There were only two times in his life that Victor Coltrane prayed to God, and both times he left it too late. The first occasion was as he and Marcus Dodge headed out into the vast Algonquin Wilderness to track down a man named Wilbur Hazard. Coltrane prayed that they would not find Hazard. It was common knowledge in the town that Hazard was out of his mind. Coltrane had seen the proof it in Hazard’s eyes - cold and sparkling and vicious. As the canopy of trees closed over them, Coltrane sensed disaster coming, the way he could feel the approach of thunder as a tingle in the back of his neck. Instinct told him to turn back. Warning lights blinked red behind his eyes. But he knew he couldn’t show himself to be a coward in front of his best friend. So Victor Coltrane walked on into the wilderness, his pockets filled with sandwiches and bullets and a full canteen bumping against his thigh with every step. He was a heavyset man with a broad face and high cheek bones behind which he could hide none of his emotions. The slightest degree of happiness or fear would crease itself into the wide expanse of his forehead or make dents in the roundness of his chin. He wore his shoulder blades like medieval armor on his back and his heavy neck and tree-trunk legs seemed built to take the shock of a danger which hadn’t arrived.
Marcus Dodge was taller than Coltrane. He had short blonde hair, straight nose, and eyes the brown-green color of old bronze. When he moved through the woods, it was with the unconscious rhythm of a long-distance runner, as if he could keep going for the rest of his life and never tire, drawing footprint rings around the world. Dodge was not afraid of Wilbur Hazard. His waking nightmares had not bloated Hazard into the beast that Coltrane imagined. And knowing this only made Coltrane more afraid than before, even though both of them were armed with shotguns and revolvers. Coltrane wished he had never become a policeman. He wished he was anywhere but here.
A long wail came from the distance. It spread through the trees and the trees echoed back until the whole forest took up this wail and held it, trembling and ringing as if the forest were one vast struck crystal. Then at last the sound began to fade. It was the train on its way from Montreal to St. John’s, New Brunswick. They heard the thunder of its wagons crossing the iron bridge that ran across the narrows of the lake. Sometimes, these trains were sixty cars long, pulled by four engines and showing on their doors dozens of railroad company names - Southern, Santa Fe, Solid Gold, Railbox, Canadian National, Ashley, Drew and Northern, the Chessie System, Missouri Pacific, the blue and white of the Bangor and Aroostock Line and the far-from-home banana yellow cars of the Appalachicola Northern. They shook the ground, made the tracks too hot to touch, and flattened into shiny postage stamps the coins that children placed upon the rails. Then the sound was gone, leaving only the murmur of wind through the tops of the pines.
Dodge and Coltrane walked in silence. The air was sweet with pine sap heated by the sun and gangly-legged mosquitoes hummed in their ears. Sometimes they followed the stamped-out broadness of human trails and other times along the narrow, branch-crossed paths of deer. Then they came to a stand of white birch. Old bark peeled in scrolls from the trunks. It was like moving in a maze. The thin white trees seemed to shift in the corners of their eyes.
“I see some footprints!” Dodge called back.
Coltrane came running, heart beating faster now. He reached where Dodge was standing and looked down. The knit of Coltrane’s sweater expanded and contracted across his chest as he caught his breath. The earth where he stood was damp from a stream trickling out of the rocks and dead leaves. In the mud was the fresh mark of a lug-soled boot. Coltrane rolled up his sleeves, revealing the hard sinews of muscle that wrapped around his arms. He crouched down and set his hand in the mud. He dabbed his fingers in the neat boot print and blurred it. “It must be him,” he said.
Dodge raised his head and looked around. Then suddenly the expression changed on his face, as if something was there, circling them, but he could not see it.
“What?” Coltrane yanked his gun out of its holster. “What’s out there?”
Dodge answered him in a whisper. “This is where I stopped to rest that time I carried Gilbert Blake off the mountain. After he got attacked by that bear.”
Coltrane lowered his gun. He slid it back into its holster. “That was a terrible way to die,” he said, “even for a crooked little money-lending man like Blake.”
