“Outlast them.” Briggs listlessly watched the road for deer.
“I hope I can. Really, I’ve come here because you never quite give up on me, do you?”
“We’re old friends,” Briggs droned.
“Perhaps once I’m a cowboy, you’ll invest your remarks with greater meaning. Anyway, to continue my saga: I knew the noose was tightening; charges were being prepared. But I had been so nimble over the years at helping my clients improperly state assets for death taxes that they saw the wisdom in dropping all complaints against me.”
Erik had moved in with his daughter and harassed her with dietary advice until she drove him to the bus station. Settling for a year in Waltham, he lived on the thinnest stream of remaining Boston comforts that shielded him from freefalling disclosure of his curiosity-filled investment days. He might have stayed, but the only job he could find was teaching speed-reading with a primitive machine that exposed only a single line of text at a time, gradually accelerating down the page; that didn’t appeal to him. He went back to Boston to “clean some clocks,” but important inhibitions were gone and he crossed the line, running afoul of the law at several points but especially attempted blackmail. Nevertheless, he survived until a client — with whom he had reached a mutually satisfactory settlement exchanging forgiveness for secrecy — died; and that brought snoopy children into Faucher’s world, followed by investigators, and “Net-net, I’m on the run.”
Just before sunrise, Briggs heard Faucher calling to him. He climbed the stairs, pulling on a sweatshirt and his shorts, and entered the guest room. He found Erik kneeling next to the window, curtains pulled back slightly. He gestured for Briggs to join him.
In the yard below, two men stood smoking next to a vehicle with government plates. The smoke could be smelled in Erik’s room as he stared hard at them. “They’re here for me, John,” he said. “I can’t believe you’ve done this. Now I’m going to jail.”
“You know perfectly well that I didn’t do this,” Briggs said. But nothing could prevent him from feeling unreasonably guilty.
“Judas Iscariot. That’s how I shall always know you.”
They carried Faucher away. Briggs ran alongside in an L.L. Bean bathrobe pouring out offers of help, but Erik waved him off like a man shooing flies.
The weather began to change, and the high white clouds that had remained at their stations for so long moved across the horizon, leaving ghostly streaks in their place. One quiet afternoon, while John looked at the casework that was to follow the demise of the town in Delaware and the new prosperity of the town in North Carolina — mine mitigation in Manitoba, bike paths, a public swimming pool, a library wing in exchange for ground permanently poisoned by cyanide — the phone rang. It was Carol, bringing news that Erik was going to prison. He had been ruinously disagreeable in court, which inflated the sentences to which his crimes had given rise. She aired this as another grievance, as though little good could be extracted from Faucher now. “You were with him, John, why didn’t you help him?”
“I didn’t know how to help him. We were just spending time together.”
“You were just spending time together?”
“I’m afraid that’s it. I feel I wasn’t very perceptive.”
“You have my agreement on that,” said Carol. “He left you literally eager for imprisonment. You had a chance to put him back on his feet, and you let him fall.”
“Well, I don’t know the facts. I—”
“You don’t need to know the facts. You need to listen to what I’m telling you.”
“Carol, I don’t think you understand how tiresome you’ve become.”
“Is that your way of commiserating with me?”
“Yes,” Briggs said simply. “Yes, Carol, it is.”
At times, John worried there was something he should have done. The whole experience had been like missing a catch on the high trapeze: the acrobat is pulling away from you, falling into the distance. Or perhaps the acrobat is pulling you off your own trapeze. Neither thought was pleasant.
It was inevitable that he would get worked once more for the newsletter. Hoyt wanted to know how Briggs had found Faucher.
“Breathing,” Briggs said.
“You’ve got good air out there,” said Hoyt. “I’ll give you that.”
In November, on his way to the town in North Carolina he had saved from oblivion, he stopped in Boston, rented a car, and drove to the prison at Walpole but Faucher refused to see him. Sitting in his topcoat in the pale-green meeting room, Briggs rose slowly to acknowledge the uniformed custodian who bore his rejection. He was furious.
But once he was seated on the plane, drink in hand, looking out on the runway at men pushing carts, a forklift wheeling along a train of red lights, a neighboring jet pushing back, he felt a little better. His second drink was delivered reluctantly by a harried stewardess — only because Briggs told her he was on his way to his mother’s funeral. At this point, a glow seemed to form around Briggs’s seatmate, and Briggs struck up a conversation, ordering drinks for both of them as soon as the plane was airborne. The seatmate, an unfriendly black man who worked for Prudential Insurance, actually was going to a funeral, the funeral of a friend, and this revelation triggered a slightly euphoric summary of Briggs’s friendship with Faucher, delivered in remarkable detail, considering that Briggs’s companion was trying to read. Briggs concluded his description of his visit to the prison by raising his arms in the air and crying, “Hallelujah!” a gesture that made him realize, instantly, that he had had enough to drink. The seatmate narrowed his eyes, and when Briggs explained that, at long last, a chapter of his life was over, the man, turning back to his open book, said wearily, “Do you actually believe that?”
North Coast
Austin was the more obviously vigilant as they made their way under the canopy of the ancient climax forest, the overgrowth of low alders and ferns towering over him and Ruth. They both had huge canisters of bear spray they’d bought in New Hazelton, but only Austin had ever had to use it — an experience that gave him no confidence since the bear stopped only feet away as the can emptied, and seemingly thanks to mature reflection rather than violent arrest. As he shook the nearly weightless can, the bear, on its hind legs, elevated its nose and just chose not to maul him. He told Ruth the spray worked great. “Point and shoot,” he said. “Nothing to it.”
They followed a game trail paralleling an unnamed creek that emptied a long way to the south into the main stem of the Skeena River, nearly a hundred miles from its debouchment into the North Pacific. It was mostly forest of cedars and hemlocks, silent except for the small dark winter wrens and the many generations of ravens, the young who squawked and the bearded old with their ominous kraah and an inclination to follow the intruders.
This was a world Austin knew. Bearing his heavy pack, he moved with the rocking gait of a Sherpa while Ruth, equally fit, found the near-rain-forest conditions almost impossible. She studied Austin’s measured stride and tried to emulate his concentration on the space in front of him, his alertness to the least resistance, and the continuous reference to an objective he somehow kept clear in his head.