Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(38)
When I came to the crossroads in Bigelow half an hour later, I knew I had gone too far. I supposed I could have called Pulsifer for directions. He was the district warden, after all. When we’d spoken on the phone the day before, he had invited me to drop in the next time I was in town. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see me pull up outside his farm.
Instead, I decided to drive into the village. Bigelow was a haven for snowmobilers who raced up and down the trails to Quebec, ran shopping errands on their sleds the way people elsewhere did in their cars, and lined the streets with their parked snow machines.
I stopped at the first business that looked open, a general store with a North Woods vibe.
Most of the crowd inside consisted of sledders in snowmobile suits that made them look fat, even if they weren’t, and caused them to rustle and clomp when they walked to the registers with their bottles of sodas and bags of chips. At the lunch counter sat a couple of French-Canadian truckers coming from or going to the border crossing twenty-seven miles to the north, where my late grandfather had once worked. Beside them sat a couple of well-appointed skiers, lost on the road from Widowmaker to Sugarloaf.
To me, this scene felt like coming home. My grandparents, whom I’d never met, had lived nearby in Chain of Ponds, and I had spent an itinerant childhood living with my mom and dad in these same sorts of backwoods hamlets. The suburbs around Portland, where my mom and I later took up residence, and where I went to high school, and now worked, would always feel to me like a place of exile.
“Can you give me some directions?” I asked the very pregnant woman clearing plates behind the lunch counter.
“That depends.” She had an acne-spotted face but a pleasant way about her. “Where’re you headed?”
“I’m looking for a logging company.”
“Cabot’s? They’re over in Rangeley.”
“No. Foss’s.”
You might have thought I’d asked her to guide me to the nearest whorehouse. “Why are you asking me?”
“I thought if you worked here, you might know.”
“I never go out that way.”
“Which way?”
“Are you going to order something or not? I’m too busy to make chitchat.”
She spun away from the counter before I could place an actual order (the truth was, I was famished). I did a quick scan of the store, searching for someone else who could give directions to the local sex-offender sanctuary. Few faces looked promising. If the people who owned Widowmaker condos didn’t appreciate having convicted rapists, pedophiles, and pornographers living among them, why should I have expected their poorer neighbors to be more welcoming?
Rather than taking a seat between the truckers and the skiers, I grabbed a bottle of Moxie from the cooler, a couple of slices of pizza from the heated cabinet near the register, and a pint of Jim Beam for later. Stacey had been nagging me to cut down on the gas-station breakfast sandwiches and fried chicken that made up so many of my meals while at work.
The door blew open again and a person hurried in from the cold.
I mistook him for a boy at first, he was so short. He was dressed in an oversized lumberman’s coat, jeans, and pack boots. His shoulders were heaped with snow, and there was a layer of frost on a brown fur hat that looked like nothing so much as a sleeping mammal.
The small person hadn’t taken three steps inside before the clerk behind the register—a bearded dude who had the lordly bearing of the store owner—shouted, “Out, Mink!”
The voice that issued from his small body was shockingly deep: “But it’s snowing!”
“You know you’re not allowed in here.”
“I need a ride home.”
“So hitchhike.”
“But no one’s on the road. It’s a freaking storm out there.”
“I’m not kidding around, Mink.”
The little man let out an audible huff. It reminded me of a sound an exasperated teenager might make. Before he ventured outside again, he paused at the door to deliver one last appeal. “If I freeze to death, it’ll be on your conscience.”
“Out!”
“I’ll probably get hit by a freaking snowplow.”
As the door slammed shut, the owner rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “That guy.”
When it came my turn to pay, I asked, “What’s his story?”
“Buddy, you don’t even want to know,” he replied with amusement.
“Tell me,” I said. “What did he do?’
My interest must have made the owner suspicious, because his tone hardened. “Forget about him. He’s harmless.”
One of the things I have learned about Maine villages is that every one has its mascot (if not its idiot). He or she might be a a developmentally disabled boy who likes to greet you at the gas pump, or a brain-damaged logger who got hit by a falling tree. Some of these people are objects of great local affection and are treated with protectiveness. Others are regarded more as nuisances who might try your patience from time to time but who are ultimately, grudgingly accepted as members of the community.
Mink, whoever he was, seemed to fall into the latter category. Nothing about his speech suggested he was mentally or physically impaired in any way. But I had seen enough scenes like the one with the store owner to recognize the status the little man occupied among the good people of Bigelow.