Dodge nodded in agreement. “For months he had been pestering me to go hunting with him. I guess in the end I just got tired of saying no. And I’d seen that bear up on the mountain ridge earlier in the summer. So now that the hunting season had started, I just gave in and said he could come with me.”
Coltrane knew what Dodge was thinking and he interrupted. “It wasn’t your fault. If he had done what you told him to do, he’d still be alive and getting on everyone’s nerves.”
“I remember,” said Dodge, “when Blake showed up on the doorstep. He had all new gear on. His boots weren’t even scuffed. His clothes were made of Gortex and polar fuzzy stuff and when he walked he made a rustling sound like someone crumpling and uncrumpling a big plastic bag. We went in along the railroad tracks and I told him we would loop around the other side of the ridge. Then we would meet on the summit. So it meant Blake was supposed to hang back a little to let me catch up.” And suddenly the smell of Blake’s blood returned to Dodge’s nostrils, heavy and metallic, as if his hands and face and clothes were splashed with it again. He breathed in suddenly and the smell disappeared. “But that man Blake,” he continued. “That stupid dead man goes racing up the hill to get the bear first and then take the credit for himself. And that was when I heard a sound that at first I thought was Blake falling into the bushes. Kind of a thrashing sound. I figured he’d just gotten tangled up in all his Gortex and polar fuzzy clothes. But then I heard a roaring sound, like when you open the door of a hot furnace and after that I heard screaming.” Dodge remembered lying on the muddy ground beside this stream where he stood now, too tired to carry Blake any further. And Blake’s body lay there beside him, his ribs all broken like a flimsy packing crate.
“And then I saw the bear. It was standing on top of Blake. It pinned his arms to the ground and was tearing off his face. So I shot it and its jaw went snap! Like a whip crack from the bullet. And then my gun jammed and I didn’t have a choice but to stand there and stare the bear down. And I swear that even I’d shot it half to death, that bear seemed more alive that I did. It was sniffing the air with its fat black nose, like it was getting my scent and would come back for me later. And then it turned and walked into the bushes, like it had all the time in the world. I carried Blake down the mountain. It took me over two hours and by the time I got back to town, he was dead. I carried him to the churchyard and started to dig him a grave. I wasn’t thinking straight. And Reverend Barnes comes out and tells me I can’t do it. But then he gets a look at Blake and he went and got a shovel and helped me dig the grave.” Dodge remembered washing Blake’s blood from his hands at this same stream. He recalled how it had stuck to his skin and how he scraped it away with his fingernails in the painfully cold water. Now he lowered himself down, knees cracking and washed his hands in the stream, as if they were bloody again. “Do you remember” he asked Coltrane, “how many days we spent looking for that bear and how we never found it?”
“I wonder if it died,” said Coltrane. “Let’s not stay here anymore.
They pushed on through the woods, but now they stayed closer together and often looked back down the trail as it closed up after them. They put out their guns and kept their fingers straight beside the trigger guards. Neither spoke of being afraid, but they were hunting Hazard the same as if he’d been that bear. More prints studded the wet ground around another spring. They scooped some water up to drink, just as they knew Hazard had done.
Earlier, Coltrane’s head had been crowded with daydreams, as if his mind had fled from the forest and left the rest of him behind. But now that he had seen the footprints, Coltrane felt his senses sharpen. The forest had hundreds of sounds and Coltrane heard all of them at once. Each shading of green and brown reached his eyes. Each branch zoomed into perfect focus. Coltrane smelled the still, cool air in the hollows. He thought about how easy it was to hide in the woods. Shadows dappled you into invisibility. You stayed still until each sound and smell became familiar, and the birds started singing again. You gathered the silence around you, becoming a part of the forest.
When they reached the train tracks, it was almost sunset. The rails were shiny where the wheels ran regularly across them. The rest was dull and orange with rust. It was too late to walk back through the woods, so Coltrane and Dodge decided they would head along the tracks and into town. Later, they would drive out in Coltrane’s truck and pick up the patrol car they had left at the trail head.
