I worked as a forensic psychologist part time to supplement the meager income I made in my private mental health practice, where I saw Medicaid clients. And Medicaid didn’t pay much. So, I did evaluations for the courts. All kinds of evals: psychosocials, psychosexuals, PSI’s, evaluations for competency, fitness to stand trial, custody, parental fitness. Legal assessments took time, but the courts paid well. Sometimes, I’d have to testify as an expert.
On the criminal side, the fact patterns were pretty gruesome. I was used to that. I used to work with sex offenders. The media was wrong. Most weren’t pedophiles and most didn’t re-offend, once they were caught. But after working five days a week with men who abused the underaged, I had to take a psychic shower on the weekends. I suffered from burn out, what the helping professions called compassion fatigue. I often wondered why I chose to work with people who scored over 33 on the Hare Psychopathy Index, the cutoff for antisocial personality disorder.
Because no one else would. Because they would and would judge their clients pretty harshly, trying to work out their own countertransference issues on males who, through the exercise of power and control, ended up disempowering themselves in the legal system. Because everybody deserves a second chance, even my own abuser. Maybe by working with them, I was vicariously trying to fix him so he wouldn’t hurt any other child. He was my countertransference, which was just a five-syllable word for skeleton, for ghost, for shadow.
He’d been an older neighbor boy. The latest eval I was working on for the court had brought him back to mind. I found myself thinking about him, wondering whatever happened to him.
The police reports for my lates forensic evaluation said there’d been two roommates living in a small, rented house. Two men. One older and one younger. They’d been stuck in lockdown because of Covid. Though they worked as sawyers, they were furloughed because a lot of the mills and factories were closed. So my client and his roommate were stranded without money. Their rental was out in the middle of nowhere, in the North Woods. In Wisconsin, that’s nowhere.
I practiced in Madison. That was back in somewhere. I had to travel up to the jail in Vilas County.
The drive up north always pulled memories from me. I believe the scents stirred those memories, good and bad. That green odor of pine as the farms gradually surrendered themselves to the evergreen forests in the great northern belt. My grandfather had lived up here, near Eagle River. I’d spent my summers here. That was where it happened, with our neighbor’s son.
I checked in at the Northernaire, an old hotel on the Three Lakes chain. The room was cold and stale, even in late spring. It held that fusty smell that old hotel rooms did. The walls were paneled with local spruce. The floors bare of anything but old, cold tile the color of pulp. No air conditioning this far north. A duo of lumpy double beds with pilled green bedspreads. Prints of evergreen forests rimming a cold, cerulean lake hung crooked on the walls. The photo over the bed was of Iron Mountain. Or maybe it was Rib Mountain outside Wausau. Or even Baraboo farther south. No TV. An old dial phone. No internet hookup. Rust stains around the drains in the sink and bathtub, and water that smelled like stale eggs. It felt like I’d stepped into the early 1960’s. It felt perfect.
I washed up with the tiny square of paper-wrapped soap left on the edge of the pink porcelain sink. I made some very old and very bad coffee in the tiny plastic, one cup coffee maker. Then I went for my first interview with Michael Gale Martin, alleged to have murdered Daryl Wolpe, his roommate, with a chainsaw.
“Hi. I’m Doctor Candace Donald,” I greeted him. “I’ve been assigned by the State to conduct an evaluation to determine whether you suffered from any psychiatric conditions at the time of your alleged offense.”
“You don’t remember me, do you?” he said from the other side of the glass.
“Should I?”
“You used to work down in Madison? With SO’s?”
“Are you a former client, Mr. Martin?”
“Call me Michael, please.”
“Michael are you a former client?”
“Of a kind, I s’pose.”
I hated it when they were abstruse like this. Playing games just to magnify their own sense of importance.
“Were you or were you not?”
He studied me with a distant look for a moment before he answered: “I was not.”
“Do you understand why I’m here?”
“To determine whether I was insane at the time of the commission of my crime.”
“Well, sanity’s a legal determination that I’m not allowed to find. But I can aid the finder of fact in your court case in coming to such a conclusion.”
He snickered. “Boy, you are cold as tuna, aintcha?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Never mind. We cannot change our dispositions, I s’pose. We was born with ’em. Anyway, I been through these question and answer things maybe a dozen times, for everything from DUI to the battery of a peace officer. So I’m conversant. You can feel free to jump in without all the preliminaries.”
“Very well, Michael. Then let’s get started.”
And start we did. This would be a long session. Sanity Q & A’s were the longest of any forensic interview. So much was at stake, for everyone involved.
I started with his developmental and family history. He kept studying me as if he were trying to place me, to recognize me from somewhere, his dry lips suffused with a grin of curiosity. He sat back on his stool as if to take all of me in at once.
“Did your parents stay married?”
“Yeah. ’til they died.”
“And do you have a close relationship between your brothers and sisters?”
“I haven’t seen ’em in years. My sister kept close, though.”
“Your twin?”
“Yup.”
“When was the last time you had any contact with her?”
“Just before all this blew up.”
“You mean your charges?”
“No, I mean the coronavirus.”
“About four months ago then, back at the end of March?”
“That’s when it all started, you know.”
“When what started?”
“They say adversity builds character, ma’am.” He shook his head. “But I don’t think that’s the way it is.”
“What way is it then?”
“Adversity introduces us to ourselves. They say that, too.”
“Do you believe that?”
“What do you believe?” he asked. “That’s what’s important.”
At first, I thought maybe he was being rhetorical. But when he didn’t reply, I realized he wanted me to.
