Massacre Pond by Paul Doiron

Author:Paul Doiron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781250033932
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2013-07-15T21:00:00+00:00

21

The next morning, I awoke before dawn, dressed myself in jeans and a flannel shirt, and began the long drive in darkness to the suburban town I had spent years trying to escape.

My 1970 Ford Bronco was as mulish on the road as my patrol truck. I’d purchased it from a classified ad I’d seen in Uncle Henry’s Weekly Swap or Sell It Guide. The guy who’d sold it to me said he’d brought it up from Jacksonville himself, where it had spent the previous four decades sheltered from the elements inside grandma’s barn, rarely ever venturing out onto the smooth, unsalted highways of North Florida. At first glance, the vintage truck was a thing of beauty: full cab, original green-and-white paint job, uncut rear fenders. It drove well at first, too, although it took a while to get used to the “three on the tree” shift. Only slowly did the vehicle reveal its hidden flaws: its balky transmission, which had already needed to be replaced, its desperate thirst for coolant, and, worst of all, its alarming tendency to develop rust spots that appeared, seemingly overnight, like acne on a teenager’s face. I’d bought the Bronco as a treat to myself, but it had become the gift that kept on taking.

My journey took me along Route 9, nicknamed “the Airline” for its ridge-back views of peat bogs and pine woods, through the Bangor “metropolitan” area, where my division was headquartered, and then south along four-lane I–95, which was the closest thing we had in Maine to a superhighway. I listened to music the whole way—classic rock—to keep my mind off my mother’s mysterious condition, and also because I needed a mental break from Elizabeth Morse and her dead moose. I pulled into my stepfather’s driveway at nine o’clock sharp.

Landscapers were busy in the yard. One of the men was chasing leaves off the wide lawn with a hose attached to an enormous blow-drying contraption he wore strapped to his back. Another was furiously raking and bagging the leaves to take away to an undisclosed location. As a teenager, I had been responsible for these same sweaty tasks.

Returning to my parents’ cul-de-sac after having spent nearly three years living in assorted backwoods shacks, trailers, and cabins, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I had forsaken the world my mother had fought so hard to give me. Was it any wonder we had drifted apart?

The person who opened the door was someone I scarcely recognized. My mother’s beauty had been her defining trait. As a dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman, she had turned heads every time we entered a restaurant or store together. My teenage friends had joked about her desirability in a lascivious way that had nearly brought us to blows on occasion. Now she stood in front of me with hollow eyes and a grayish tone to her skin. Her hair looked brittle and badly dyed. Always skinny, she had lost pounds her petite body could not afford to lose.

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