Dead Meat Page 4

  “Why”—I gulped—“are you telling me this?”

  “This thing here’s a throttle,” he continued, ignoring my question. “Do this and she slows down. Do it too much and she stops, of course. Then we crash onto the ground. Do this here to it and she goes faster. Course, you don’t want her to go too fast. Okay, you got all that, man?”

  “Up, down, left, right. Sure, I guess so. I really don’t want to fly this thing, though.”

  “If’n I have another one of them heart-attack things, you’re the one who’s going to have to get us down,” said Gib. I studied his face for the glint of a grin. I saw none.

  “You’re joking, of course,” I said hopefully.

  Gib was a compact guy with a prematurely weathered face. He wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a Boston Red Sox cap twisted around backward on his head. A little pigtail hung down the back of his neck. I had initially taken him for about my age, but as I saw him more closely, I revised my estimate. He was younger than I. Perhaps in his early thirties. A lifetime in the out-of-doors had eroded premature gullies in his cheeks and forehead.

  “Way off to your right there,” he said, “you can see Mount Katahdin. The Indians think it’s haunted. Biggest mountain in the state. That hunk of land beyond the mountain is Baxter State Park.” He chuckled, his eyes sweeping the landscape in front of us. “Sound like a goddamn tourist guide, don’t I? Keep forgetting you’ve been up here before.”

  “Several times,” I said. “But it’s new to me each time.”

  “It’s pretty awesome the first time you fly your own plane over it. I’ve talked to boys who do this kind of flying in Alaska. They say the same thing. Thank God for skis and floats. Bring a plane down just about anywheres. You can land a floatplane on grass if you’ve got to. Course, you have a helluva time getting her up again.”

  “You’ve been doing this a long time,” I said.

  “Learned to fly after ROTC. Then the first chance I had I went into hock to buy this machine. Been flying out of Greenville several years now. Best kind of flyin’ there is. Take off and land where you want, when you want. No flight plans to file. No traffic. Just me and the sky and the lakes.” He paused and crinkled his eyes as he studied the landscape below. “Fact is, business ain’t what I thought it would be. Folks come to Maine lookin’ for what they call a wilderness experience. Shit, man, this hasn’t been wilderness for a long time. Here. Take a look over there.”

  He banked the plane a few degrees so that I could peer out over the right wing. I saw an area several acres square that looked as if it had been shaved clean. The earth lay raw and exposed. It was studded with stumps. “Fresh clear cut,” said Gib, leveling off the Cessna again. “That’s how the loggers do it nowadays. Ever since they outlawed the river drives. They cut roads into the woods, strip the land clean, load the logs onto trucks, and lug them out that way. They’ve cleaned up the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers that way. They claimed that all the bark and sunken logs and shit was poisoning the water. What they got instead was this clear-cutting and a wilderness full of passable roads. Shit, man, there’s hardly a pond or stream up here now that ain’t fished—and fished hard. You could drive your Caddy right up to most of ’em. Places that twenty years ago you had to fly into, and you could cast a fly to trout that had never seen a lure before, now you go there and you find beer cans and Big Mac wrappers the assholes dump along the shore. There’s a stream up there—I ain’t sure it’s even got a name—where there’s a boulder in it. You fish there, you’d swear you were the first white man ever been there. Then you look at this boulder, and there’s a bronze plaque on it. Says, ‘President Eisenhower fished here.’ Wilderness! Shit, man. You really want wilderness, you’ve got to go to Alaska.”

  I studied the landscape beneath us more carefully, and I could detect the web of narrow, twisting roadways that meandered through the forest and the areas that had been cut clean over the years. There were whole mountainsides that were beginning to grow back, where the foliage was a light green, and other areas already thick with new second-growth forest. To the untutored eye, it still looked primeval. There were no paved highways, no housing developments. But a careful look revealed a scarred and wounded landscape.

  “Is business that bad?” I asked Gib.

  He shrugged. “It’s a struggle. There are fewer of us now than there used to be, so I guess it evens out. Before, a plane was the only way to get into the woods, and there were plenty of folks who wanted to do that. Nowadays I’d guess there are more folks than ever who want wilderness and come to Maine for it. But they find out they can drive right in. I still get a lot of first-timers. And, of course, flyin’ in gives you the illusion of wilderness, if you can fool yourself into thinkin’ it’s the only way and if you don’t look too close while you’re up in the sky.”