They passed a cabin by the side of the lake, which belonged to a man named Booth who showed up for a few weeks every summer. Seeing that no one was home, the two men stopped there to rest and eat their sandwiches. Dodge spotted two Adirondack chairs tucked under the porch. They pulled out the chairs, set their guns against the cabin wall and sat looking across the lake. The sky turned purple with the closing in of night.
While Dodge walked over to the bushes to have a pee, Coltrane sat slumped in his chair, a half-eaten sandwich bunched in his fist. He tried to hide his relief at not finding Hazard. But he felt sure they had been close. At some muddy twist in the trail, Hazard’s mad-man eyes had blinked from the heart of the forest, watching them go by. Coltrane rummaged in his pockets for his pack of Lucky Strikes. He heard Dodge behind him, creaking the old cabin boards. He turned, holding out the red bull’s-eyed cigarette pack. “You want one?”
It was not Dodge. The door to the cabin was open and a man stood half way out.
Coltrane thought it must be Mr. Booth, but the shadows had stolen his face, so he couldn’t be sure. Coltrane stood up, composing an apology in his head for making himself comfortable in Mr. Booth’s chair. But the man was not standing like the owner of a place where strangers have appeared. Instead, he clung to the darkness. The air around him seemed to shudder.
The man took a step towards Coltrane. The planks creaked under his feet.
“Hello?” Coltrane tried to say but only whispered. Then the knowledge reached him in a wave of nausea. He felt dizzy and sick. It was not Booth. It was Hazard, who seemed to stare straight through Coltrane and half way out across the world. Coltrane lunged towards the place where his shotgun stood balanced against the cabin wall. He grabbed the gun and turned to face the man.
Hazard stood almost on top of him. In his right hand he held a knife. Its blade was double edged and longer than an outstretched hand.
Coltrane tried to raise the shotgun and with one vicious shove Hazard wrenched it from his hands. The gun flew out of Coltrane’s grasp and skittered away onto the cabin’s front lawn. He felt a sudden coldness in his empty palms.
Hazard’s foot slid forward over the rough planking.
With all the strength he had, Coltrane grabbed at Hazard’s chest, hands clawed into the rough wool of Hazard’s coat. He was about to throw his head forward into the man’s nose, when suddenly the breath vanished out of his lungs. His head started spinning inside. Coltrane saw the man turn and leap out into the dark, as if the grass were not land but water, and he would disappear beneath it.
Coltrane did not know what had happened to him. His whole body was trembling. He stepped back until he was resting against the wall of the cabin. Then he looked down at the splotches of his hunting jacket camouflage. There was a small tear in the cloth. The knife blade had cut him. He reached a finger through the tear and felt blood pouring down his stomach. Not just a trickle. It was pouring. The dizziness grew suddenly worse. Coltrane dropped to his knees. He vaguely felt the thud of wood against his joints. His body had become a whirlpool. He coughed and blood flew from his mouth, spattering the cabin boards.
Hazard sprinted across the lawn and up the steep sides of the railway embankment. He felt a sickness at how easily the blade had gone in, as if behind the layer of canvas Victor Coltrane had been made of nothing more than sand. He kicked through the raspberry bushes that grew beside the ties. The knife was still in his hands. He swung his body up and landed on the tracks. Then he began to run, adjusting his stride to the awkward distance between the spacers and the tracks. In a strange, fragmented thought, Hazard wondered why the tracks ahead seemed to vanish in a wall of blackness.
Something burst against his face and suddenly his nose and teeth and jaw all felt like broken glass.
Dodge was standing on the tracks. He had watched what happened and had been running towards the cabin when he saw Hazard jump from the porch. So Dodge stayed where he was and took the revolver from its holster. An ugly calm hovered in Dodge’s body as he stood waiting, the checkered grips of the gun digging deep into his palm.