He breathed out, and as he did so, he fogged up the glass that separated us. I almost felt he was trying to infect me with it. If he had it. The prison authorities wouldn’t tell me whether he did or not. Privacy. HIPAA, integrated with a dozen state laws protecting patients and inmates. But the glass, that would protect me. Wouldn’t it?
Thick security glass separated us, and his gravelly voice crackled through a wire and not an aperture in a window. There was no way any pathogen could get through. But what I’d begun to fear moving from him to me had passed between us long ago.
“What I believe isn’t what we’re here to discuss,” I replied. “We’re here for your sanity eval—”
“—I’m sane. Put it down on that paper you got there. I ain’t trying to get outta nothing. I know I’m goin’ away for natural life. After what I did.”
“Let’s start with that. What did you do?”
“You read the reports, from the police right?”
“It’s always best in your own words, though. The police can be biased.”
“Alright, if it makes you happy for your statement of facts. I took a Stihl 16-inch to him. Then he died.”
“Was it planned?”
He laughed. “Of course it was planned. My hand didn’t slip on the trigger, ma’am.”
“No, what I mean is, how long had you been thinking about it before you did it?”
He lathered his gray stubble with his long, tan fingers. He had strong, bitten up hands, stippleded in white scars. “I never thought a that before,” he admitted. “I hated him though. I guess you don’t do what I did to another man unless you really hate his guts.”
“Who was he to you?”
“Whatdya mean, who was he? My roommate.”
“What I mean is, was he your friend? Your relative? You never told the police how you’d come to share a house with him?”
He shook his head. “He wasn’t no friend a mine. Wasn’t no blood a mine neither.”
His face changed. He swallowed as if he were digesting something, but at the same time, as if he were regurgitating a stone that had been down there in him for a long time. His granite eyes narrowed and he cast his irises low. He was about to confess. I’d seen it a hundred times.
“We met,” he swallowed dry, “in a bar. At Blackie’s, up near Iron River.” Then he glanced at me like with cold distance. “Wouldn’t expect you t’know it, but there’s a lot of lumber work up there. Woodsmen, we’re the bottom a the barrel.”
I took notes. The County wouldn’t let me in with any electronics.
“Don’t know a one of ’em that don’t drink. Most of us do meth or crush oxy or somethin’ to keep the pain away from the damage we done to our bodies.”
I glanced up into his sunken eyes, caught the edges of his dark teeth. He was gray and the gray in his hair matched the mottled gray in his tanned skin. One shoulder higher than the other. His elbows sharp and boney. The whole man 6 feet tall, yet barely 150 pounds. He just waited for me take him in like that, with pity and misunderstanding.
“We don’t got skills other than takin’ down trees. Most of us wander from job to job, state to state. Depending on the season.”
He kept looking me over, up and down as far as the glass that halved us would allow.
“Lotta times we shack up. Two or three to a single-wide or a fifth wheel. So I found this place on the edge a Rhinelander. Rent was month-to-month, but it was too much for me alone. You put out the word when you’re on a crew in spring. By the end a the day, usually, you got some other poor cocksucker come up to you ’n tell you that yeah, he can float ya for half. He’ll come up with the cash next check.” He pushed his tongue out between the space for his missing incisor, and it looked like a worm trying to get out of his rotting mouth.
“I had to front for him with the landlord. Not a big deal. I done it dozens a times over the years.” He swathed the back of his neck with his great hand, knotted on the back with veins the way a gall swells a tree. He grimaced from some cervical pain.
“We move in a week later. That’s when the virus hit. They closed down the mills. Closed down the forests. No more work. No more bars. We’re on lockdown.”
“And that’s when you killed him?” I said without looking up as I scribbled the facts.
He snickered, shook his head, and irritation spread across that arrowhead face chiseled like pine bark. “Ma’am,” he said. “That was just the beginning.” He sniffed the air with his hawksbill like he was retrieving a memory.
“It was a tiny place. Just the two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small livin’ room. No carpet. Linoleum floors. Furnished. Had to use camphor for the bedbugs. No TV. But hell, we bought enough beer to last 5 pandemics. Took up the whole friggin’ fridge.”
I wrote as fast as I could. My cursive was so bad, I only hoped I could read half of what I wrote. I had a theory that the longer you went to school the more abstract your handwriting.
“I ask him before he moves in: ‘Do you use?’ It was the one thing I always ask. ’Cuz it’s the one thing I cannot abide. He says ‘no.’ Puts his hand up like he’s declinin’ another card from the deck. ‘No way,’ says he. ‘Gave that shit up years ago.’”
Q, I wrote. Client meth addict?”
“I walk into his room one day and he’s skin poppin’.”
I glanced up at him and he seemed to read my mind. “Me? I hadn’t used in years. That shit gets into you, man, turns you into a smile zombie overnight. I made a vow to my sons that I wouldn’t be doin’ meth no more. And I abided by that.”
“You have children?”
“Two boys. 12 and 15. They stay with my moms. Over in Eagle River. That’s where I’m from. I send home the money. Besides havin’ donated them the DNA, that’s all I’ll ever leave ’em.”
His wide, joker’s mouth pursed into a bitter regret and his eyes narrowed, as if he’d cry. “I haven’t been much of a father,” he sighed. “But it all starts when you’re a boy. Somethin’s done by the father to the son. The son acts it out, with his own children.” I saw the regret hang on his face like ice on a cave.
“Did you act it out with your boys?”
His somber expression turned into sour betrayal. “No. Why would you even think that?”
I allowed him his moment of indignation, then nodded for him to go on.
