Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron

Author:Paul Doiron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312558482
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2012-08-07T07:00:00+00:00

MAN, OUT OF TIME

By Ariel Evans

Kevin Kendrick is a teacher, an environmental activist, and, he’ll tell you, the best woodsman left in America. He believes that the nation’s survival depends on relearning forgotten skills, from building a fire with nothing but sticks of wood to making a boat out of sealskins. It might sound far-fetched, but spend a week with him in the wilderness of eastern Maine, which he calls home, and you just might decide he’s right.

The article was long but well-written and interesting. It repeated the stories Larrabee had mentioned of Kendrick’s amazing adventures living among the headhunters and paddling across the Labrador Sea.

It also laid out his philosophy in depth, of which I’d sensed only the vaguest outline the other evening. It was, verbatim, the credo of Earth First! “The Earth is currently experiencing the fastest mass extinction event in its history and the perpetrators of this holocaust are none other than ourselves, the human race. Much as addicts have no hope of a cure until they admit to themselves that they have a problem, so must we admit to one in our relationship with the Earth.”

Kendrick, the article said, had collected an almost cultlike following among young people who came to the University of Machias to study with him or attend his Primitive Ways survival school. I wondered if Trinity Raye had been one of these youthful devotees, but when I searched her name, all I found were some brief news stories in the Bangor Daily News and the Ellsworth American and an obituary that claimed she had “died unexpectedly” in her dorm room.

I bought a Snickers bar from the vending machine to gnaw on while I folded my clothes. My diet, never great to begin with except when I’d been living with Sarah, had deteriorated in recent weeks. Thinking about her made me melancholy. I wondered what man she’d woken up with this morning while I was stuck in a suffocating Laundromat washing the skunk smell out of my T-shirts.

On my way out the door, I stopped at the counter and was startled to find the teen blabbermouth gone and Ben Sprague, of all people, standing in her place. He wore a starched white shirt, which showed the undershirt beneath it, blue Dickies held up by red suspenders, and an expression of inexplicable hostility.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I tried to project good fellowship. “Laundry. I was in town and had an emergency load to do. Is this your Laundromat?”

“We own one in Machias and another in Calais.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Why would you?”

I continued the charm offensive. “That was quite a night we had, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“How’s Doris doing?”

“The same. We heard the other one survived.”

“He’s still in the medical-surgery ward at the Down East Community Hospital, but the doctors expect him to pull through.”

Sprague blinked at me a few more times. “What can I do for you?”

“I have a lot of laundry to do, and I was wondering about wash, dry, and fold service.”

“We don’t offer that.

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