  “It’s also a hell of a lot quicker,” I observed.

  “True enough,” he said. “And that’s typical, too. I mean, folks want the wilderness, and they want it instant. I can get them a long way up in a short amount of time, that’s true.”

  “What is the range of this plane?” I asked.

  “Comfortable seven hundred miles. She’ll do about one-twenty at a sixty-five percent cruise. Gets about twelve gallons per hour. She’ll carry four adult men, fuel, floats, a hundred pounds of gear, easy. Nice little plane. There, up ahead. That’s Chamberlain Lake. Headwaters of the Allagash. Still damn fine trout fishing in the Allagash. Big water.”

  The lakes, ponds, rivers, and mountains had begun to take on a sameness to my eye. I’d had a glut of the beauty of it. I was ready to set my feet onto solid ground. I relaxed back into my seat and closed my eyes. It had been a long day—long in time, a sense that was further heightened by the distance I had traveled. I had awakened in my apartment overlooking Boston Harbor, driven to Portland, Maine, spent an hour with Seelye Smith, and then ground over two-lane roads for the afternoon to Greenville, stopping only at a two-pump gas station for a fill-up, a can of Pepsi from the machine, and a Hershey bar. I was tired, and I was hungry. I looked forward to a healthy slug of Old Hipboot at Tiny Wheeler’s rustic but well-stocked bar and then something fancy from Bud Turner’s kitchen. A good night’s sleep and I’d be ready to spend a day in a canoe hauling in big salmon.

  “How soon?” I mumbled to Gib without opening my eyes.

  “Running into a little headwind,” he said. “Going to take her up a ways, see if we can get on top of it. We should be there fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  I glanced out my window. The tiny ponds below glittered as the slanting afternoon sun caught their riffled surfaces. “Looks like it’s getting rough down there,” I said.

  “The four o’clock chop. Wind always picks up in the afternoon. So does the salmon fishing. Cause and effect.”

  “I remember,” I said. “That chop must make it tough to land this thing.”

  Gib turned to peer at me. He seemed mildly amused. “If I don’t have one of them heart attacks, no problem. Damn sight better than glassy smooth. It’s a pure bitch putting one of these ladies down on a mirror. Can’t see where the hell the top of the water is. Hit it wrong, just like hitting concrete. Nice little chop, you can see it. Makes it easy.”

  I shrugged and nodded. Flying floatplanes was another one of those things I knew nothing about.

  I settled back again and allowed my eyelids to droop. The hum of the engine drugged me, and the faint vibration in the fuselage was a gentle body massage.

  Abruptly we tipped onto our side and dropped. The plane’s engine whined at a higher pitch. I swallowed hard, both against the sudden tightening in my inner ears and against the flip-flopping of my stomach.

  I sat forward. “What the hell?”

  Gib was peering out his side window. “Down there. See it?”

  I leaned over to look out his window. “What? What is it?”

  “Moose with her calf. There, in the cove.”

  He had circled around as we descended, so that we came a
cross the pond toward the cove, where I could now see the two moose. The cow was enormous—bigger and bulkier and longer legged than a full-grown steer. As the plane approached her, she lifted her head and then began to trot with surprising quickness and grace through the weedy shallow water toward the woods that bordered the shoreline. Her calf, a miniature version of herself, followed. As they slid into the underbrush, Gib veered away, and we skidded over the tops of the trees.

  “They move like ghosts through the woods,” he said softly as we slanted upward to regain altitude. “You’d think they’d crash around, but they can slip away from you so you’d never know they’d been there. Amazing animals.”

  “How in the world did you ever spot them?”

  He shrugged. “You develop an eye for something that doesn’t quite belong, I guess. The wrong shape, the wrong color. I’ve hunted a lot of deer. Usually I spot a deer by detecting a horizontal line. Think about it. The woods are all vertical lines—trees, saplings, brush, weeds. A horizontal line’ll be the belly or the back of a deer. That or the white tail flipping, though usually if you see the tail it’s too late. By then the deer’s hightailing it.” He paused. “I reckon that’s where that word came from, isn’t it? Hightailing, I mean. That’s what deer do when they’re running away. They stick that tail up there high so’s the white shows.” He rubbed his face with his hand. “Anyway, I saw those dark shapes down there in the water, and there wasn’t anything else they could be except a couple of moose. When there’s nothing else they can be, man, then they’ve got to be moose.”

