The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

He’d been carry ing a shotgun. “I bet you’re the one who fired, too. Back at Bickford’s cabin.”
    His answer was another smirk.
    “A little trigger happy, aren’t you?”
    We pulled into the parking lot of the Somerset County Jail. My truck shined green beneath the streetlights.
    “Ride’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 behind the wheel, a woman next to him, kids up late in the backseat. They all had their eyes focused on the red smear in the road. They wanted to know what had died there. They were curious, and they couldn’t help themselves.
    I couldn’t fault them. It was human nature.

 
     
    12
     
    A s a kid, I probably ate more deer meat than I did hamburger. For the first part of my life, I lived with my mom and sometimes my dad in a series of house trailers and backwoods shacks in the hardscrabble farmland of western Maine. We moved a lot, every year or so. Sometimes more often than that. My father would get fired from a job at a sawmill or a well-drilling company, and then we would have to move again. We lived under power lines that hummed in the night and beside stinking landfills of old automobile tires. Each trailer seemed a little shabbier than the one we rented before. My mother used to say we were “downwardly mobile.”
    She was a reckless, dark-eyed beauty, the youn gest of five kids, who’d grown up as the center of attention in her house hold and lived life without ever taking precautions against possible misfortune.
    Six months after my dad got her pregnant, they were married in a big Catholic wedding down in Madison, where she insisted on wearing white. The wedding pictures only showed her from the chest up. She looked happy enough, though.
    I don’t know whether she ever loved him. God knows he didn’t make it easy for her. My impression of my father during that time is of a fatalistic young guy, wounded in body and soul, who couldn’t believe the good luck that had come his way in the form of this gorgeous girl, who knew from having been to war that good luck never lasts, and so went about sort of preemptively destroying his luck before it could go bad on him.
    Somehow their marriage lasted nine whole years. It survived a couple of miscarriages and lots of 2 a.m. visits by the police. By the end, which is when my memories are sharpest, they were fighting constantly. My mom knew she wanted a better life—she was educating herself, taking adult ed classes at the high school and reading constantly—and she was sick of being broke all the time. They argued about not having money to buy groceries or heating oil, about my dad’s binge drinking, about how he disappeared for days without telling her where he was going or where he’d been.
    He never struck her, no matter how much she screamed or spat or slapped at him, but this only seemed to make her all the madder. As it was, his face during those battles just about glowed red with rage. If he had come home drunk one night and cut our