Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work by Jason Brown

Author:Jason Brown [Brown, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781890447649
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

A FAIR CHANCE

Pete stood in front of his parents’ house clapping his gloved hands together in the falling snow. For the first time in the six months Pete had been working for him, Jack was late, and when he did appear from around the corner in his old Ford Ranger, he had a man the size of a moose in the seat next to him. Jack was busy shouting at the man, and he showed no sign of slowing. The passenger door flew open while they were still moving, and the truck spun in a slow circle, passing right in front of Pete. They came to a halt in the middle of the road facing the wrong direction, and Jack leaned over the steering wheel with his eyes closed. The man next to him looked at Pete and pulled a smile across his face as if his mouth were a trigger and his dark, closely set eyes the double barrel of a shotgun.

Pete threw his gear in the bed with the saws and gas and tried to squeeze in next to the man’s knees, which folded into his chest and pressed against the dash. Up close, the man looked like the largest kid Pete had ever seen.

“You probably heard of me,” he said, looking at Pete out of the corner of one eye.

“Heard of you?”

“I’m the one that killed that guy up in Bangor—drove a hammer right through the back of his melon.”

Jack slowly shook his head.

“I’m just playin’. But there was a guy up in the county done his mother that way—with a friggin’ hammer. Believe that?”

Obviously, this was Jack’s son, Doug. Pete had heard of Doug, who had grown up with an aunt in Gardner, where he was known to have thrown a kid out of a moving car. The dashboard heater blasted against Doug’s tattered snowmobile suit, filling the cab with the smell of rotten venison. Pete only wished Jack had told him he was going to hire his son, though it wouldn’t have changed anything. After the accident, Jack was the only person around willing to give him a job.

They passed between low white hills and distant gray tree lines. Jack headed west out of Vaughn toward a new stand outside Eutis, not far from the Maine-Quebec border. Pete hadn’t seen it yet, but according to Jack it was supposed to have a slope of ten degrees, no more, up from the road; there was very little birch or alder and no stumpage to the owner, as long as they pum-yarded, burning the brush as they worked. The owner, some guy from Massachusetts, was going to put a hunting camp in and just wanted part of it cleared. They’d get a lot of sixteen-fours out of those trees for boards, the rest for stud, Jack had said. Even if they paid someone to skid the logs to the road, they’d come out double their usual take, and Jack was going to give him a share this time instead of paying him by the hour.

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