  “Unassailable logic,” I said, smiling. “They say the moose are coming back in Maine.”

  “Well, yes, they are. Not so much that you don’t want to circle back to take a closer look, of course. The plane scares them. Which, to my way of thinking, ain’t such a bad thing. They may not be as stupid as they look, but they sure’n hell ain’t hard to kill if you’ve got a mind to. They don’t have any enemies except man, so they don’t scare easily. I figure I can save a few moose if I buzz them when I can. Put a little fear into them. Anyways, I do like to look at them.” He glanced out the window. “St. John River below. Just a few minutes to Raven Lake.”

  “Moose are legal now, I understand,” I persisted.

  “Oh, yes. Big controversy up here. The Audubon-type assholes think it’s horrible that people want to shoot moose. It’s very closely regulated. There’s a lottery for permits. The Fish and Game fellas study the herd, figure out how much of it needs to be harvested each year to keep it healthy. Not much sport to it, moose hunting. But a rack of moose antlers looks nice in the pine-paneled dens down there in Wellesley and Greenwich and Scarsdale. Sorry, man.”

  I laughed. “Don’t mention it. I don’t hunt animals.”

  “Best damn eatin’ critter on the face of the earth,” said Gib. “Bar nothin’. Ever eaten moose, man?”

  “Not that anybody told me.”

  “Even Thoreau said so. Like sweet, supertender beef. Look at what they eat. Lily shoots, watercress. Stands to reason. A Maine family can get through a whole winter eating off the carcass of one adult moose. Makes perfect sense to let folks shoot them rather than have them starve to death in the winter. Even if there ain’t any sport to it. The guides love it. Naturally. They can absolutely guarantee their sport gets a point-blank shot at a moose. Sometimes they’ll dick around for a few days before they show them the moose, just so the sports’ll think they’ve done some hunting. But if they wanted to, any asshole who can point a gun could fill his permit in half a day with a decent guide. I guess the bleedin’ hearts think it’s okay to kill a deer because it’s harder to find. I imagine the deer don’t like gettin’ shot any better than a moose does, though.” He craned his neck and squinted out over his wingtip. “There’s your lake.”

  I peered down. Raven Lake looked like a dozen others we had flown over—crescent shaped, perhaps two miles long, with the silver threads of an inlet at the north end and an outlet at the south. Except this one, unlike most of the others, had a dock stretched over the water halfway down the eastern shore and a clearing where several buildings huddled, backed up to the dense woods. “Lake Banana,” I muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  We approached the lake from the north end. Gib brought the plane down to about five hundred feet and flew the length of the lake. He studied the surface of the water as it slipped past under us. At the southern end we tilted up, banked in a tight circle, and returned. He came back at it low. We seemed to be barely skimming the treetops. When we had water under us, we sank down so that our eyes were at treetop level. Gib paralleled the shoreline. The engine roared as he throttled back. We touched, bounced, touched, skipped, and touched again. This time we stayed down, and I could feel the water brake us. Then we taxied toward the dock in front of Raven Lake Lodge, rocking on the rippled surface of the water.

  “Nice job,” I said.

  Gib shrugged. “Made it that time. Always a relief.”

  “I didn’t realize you were concerned.”

  “I’m always concerned, man. That’s what keeps me alive.”

  I studied his face for a hint of irony. I saw none.

  Four

  MARGE WHEELER WAS STANDING on the dock, and as soon as Gib had maneuvered the Cessna up onto the sand beach, she came bounding down. “Damn,” she said, smiling broadly, “it’s good to see you, Brady Coyne. It’s been too long.”

  She laid a wet kiss on my cheek and gave me an awkward one-armed hug around the waist. Marge had flashing eyes. She wore her hair in a short ponytail, which I noticed had begun to streak with silver since I had last seen her. She was about forty now, a full twenty-five years younger than Tiny, who loved to boast about how he had snatched her away from the preppies of Princeton.

