Bad Axe County Page 10
She could see his weapon now: he had struck her with an aluminum baseball bat. He waggled it low, paddling his boots in the slush like a nervous hitter. Her arm felt numb. How did he get here? she wondered. Had he come home with Coach Beavers? And planned to leave in Beavers’s truck? Then she arrived? Had he tried to wait her out, then seen a chance to attack when she went under the house?
“Stick that head out here again. Come on, Dairy Queen, you can milk my cock.”
He was sky high, she decided, and lethally dangerous. She watched as he released one hand from the bat and honked the grimy crotch of his pants. He took a little hop and a skip and wound up with the bat and bashed out one of the Charger’s headlights. Then he did the other. When he danced back, she saw that his rubber boots had a yellow rim stripe and were stuck with dried cow flop. The bat had lost its rubber grip. It had a hole drilled above the knob, a strap looped through the hole. It was a sturgeon wallop now.
“Come on!” She flinched back as he bent to look beneath the trailer. “You wanna get down, let’s get down!”
She shined her flashlight in his face. He was nobody she had ever seen before. He was nobody, period. One of the zombies, emerging from the night to take away another life. As he danced back, panting jets of steam from the dark cowl of the sweatshirt, her heart thundered with the urge to shoot him. He jammed the bat barrel into his crotch, made it a phallus. He humped the knob in her direction.
“Come out backward again! Come on! Gimme that royal ass!”
But she couldn’t see him from the waist up anymore, couldn’t make a lethal shot. She fumbled the Ruger back into its holster. With frazzled imprecision she unsnapped and armed her Taser. She had been good with the weapon at the academy, but practice targets didn’t dance around in a meth frenzy. Yet he was gripping high-conducting aluminum, touching the bat to the core of his body. If she could hit him anywhere, put him down, then take her time with the Ruger, it would feel so good . . .
A car horn surprised them both. He paused with the bat jammed into his crotch, looking toward the road. He was motionless for about one second. Now or never. She half squeezed—watched the red laser touch his hip—and then she squeezed all the way.
She watched her shot connect in slow motion. The leading probe traveled about ten feet, and with more luck than she had counted on, it stuck in the bare skin of his right hand. The other probe, delayed an instant, stuck someplace on his left side as he twisted away. With the second contact came a flash and a snap, then a howl of pain like no live-subject demo she had ever witnessed. The bat cartwheeled straight up. He flew backward, disappeared into the black around her flashlight beam. She had him.
But then she didn’t. By the time she could scramble upright on the slippery yard and draw the Ruger again, he was on his feet in a burst of superhuman adrenaline, hurling back filthy oaths as he took off in a clumsy sprint behind Beavers’s truck, heading for the car idling at the road. It was some kind of low-to-the-ground sport sedan, darkly patched with Bondo and finned in the rear by what seemed to be a spoiler. The passenger door was open, but galloping toward it he screamed at the driver to get out, and the sheriff glimpsed a female, thick and busty, with the sluggish fearful movements of a child as she slipped through headlights around the nose of the car. She just made it into the passenger seat. The car howled away.
She was not imagining this time. She was exploding out of the imaginary into the real. She started the Charger, crushed the gas, and braked to swing the car around. A nearly sightless minute later, plunging into a corner with slapping wipers and no headlights, she saw him doubling back on the ridge above, his crooked high beams dialing through the icy mist. He was aiming down the long descent of County J to the Mississippi, heading out of the coulees to the highway along the river, where there was traffic and he could lose her.
She accelerated into gusts of sleet. As she reached the first switchback of County J’s icy decline she was still far behind, but she could see his headlights below through ice-glazed treetops. She was going too fast. She went faster. Two curves down, coming out of it, she saw his taillights. Now she had him. But once more she didn’t. She couldn’t see the road in front of her, couldn’t find the edge of the opposite switchback. Her foot went for the brake. She stopped just short of touching it—then she touched it.
The Charger sailed on ice like a balloon in the wind. Past her window spun the black-on-yellow icon of a truck aimed down the side of a triangle, warning of the steep straight grade that she now slid down backward. She pictured the bottom: one buckshot sign, tight against the Great River Road, commanding STOP; a slippery half second beyond the sign, the Burlington Northern tracks from Duluth to New Orleans; and one more slick half second beyond the tracks, two million gallons of muddy water purling south every second.