When Dodge saw the long knife in Hazard’s hand, he knew Coltrane would be dead. Dodge had no time to be angry. He raised his revolver, cocked back the hammer, and put three rounds into Hazard at a range of fifteen feet.
Hazard’s mouth was wide open as if to scream, but he didn’t make a sound. His arms spread like bony wings. His legs swung out from under him and his head smacked hard on the ground, teeth cracking as they smashed together. The knife clattered onto the tracks.
For a moment longer, Dodge kept the gun aimed at Hazard. Cordite smoke billowed past him. Its smell was bitter in his lungs. He waited for Hazard to move, but in the dark it was as if Hazard had vanished and all that remained of him were crumpled clothes and boots with the leather chafed to suede.
Dodge ran to where Coltrane lay, scrabbling down the gravel embankment, hacking the skin from his palms as if he had scraped his hand down a cheese-grater. He dove into the blackness which had sunk down on the cabin.
Coltrane was still on his knees. He kept his hands pressed to the wound. It was difficult to breathe. He thought it would be easier if he could just stand, but he felt too frightened to move. Coltrane’s head was filled with a jumbled desperation to be well again. Not to need help. Not to go to the hospital. Voices in his mind were trying to tell him, in hopeful sputtering broadcasts, that he would need only a few stitches. He would not be sent to the vaporized land of general anesthetic. But the rest of him knew he was at the mercy of whoever would help him, and if no one helped him he would die. Several times, a heaving groan pushed out from deep inside him. It was a sound he did not even know he could make. It did not come from the pain. It came from his great disappointment. The slow, downward glance of knowing that this was the end.
At last Coltrane struggled to his feet. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He clenched the skin around his wound and felt only tiredness where he expected to feel pain. He wished there would be pain, instead of this dragging fatigue. At least when it hurt, he could be sure he was still alive.
A shape lunged from the night. Coltrane wheezed in terror. He thought it was Hazard again, come back to finish him off. Coltrane cowered crooked like a hunchback, one arm raised in an offering to the blade.
But it was only Dodge, who took Coltrane in his arms and made him sit against the cabin wall. Dodge talked to him and held up fingers, trying to make Coltrane say how many there were, to see if he had drifted into shock. It all seemed impossibly childish to Coltrane. Dodge slapped him in the face. In the pop of Dodge’s palm boxing his ear, a fuzzy sensation spread across Coltrane’s cheeks and spider-crawled over his head.
Dodge pried away Coltrane’s clawed hand and then undid the shirt. He took Coltrane’s Zippo lighter and struck it and used its flame to see by. Dodge could tell from the tiny bright red bubbles appearing around the gash that the knife had gone through to the lung. He had to cover the hole or Coltrane would drown in his own blood. Dodge ran into the cabin.
Coltrane was trapped in the whirlpool. He could not fight it. The vortex had hold of his heart. He held up the white of his palms in surrender to the dark angels that seemed to cluster around him. Coltrane found himself thinking of what Dodge had said about the bear, that it seemed more alive than he did. this had not made sense to coltrane until now. it was as if he could grasp in his hands the force of his own life - some kind of energy which could not be quantified, something powerful and mysterious, which would not be snuffed out even by death. and suddenly coltrane knew with perfect clarlty that even if the bear was nothing more than a toothless skull stained by dead leaves in some tangled thicket in the forest, that unnamed fragment of its power was still alive, still roaming the woods, but jolted from its body by the impact of the bullets. and what that bear had was more than coltrane possessed and coltrane felt suddenly ashamed that faced now with his own oblivion, this was all the immortality he could find inside himself.
Dodge reappeared on the porch with a roll of plastic wrap, some electrical tape and a flashlight. He set up the flashlight, whose beam glanced off the rafters of the porch and enclosed them like the dome of a bell jar. Then he laid Coltrane down and bared the man’s chest. He set the plastic wrap over the wound. The candy-apple red bubbles pressed up against the clear plastic. Then Dodge took the black electrical tape and stuck the plastic wrap to Coltrane’s chest.
