And Billy had landed in the Supermax. He did months in solitary confinement.
I had never been allowed inside the Special Management Unit, or SMU, as it was euphemistically known, and Billy refused to tell me about the experience, but I’d heard plenty of horror stories. Inmates sent to the prison’s Supermax building spent twenty-three hours a day in cells smaller than my mom’s walk-in closet. Their rooms were lit constantly and blindingly, with no clocks to mark time. Prisoners in the SMU were denied books, televisions, and radios. Even toothbrushes were forbidden. Sometimes, if they created trouble for the COs, they were also deprived of blankets and even clothing. Their cold meals were shoved through a slit in the door. Insane prisoners not uncommonly sought revenge on their captors by splashing them with cocktails of feces, blood, and semen.
Whenever I thought of the Supermax, I heard the voice of the Reverend Deborah Davies in my head. She was one of the Warden Service’s two female chaplains. Before that, she had volunteered her pastoral services in correctional facilities across Maine.
“History is going to judge us for the six million Americans we have consigned to our gulags,” she’d told me. “And our descendants are going to hate us the same way we despise our slaveholding ancestors.”
I had sent too many evil men to jail to hold with all of her progressive notions.
“You’ve got to acknowledge it’s a form of torture, Mike,” she’d said.
“That’s for someone else to decide.”
“None of us gets off that easily, my friend.”
I hadn’t known what to expect when Billy emerged from solitary, and I’d approached my first visit with trepidation. I was shocked to find that he had begun exercising again and had grown out his hair and beard. He had seemingly climbed out of the pit stronger than when he had been tossed into it. Except for the paleness of his complexion, he again resembled the Billy Cronk I had first met: a Norse god fallen to earth.
After his surprising physical rebirth, had I been wrong to believe that he would emerge from prison with his mind intact, too?
I rolled down the window to feel the slap of air against my face. Then, because I am nostalgic by nature—perversely so, according to my friends—I turned down a back road I had patrolled years earlier as a newly minted warden. Here, on the Maine Midcoast, I had made my first arrests, saved my first lives, lost my first love.
Almost at once I noticed the difference in latitude from where I had begun the day. While the benighted forests around Grand Lake Stream were still encased in ice, the snow here had largely melted, even in the ragged shadows of the evergreens. Pussy willows clustered along the roadsides, begging to be cut for vases. Elsewhere, the reddening buds of maples added an erotic blush to what would otherwise have been a landscape of unbroken grayness.
One other seasonal change announced itself. During my brief sojourn in the North Woods, election signs had sprouted from the rotting snowbanks and flooded lawns.
The primary would not be held until June, but our current governor—a man nicknamed the Penguin because of his physical and ethical resemblance to Batman’s comic-book foe—was in trouble. His approval rating was underwater, and he was facing a formidable opponent, the state’s leonine attorney general. Campaign consultants had advised Henry “Hal” Hildreth III to downplay his wealth by choosing a slogan (HAL!) meant to imply he was a relatable man of the people.
The Penguin’s roadside signs, by contrast, bore the message the governor himself had chosen for his reelection bid:
BECAUSE FREEDOM ISN’T FREE
I couldn’t read those words without thinking of the cage in which I had abandoned my friend.
Again.
My drive through these nostalgic woods had for once failed to revive my spirits. With a weight pressing on my shoulders and nowhere else to go, I headed home.
When it had become certain that I would be working out of the Bangor office, I had purchased a four-room cottage set amid ten acres of mixed woods in the seaside village of Ducktrap. It was one of those New England hamlets with a full graveyard and an empty schoolhouse. Half a mile from my place, a crumbling old farm had an actual family plot in its front yard. No wonder the dump had scared off potential buyers for the past decade.
My home wasn’t in such dire shape, but it definitely needed some love. Its pine floors were warped and its joists leaned every which way but upright. On the plus side of the ledger: the fieldstone foundation was solid, the roof didn’t leak, and a nearby nest of Cooper’s hawks kept the red squirrels from invading my attic.
Best of all, a river flowed along the bottom of the property. Every fall, a dwindling population of Atlantic salmon returned to the Ducktrap to spawn—one of the last places this still happened in the United States—but the brackish waters also held sea-run brook trout, striped bass, even a few shad. In the woods I found the tracks of occasional bears and wayward moose. At night, sitting on the porch, gazing up at the sky, with the stars as sharp as diamonds, I could persuade myself I lived someplace wild and remote.
I parked my Scout in the dooryard beside my government-assigned vehicle, an unmarked Jeep Compass. I missed the truck I used to drive when I was a patrol warden. My promotion had come with costs as well as benefits.
When I stepped through the mudroom door and continued into the kitchen, I realized that something was amiss. Someone had been inside my house during my vacation.
I found the explanation on the table in the form of a note:
I was in the neighborhood.
Check your refrigerator.
You’re
