Still, in the seven years we’d known each other, Charley had conducted the equivalent of a Ph.D. program in the flora and fauna of the Maine woods. He had taught me how to do my job, enforcing the state’s laws while staying true to my inner compass. Most importantly, he had instructed me in what it meant to be a man in a cultural moment when masculinity was presumed toxic until proven otherwise.
“With luck, he’ll be home by the time I get there. Probably with a bouquet of flowers and some lame excuse for Ora. Same old Charley.”
Even while I typed these words, I felt a hollowness in my chest. I could say that he was just being himself. But in running off without any explanation, Charley had behaved like someone I didn’t recognize. I was afraid, I realized. Afraid that in finding the man, I risked losing my respect for him.
At thirty-one, maybe I was too old to believe in heroes, but I needed Charley Stevens to remain what he had always been—the best man I’d ever known.
9
Driving along coastal Route 1 in the summer was one of my several visions of hell. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper where the road threaded through pedestrian-clogged villages. Then on the straightaways, tourists passed one another like maniacs, desperate to get to Acadia National Park, where they could relax among the hundreds of thousands of people just like them.
It took two hours, but I finally escaped the worst of it. Just past Ellsworth, the road opened, the speed limit rose, and soon, I was cruising through miles of rolling blueberry barrens, the bushes already in full flower. It was as if I had entered not another county but another nation.
My second patrol district had been here, in Down East Maine. The assignment had felt like exile at first. Washington County was one of the poorest counties north of the Mason-Dixon Line and an early epicenter of the opioid pandemic that later devastated so much of rural America. It had taken time, but I had warmed to the luckless region, even came to love it after a fashion, the people especially, and had settled briefly in the county before fate announced it had different plans for me.
When I crossed the bridge above Bad Little Falls and entered downtown Machias, I had the sensation of revisiting a place I’d known from a past life. Storefronts that had been vacant from my days as a patrol warden still had yellowed FOR LEASE signs in their dusty windows. Everyone was shopping at the three new dollar stores out on the strip, I’d heard.
At last, I came to the Dike. On the eastern side of the road was the salt water, still brackish from the river tumbling down the falls. On the western side were dozens of parking spaces and a guardrail separating the pavement from a well-traveled ATV trail. People in this part of the world took their four-wheelers to the convenience store to buy beer and cigarettes the way people elsewhere used their cars for the same desperate errands.
The flea market was bunched up at the north end. On this overcast afternoon, the bazaar consisted of a handful of tables and sheltered booths, plus the food truck that sold breakfast sandwiches made with apple cider doughnuts instead of english muffins. I backed my Scout into one of the many empty spaces and stepped out into the afternoon steam bath.
Ora’s friend, the artist Carol Boyce, was an outsized woman in every way—large, lavish, and loud—who wore muumuus and used a paintbrush as a hair stick in her bun. She’d been an adjunct English professor at the University of Maine at Machias but had taken up painting in retirement. Her watercolors hung from the tent: blurry depictions of lighthouses and smeared lupine fields. It was hard to discern if Carol was an impressionist or just had bad eyesight.
She peered up at me when my shadow fell across her sketch pad.
“I know you,” she said with an undertone of accusation. “You’re our dear departed game warden.”
“That makes me sound like I’m dead, Mrs. Boyce.”
She smelled of rose water. “I expect you’re here on account of Ora Stevens.”
“How did you guess?”
“You and Charley were always as thick as thieves. She called me to ask about the strange vendor here the other day, the one who argued with her husband.”
“Can you describe him?”
“He was but a ruin of a man.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“‘It was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain.’”
I didn’t realize she was reciting a quote until my vacant expression exposed me.
“Did you never read Ethan Frome, Warden?”
“In high school, I think.”
She slapped closed her sketch pad. “It seemed to me that this man you’re looking for had been in a pretty bad smashup, the way he dragged himself around. I would say a motorcycle was involved, based on the tattoos and the grungy affect. But you want specifics. He had a kerchief around his bald head and a scraggly beard, more gray than black; wore dungarees and a flannel shirt, no sleeves. He never removed his sunglasses, but they looked cheap, like ones you might choose from a rack at the gas station.”
Her detailed description made me wish more of my witnesses were visual artists. “Did you catch his name?”
“I went over to have a look at his wares and be sociable, as I always do, but he refused to introduce himself or even say where he was from! We’re a community here on the Dike. We have manners and mores. The things he had for sale seemed fishy, too. Not the usual culch.”
The term is Maine lingo for the knickknacks