It was two miles down the tracks to town. Dodge knew he could not carry Coltrane that far. It was half a mile across the lake, but they had no boat. Dodge knew if he left Coltrane here, the shock and the night cold would kill him. Then he had an idea and ran around to the back of the house. A canoe was propped against the wall. Under it were paddles and square flotation cushions. He dragged the canoe fifty feet to the water’s edge. It slid across the lawn with a gentle, whispering sound. He reached the lake. Water rushed into his boots. Then he ran back to the cabin. Dodge hooked his hands under Coltrane’s armpits and hauled him down to the canoe. Coltrane’s heels dragged through the grass, leaving a phosphorescent trail through the dew.
“I’m going to put you in the canoe, Victor. We’re going to make you a little chair out of these cushions. Are you listening to me now?”
Coltrane wasn’t listening. He kept floating in and out of his body, like playing hop-scotch in slow-motion. One second he was being dragged down to the beach and the next he seemed to be gliding far above the Booths’ cabin, where he could see the railroad tracks running through the forest like a river. Then Coltrane tumbled back into his body. He looked out across the lake. It was a darkly ruffled plain, which he knew they would never cross before he died. The idea no longer frightened him…. It was just a fact.
“You see, Victor?” Dodge set up the cushions at the bow, and slapped them like someone fluffing up a pillow. He talked to fill the quiet, as if silence itself would bring death skulking from its hiding place. “I’m making you a chair. Make you comfy for the ride. Can you hear me Victor?”
Coltrane wanted to speak with Dodge, but no strength he had left could bring the words to his mouth.
Tiny waves patted the shore. They were clotted with old leaves, which painted Dodge’s boots as he shoved the canoe into knee-deep water and then climbed aboard. He grabbed the paddle and dug it into the crow-black waves. As he swung the paddle up and over, he sent a spattering of water across Coltrane’s face. They moved slowly out towards the distant lights of the town, which lay like a cluster of fallen and still burning meteors among the trees on the far shore. Wind blew off the mountain and into their faces. When Dodge raised his head, he could see the silver smoke trail of the Milky Way from one end of the horizon to the other. “You still with me, Victor?” he asked.
“Yes.” Coltrane’s dried-out mouth opened and closed, as if to drink the droplets that had splashed across his face.
“You stay awake now,” said Dodge. Sweat trickled down the trench of his spine.
This time, Coltrane only managed to snuffle in reply. The wound was calling to him, sending out hard thumping messages through his chest which fanned out through his body like ripples across a pond. Then a thought appeared that woke Coltrane from his numbness. “Did Hazard get away?” he asked.
“No.” said Dodge. After half an hour paddling, it seemed to him that he could feel each band of tendon, each thread of muscle in his arm. He looked up at the moon, just as a chevron of Canada geese passed before it. He heard their distant honking. It reminded him of a storybook he had read as a child, in which a woman had traveled out among the stars while she sat in a chair towed by geese. The illustration showed the same silver plating of moonlight on her face and hair that Dodge saw now on the smooth backs of the birds. He used to fall asleep imagining himself in the chair and the thrum of beating wings as the geese raised him up through the cloudless night sky. It seemed like such a miracle. As the geese passed into the dark over the Lake, Dodge realized that Coltrane needed the same kind of miracle, something which appeared so out of reach that even to dream of it seemed foolish.
They were close to the town now. Dodge began shouting for help. His voice carried on the lake, amplified among the ranks of pine.
After a few minutes, flashlight beams began to clip across the water. They found Dodge’s canoe and clung to it. Dodge went blind in the glare but kept paddling towards the harsh silver that splashed at his eyes.