  I held her at arm’s length. “You’re looking fine, Marge.”

  “Damn straight. Wood choppin’ and canoe paddlin’.” Her plaid flannel shirt was open at the throat that one extra button, which, on slick lady attorneys in their off-white silk blouses, always looks calculated. On Marge it just looked careless. And sexy. She patted her hip. “I can still squeeze into these old jeans.” She jabbed my stomach with her forefinger. “You could use a little wood chopping yourself, Counselor.”

  “The only exercise I want is hauling in big salmon,” I said.

  “That can be arranged. Come on up. You’ll be staying at the lodge, if that’s okay. The cabins are full.”

  Gib had unloaded my gear from the plane and was busy making it fast. “Be staying for supper, Gib?” Marge said to him.

  “Yup. Need a sack, too.”

  “There’s room with the guides, if that’ll be all right.”

  She picked up my aluminum rod cases, and I shouldered my big duffel bag. We walked up the slight incline to the main lodge.

  “Too bad you weren’t here on Monday,” she said. “We could’ve used a level head around here.”

  “What happened?”

  “We lost a sport.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fella disappeared. Ken Rolando, from Albany. He was up here by himself. Came in Sunday night. Monday it was raining. All the others went out, anyway. They usually figure, you pay two hundred and fifty bucks a day, you don’t want to sit around the lodge playing solitaire on a rainy day. But Mr. Rolando, he said he was going to hang around for the morning, wait and see if the weather was going to break. Around noon we noticed he wasn’t around. Figured he went out for a walk, maybe casting from the shore. Or he could’ve just gone back to his cabin for a nap. But when he didn’t show up for dinner, Tiny went to his cabin. He wasn’t there. We asked all the guides and guests. Nobody’d seen him all day.” She shrugged. “Still haven’t. We never had that happen before. Oh, once or twice every fall a deer hunter’ll get twisted around in the woods. But the guides always manage to find him. Generally they have enough sense to build a smoky fire, shoot off their rifles. But Mr. Rolando just disap
peared. Five days now. It doesn’t look that good.”

  We climbed the broad steps onto the front porch of the lodge. “Want to sit and rock for a bit?” Marge said. “Tiny’s inside changing. He should be out in a minute. This thing’s really thrown him for a loop.”

  On the porch a receiving line of rocking chairs waited with open arms for the weary fisherman. “Brumbys,” Vern had once told me with pride. “Best damn rockers on earth. Made from good Georgia oak.”

  The porch extended the full width of the spruce log lodge. A railing ran along the front at just the right height for propping up a man’s feet while rocking. The only thing missing was a penknife and a stick to whittle on. Marge and I hitched up Brumbys and sat down beside each other. Before us lay Raven Lake, the ripples catching and reflecting the slanting rays of the late-afternoon sun. Beyond it the endless spruce and balsam forest rolled north and westward toward the Canadian border.

  I sighed deeply. “I think I love the smell best of all.”

  “Pitch pine and woodsmoke,” Marge said. “Tiny’s smells. I think it was the smell of that man that seduced me.”

  I lit a cigarette. “So what have you done about Mr. Rolando?”

  “By the time we figured out that he was gone, it was nearly dark. We sent the guides out. Couple of them took out the square enders with motors to look around the shoreline of the lake. Couple others went through the woods as best as they could with flashlights. Shot off their guns, hollered a little, looked for tracks or something. Bud got into the truck and went down the road a ways. They didn’t find him. No trace. It had rained hard all day, of course. Next morning Tiny got ahold of Thurl Harris—he’s the sheriff down in Greenville. Called him on the shortwave. Thurl flew in that afternoon after the weather finally broke. Asked a bunch of damn-fool questions. Wanted to get the state police up here with dogs. Tiny reminded him ever so gently that we’d just had about three inches of rain and it was unlikely the dogs’d be able to smell anything. So Thurl, he huffed and puffed a bit, pretending he knew what he was doing, and then kinda shrugged and got back into his airplane and flew away. I checked Mr. Rolando’s registration form, got his phone number. Next day Tiny took the truck down to Greenville and called it. Got a man name of Philip Rolando. Kenneth Rolando’s brother.”