I turned off the engine and tossed the keys under the seat. “We hoof it. The dam’s about two miles in from here.”

“The dam?”

“Old WPA thing connecting the upper and lower Ziskos. Been abandoned for years, since Maine Power built a bigger one upstream and pulled out the turbines. The gate’s stuck open, so there’s fish by the ton, even when it’s hot like this. The big Atlantics come up to feed below the spillway. You’ll see.”

I walked back to the BMW as Pete’s window glided down to meet me. Carl Jr. was smacking on a last doughnut; Marathon Mike, stretched out in back, was fast asleep, his head propped on a sweater against the door.

“This is the place,” I told him. “Just park anywhere.”

Pete looked around and scowled. “This is a brand-new forty-thousand-dollar BMW. You want me to leave it here?”

“That’s the idea.” There was no use getting mad; it was going to be a long day with these guys. “Just be sure to leave the keys in it for the valet.”

In the passenger seat, Carl Jr. slapped the dashboard and burst into laughter. I felt an instant rush of love for him, balancing my already intense dislike of crybaby Pete-though I was also suddenly sure that Mrs. Pete had made off with the whole kit and caboodle, save for one very expensive BMW.

“Very fucking funny, you asshole,” Pete said to him. He looked back up at me from the window. Whatever I was going to get, I figured, would have to do for an apology. “Okay, that didn’t come out right, I guess.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, just park the thing,” Carl Jr. said. “Nobody wants to steal your fucking car.”

As far as I know, Kate never minded having a convicted felon for a father. After all, it wasn’t as if I’d hurt anybody, or robbed a bank, or even cheated on my taxes. (To the contrary: my brief and rather cushy trip through the federal justice system was enough to turn me into a model citizen forever. I don’t so much as double-park, and you could eat off my taxes.) Though my crime was in every way a failure of proper obedience to the proper authority, it’s also true that the backward glance of history has been kind to those of us who, for whatever reason, hit the road when duty called. Some people even call us heroes.

“Congress never declared war. Against Vietnam, I mean.”

Kate said this to me on a day of snow in deep midwinter-a school morning, though with the drifts already a foot deep, nobody was going anywhere. We were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking cocoa after a trip outside to fill the bird feeders and taste the snow on our tongues. The room was warm and close-smelling from the wet clothes we’d propped by the open stove door to dry.

“Okay,” I said, and put down my mug. “What brought this on?”

“They didn’t. Mrs. Wister said so. We’re learning about it in social studies. She said a lot of people believed Vietnam was wrong.”

Shellie Wister was Kate’s fourth-grade teacher, something of a local character who kept a menagerie of rabbits and other small animals in her classroom and puttered through town in an old lemon-yellow VW Squareback with a faded peace sign in the window and teardrop crystals swaying from the rearview. She had moved up to the North Woods to live on a commune sometime in ’68 or ’69, about the same time I skipped town. The story went that she had been a society wife down in Boston who simply woke up one morning to realize her entire life was built on the murderous lie of warmongering capitalism. Though the commune was long since defunct, a rocket that had blown up on the pad, she still lived alone out in the country in a wood-heated cabin, raising goats and chickens and composing fierce letters to the local paper on everything from nuclear disarmament to the Nicaraguan Contras-letters that, despite their argumentative ferocity, always seemed to me unfailingly polite. Every few years she got herself arrested for chaining herself to a tree or some other good-natured nonsense meant to irritate the loggers, but the school board let her continue teaching despite these outbursts of Thoreauvian civil disobedience (required reading for draft dodgers, by the way), good teachers being about as rare in these parts as plastic surgeons. It was also pretty well accepted that Shellie was a lesbian, though in my opinion this was pure sour grapes: Shellie was a good-looking woman who simply didn’t need or want a man, and the ones who tried quickly found this out.