“I had no objection to the Leinenkugel that stocked the icebox and the extra cases we kept on the front porch in cold storage. I partook of plenty a that, ma’am, I don’t mind tellin’ you. But he wasn’t gonna be jammin’ that other shit up in fronta me. I tole him before he moved in: no drugs.”
I saw the rage build in those fading eyes, the fire behind them restoked by an ancient choler that never dimmed with time. The V-shaped eyes clinched and his jaw locked and the skin around his boney knuckles tightened. It was the first real anger he’d betrayed, and with that betrayal came the evidence that he could limb a man to death with a gas-powered saw.
“‘No. Don’t worry,’” he imitated his victim in a whiney voice. “‘I don’t do that shit no more. I learned. Boy, did I learn.’”
“First night in, I catch him plungin’ a spike in his arm. He’s pickin’ at scabs, says he’s tryin’ to make a hole so the mites can get out. Skinny little fuck. I shoulda known.”
And he held up his arms and the gray skin sagged off his bones in a demonstration of just what meth and its analogues could do to a man who used them for chronic pain, for the energy to work a job for which his body had long ago given out. He had all the hollows and hallmarks of addiction.
“The rental, it was out in the middle a nowhere.”
I pulled out the crime scene photo of the cottage from my file. It was the last structure standing in an old logging camp in National Forest land that bordered the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was one of those old, clapboard cottages, rotting away in the trackless, boreal forests. This region of the world got more snow than just about anywhere, owing to the effects of Lake Superior and the uplands which surrounded it. All those storms rotted the wood, and the white paint had peeled off the slats, leaving gray bones. The tar shingle roof was carpeted with pine needles instead of rivets.
“I think the nearest house, it was a few miles down the logging road.”
“Seems so,” I agreed as I put down the photo.
“We shoulda been loggin’ double shifts 5, 6 days a week. But when the lockdown order came, they laid us all off. It was just me… ’n him, stuck together in that little cabin. Didn’t have the money to head back home, owin’ to the fact I’d put it all down on the rent. Landlord always wants first and last month’s rent, figurin’ you’ll skip. Plus, we thought the furlough would end soon enough.”
“What happened next?”
“Gets cold up there in the Superior Forest, cold well into June, Joo-lie, ’specially at night, Screens in the windows were all busted. Gotta have some woodsmoke to keep the skeeters out at night. So, we cut us up a couple cords from what we found near the cabin. You know, mostly beetled pine. In fact, he was up all night lumberin’, tearin’ down the forest, pushin’ it back. Draggin’ back trunks with his chain tied to his beat up ol’ Honda hatchback. Talkin’ to the trees. He tole me each one had its own personal-i-tee.”
“Had he been that way when you first met him?”
He shook his head.
“Meth?”
“Whatever it was he was spikin’ into his muscle. Bath salts. Kroc. I don’t fuckin’ know.”
I looked at the post mortems with a cold, clinical eye, the first batch taken on scene, the second on the slab. I’d seen thousands as a forensic psychologist.
The body was unrecognizable. The face a jigsaw of deep and superficial wounds, painted in blanched carmine, all as wide as the chain. The nose a stump so I could see into the cavity. The lips excised. The neck garroted. A long incision along the midline carved from the larynx through the sternum and abdomen down through the testes. The arms and legs stumps. It may have been that he did it this way out of rage. Or it may have been an attempt to dispose of the body, maybe feed it to the wolves in pieces, dropped in different parts of the forest to lessen chances of identification. I’d handled a case where the defendant, a veterinarian, had killed his wife, then cut off her head, hands and feet and fed the parts to dogs that he was kenneling for vacationing pet owners. He was apprehended after one of the dogs excreted part of a finger while his owner was walking him.
In the case of Michael Gale Martin, the M.E. didn’t write a long report. Cause of death was kind of obvious, and a dead woodsman wasn’t really worth all that effort, especially during pandemic time when the coroner had other DB’s piling up in her morgue.
“Anyway, he was tweakin’. I tole him, I said I can’t sleep with you runnin’ that saw all night.” He almost pled the words as if he was telling his victim all over again with those washed-out eyes begging.
“He sits down on my bed. I mean, it’s tic season for Chrissake and he’s all dusted with litter ’n pulp.”
I took his words down. They’d be the only words the judge would hear at his plea and sentencing. That gave me a certain amount of power. To portray the defendant, the way he seemed to me, at his allocution.
“Get the fuck off my bed!” he yelled, and I flinched. The C.O. at the door glanced over, but wasn’t too concerned. Martin was chained down behind an inch of glazed glass. “And I kicked that fucker off my mattress.”
He waited for me to finish my note. I didn’t even have to look up. He timed it perfectly, courteously.
“He don’t care. ‘The- the- the- the way it’s laid out is the key,’ he says. ‘It’s all preplanned, like a subdivision. They- they- they- they- they know. It’s all accordion to a preplanned plan.”
“‘Accordion?’ What the fuck you babblin’ about, boy? Thing is he never stuttered before. I knew all the signs. He was tweakin’ alright. That daddy was strappin’ up but good. It was 3 a.m. He was tweakin’ alright.” Martin said it with a hatred reserved for the drug, with a derision put upon his addict-victim, but meant for himself, too. For what he’d been. For how he’d ruined his life and the lives of his sons.
Martin said he was a Kansan, but the PSI I’d gotten from pretrial services said he’d been born in the U.P., up in Marquette.
“‘Each tree’s got its own soul. If you think about all the hundreds of millions and billions of trees on the planet. Ya-, ya- ya- ya know there’s over three trillion trees on the planet, Gaia, dontcha? Maybe we’re here for them and not the other way around. We harvest 10 billion a year, for a net netnetnetnet loss. In 300 years. They’re all gone man. Wh- wh- wh- where’s the old growth left up here, man, huh?’ My defendant seemed to have perfect recall of everything his victim had told him.
