The Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron Page B

deputy’s battered profile. There was something familiar about it. “So why did you drive out to Rum Pond?” I asked.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe sheriff said you went out there on your own authority. What evidence did you have on my dad?”
    He glanced over at me for the first time. “Go fuck yourself.”
    Outside the roadblock TV news vans were drawn up. I saw spotlights trained on reporters’ incandescent faces. Cameras turned in our direction as we made our way through the gauntlet of stopped traffic. Reflexively I raised my hand to conceal my face.
    What would I tell my mother? I’d scarcely thought of her at all. But Detective Soctomah would be calling her soon, and she was guaranteed to freak out, afraid my dad was going to drag her reputation through the mud. If they gunned him down tomorrow, her first concern would be that her friends would see her name in the newspapers. How could she bear her neighbors knowing that she’d once been poor white trash, married to such a violent man?
    I leaned my head against the glass.
    Some time later I was awakened by gunshots. I sat up with a start. Twombley was looking over at me, smirking. I’d been dreaming. We were cruising past the brightly lit shopping plazas outside of Skowhegan. That was when I remembered that pink face. Twombley was the deputy who had arrested my dad two years ago at the Dead River Inn, the one who made him kneel in broken glass. So they had a history together. He’d pegged my father as a likely murderer and decided to bring him in without proof.
    I could imagine what had happened next. “So what did he do—taunt you from the backseat? Is that how you ran off the road?”
    He kept his eyes on the road, as if he hadn’t heard me.
    I continued: “What happened next? You went around to drag him out of the car, and he knocked you down? How did he get your gun away from you?”
    â€œFuck you.”
    I noticed his holster was still empty, but now that I thought about it, I remembered seeing him at the standoff—that evil baby face. He’d been carrying a shotgun. “I bet you’re the one who fired, too. Back at Bickford’s cabin.”
    His answer was another smirk.
    â€œA little trigger happy, aren’t you?”
    We pulled into the parking lot of the Somerset County Jail. My truck shined green beneath the streetlights.
    â€œRide’s over,” he said.
    I got out and started walking away.
    He shouted at me through his window: “You better hope someone finds him before I do.”
    Afterward, driving home to Sennebec, I stopped to remove a dead porcupine from the middle of the road. I parked my truck so that the spotlight illuminated the animal, turned on my flashing blue lights, and got out. Using a pair of heavy gloves I kept in my truck for occasions like this one, I lifted the carcass carefully, avoiding the barbed quills and dripping blood. I set the porcupine in the bed of my truck to dispose of later in an old sandpit near my house—a place that had become, in the eight months since I’d finished my training period and been assigned to this district, a mass grave for porcupines, skunks, crows, gulls, woodchucks, raccoons, foxes, vultures, and deer.
    Quills stuck in the heavy canvas and leather of my gloves, and the palms were black and sticky with blood. I sat behind the wheel of my truck a moment, the window rolled down, the engine silent, and found that when I removed the gloves, my hands were shaking uncontrollably. I thought about all the dead animals I saw in the course of a day: a dead porcupine lying in a darkened road, dead trout in a fisherman’s creel, a dead deer lashed to the luggage rack of a latemodel Chevrolet. Why had I chosen to spend so much time in the company of death?
    Headlights approached from the opposite direction, coming fast at first, then slowing almost to a crawl as they drew near. As the car passed me, I saw a man