‘What now?’ said Louis.
‘Find us a couple of rooms at a motel, and tell Jackie Garner where you’re at. I’ll be back here by evening.’
‘And where are you going?’ asked Angel, as they got out of my car.
I started the engine.
‘To ask an old friend why he lied to me.’
42
Ray Wray wasn’t happy.
He had arrived at Joe Dahl’s camp just south-west of Masardis knowing only that there was a job waiting for him, a job that would pay him a couple of grand for a couple of days’ work involving an airplane, which meant that the work was probably illegal. Illegal work in that part of Maine generally meant smuggling, and the only thing really worth smuggling was drugs. Hence Ray Wray had decided that what he and Joe Dahl were looking for in the Great North Woods was a crashed plane full of drugs.
Of course, Ray Wray had no trouble with drug smuggling. He’d done enough of it in the past to know how to limit the risk of getting caught, which was the main worry in that line of work. Getting caught caused all kinds of difficulty, and not only with the law: the individuals who paid folk to smuggle their drugs for them often took it amiss when the consignment didn’t reach its intended destination. Paying your debt to society was one thing; paying your debt to the bikers, or the Mexicans, or a piece of shit like Perry Reed was another thing entirely.
So the fact of smuggling wasn’t the issue for Ray, and neither was securing the plane and its cargo without getting caught. What he did have trouble with was the fact that a woman and a boy were sleeping like vampires in Joe Dahl’s place, the drapes drawn on the windows of the little cabin, the woman curled up on the camp bed and the boy sleeping beside her on the floor. Ray could see that the woman’s face was badly disfigured when he peered around the thick sheet that separated the sleeping area from the rest of the room, but he’d been troubled more by the kid, who had woken suddenly when Ray appeared and shown Ray the business end of a knife.
Now Ray was sitting on a roughhewn bench overlooking the Oxbow with a cup of coffee in his hand, Joe Dahl beside him, and Dahl was so jittery that he was giving Ray a case of the jitters too.
‘This plane?’ said Ray.
‘Yeah, what about it?’
‘When did it come down?’
‘Years ago.’
‘How many years ago?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How come nobody’s found it before now?’
‘They didn’t know where to look.’ Dahl pointed to the forest beyond with his own cup. ‘Come on, Ray, you could lose a jumbo jet in there, you know that. What we’re talking about is a small plane. Folk could have passed within feet of it and not have seen it if they weren’t already looking for it.’
‘What’s on it?’ asked Ray.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Drugs?’
‘I said I don’t know, Ray. Jesus.’
This wasn’t right. Joe Dahl was hard. Unlike Ray, he’d done some killing. Ray wasn’t the killing kind, but he was good in the woods, could hold up his end in a fight, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. Dahl, on the other hand, had knocked heads with some serious people in the past, and was still standing, but he was giving off bad vibes about this job, and Ray was increasingly inclined to put it down to the woman and her spooky kid.
‘So how do we know where it’s at?’ asked Ray. There was no point in pursuing the subject of the plane’s contents any further with Dahl, not now. Maybe later, once he’d calmed down some.
‘She says it’s near the ruins of a fort, and there ain’t but one fort in there,’ said Dahl.
Suddenly Ray understood why he was being paid so much money for heading out into the woods for a day or two. It didn’t really matter what was on that plane. It wasn’t even so much the difficulty in getting to it. But he had heard the stories about that fort, about Wolfe’s Folly. It was situated in a part of the forest where hunters didn’t go because game stayed away from it; where there were no trails, and the trees hunched like the forms of giants; where the air smelled wrong, and north and south, east and west, got all screwed up, didn’t matter how good your compass was, or your own sense of direction. It was a place where a man could get lost, because something in there wanted you to get lost, something that maybe looked like a little girl.
Ray had never been out there, and had never intended going. Even the stories about it tended to be kept among locals, just to ensure that no idiot thrill-seekers or hardened skeptics took it into their heads to start exploring to prove some point that only they could understand. There was a time when hikers used to go missing, and it was said that they might have strayed too close to Wolfe’s Folly, but that didn’t happen so much anymore, not since care had been taken to excise it from the general discourse and ensure, by unspoken agreement, that whatever was out there was left undisturbed. Most of what Ray knew about it he’d learned from Dahl, and Dahl didn’t hold with ghost stories, so if you heard it from Joe Dahl’s mouth you knew that it was true. Dahl said that nobody with an ounce of sense had been out near Wolfe’s Folly in years, and Ray believed him. If the plane had come down near there, it would explain a lot.
‘How much is she paying again?’ asked Ray.
‘Two thousand up front to each of us, and another thousand each when we find the plane. That’s good money, Ray. I could sure use it.’
Amen to that, thought Ray. He’d only managed to get through last winter with cash from the Home Energy Assistance Program, and now that state benefit had been halved because of the recession. Without money for heating oil, a man could die.
‘Out there’s no place for a woman and a child,’ said Ray. ‘And that boy looks sick. They ought to stay here, leave the finding to us.’