“I kicked him again and he stood with his saw drippin’ chain oil all over the wood floor. GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE WITH THAT THING!”
I reared back again.
“Stop shouting!” the guard barked from her post at the door.
“‘L- L- Look around you,’” he says. ‘The floor, the walls,’ and his crazy greenish eyes scanned the ceiling. ‘The whole house. Your bed, the dresser. Everything around us is made from ’em.’”
He waited for me to finish my note. “Then he just walked outta my room, the saw hangin’ from his hand like a second arm.”
I scribbled my notes in pencil. They wouldn’t allow in pens. As the eraser on its end ticked back and forth my writing, it occurred to me that the wood in my pencil had once been a tree.
“He finally run outta gas,” Martin said. “I thought that’d be the end of his woodcut.”
He scanned the visitor’s room. White light buzzed in tubes underneath metal grates high above. Cameras watched behind convex, black-glassed quadrants from all corners of the room. The guard escorted the other inmate out, leaving Michael Gale Martin as the lone prisoner, chained to a stool mounted in the floor.
“Know what’s cruel?” he asked me.
I demurred.
“What’s cruel is takin’ away everything from a man, and not replacin’ it with nothin’.”
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody once said that intemperance is a cruel master. What’s crueler is takin’ away all the ways a man copes and not givin’ him nothin’ to cope with in their place. Like smokes, ’n beer, ’n the woods themselves.”
Social histories could be difficult when the person you were taking them from was a poor historian. Martin was different. He was lucid, not tangential. His memory was intact. And he didn’t enjoy the stage as much as he seemed to have the need to unburden himself. I found myself patient with him. Some clients you like, some you don’t. Despite the horror of what he’d done, he was drawing me in.
“That’s what happens when you’re in stir, ma’am.” He chewed on what appeared to be a strip of paper, maybe left over from a breakfast napkin. “You end up with just yerself, ’n yer memories a what you done. Lotta guys get locked up ’n they think their memories will save ’em. But you can’t recapture your first lay, or the day’s first cigarette. You try t’do that, you get stuck in time. You keep goin’ back to the well. That’s what addiction is. Sooner or later, they gotta take it away from you.”
“What did they have to take from you?”
“That man, he lived to cut. He loved to take trees down. The compulsion was in him. He had to find a way t’do it until the meth worked its way out of his bones.”
“What did he replace his addiction with when he ran out of gas?”
“When he ran outta fuel for his saw, he found an old handsaw and he started limbin’ all the trunks he’d felled with the Stihl. But then he ran outta gas. The drug in him wore off. He fell out. He slept.”
Martin lathered the stubble on the sharp corners of his chin and I noticed that half of one of his pinkies was missing. How come I hadn’t seen that before. It wasn’t in the medical screen. But then, a man like this had all kinds of damage he woke with every morning and worked with every day. He’d take something like a missing finger in stride, where the more civilized among us would call it trauma.
“For days he slept. He’d wake up, drink some a that cold well water from the tap. We didn’t have no hot water for showers ’n such. Didn’t even have no shower or tub in that ol’ cottage. Just a sink ’n toilet with the flush overhead on a chain. He woke up every other day or so that first week. He raided the icebox, drunk my beer. He ate my beans ’n boiled my rice.”
“What were you doing during this time?”
“I carved.”
You carved?”
“I’m— I was a carver, ma’am. I used dead trees as my scrimshaw.”
“What did you carve?”
“My dreams.”
“What were your dreams?”
“Don’t we have but all kinda dreams? Sometimes they’re angelic and full a light. Most of ’em, though, are darker, haulin’ our doom down that River Styx into the Underworld. You gotta work them dreams out or they pull you under ’n claim you.”
He was getting sidetracked. Tangential speech, I jotted.
“And I would put the faces of the dreams into the trunks of trees. I’d make ’em stories startin’ from the top, movin’ down to the bottom. Bodies twisted in the wood. Filigrees. Friezes. Frescoes. Effigies carved on the surfaces of different things besides trees. In the legs of tables and the bannisters and balustrades of houses I sometimes did woodwork in for people of means, in the winters when it was hard to find work in the North. I was a woodsman, but I believed in makin’ somethin’ outta what I did besides the mindless felling of living wood. The spirit of the tree had to be honored. I had to release it to its proper bardo. So it wouldn’t hang around and cause mischief.”
He’d stopped dropping his g’s. His elocution sharpened. His vocabulary broadened as he spoke about woodcarving.
“Everything that useless man cut down for no good reason, I whittled it into something else, to make sure the spirits he liberated from the live trees he cut went to the right place.”
“The right place?”
“The right afterworld, ma’am. For the forest’s sake, and for ours.”
I stopped writing. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Why do you think everything’s happening the way it is? The world’s turning on us. The virus? Droughts. Locusts. We haven’t honored the earth, so she’s flicking us all off her hindquarters with a slap of her tail.”
I scrawled a note: religious delusion.
“Every spirit needs to be free, doesn’t it? And if it isn’t, it lingers where it’s not supposed to be.”
None of this would make it into my report to the court.
“The energy’s has to go somewhere.” He licked his thirsty lips and I could hear him swallow. “You kill for a reason. Alright. We have to take life to live. You needlessly kill, the Mare, she don’t like that.”
“The Mare?”
“Our Mother. Earth.”
“Okay.” It was hard to separate an earnestly held spiritual belief from a delusion.