Coltrane had no idea where this light was coming from. He wondered if it might be the angels and perhaps he was already dead. And maybe all that had happened to him since he first fell on to the dried-out planks of Booth’s porch was just the stubborn plodding of his brain, carving out an imagined survival for itself, while the rest of him lay cold and stiffening and frozen in time. He could no longer feel the grip of the plastic wrap at every rise and fall of his chest. It wasn’t so bad, this business of being dead. Coltrane felt only curious about what would happen next. Now for the second time in his life, he began to pray. He did not pray with words, because he couldn’t remember any of the prayers he had been taught as a child, and it had been years since he set foot inside a church. He wasn’t even sure what he was praying for. He no longer knew for certain whether he wanted to survive. There were voices all around him. The voices of the angels, he thought. They reached through to the marrow of his bones. And the last thought which passed through his head before he lost consciousness was that the angels - were laughing at him.
The bow of the canoe ground up against the sand and people were all around. They waded out into the water and dragged the canoe up onto land. Their questions popped in Dodge’s ears. These voices were familiar but in his confusion, Dodge could not put names to their faces. Dodge did not answer. He was too tired and blinded by the lights. Strong hands helped him from the boat.
An ambulance bumped over the curb of the parking lot and drove across the grass to where Coltrane lay beside the canoe. A Medic opened Coltrane’s shirt. Under the glossy film of plastic wrap, Coltrane’s blood was a puddle of neon cherry.
Wind blew in from the lake and slapped waves on the pale sand. Loons grieved out on the water. Children ran past Dodge towards the flashing lights. Some wore windbreakers over their pajamas. Their eyes were fixed on the commotion Everyone seemed to be talking. In each voice was the high-pitched jabber of panic.
Coltrane was placed on a stretcher, strapped to it with orange nylon bands, and carried to the ambulance. An IV hose snaked down into Coltrane’s arm. In the flickering light, the IV bag looked like a tiny sack of diamonds.
Dodge could not see Coltrane’s face. He was lost in the crowd.
The ambulance spun its wheels on the grass. It roared into the street, ear-drilling sirens sounding through town, rising and falling. The children ran after it, until the ambulance gained speed and left them behind, coughing in exhaust.
Dodge had no idea where they were taking Coltrane. There was no place in town that could handle such an injury. Part of Dodge wanted to get away from the noise, but the rest of him thought he should stay and help bring order to the chaos of the crowd. But the chaos belonged to itself and was unstoppable. For a while longer, Dodge just sat there, his sweat growing cold and pasting his shirt to his back with the clamminess of raw meat. No one came to talk to him. They still hovered around the canoe, as if afraid to leave the place.
Dodge got up and walked. He had to get home to where things were familiar and he could feel himself anchored to the world again. It was several miles to his house, but he was too dazed to think of anything except walking there. He headed down Main Street. Grit crunched under his boots. When Dodge reached the crest of the hill which rose above the town, he turned to look back. The sabres of flashlights, still feeling their way across the black water. It was as if they were expecting more canoes, a convoy from the island of the dead.
When Dodge reached home he sat himself down at the kitchen table with a decanter of whiskey. He took a sip and felt the smoky burn go down inside him like embers. In the stillness of the room, he felt the steady beating of his heart.
Then something happened to him which at first he didn’t understand. The peace of mind which had begun to settle on his vanished so completely, it was as if it had never been there. His body hummed the way a sewing machine does before the needle jabs into the cloth. Something was rushing towards him. He could not hear or see it, but it was out there and coming closer. It was something vast and terrible, sweeping down the mountainside and through the blindman’s darkness of the forest and he felt its approach like a freezing wind which blew through his body as if his skin had been nothing more than gauze. This strange gust passed through the town as if it were searching for something. And just as suddenly, it vanished, leaving nothing but a swirling emptiness behind.
Then Dodge realized what it was and he knew where it was going. It had not been looking for him. It was hunting for Victor Coltrane, and Dodge knew that now his friend was gone for good.
This waking dream would never leave him, and years into the future he would find himself suddenly back at this table, and would taste again the amber fire of the whiskey and feel once more the weight of the decanter as he raised it to his mouth, blue night winking off the crystal. He never spoke about it, because he never dared to say that on the night when death itself came stalking through the town, Marcus Dodge had never felt so close to life.
-Paul Watkins