‘They’re coming, Ray. There’s no discussion about it. I wouldn’t worry about her and the boy. They’re –’ Dahl sought the right word. ‘Stronger than they look.’
‘What happened to her face, Joe?’
‘She got burned, looks like.’
‘Burned bad. She ain’t never going to see out of that eye again.’
‘You an eye surgeon now?’
‘Don’t need to be a surgeon to tell a dead eye from a live one.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘Who does that to a woman?’
‘Whoever it was, I don’t believe they’re around to ask no more,’ said Dahl. ‘Like I told you, don’t misjudge that woman by her appearance. Cross her, and she’ll leave you buried in a hole.’
‘Is the boy her son?’
‘I don’t know. You want to ask her, maybe pry into her other affairs while you’re about it?’
Ray looked back at the cabin. The drapes moved on one of the windows, and a face appeared. The boy was awake, and watching them, probably with that blade in his hand. Ray shuddered. He shouldn’t ought to be scared by a child, but something of Dahl’s own unease had communicated itself to him.
‘The kid’s watching us,’ he said.
Joe didn’t turn around. ‘He looks out for the woman.’
‘He’s a creepy little fucker, isn’t he?’
‘Yeah, and he’s got real good hearing too.’
Ray shut up.
‘This woman, she’ll put more work our way if it all goes right for her,’ Dahl said. He paused. ‘As long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.’
Ray didn’t mind. He’d seen the guns: a pair of Ruger Hawkeyes and two compact 9 mm pistols. So Ray Wray had never killed anyone: that didn’t mean he wouldn’t, if it came down to it. He’d come close once or twice, and he thought that he could take the final step.
‘Are we the only ones looking for this plane, Joe?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t believe we are.’
‘I thought not,’ said Ray. ‘When do we start?’
‘Soon, Ray. Real soon.’
V
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she ca
n hear
The daisies grow.
‘Requiescat’, Oscar Wilde
(1856–1900)
43
When I was a boy, I thought everyone over thirty was old: my parents were old, my grandparents were real old, and after that there were just people who were dead. Now my view of aging was more nuanced: there were people in my immediate circle of acquaintances who were younger than I, and people who were older. In time there would be far more of the former than the latter, until eventually I might look around and find that I was the oldest person in the room, which would probably be a bad sign. I recalled Phineas Arbogast as being almost ancient, but he had probably not been more than sixty when I first met him, and possibly even younger than that, although he had lived a hard life, and every year of it was written on his face.
Phineas Arbogast was a friend of my grandfather and, boy, could he talk. There were people who crossed the street when they saw Phineas coming, or dived into stores to avoid him, even if it meant buying an item that they didn’t need, just so they wouldn’t get drawn into a conversation with him. He was a lovely man, but every incident in his day, however minor, could be transformed into an adventure on the scale of the Odyssey. Even my grandfather, a man of seemingly infinite tolerance, had been known to pretend that he wasn’t home when Phineas dropped by unexpectedly, my grandfather having been given some warning of his approach by the belchings of Phineas’s old truck. On one such occasion, my grandfather had been forced to hide beneath his own bed as Phineas went from window to window, peering inside with his hands cupped against the glass, convinced that my grandfather must be in there somewhere, either sleeping or, God forbid, lying unconscious and requiring rescue, which would have provided Phineas with another tale to add to his ever-expanding collection of stories.
More often than not, though, my grandfather would sit and listen to Phineas. In part he did so because, buried somewhere in every one of Phineas’s tales, was a nugget of something useful: a piece of information about a person (my grandfather was a retired sheriff’s deputy, and he never quite set aside his policeman’s love of secrets), or a little shard of history or forest lore. But my grandfather also listened because he understood that Phineas was lonely: Phineas had never married, and it was said that he had long held a flame for a woman named Abigail Ann Morrison, who owned a bakery in Rangeley that Phineas was known to frequent when he went up to his cabin in the area. She was a single woman of indeterminate age, and he was a single man of indeterminate age, and somehow they managed to circle each other for twenty years until Abigail Ann Morrison was sideswiped by a car while delivering a box of cupcakes to a church social, and so their dance was ended.
So Phineas spun his stories, and sometimes people listened and sometimes they did not. I had forgotten most of those that I heard; most, but not all. There was one in particular that had stayed with me: the story of a missing dog and a lost girl in the Great North Woods.
The Cronin Rehabilitation and Senior Living Center was situated a few miles north of Houlton. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside – a series of blankly modern buildings built in the seventies, decorated in the eighties, and allowed to remain in stasis ever since, the paintwork and furnishings restored and repaired when required, but never altered. Its lawns were well tended, but there was little color. Cronin’s was nothing more or less than a neutral corner of God’s waiting room.
Whatever the subtleties of defining the aging process, there was no doubt that Phineas Arbogast was now very old indeed. He lay sleeping on an armchair in the room that he shared with another, marginally younger, man who was reading a newspaper in bed when I arrived, his eyes magnified enormously by thick spectacles. Those owl eyes focused on me with alarm as I approached Phineas.
‘You’re not going to wake him, are you?’ he asked. ‘The only peace I get is when that man is asleep.’