“If the spirit isn’t freed, it causes trouble. It can’t help itself. Some call it dark matter. Dark energy. 68% of all energy’s dark in the universe.” And he looked up at the dark-glassed cameras as if that energy eavesdropped on him now. “The web, 96% of it’s dark. Slave trade, terrorist money, drug deals, money laundering, hackers.” He rattled them off.
“The dark web?” I knew what it was, but not much else about it.
“Navy developed it, then gave it to the genpop. I was in the Navy for a stint.”
My interest in him dropped, but I felt a certain satisfaction that I’d hit paydirt, as he might’ve called it. Once they started talking about dark matter and dark energy and linked them to the dark web, the outlines of his delusion took shape. His insanity defense assumed form.
“How long were you in?” I readied my no. 2 pencil for a note which could support my opinion as to my client’s inability to appreciate the logical consequences of his actions at the time of his offense. “How long were you in the Navy, I mean.”
“12 years.”
My pencil stopped. 12 years? I’d expected two years, with a general discharge for psychiatric reasons. Maybe a dishonorable for a series of positive drug tests and fighting with his commander.
“12 years?”
“I was in Intelligence.”
“What did you do? For Naval Intelligence, I mean. And don’t tell me it’s ‘classified.’” I smiled.
He didn’t smile back. “‘The truth is out there.’ You heard that before?”
I nodded. “I believe the reference comes from the old X-Files, the television show that explored alien conspiracy theories.”
He nodded back. “The truth is that the truth isn’t out there. It’s in here,” and he tapped his heart with his fingers, fingers plagued with knots and burls. “But that doesn’t make it any less mysterious.”
I wrote down his quote.
“I worked in SIGINT,” he said. “Signals Intelligence. Detached service to NSA.”
I’d have to confirm that. How did a Naval Intelligence Officer (NCO, I assumed) end up chopping trees down for a living? His diction. The way he presented. It didn’t fit with Naval Intelligence. I suspected a delusional disorder at best. Schizophrenia as the most likely.
I finished jotting down my diagnoses. “Why did you leave?”
“You heard of the Doomsday Signal?”
I shook my head. Once the delusion came, a client like this, with some remarkable characteristics, became just another sanity determination, maybe with some unfitness to stand trial thrown in. Could he cooperate in his own defense and understand the nature of the charges and proceedings against him? Those were the issues. I could bill for a separate fitness report, if I played it right.
“It’s a signal, from space. We’d been listening to it at Fort Meade for decades. It consists of microbursts sourced distantly in space, in the direction of a particular quasar.”
He chewed on his thumbnail. I twiddled my pencil before making a couple notes: DELUSIONS – Navy Intelligence. UFO SIGNAL.
“The frequency was such that we were convinced that it meant something.” He licked his lips again. “Could sure use a beer,” he suggested, as if I’d go out and get him one.
“I figured out it didn’t mean nothing,” he concluded.
“Were you a mathematician, an engineer?”
He shook his head. “I was a decoder of a different sort, ma’am. I was just a listener. An equipment operator. I began to understand that the pattern of the Doomsday Signal didn’t have any meaning. It was all just noise.”
“Just noise,” I repeated. Like you’re making right now.
“In the spiritual life, there comes a point, there comes a time, when you realize that this here, all around us, isn’t all there is. Then, you begin to focus on where you’re going. But where you’re going is where you already are.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nah, I knew you wouldn’t. What you’re looking for, you’re looking with. The frequency – the pattern they were looking at – it was coming from them.”
“From who?”
“From the people who were studying it.”
My brow bunched. “From their listening devices?”
“No, it wasn’t no artifact. Don’t you understand? Everything’s an echo chamber, a mirror. It don’t have its origins from outer space. Every pattern you see is a pattern you make up. It’s all just noise. There’s meaning, but it comes from the meaning maker. You’re condemned to find it. In you, in me, in the world. And when I don’t make no sense, you diagnose me. You say I’m the one who’s nuts. You got yourself a PhD ’cuz you wanted to figure out why some things don’t make sense. Somethin’ in your childhood maybe. But then you end up lookin’ at me and sayin’: ‘The problem’s in him.’ The Court’ll read your report and say: ‘The problem is that guy,’ and sentence me. Then you don’t gotta look at yourself no more.” He folded his arms. He was irked. More than irked, he steamed with that old anger of being misunderstood.
Then he laughed derisively, taking me in as if I were the stand-in for the whole system that oppressed him, probably since childhood. I’d seen that look many times before. I represented the psycho-legal system.
“Your circuit board of a system won’t admit to a God, but still, the world’s gotta make sense somehow. And when somebody don’t fit your molds, you sentence ’em and throw ’em in places LIKE THIS!”
I jumped back as if the spit that flecked his side of the glass had hit my eye. He panted. I glanced up at the black lobe up in the corner of the white, cinderblock room, as if to say Did you get all that?
I stiffened my arms, looked down at my all-important notes, retrieved a breath. “I would like to return to your relationship with the victim in this case, Daryl Wolpe. Why did you kill him?”
He delivered a bitter huff, shook his head. “Boy, you people take the cake. I just give it all to you, and you always put it back just the way you constructed it, and leave it all on the guy behind the glass, or in the grin bin, or lying on the gutter with three winter coats in June babblin’ to himself about the city in the mountains on the moon, Triton.” He configured his gaze and spit it out to me: “I killed him ’cuz that same noise started comin’ outta him. The same frequency that emanated from that quasar.”
“You couldn’t get away from it.”
He shook his head. “No ma’am I couldn’t.”
