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Chapter One

From where he lay on his cot, Reg Cumber could hear the wind threshing the juniper and cedars along the shore of Unknown Pond, whistling, and he thought of Pap, those years ago when he would whistle, low and sweet, for the kids to gather around him on the front stoop. Hoisting himself upright, back to the wall, Reg buttoned his union suit, scratched his unshaven chin and rose in the dark still of the cabin. Lowering his head to accommodate the doorway, he shuffled into the kitchen.

    From a shot glass atop the stove he took a wooden match and struck it on the counter, his breath smoking in the matchglow. He lit a burner; the gas caught and a ring of blue flame sputtered, steadied itself. From a tobacco tin he fished out a joint, crouched and lit it, cranked the faucet and leaned against the counter, smoking. The faucet vomited chunks of filth. Pipes moaned. When the water finally ran clear he filled a coffeepot, dumped the last of the grounds into it and sat it on the burner. Rubbing his hands together he stepped to the back door.

    The door creaked as he pushed it open, and a rush of cold air stung his knees, bared through holes worn in his union suit.

    Outside, the moon sat low and shone pale through gathering clouds, and the trees between the cabin and Unknown Pond stood dark and formless. He could hear the muted gaggle of unseen Canada geese rafted against the shoreline. The late-August snow had held off, for now, the worst of the cold front remaining just north, in Canada. The grass was white with frost, and looked as if it would shatter if he were towalk on it.

    He flicked the roach out into the dark and breathed into his hands and leaned back to stare up at a starless sky.

    The air smelled of ore. Of snow.

    "Fuck," he said and stepped back inside, the door squeaking shut behind him.

    Inside he poured a cup of coffee and turned off the burner, wincing at the stink of propane. The coffee seared his insides, but he drank it anyway. He rapped a fist on the counter, knuckles like beaten knots of wood, then opened a pie safe on the counter and looked at the pistol. A .45. Pap's. He picked it up and considered it in the room's growing light. He licked his thumb and rubbed at a stubborn smudge on the grip, then set the pistol on the table.

    In the bedroom he dressed: duckcloth trousers from the back of a chair, a flannel shirt, a wool shirt over that. Workboots on, he went to the kitchen and drank down his coffee, now cooled, stuck the .45 into his pants. He grabbed an army fatigue jacket off a nail in the wall. Taking a cap from one of the jacket pockets, he tucked his hair back behind his ears, snapped the cap against his thigh, creased its bill and set it on his head with a tug. In the other pocket was a camouflage headnet. He didn't put it on. From under the sink he grabbed a rucksack, looked inside it, nodded. He opened the back door and crept outside, the door settling in its jamb without a sound, the cold air rushing at him once more.

The early-morning sky was low and gray. Beneath it, beneath the trees, Reg was a speck on the mountainside, a nothing in a mess of wild reckless blackberry cane that scratched and snagged like pike's teeth in his jacket and pants. He clambered up ravines in the graylight of dawn, pushed through slash and header debris, up and up, the rucksack cumbersome, its straps gnawing at his collarbone, sweat gliding down his back, chilling him. He stopped and rested against a larch, gasping, wriggling his toes. It was difficult to see very far: the mountains of August were not the mountains of April; in the spring the mountains were a landscape of scrawny wintered trees shot green with peeping buds; the summer woods were choked and fuming with leaves and vines and ferns. He preferred the woods during winter, the silence of them, the harsh landscape, carved by the glaciers so long ago, bared before him. He rooted in his jacket and brought out a cigaret pack, shook a butt loose and lit it. Inhaling deeply, he adjusted the .45 where it dug into his hip, then trudged on, head bent as if into a violent wind.

    Fending off sapling branches, he came onto a vast clearing, logged years before, and tripped and fell. A tomato stake lay on the ground beside him, a section of chicken wire near it. Fiddlehead ferns closed about him like giant green ostrich feathers. He could hear the distant thockthockthock of a lone pileated woodpecker.

