moon and a looming cell tower blinking red above the Sea of Tranquillity.
I switched on the dome light and reached for the birthday card I’d tucked between the front seats. It had arrived in my mail that morning, just a week late. The picture showed a cartoon cat hugging a cartoon dog.
To a purrfect friend, it read.
Sarah had always given me ironic cards-the sappier the better-so why should it be any different now that our relationship was over? She’d handwritten a note in purple ink inside:
Dear Mike, I hope things are well and that you’re enjoying the winter Down East. Do you have any time to ski or ice fish? How are Charley and Ora doing? I know it’s not your way to do something special for yourself, but it would make me happy to think of you having some fun with friends today. Life is busy here in D.C., but it’s stimulating work and I’m meeting lots of fascinating people. One of these days we should catch up-it’s been so long since we talked. xoxo S.
I didn’t really want to speak with my ex-girlfriend. Sarah and I were finished forever as a couple, and probably finished as friends, no matter what her birthday card said. A year earlier, she had become pregnant with my child, a condition she had hidden from me until she miscarried. The fact that she had concealed her pregnancy proved that she would never overcome her doubts about my fitness to be a husband and father. We had broken up by mutual agreement over the summer, before I’d received my transfer to the North Pole. She was now living in Washington, D.C., working for the national office of the Head Start program. Sometimes I pictured her going out for drinks with people our own age-with men our own age-while I was stuck in the wilds of eastern Maine, fielding dinner invitations from elderly veterinarians.
I’d been struggling to find meaning in the sequence of events that had led me to this wasteland, but my prayers always seemed to disappear into the black void that stretched from horizon to horizon, and I never got any answers. All that was left to me was to accept my fate and do my job with as much dignity as I could muster.
Tonight, however, I found myself yearning to hear Sarah’s voice, even though I knew that speaking with her would make me feel more lonely and not less. Two years earlier, when we were weathering a rough patch, I had convinced myself that I was a lone wolf by nature. It was the reason why I had chosen the profession of game warden-because I secretly wanted a solitary life.
Now I knew better.
The moon was high and bright overhead when I arrived at my trailer on the outskirts of Whitney. I’d lived in my share of mobile homes as a child, and this one was better than most. The roof barely leaked, all but two of the electrical sockets worked, and a rolled towel pressed against the base of the door was enough to stop the snow from blowing in through the crack. My rented trailer was located down a dead-end road, far enough from the main drag that I could park my patrol truck out of sight-although every poacher, pill addict, and petty criminal within a hundred miles knew where I lived.
As I turned the truck into the plowed drive, the bright halogen bulbs swept across the front of the building. Something long and dark seemed to be affixed to the door. I couldn’t tell for sure what the black thing was until I climbed the steps with my flashlight in hand.
The object was a coyote pelt. Whoever had killed the animal had done a poor job of skinning it, because the fur stank to the heavens. A tenpenny nail had been driven through the head into the hollow metal door.
There was a note written in block letters, large enough for me to read in the moonlight: “WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.” It was signed, “GEORGE MAGOON.”
FEBRUARY 12
The moon don’t rotate, you know. All you ever see is the same side of it! There could be space aliens living up there in the shadows and we’d never know if they was planning to invade us.
Aunt Tammi don’t believe me.
What do you think that Pink Floyd song means? I ask her.
She’s knitting in her wheelchair. Which one, Lucas?
The one you’re always playing. DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.
She says it don’t mean anything. It’s just a song.
We’re all having dinner, Tammi, Uncle Prester, and me. Ma likes to eat at the table like we did when Gram and Gramp were alive and this was their house.
She always makes us say a prayer now, ever since she started going to those Don’t Drink meetings.
About halfway through dinner, Randle comes by to get Uncle Prester.
Randle’s got that scary new tattoo all over his face-the spiky one he got after Ma kicked him out before Christmas.
You don’t have to go with him, Ma tells Prester.
Yeah I do, Prester says. He seems real sad about it, though.
Randle laughs and says they’re just going coyote hunting is all.
Where’s your dogs? I ask him. He used to have a pit bull, but they don’t hunt.
Don’t need any.
You using bait, then?
Nope.
So how you going to get them?
We call them in, he says. He does a sort of wolf call then, because he likes to scare Tammi and me.
After Randle and Prester leave, I say to Ma, They ain’t going coyote hunting, are they?
She don’t answer. She just keeps washing dishes.
They got some kind of big drug deal, don’t they?
That gets her all worked up. Don’t you have homework?
I already did it, I tell her.
Don’t lie to me, Lucas.
She gives me that X-ray look. I can’t understand how she figures things sometimes.
The curtains are rolled up in my room and the moon is shining in until I yank down the shade. I don’t like seeing the full moon out my window. It reminds me of the White Owl.
3
“Who’s George Magoon?” I asked Sgt. Kathy Frost.
I’d risen early to do push-ups, burpees, and planks, and I was standing in my boxer briefs, with the cell phone clamped to one sweaty ear. The windows inside the trailer were all frosted over, but I could tell from the ashen light that the day was shaping up to be a dark one. The sun had risen brightly at dawn, but menacing clouds were already rolling in from the northwest. The forecast called for snow.
I’d reached Kathy on the road. She was heading up north for a few days, towing her Ski-Doo Renegade on a trailer behind her patrol truck. The guys in Greenville needed some extra wardens to help work snowmobilers over the Presidents’ Day weekend. There had been a fatality on Moosehead Lake five days earlier-too much booze, speed, and testosterone.
Kathy’s voice was cutting in and out. Our connection wasn’t great. “George who?”
“George Magoon. I checked the computer, but there’s no one in the area with that name.”
Kathy laughed. “I wouldn’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“George Magoon is a fictional character-like Robin Hood or Brer Rabbit. He was this wily poacher who was always outwitting the game wardens Down East. There are all kinds of tall tales about his exploits. Ask Rivard about them.”
Kathy Frost wasn’t just my former supervisor; she was the closest thing I had to a friend in the Warden Service, someone who had been a confidante to me during the tense days when my father was a fugitive in the North Woods. Kathy was also the most physically fit person I’d ever met. She was a tall, strong-limbed woman who wore her hair in a blondish bob and could bench-press her own weight. She routinely won triathlons without ever
