The Poacher's Son
When I was nine years old, my father took me deep into the Maine woods to see an old prisoner of war camp. My mom had just announced she was leaving him, this time for good. In a few weeks, she said, the two of us were chucking this sorry, redneck life and moving in with her sister down in Portland. The road trip to the wild country around Spencer Lake was my dad's idea. I guess he saw it as his last chance to win me over to his way of thinking. God knows he didn't really want custody of me. I'd just get in the way of his whiskey and his women. But it mattered to him that I saw his side of things.
And so, one rainy morning, we drove off into the mountains in search of the past.
It was a grueling drive. The logging road was muddy and deeply rutted from the heavy trucks carrying timber out of the clear cuts, and it was all my dad's tired old Ford could do to climb Bear Hill. Pausing at the top, we looked out across the Moose River valley to the forested mountains that marked the border with Canada. I'd lived my entire life in rural Maine, but this was the wildest place I'd ever been. Soon I would be leaving it -- and him. Like most small boys I'd always viewed my father as the strongest, bravest man in the world. Now I couldn't understand why he wasn't fighting to keep us all together.
My dad was silent for the first hour of the trip -- he was hungover, chain-smoking -- but as we drove deeper into the woods he finally started to talk. Not about my leaving, though. Instead he told me how, during World War II, thousands of captured German POWs were brought to the most remote parts of Maine to work in the logging camps. He said the prisoners at Hobbstown Plantation, where we were going, had belonged to Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps. They'd driven panzer tanks through Sahara sandstorms and fought desert battles at Tunisia and El Alamein. The foreign names stirred my imagination, and despite the sadness that was my perpetual condition back then, I found myself leaning forward against the dash.
"Don't expect too much," he warned. These days, he said, all that was left of the guard towers, barracks, and fences that once made up the Hobbstown POW camp were a few log cabins, hidden among the pines. Trappers sometimes holed up in these old buildings in the wintertime. Otherwise they were just a bunch of ruins rotting into the earth.
Actually, they were less than that. My dad drove by the clearing before he realized it was the place we were looking for. He climbed out of the truck and stood there in disbelief. No cabins were to be seen. There were just a couple of blackened cellar holes covered by tangles of wet raspberry bushes.
I stood beside him in the rain. "This is it?"
"I guess someone must've burned the cabins down."
"It's just some holes in the ground."
"It's still history," he argued.
Afterward, we drove down to Spencer Lake and parked at the shore, looking down the length of the lake, toward the mist-shrouded Bigelow Mountains. He turned off the engine and lit a cigarette and then, with the rain beating on the roof, he told me a story that has haunted me ever since.
He said that, during the winter of 1944, two Germans escaped from the prison camp. The guards located one right away by following his tracks in the snow. But the other, somehow, eluded capture. Game wardens and state police troopers joined in the search. Guards were put on high alert at the Kennebec River dam in case the Nazi saboteur tried to blow it up. And people in Flagstaff and Jackman slept with loaded shotguns under their beds. It was the biggest manhunt in Maine history -- and they never found him. The prisoner just vanished into the wild and was never seen again, alive or dead.
"You'll find some loggers who say he's still out there," my dad said, "holed up in some cave, not knowing the war's over."
I looked hard into his eyes. "You're lying," I said.
The speedometer read seventy miles per hour, dangerously fast for this country road. Every so often I would catch myself and slow down, then minutes later I'd find myself flirting with seventy again.
The cedar swamp lay miles behind me. An hour had passed since I'd crossed out of my district, headed first west and now northwest, toward the distant jail in Skowhegan where my father was being taken in handcuffs. But in my mind I was still standing under the cedars, the cell phone pressed against my ear, hearing Russell Pelletier say:
"They arrested him, Mike. I don't know how else to say it."
I felt the ground slide suddenly beneath my feet. "Arrested? For what?"
Pelletier said: "A deputy came out here this morning wanting to question him, and your dad lost it. I wasn't around when it happened. But I guess there was a fight and your dad was Maced. Anyway, they're taking him to the jail in Skowhegan. I'd drive down myself, but I've got a camp full of sports. Maybe you should call over there, find out what's up."
"The police think he killed those men? Is that what you're saying?"
Pelletier took his time answering. "They seem to think he knows something."
"But that's not why they arrested him? Not for murder. It was because he struck an officer, right?"
"Like I said, I wasn't there when it happened, so I can't say. I just heard about it when I got back from fishing. I think you should call over to Skowhegan. Get it all sorted out."
"It doesn't make any sense."
"I'm sorry for the bad news, kid," Russell Pelletier said as he signed off.
