Borderlines

BORDERLINES

Archer Mayor

I bent over, reached out and touched the warm, smooth hide with my fingertips, reminded suddenly of my own losses-real and imagined. If only I’d given warning when I thought none was necessary. I stood up again slowly, anger replacing shock. The location of the wounds indicated that the shots had come from the same side of the road as the deer, but farther south. I began to walk in that direction, cutting diagonally across both lanes of the interstate, my eyes glued to the treeline above the road bank, watching for any movement, listening for any sound. I knew, as if I could actually feel them, that another unseen pair of eyes were watching me come.

I was on the southbound lane’s divider line when I saw it-a flash of fluorescent orange-accompanied by a hunter’s heavy boots crushing the brush underfoot as he moved. “Stop where you are. I’m a police officer.” I began running the rest of the distance to the treeline, straight to where I’d seen that one bright flicker of color.

Just before I entered the woods, I glanced back to see the two parallel blacktop ribbons, my car, its exhaust pluming smoke in the crisp cold air, and the body of the deer. From this angle, the animal must have presented an almost irresistible target, its muscular outline highlighted against the black of the road and the pale horizon, a temptation only decency and sportsmanship might have stilled, and obviously had not.

I hadn’t walked ten feet into the woods before I was utterly enveloped in its dense, dark embrace. I stopped, listening. The hunter had bolted late in my approach, and could only have covered a short distance before I’d reached this spot. I scanned the dark curtain of trees before me, aware of only the absolute stillness, and of the sound of my own heart beating from the exertion of the run. “I’m a police officer. You’ve already broken one law; don’t add resisting arrest.

Come on out.” The vapor from my words hovered briefly about my face and then vanished in the answering silence.

I looked to the forest floor, hoping to see some tracks, but tracking wasn’t one of my strengths, at least not in the woods. All I could see was a tangle of twigs, rotting leaves, and frozen brush. The sudden, blinding combination of a third rifle shot and the explosion its bullet made in the tree trunk next to me threw me to the ground before I could think, my Korea-bred instincts suddenly as keen as they had been many years earlier.

With my face to the ground, breathing in the damp mustiness of the near-frozen earth, I waited for the ringing in my ears to fade. Behind it, fading also, I could hear a body crashing away through the forest.

It had been a warning from a hunter whose initial purpose had not been sport. That deer in the road had not been shot for a trophy and some bragging, as I’d imagined. It had been meat, a hedge against the winter, a hungry and self-sufficient man’s necessity for survival, as he saw it. He had not missed killing me; he had warned me to back off. I got up slowly and brushed myself off. Ahead of me, some one hundred and fifty feet away, I saw an orange hunting jacket hanging from a tree branch a single bright beacon in an ever-darkening, cold and silent world. It was another warning; he was a hunter no longer, but a man with a gun, dressed to blend into his chosen environment. He could now stand with impunity next to a tree, invisible beyond fifty feet, and fill his rifle scope with my chest. I was now in Vermont’s so-called Northeast Kingdom-poor, isolated, thinly populated by people who had chosen to put their independence and wariness of the rest of the world above the hardships of living here. The man watching me had no interest in killing me, but he did want it known that he would if he had to. I stood absolutely still, watching, listening, aware now that my movements were my only relevant spokesmen. A line had been drawn: I could die defending the rights of a dead deer, or I could retire and leave the field to my unseen opponent and his more ancient, instinctive code of moral right and wrong. It wasn’t my kind of debate. I returned to my car, as depressed as I’d been angry when I’d left it in outrage. It had been a short and violent reminder of the limitations of legal authority.

Here, in this high, cold country, the law had less to do with rules, and more with personal honor. Often, they were one and the same, but not always. I got back behind the wheel, drove around the carcass, and continued north.

My trip to the Northeast Kingdom that late fall was an escape. I was heading for a temporary job a minor embezzlement investigation for Ron Potter, the Essex County State’s Attorney-but that was largely a pretense. I was also leaving in Brattleboro an accumulation of tensions, disappointments and heartache with which I’d felt I could no longer deal. In fact, I had telephoned Potter because I’d heard he was searching for a very short term investigator, a need imposed on him because he was the only Vermont State’s Attorney not assigned a full-time man.

He’d been tickled pink, for purely selfish reasons, no doubt. I had a feeling his delight and ready acceptance of my offer had less to do with my prowess than to the fact I’d been the first to nibble his hook. A stint as the Essex County SA’s investigator was not the stuff of legend in a resume. In fact, not even the SA’s job is full-time, and his office is located in St. Johnsbury, which isn’t even in the county he serves.

My call to him was also helped by the fact that we knew one another. Potter had been a patrolman in Brattleboro about ten years ago, trying to scratch together enough cash to pay his way through law school. He used to come by my desk for occasional moral support, both as a prospective student and as a fledgling cop. I hoped he was better at serving the people of Essex County than he had been working for me.

For nearly thirty years now, I’ve been a policeman in Brattleboro, starting as a patrolman and having just wrapped up a six-month assignment as Acting Chief, an event which went a long way in explaining why I was flirting with burnout. Tony Brandt, the man whose job I’d temporarily held, had been given a half-year suspension so the Town Manager and the Selectmen could save face over a case I’d reopened to prove an innocent man had been falsely jailed. The irony that they’d then asked me to take Brandt’s place should have prompted me to change citizenship and head straight for the border.

But I hadn’t, any more than I’d scared away the deer. In retrospect, the reasons for this lapse of judgment seemed inexcusably trite. The case, involving a hell-bent homicidal crusader in a ski mask, had attracted national attention, and I, in the public’s eye, had emerged the hero of the day. Perhaps I succumbed to the Selectmen’s wishes because my own view of myself was considerably less than heroic.

The outcome, as I saw it later, had been inevitable from the start.

innocent had been freed, most of the guilty had been punished one way or another-but I had been less the driving force in it all than the conductor, madly trying to maintain order on a runaway train. When the dust had settled, I was the only one left who’d looked good, and I felt unhappy enough with my performance to welcome the flattery of the Selectmen’s offer. Now, a mere lieutenant once more, I found the results of my foray into town government had been a lethal overdose of political soft-shoe, and a painful severing of cherished ties to the street. It had also helped to poison my friendship with Gail Zigman, the only woman I’ve really cared for since my wife died almost twenty years ago. Not bad for six months’ work.

So, through either my own stupidity or the simple workings of fate, I felt I’d taken two shots on the nose, one right after the other. I needed to retire to some cave and lick my wounded pride, and to do that, I had looked back over my personal history to find solace in its highlights and refuge in its memories.