“Why didn’t you just leave?”
“I just wanted it to stop.”
“The noise.”
“Yeah, the noise.” He bit on his cuticle, and I could see the angst that came out in the blood that squeezed out between the nail and the skin. “But more than that noise, it was the pattern that I heard coming from his mind, at night especially.”
I finally looked up at his cold, insane, hot, killing eyes with a dead look of detachment of my own, planting my tongue in my cheek in a nonchalant way. It was the only way to stay sane among them. Maintain your distance.
“You see God, It isn’t what people think It is. It’s really just the chaos, the unimaginable immensity you can’t get your head around. Your head, it’s just the receiver of the signal, of the pattern. Your mind’s always trying to get itself around anything and everything. It thinks if it can figure something out, then it can contain it, control it. God’s just that sum total of everything we can’t claim to understand. It breaks all the patterns. Its signal busts the receiver, because the receiver’s too small to gather it all. The signal terrifies. It drives you mad. Like flying too close to the sun and looking directly into its single Cyclops eye. And that chaos was coming from him, that Doomsday Signal, and I just didn’t want to be reminded of it anymore.”
“Of what?”
“It was the God signal. The same signal that’d been emanating from that quasar. It came from him.”
“Why would you want to kill that?”
“You can’t kill it. You can’t kill God. Most people try to go to God. They want to get to heaven. They try to focus on where they’re going. But where they’re going is where they already are.”
“So then why?” I really wanted to know. Why would you kill God? “Why did you kill him?”
“Because I wasn’t ready for paradise, ma’am. I just wasn’t ready. But if his signal spread to me, then just like the coronavirus, it’d begin oscillating from my mind into other minds. It would infect me and from me it would infect others. Until we all come into resonance with each other.”
He was flitting from sense to nonsense, from sanity to insanity and then back. What was it about the mad? They possessed raw, archetypal content – half the truth. But they couldn’t carry it because it had destroyed their vessels.
“What would’ve been wrong with that?” I asked. “Coming into resonance with him instead of dicing him with a chainsaw?” I’d learned not to argue with a delusion. You play along until it reveals what it’s standing for. But I’d had it with all the blood and rape and hate I’d had to take from all these patients all these years. I wanted something to make sense.
“The world, it isn’t ready for paradise either. It isn’t ready for mercy. So it dispatches hate.”
“It has to start somewhere, doesn’t it? Where, if not between two men in a cabin?”
“Compassion, forgiveness, they’re earned. That man didn’t earn nothin’ but contempt.”
I’d lost patience. The insane could be just as evil and selfish as any other people. Just because they weren’t responsible didn’t mean they weren’t evil. “Get on with your story, please.”
“I’d wake up, and he’d be standin’ over my bed. His eyes’d be open. When I’d call his name, he wouldn’t say nothin’. I’d nudge him with my foot. He’d gasp, claim to have just woke up. Said he was sleep walkin’. Then he’d never stop gabbin’. Never stop eatin’ me outta house ’n home. He’d go off on these rages, bustin’ stuff up. Drinkin’ my beer ’n flyin’ off into these fits.”
I made a note: SELF-DEFENSE? But that was for a defense lawyer to determine, not a sanity evaluator.
“He was a younger man than me. I was afraid…” His voice faltered. “I feared that maybe one day, he’d take me.”
“Why?”
“’Cuz he said he would. He said it was either him or me. That only one of us was walkin’ out of the forest.”
“Did you tell that to the police?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Didn’t think they’d believe me, once they saw what I done to him.”
I remembered the death scene and autopsy photos. They didn’t show a man who’d been killed in self-defense.
“How could he hurt you? You said his chainsaw was out of gas.”
“His mighta been.”
“But yours wasn’t?”
“I kept mine under my bed.”
“Then he couldn’t harm you.”
“He kept gettin’ more ’n more twisted up on glass. Then he’d drink to even out.” He seemed frightened as he related the story, his marble eyes flitting back and forth. “Summon the nightmares out of a man.”
“But, Mr. Martin, you had the chainsaw with the gas. You had the upper hand.”
I stared at him, but he wouldn’t look back. He wasn’t scared. He was evasive. He wasn’t telling me something. My instincts kicked in. Like a lawyer crossing a client, I had an intuition when it came to lies. I’d heard enough of them over the years. Clients who held back information. Suspects who didn’t want to admit to evidence of prior crimes. Mainly, I had familiarity with the paths – the sociopaths and psychopaths. They were the artists of lies. But I could dismantle them. All this suspect needed was a little push over the edge. He was ripe for confession.
“I don’t know,” he muttered.
“Sure you do.”
His eyes clinched, so deeply set and furrowed that it seemed he didn’t have any eyes. When they opened, tears streamed down the runnels and furrows. They watered a long-parched ground droughted far too long.
“It was mine,” he croaked.
“What was?”
“The stuff.”
“The meth?”
He couldn’t get the words out. He just nodded.
“Where did you keep it?”
“The one place he wouldn’t look. In my saw.” He said it as if it was betrayal, and I supposed it was: of all that he’d tried to do to atone for his grimy life.
“In the gas tank,” I guessed.
He nodded, and sobbed.
“So, then it wasn’t him, was it? Standing over your bed. It was you, standing over his.”
He nodded again.
“Did he even get high at all?”
He shook his head, wiped his face with the inside of his arm.
“Sometimes, you try to change, but you just can’t get there,” he said. He wept. “Sometimes, you just can’t make it.”
“So, you were using the whole time, and you blamed it on him.”