    Standing, he saw the plants, just ahead, rising from the underbrush, a thick grove, mossgreen and reeking. Deer had made recent use of the downed fence, the frost stamped with their tracks and littered with shit. He took off his cap and put on the headnet. Stupid not to have worn the netting from the start. Stupid.

    Two years ago, he and Lamar and Bump Duclos had been growing out in back of Bump's barn, and some son of a bitch had barked about it. Cops had pictures of Bump. The list was long as to who might have talked, but from the beginning Reg had thought it was the Lavalettes who'd run their mouths. Mack and Elis, likely.

    Reg looked around the woods.

    Bump had called him in a panic that afternoon, told him he suspected the cops had been out at his place, had been watching it. Said he was going to rip up the plants behind the barn, destroy the seedlings in the cellar. Reg had told him to calm down, he'd dig up the plants himself, transplant them up in Moose Bog, but no one was ripping them out of the ground and losing him all that money.

    "What if they come back?" Bump had said, his voice low, as if he were trying to keep from being heard by people in a nearby room.

    "Plead the fifth," Reg had said. "I'll take the plants, sell em, get yah the money if yah need a lawyer. But don't yah say a fuckin word if they come back."

    He'd driven directly to Bump's farm. He hadn't noticed, until later, the cruiser parked behind the barn, and he'd found nothing remarkable about the front door being off its lower hinge when he'd let himself inside and walked down the hallway to the back of the house, to the kitchen, where Bump often sat in the evening waiting for one of his "rare" birds to show itself at the back feeder: a scarlet tanager, a Baltimore oriole. But when he'd stepped into the kitchen, instead of being greeted by Bump, he'd been greeted by a pistol barrel jammed under his chin; two men had wrenched his arms behind his back and forced him down flat on the kitchen floor, his face pushed into the grit of road salt and dirt.

    "Fuck," he'd said, his face ground harder to the floor. "Fuck you." The taste of blood.

    The troopers had cuffed him and yanked him to his knees, and he'd glanced into the living room to see Bump sitting on the edge of the couch, peering at him through the fingers of his unhandcuffed hands. He'd had a pitiful look on his face, as if he were trying to convey that he was sorry, that he'd had no choice. The fuck. There was always a choice. Reg had tried to stand, to get at Bump, but a trooper, the taller and older of the two, had wedged a baton between his arms and cranked it. The other trooper, who wore sunglasses and was short and broad and thick-necked, a real gun-happy sufferer of littleman's disease, had stood a few feet away, legs spread, a revolver leveled at Reg's face, its hammer back. The other trooper had rooted Reg's wallet out from his back pocket.

    "Mr. Cumber," he'd said. It wasn't a question, it was an affirmation.

    He'd wanted to know everything Reg knew about the plants behind the barn, the ones downstairs, about the guns in the house, a felony when involved with possession with intent.

    Reg had denied knowing anything. He'd come to see his friend, that was it.

    "You always walk right in?" the trooper had asked.

    "Known em all my life."

    "Not too well, apparently."

    Reg had tried to stand again and had gotten a baton across his back for it.

    "You know a Lamar Cumber?" the first trooper asked.

    Reg hadn't said anything.

    "He's your cousin, isn't he?"

    "I don't know a fuckin thing."

    "Apparently," Gun Happy had said, pushing his glasses onto the back of his head with two fingers as he stepped over to Reg. He put the gun to Reg's cheek. "How'd you get here?"

    "Yah saw me pull up."

    Gun Happy had shaken his head. "So, if we go out to that truck of yours and we look in that tool vault, we aren't going to find anything? Not so much as a pipe, a joint, not so much as one fucking seed?" Reg had thought about the bags of vermiculite, the baggies of seeds, the quarter-pound stash, his pipe and papers, his grow lights, all in the truck. "No," he'd said. "And when yah don't find nothin, I'm gonna sue yur fuckin ass. I come over to shoot the shit, and I get this."