I told Kathy my father had just been arrested, but she had gathered as much from overhearing my end of the call.
"They think he shot Brodeur?" she asked.
"I don't know. I guess a deputy drove out to Rum Pond to question him, and something happened. They're taking him to the Somerset County Jail right now. I don't know what the charge is."
Kathy came around the front of the truck and held out her hand. "Give me your phone."
"Why?"
She punched in a number and brought the phone to her ear, waiting for a response. "If they were going to arrest your father for killing a cop, they wouldn't send a single deputy to do it." Someone must have picked up on the other end, because suddenly she was no longer speaking to me. "It's Sergeant Frost with the Warden Service. I heard one of your deputies just arrested a man named Bowditch. He's the father of one of my wardens. I wonder what you can tell me at this point."
Her conversation was brief and hard for me to follow without hearing the other end. Mostly it consisted of Kathy trying to convince someone to tell her what was going on and him refusing. Two minutes later she handed me back the phone with a defeated look on her face.
"The sheriff's office won't say what happened," she said, "but it's pretty clear the deputy wasn't authorized to arrest your dad. I get the sense that he went out to Rum Pond on his own to ask some questions, and tempers flared."
"So they're not charging him with murder?"
"I don't know, Mike. I don't know what they're charging him with."
"My dad's a prick," I said, "but he's not a cop killer."
Kathy was silent. She crossed her freckled arms.
I reached into my pocket for my keys. "I've got to get up there." I climbed into the truck and slammed the door shut. The noise was like a gunshot. "You've got to cover my shift for me."
"Mike." She sighed.
"Please, Kath," I said. "If it were your father, what would you do?"
Kathy didn't answer my question, but then again, why should she? Her father was a retired Presbyterian minister, and chief of the volunteer fire department. Not some saloon-brawling logger with a rap sheet of misdemeanors and the public persona of a Tasmanian devil. How could Kathy Frost understand what it was like to grow up with such a man?
A moment later Dot returned. She clutched something in a napkin. She pressed it to me through the open window. "You be sure to stop in for lunch," she said.
I told her that I would.
As I drove away, I wondered why I'd promised to return for lunch when I had no idea what the day would bring. Was it just to reassure Dot? In a small town like Sennebec, routine is such a precious thing -- it's how people get to know and trust one another. I'd only been in town for eight months, but I was already becoming somewhat predictable to my neighbors. It was the first step to becoming one of them, part of their community. Maybe that was what I was afraid of happening.
Inside the napkin was one of Dot's homemade molasses doughnuts. My favorite.
On my radio I called in to the dispatcher to tell her I was 10-8, on duty and available to respond. Then I tried Detective Soctomah.
"What can I do for you, Mike?" he said, polite but not friendly.
"Remember I told you about that bald guy my dad knew at the Dead River Inn two years ago? Well, I just saw the Bangor paper and there was a picture from the public meeting. It's him, Vernon Tripp."
"We spoke with Mr. Tripp yesterday."
"So he's also a suspect?"
In his silence I sensed his disapproval as clearly as if I'd seen his face. "We'll keep you up to date, Mike -- as events warrant." I thought he was going to hang up on me then, but instead he said, "Does the name Brenda Dean mean anything to you?"
"I don't think so. Who is she?"
"She works at Rum Pond Sporting Camps. She's says she's your dad's girlfriend."
"That's what she thinks. She's probably one of ten." I tried to sound lighthearted, but Soctomah wasn't in the mood for humor.
"Your father never mentioned her?"
"No. Do you think she's the woman I heard on my message machine?"
There was silence on the other end.
"Detective?" I said.
"We're all set here, Mike."
"I know the sheriff doesn't want me up there, but -- "
"You don't have to call me again," said Soctomah. "Not unless you remember something else important that you left out of your statement."
"I understand."
"Good," said the detective.
To occupy myself I decided to check the culvert trap. I followed the rutted dirt road down through the hemlocks and cedars to the old cellar hole at the edge of the swamp. As I neared the trailer, I saw that the trapdoor had fallen shut. Because of the liquid shadows beneath the trees I couldn't see what, if anything, might be caught inside.
The sound of an animal thrashing about was the first thing I heard when I got out. I moved slowly, but the animal heard me coming and fell silent at once. Slowly I circled around to the gateend of the trap to have a look.
"For Christ's sake," I said aloud.
Inside the trap was the fattest raccoon I'd ever seen. Fat like a furred basketball. A stomach swollen with doughnuts and bacon. Heavy enough to trigger the door when it clawed at the bait bag.
I opened the door and stood aside, waiting for the raccoon to come out, but it seemed content to huddle at the gate-end, as if it had decided to take up residency inside the trap.