“There’s this gremlin asleep inside us. It’s dormant, you know? A wee, hibernating thing. You starve it and starve it and you think it’s finally all dried up and dead like a fossil thing. But all you got to do is pour a little poison on it. Just add water, and it stirs and it grows. It wakes and grows to occupy every cell of your being. Its arms inside your arms. Its legs moving within yours. The fingers of a demon’s hand inside the puppet you become to it. It just crawls up your gut and claws on the inside of you,” he whispered in a rage. “And you do things you can never take back.”
He finally looked me in the eyes, reached inside me as if he knew me. And that’s when I felt it, that bizarre chill. As if I’d known him from some ancient time.
“I want you to do something for me,” he asked. “Will you?”
I said nothing, made no gesture.
“I want you to visit something. It’s up there in the forest surrounding the cabin where he died.”
I knew it was another body.
“You’ll have to drive up to the cabin. From there, take Forest Service Road 35. Take it 10.2 miles west. There’s an old logging road south from there. Turn onto it. Follow that for another two miles exactly. The second road’s unnumbered, but your odometer’ll read exactly two miles after you make that left. No more, no less.”
“What will I find?”
“You’ll know when you see it.”
I marked down the information. I made no promises. I had no intention of going.
Each year, one-third of suicides in the United States occur in institutions where the patient is observed one-on-one or with 15-minute check-ins. Most completed suicides in hospitals and jails are due to hanging, but not necessarily where the patient’s feet leave the floor. In fact, most institutional suicides don’t involve suspensions. It doesn’t take much to choke off the flow of air and cause asphyxiation. A doorknob will do.
15-minute checks are insufficient. They fall below the acceptable standard of care. Best practices include direct observation at all times, and the itemization and control of the inventory of bedding and clothing. Jail staff are supposed to identify anything that can be tied or draped around the throat.
A small, rural jail doesn’t have the resources needed to watch an inmate one-on-one, 24 hours a day. He died the day after our interview.
I should’ve notified the Sheriff. But I was curious. I’d notify the Sheriff after I found what I found.
The North Woods are part of the boreal forests of the world. They’re not quaint little woods with manicured trees you can picnic under. They stretch endlessly across the Superior Upland of northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Lapping up against the low mountains and cliffs that line the inland sea called Superior, those forests eventually merge with the taiga and come up against the ends of the earth.
An everlasting wind drove through the pine as I rattled down the forest service road in my little Yaris toward the site of the killing. I drove down gravel and dirt mile after mile, walled in by white spruce and black spruce which cast the road in sawtooth shadows.
The North Woods are cold, the soil boggy and poor. They couldn’t grow useful things up here, so the farmers from Scandinavia came and in a generation they were gone. Black flies tortured me during the day when I stopped for a break. That night, even in July, my breath puffed into a crisp frost. Mosquitoes swarmed me. They brewed into clouds measured in square miles. Their single octave whined a warning to any blooded thing caught in their storm. I sought refuge in the back seat of my car and caught tortured instants of nightmarish sleep as my gooseflesh fought off the clammy cold air.
Far off wolves harmonized with their drone, melting into a chorus of gloom. This was the region of Peshtigo, the deadliest wildfire in the history of the nation. Slash had been left after the great lumber rapes of earlier times, resulting in the firestorm. Menominee and Winnebago were cleared away as if they’d been lumber, too. Then the golden age of fishing camps and hunting came and went. What could be left here but ghosts? And woodsmen.
The next morning, I drove down the single-track road through mountain ash and paper birch. My low chassis barely cleared the poor, dusty ground. Up ahead, a white patch hovered in the mesmerizing field of semisweet green studded with copper trunks.
At the center of a clearing, the white resolved into a clapboard cottage. Not a regal huntsman’s cabin with massive, hewn beams and a fieldstone chimney. Just old lead paint peeling off the planks. The front porch was shut by glassless flaps of wood battened down by rusty hasps. Four rotting wood steps led up to the glass door, which was broken and boarded up with plywood. Moss and deadfall littered the tarpaper roof. This was where it happened.
I expected police tape to be X’d across the door. But there was none. I always imagined crime scenes as roped off forever. Yet eventually, the world needs to move on, needs to forget its own participation in its macabre acts. I pulled over, shut off the engine, stepped out. The Laurentian cold, even in the sun, made me shiver. The wind thundered through thousands of square miles of forests empty of asphalt and city.
I circumnavigated the small, cold-water cabin. Crude, single-paned windows were punched along its rear wall. I stopped at the window on the southeast corner. That’s where Michael Gale Martin crept into Daryl Wolpe’s bedroom at 2 a.m. and carved the man’s face into wood pulp. I quivered again, held my own body in a grip against the image. The vision of it passed. After I left this world, and a few sheriff’s deputies and a judge and a couple lawyers did as well, no one would know of the grisly happening here one night just two months ago. And that seemed for the best. The tragedies of the world should be left to fall in ruins like this crumbling cottage, unremembered.
I stepped back in my car and followed his directions from the cabin. I saw the sign for FS 35. My little two-door car whined down that single track for precisely 10.2 miles. An unmarked logging road, slightly better maintained than the Forest Service road, cut in. I followed that south. The cold scent of pines, with weak sunlight barely filtering through the pollen and spores to the bottom of the forest, gave way as the spruce and fir relented to successional aspen and sweet fern and balsam poplar. The musty scent was something I remembered from my time as a girl when we we’d come and visit Grandfather on Lake Planting Ground. I remembered his immense collection of butterflies under glass, and smiled.