    Gun Happy had straightened up and looked at the other trooper, who'd leaned back on the kitchen table and said: "Check it." Gun Happy had nodded and stalked off down the hall. The other trooper had walked over beside Reg and looked out the window: A scarlet tanager, a male, plumage bright as blood, had lighted outside on the feeder.

    "We got you on tape," the trooper had said, so softly that, at first, Reg had thought he'd been talking to the bird. "The call your friend made. To get you over here. We taped it."

    Reg had tried once again to get at Bump, but the trooper had proved too quick, and too vicious, with the baton.

    Reg had found out later that the troopers had arrested Bump immediately. Said if he didn't cooperate, they'd seize the farm. He'd do five. Minimum. A felony. He'd cooperated. He'd given up Lamar and Reg, and the Lavalettes.

    It showed you.

    Reg had done fifteen months at Fairland. Lamar had, too.

    Bump'd only done twenty days.

    First couple weeks inside, Reg had planned how he would burn down Bump's barn and farmhouse when he got out. But he hadn't been allowed the chance. Claude Lavalette, Mack and Elis's brother, had cut a deal, walked away clean, which made Reg believe they'd been part of it all along, somehow. Claude had made it to daylight and come knocking for Mr. Cooperation the day of his release. But by the time he'd arrived at the farm, Bump had given a blow job to the barrel of a twelve gauge, and pulled the trigger.

    That was the story, anyway.

    Stupid fuck.

    Reg rubbed his face, his bitten nails catching in the headnet. He stepped into the fenced area. The plants dwarfed him. Water dripped from drooping leaves to patter the ground. A mist eddied in his wake. Exhausted and hungry from the hike, he sat down, his back against a stump. Deer had been at the lowest leaves and buds, stripped some of the plants for the first few feet. Leaves and leaders lay scattered about, but most of the buds seemed to have withstood what the summer, and now this cold front, had brought. The plants were healthy, but needed a few more weeks. He stretched his legs out and sighed.

    Pap had first brought him here, years ago, one of the few times Pap had been around for deer season. Pap had driven trucks. At first, dump trucks for Nullhegan County Lime and Granite, then his own, leased rig, hauling anything anywhere: Florida, California, Toronto. Pap's life on the road had taken most of his time, but it had allowed him to support a family and have a home, that in return had allowed him to be alone on the road without being lonely. He'd beat sense into Reg, taking the easy way out. You didn't fuck with Pap, he didn't fuck with you. It was a good way to be. A hard way to be. Reg had always known where he'd stood with Pap.

    This wasn't the easy way out, humping up mountains every spring, carrying seventy-pound loads of manure and vermiculite and chicken wire, one after the other, in the dark, in the rain and mud; digging in the stubborn ground with a foxhole shovel, stringing fence; worrying all summer about the plants taking, about animals or thieves or game wardens discovering them, about too much rain, or too little. But, even with all that, it still beat having to answer to someone; and he didn't mind hard work, not if it paid. Pap had believed that hard work somehow brought a man integrity; Reg had never bought into it: There were too many men who worked hard who had a lot less integrity than those who hadn't held a steady job their whole life. Pap had had integrity, but it hadn't come from how hard he'd worked. You could watch his face when he spoke to another man, not knowing a damned thing about what kind of worker Pap was, and know that to be true. It had been in his eyes, bright and alert, concerned, his gaze steady; it had been in his good posture; it had come from within, and had been more about the way he chose not to live, than the way he did live: Pap hadn't drunk, to excess, or womanized, as far as Reg knew, and he'd never said anything about anyone that he wouldn't have said to their face, and even then bit his tongue more often than not; all traits Reg could admire, but could rarely claim.