I apologized, and said it was important that I spoke with Phineas.
‘Well, on your head be it,’ he said. ‘Just permit me to get my gown on before you go rousing David Copperfield over there.’
I waited while he got out of bed, put on his gown and slippers, and prepared to find somewhere to read undisturbed. I said that I was sorry for a second time, and the old man replied, ‘I swear, when that man dies God Himself will move out of heaven and join the devil in hell to get a break from his yammering.’ He paused at the door. ‘Don’t tell him I said that, will you? God knows, I’m fond of the old coot.’
And away he went.
I remembered Phineas as a big man with a gray-brown beard, but the years had picked the meat from his bones just as the fall wind will denude a tree of its leaves before the coming of winter, and Phineas’s eternal winter could not be far off. His mouth had collapsed in on itself with the loss of his teeth, and his head was entirely bald, although a little of his beard remained. His skin was transparent, so that I could count the veins and capillaries beneath it, and I thought I could discern not just the shape of his skull, but the skull itself. According to the nursing assistant who had shown me to his room, there was nothing wrong with Phineas: he had no major illnesses beyond an assortment of the various ailments that beset so many at the end of their lives, and his mind was still clear. He was simply dying because it was his time to die. He was dying because he was old.
I pulled up a chair and tapped him lightly on the arm. He woke suddenly, squinted at me, then found his spectacles on his lap and held them to the bridge of his nose without putting them on, like a dowager duchess examining a suspect piece of china.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘You look familiar.’
‘My name is Charlie Parker. You and my grandfather were friends.’
His face unclouded, and his smile shone. His hand reached out and shook mine, and his grip was still strong.
‘It’s good to see you, boy,’ he said. ‘You’re looking well.’
His left hand came out and joined the right, like a man being saved from drowning.
‘You too, Phineas.’
‘You’re a damned liar. Give me a scythe and a hood, and I could play Death himself. If I stumble by a mirror when I’m up to take a piss at night, I think that’s the grim old bastard come for me at last.’
He took a brief coughing fit then, and sipped from a can of soda that stood by his chair.
‘I was sorry to hear about your wife and your little girl,’ he said, when he had recovered. ‘I know you maybe don’t like folk reminding you about it, but it has to be said.’
He took my hand in his again, there was a final tightening, and the hands withdrew.
I had a box of candy under my arm. He looked at it bemusedly.
‘I got no teeth left,’ he explained, ‘and candy plays hell with my dentures.’
‘That’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t bring you any candy.’
I opened the box. Inside were five Cohiba Churchill cigars. Cigars had always been his vice, I knew. My grandfather would share one with him at Christmas, then complain about the smell for weeks after.
‘If you can’t have Cuban, I figure the best Dominicans will have to do,’ I said.
Phineas took one from the box, held it beneath his nose, and sniffed it. I thought he might be about to cry.
‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘You mind taking an old man for a walk?’
I said that I didn’t mind at all. I helped him to put on an extra sweater, and a muffler, then his coat and gloves and a bright red woolen hat that made him look like a marooned buoy. I found a wheelchair, and together we set off for a stroll around those dull grounds. He lit up once we were out of sight of the main building, and happily talked and puffed his way to a small ornamental lake by the edge of a fir copse, where I sat on a bench and listened to him some more. When he eventually had to pause for breath, I took the opportunity to steer the conversation in another direction.
‘A long time ago, when I was a teenager, you told my grandfather and me a story,’ I said.
??
?I told you both lots of stories. Your grandfather was still here, he’d say that I told too many for his liking. He hid under his bed from me once, you know that? He thought I didn’t see him, but I did.’ He chuckled. ‘The old fart. I kept meaning to use it against him sometime, but he upped and died before I could, damn him.’
He drew again on the cigar.
‘This one was different,’ I said. ‘It was a ghost story, about a little girl in the North Woods.’
Phineas held the smoke in for so long I was convinced it was going to start coming out of his ears. At last, when he’d had time to think, he let it out and said, ‘I remember it.’
Of course you do, I thought, because a man doesn’t forget a tale like that, not if he’s been a part of it. A man doesn’t forget hunting for his lost dog – Misty, wasn’t that her name? – in the depths of the forest, and finding her all tangled up in briars with a little barefoot girl waiting nearby, a girl who was both there and not there, both very young and very, very old, a girl who claimed to be lost and lonely even as those briars started snaking around the man’s shoes, trying to hold him there so that the girl could have company, so that she could draw him down to the dark place in which she dwelled.
No, you don’t forget a thing like that, not ever. There was a truth to the tale that Phineas Arbogast told to my grandfather and me, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He had wanted to tell the story, to share what he had seen, but some details needed to be changed, because one had to be careful about such matters.
‘You said that you saw the girl somewhere up near Rangeley,’ I said. ‘You said she was the reason why you stopped going up to your cabin there.’
‘That’s right,’ said Phineas. ‘That’s what I said.’
I didn’t look at him as I spoke, but I kept my voice soft and there was no accusation or blame to my tone. This was not an interrogation, but I needed to know the truth. It was important if I was to find that plane.