But as I drove those last two miles, I felt sicker and sicker. Michael Gale Martin had given me directions to a second grisly crime scene and I’d be the first to discover it. I should’ve called the Sheriff. What if he’d left booby traps, snares designed for bears? The gruesome find might be me, there for the Vilas County Coroner to snap pictures of, photos for some other forensic investigator to peek at in her file. I pulled over and gripped my chest, panting. This was a mistake.
But I had to keep on now. I couldn’t turn around and drive back 2 ½ hours to inform the Sheriff of something I should’ve mentioned days ago. All that wasted time. I had to see. Something impelled me. I didn’t really do forensics or work with the -paths to supplement my income. I did it because I was driven to know the unutterable, to see what lay in its maw, undigested. I, the keeper of secrets. To know the heart of the monster. It might help me understand the monster that had left his searing brand upon my heart when I’d been a little girl. Yet the closer I drew to his dark enigma, the sicker I felt.
I became that little girl again. The girl next door, my new friend. Her name was Monica. Her older brother befriending me, asking me my name. Then carrying me deep into the woods. I don’t remember his face and I never knew his name. Maybe it had been better that way. Not better, but easier.
When it was over, I ran. I became lost, and ran mindlessly through the trackless forest. I just ran toward the sun, and found my way back.
Grandpa asked what had happened when I came running back through the birch, sobbing. But I never said a word.
I remember feeling worse when it was over than when it was being done. And I remember that smell. That distinct woodland scent up here that no other woods in the world smelled like. Right now, that piney-mossy stench brought all the horror of that day back. I sniffed the air and tasted that same spoor right now. I felt nauseous.
The light slanted down in fallstreaks through the upper story of the quakies. It made everything pristine, washing away the immensity of the horror.
Closer. Closer. My window open so I could throw up. The odometer ticking over that last tenth of the mile to 2. I braked, left the engine humming. Then thought better of it and switched it off. Didn’t know if I’d ever turn that key again. But I had to know.
I stepped out of the car. An altar up ahead. A sacrifice of some sort. The color of bark, the height of a stupa. I approached, wobbly. Wiping the vomit from the corner of my lips.
I approached it: a totem carved into a live tree. Not a Native totem, but the story of a life, of my life, fashioned into a tree. CANDACE was carved at the bottom, with a relief of a little girl with a tear dropping from the corner of her eye, then another, and another which by its third iteration had evolved into the petal of a flower, a hyacinth. A chill willowed up my shoulders. What a demon he was, celebrating my pain. What right had he to summon me up out of wood like that? To chunk my name without my permission. To exhume that horrible memory. A violation all over again. I picked up a stone with a sharp point and I stabbed the letters of my name, X’d them out as best I could. But to obliterate them, I’d have to kill the tree. Something told me not to.
Somehow, the great cedar into which his frieze had been carved still lived, flourishing in its bough of green. It must have been two feet across, that trunk. EXPIATIO was chiseled above the girl, and above that, the relief of a gallows and an empty noose. Expiatio. It meant atonement in Latin. Had Michael Gale Martin killed himself to repent of what he’d done to me?
The bas-relief spiraled up the trunk the way a squirrel escapes a predator. And as it rose, hyacinths decorated the borders in sunken relief. The flowers were everywhere. I was a Jungian, and Jungians believed in the power of dreams. In dream symbolism, the purple hyacinth represented forgiveness, absolution. I realized in that moment what a mistake it had been to deface my name at the bottom of the tree. Forgiveness was for the forgiver, not the forgiven. By holding on to a buried rage, I chose to mire myself in my past. This tree allowed me the ritual for which I’d searched my whole life. Through it, I could finally move on.
I gazed up at wooden angels, their arms outstretched to heaven as the story wound around the tree and reached higher, higher. Winged seraphim along with creatures of the forest: eagles and bears, wolves and doe. The filigree spiraled up the sides, took up every surface of the trunk in a divine helix, but not too deep so that it would harm the tree. A fresco in relief. A frieze in minutest detail. And between the figures, the most beautiful latticework I’d ever seen. The faces of the cherubs so delicate I could make out the individual lashes in their guileless eyes.
And at the top, a final angel before a carved cloud just about to occult the shafts of the sculpted sun. The face on that angel was me. Not as a child, but as I looked now. How had he known what I looked today?
He hadn’t seen me before. Had he?
Michael Gale Martin had been born and raised in Eagle River. I looked it up on a map: it was just a few miles from my grandfather’s place on Lake Planting Ground.
I suppose he could’ve gotten a picture of me online. Had he killed Daryl Wolpe in order to get me up to see him? So that he could try to make amends? The chain of events seemed too tenuous. He would have had to know that I would’ve been the one to take his forensic interview. I did do all the forensic work north of Madison.
There was something about him that seemed different in the last part of our interview. Something that surfaced in the final moments. Something in his fading eyes. It was the light I’d searched for in the cold, deliberate eyes of all those hundreds of -paths I’d interviewed before him. The light that had helped me find my way out of the forest that terrible day when I was 8. If I could find it in their eyes, in just one of them, then I could forgive the boy who hurt me. I could see that they, too, were human. And if I could forgive, I could let go. And get on.
I’d grieved a little girl lost, lost in the woods. I found her in the pathless forests that went on to the very verge of the world.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s short story collection, Canyon Calls, was published by Zumaya Publications in 2009. Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
Mike’s other titles, including his novels, The Crippy and The Mind Altar, as well as Canyon Calls, are available through his websites, https://justmikejust.com and https://canyoncallsthebook.com or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Five of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, has been published by The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within
You Get the Two has been published by Hellbound Books and is available in print, eBook, kindle or audio format at Kids are Hell!- Anthology (hellboundbookspublishing.com)