    Reg had held a job, of one sort or another, since he was fourteen. Stan had given him his first job, at the Bee Hive, washing dishes, the September Pap had died. Within a few weeks Stan had had him waiting tables; Reg had given it a go, but had ended up, by choice, back with the dirty dishes. He'd enjoyed being out back, alone, the radio on, able to take cigaret breaks, sneak beer from the walk-in, take a hit now and again from the whipped cream canisters' [Co.sub.2] cartridges. He'd been able to wear jeans and a T-shirt instead of those hellish black slacks, and the cotton button-up shirt that had looked like a blouse. And if he'd come into work pissed off or hung over or depressed, he'd been able to stay that way, he hadn't had to put on an ingratiating smile for anybody. He'd liked that no one hung over him or told him what to do; as long as the dishes were done, Stan had stayed clear, poking his head in once in a great while to see if he wanted a soda or fries, or to say "How goes the war?" or "Looking good, America."

    As a waiter, Reg had felt everyone's eyes on him, expecting him to slip up. He hadn't liked the out-of-staters talking of the town's quaintness and asking what there was to do around here. He'd loathed having to pretend that some of the most demonic and homely urchins he'd ever encountered were cute and saintly children. He hadn't known how Barb and Ruth, the two waitresses, had handled it. How they'd sucked up to anyone who'd sat in their sections. It was different for them though. They had families. A family changed things.

    Mornings, before the Bee Hive opened, Reg had stuffed napkins into holders and filled ketchup bottles with Ruth and Barb, listening to the two women carry on. They'd given him his first cigaret, a menthol 100, and with his first drag they'd traded witchly grins, and he'd understood that these were women who remembered being girls, and no matter the passing years, they'd never feel very far from those nights they'd spent parked at the end of the dark dead-end roads, in the back seats of their boyfriends' cars, their skirts hiked up and their knees pinned to their chests.

    At seven A.M. when Stan flipped the Open sign in the front window and tourists and locals alike wandered in, Barb and Ruth had been Professional. A state of mind Reg could never muster for a job he disliked. Actresses, the both of them. Jesus. He admired them, but not a second passed that he wasn't glad their lives weren't, in any way, his.

    Reg had worked for Roland Dupree, too, a mason who was a better drunk than a bricklayer, and who'd filled some small need in himself by calling people "Little Fuck Face" and "Little Puke;" Roland had been as likely to pick Reg up for work at noon as he had been to show up at seven in the morning. Whatever time he'd shown, he'd expected Reg to be waiting: "I own you from seven to five." He'd never offered a reason for being late, and had never paid Reg for the time Reg had sat around waiting. Once, when Roland hadn't shown up by one o'clock, Reg had taken his shotgun and gone bird hunting out behind the house. When he'd come back a couple of hours later, Roland had been waiting in his truck in the front yard.

    "Where in Christ you been?" Roland had hollered from the truck as Reg set his shotgun and a brace of woodcock on the porch. "I been sitting here nearly an hour. I gotta depend on you. You don't want a job?"

    "Yah dint show," Reg had said, his chest tightening.

    "I'm here, ain't I?"

    "It's three-thirty." Reg had pushed his fists into his thighs, angry at how he'd let Roland take advantage of him, angry that he'd had to learn of the likes of Roland the hard way, had learned a lot of things the hard way, with Pap gone. He'd glared at Roland, who was only in his thirties then, but might as well have been at the hard end of fifty years, with his bitterness and drunkenness and beat-up truck and pitiful life.

    "I'm your goddamned boss," Roland had barked. "Your ass is mine from seven to—"

    "Yur crazy," Reg had said, wanting to drag Roland out of his truck and kick him into the ground.

    "Come again." Roland was trying to get out of the truck but seemed to be having difficulty.

    "Yur crazy."

    "I'm your goddamned boss." Roland was looking at the inside of the door, a puzzled look on his face, as if the door handle had disappeared.

    "Bullshit." Reg had taken up his shotgun.

    "You little prick." Roland had reached out the window to unlock the door from the outside, and Reg had run over and brought the butt of his shotgun down on Roland's fingers. Roland had howled: "I'm crazy?" But he'd made no move to get out; he'd sucked on his bloody hand, glowering, and backed out of the yard.

    Reg had seen his share of hard work, for what it was worth, and he hadn't minded it. But if someone were to point him in the direction of easy, just once, he'd have gladly gone down that road. Name one person who wouldn't. Just one.

    He shut his eyes; listened to his breathing.

    He awoke to find the frost had melted and clung now to his skin and hung in the trees about him as a cool moist gauze. The woodpecker had fallen silent, or retreated to some deeper reach of woods. A cold drizzle fell.

    He gained his feet, his back and shoulders curdling with a heated pain that ended in a shiver. He walked among the plants. One of the leaders looked as if it had been cut clean, with a knife. Some others looked cut, too. It was hard to tell. He considered the downed section of fence, wondering if someone had been fucking with the plants. The Lavalettes, he thought.

    Mack and Elis had done six months at Fairland, less than half the time Reg had done; they'd thought Reg had run his mouth, as Bump had. He hadn't. It didn't matter. It wouldn't have mattered to him had it been the other way around. But one thing was certain: They'd better pray it wasn't them fucking with his plants.

    He lit a cigaret and made his way from the plants. Ferns jigged in the rain. He took a foxhole shovel from the rucksack and unfolded it. He straightened the tomato stake, stretched the chicken wire taut and, with the shank of the shovel, pounded the stake until it sank deep into the rocky soil.

    The woodpecker was hammering away again, closer:

    thockthockthockthockthock

* * *

I am a bootlegger, Jessup thought as he skulked among the trees. He'd never been this far up Smuggler's Gap. It had been an exhilarating, prosperous expedition. He'd set out early, in the dark, the crickets' silence in his ears and the frost's cold seeping through the bottom of his canvas sneakers as he'd traipsed logging road and field, pausing periodically to take out his penlight and check the map he'd sketched in his notebook. Smuggler's Creek had proved worth the bushwhacking, his wicker creel gratifying with the weight of neck-broken native brookies.

    He opened the top of the creel and peeked inside. Five brook trout lay glistening on a mat of wet ferns, eyes milked. His heart knocked to look at them, to think of each tug on the end of the line. Each set hook. There was nothing better.

    Except Emily.

    He closed the creel, opened it again, snuck another peek, let the lid fall.

    A cold rain dappled his face; steam rose in tendrils from his hands.

    Ambling out from the woods, mindful of his rod tip, he came onto a smidgen of steep muddied road. He halted at the sight of a vehicle, parked to the side in a way that allowed little room for any logging truck to ease past.

    He snuck toward the vehicle, his creel snug and reassuring against his hip. He rubbed his hand over the wet fender, over the insignia.

    "El Camino," he whispered.

    Cupping his eyes, he pressed his face to the black-tinted window, noticing in the reflection his copper hair, a profusion of twists and snarls, like some old woman's pile of scrap yarn. He could just make out shadowed shapes on the floor and the fur-covered seat of the El Camino: wrenches and screwdrivers, old chains and rope, topographic maps, loose shotgun shells, a Styrofoam cup. From his back pocket he fetched a handkerchief and wiped the window where his nose had left a smudge.

    Slipping back into the woods he scrambled down a logging road. He did not wonder who might be parked up this far or why. Already he was reliving the thrum of life that had run through the fishing line, down the cork handle and into his wrists.

    And Emily's kiss.

* * *

It was afternoon when Reg finally found his way back to the road. He waited for a logging truck to pass, then stepped from the woods and threw his rucksack and headnet into the back of the Camino. About to open the door, he glimpsed something at his feet: a yellow scrap of paper; he looked up and down the road, into the woods. The slip seemed to glow in the mist. He rubbed his chin and touched a fingertip to the paper. Murmuring, he picked it up and crept his eyes across it, slowly, slowly. The rain came harder. Nearly snow, it spattered the paper. He folded the paper and stuffed it in his pocket. He surveyed the road around the Camino. Footprints. The rain had nearly washed them away, but he saw them now, footprints that were not his own, footprints minutes away from becoming ghosts.

    "Son of a bitch," he said and knelt at the clearest tracks, which headed into the woods. His heart pushed against his rib cage. "Son of a bitch," he said and stood and kicked the El Camino's door. "Sonofa fuckin bitch."

(Continues...)