She touched her brake again. Faster than a heart skip, the cruiser’s rear end launched to the side. With a neck-snapping squeal the guardrail knocked the Charger back into a nose-first slide. Now she could see it all coming. But all for nothing, suddenly. The taillights she was following had vanished. No headlights reflected in the trees. Nothing. He had dodged her somehow. The zombie trick. She was going to die for nothing.
She surrendered the Charger into the final sheer-ice straightaway. There was no way she could stop at the bottom. Whether she braked now or not, she was going to shoot through the stop sign onto the highway—and if she wasn’t hit by traffic, she would slide beyond the highway, across the railroad tracks, and into the river.
She put her emergency lights on. She started her siren. Sliding out the narrow bluff cut toward the highway, she released her seat belt, unlocked her doors, reached under the dash for the escape hammer that broke window glass. The distance to the highway closed fast. The Charger was spinning again—but now unexpected light and thunder filled the bluff cut, swelling massively as she slid two hundred yards, one hundred, fifty . . . Then the night was split by the earthshaking horn of a freight train.
The train’s power froze her as the cruiser broke from the bluffs. Its huge black body barreled across her windshield view and she knew from her studies in self-destruction that this was the midnight ore train out of Duluth, a hundred boxcars full of iron ore going sixty miles an hour. She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms across her chest. For nothing. The siren shrieked. The train horn blared. The car spun.
* * *
Then it was quiet, except for river water gurgling through the cruiser’s front grill.
She felt herself tilted forward, sprawled against her steering wheel. She opened her eyes.
She had slid halfway off the Pool 9 fishing pier. The cruiser bobbed, its nose tipped into the current, its chassis grinding against a girder in the pier frame. She could see in the southern distance a back-hauling freight engine with a half dozen empty boxcars rummaging through a curve along the backwaters of the Bad Axe. She sat shaking for a full minute. That was not the ore train from Duluth. That was a short train. It had missed her.
Walt Beavers. Still under his house. She had forgotten him. Radio. She had just reached for her radio handset when headlights flashed behind. On a manic engine snarl, a pair of crooked high beams surged to fill her mirror. She twisted, saw his cockeyed blazes coming fast. He was ripping down the pier. Then he struck.
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The massive crunch from behind snapped her head against the headrest, then tossed her into the airbag as the Charger was pounded, nose first, into the Mississippi. The heavy car bobbed vertically for a few seconds while she slashed at the airbag and tore it from her face. She popped the dome lights and they vivified a muddy brown bottom. For a half-conscious moment she stared at sticks and rocks, beer bottles, a crayfish scuttling. Then the car dropped its rear end with a cannonballing crash. The current took over, glide and spin.
Her zombie was reversing away. She could see his headlights speckling the drizzly air and panning the snow-bright bluffs as he raced north along the Great River Road.
The cruiser’s
tail bobbed up again. Now the car began to sink.
The escape hammer did its job. The glass shattered in, washed over her on a tide of incoming river. She held her breath and squatted on the driver’s seat and propelled herself out. She stroked for the surface.
Four pulls and there she was, swept along in the dark, watching the car sink behind her, watching headlights pass in both directions on the highway a few hundred yards distant. She waved, yelled. Then she drifted alone. She had been unsafe, but she did not feel sorry. She had almost died for nothing, but for some reason she was still here.
* * *
She knew rivers well enough. She reached land about where she had aimed, a place where she could see the silhouettes of ice-glazed trees on the bank, roots and soil, instead of cattails and swamp. Even so, the shoreline was a stinking muddy quagmire. She made torturous progress. Nothing worked, not her flashlight, not her radio, not her phone, just her heart and lungs, her churning legs. Through exhaustion and bone-deep cold she fought her way across the downed trees, the icy heaps of rotted flotsam, the sucking pockets of muck. When at last she reached the Burlington Northern tracks, here came the real midnight ore train out of Duluth.
This was the train she once had planned for. She had scouted it, timed it, imagined lying down for it, and was severed by it many times over. Now it pounded toward her on a frigid oily gust, the devouring clatter-squeal-roar of a hundred ore cars moving at sixty miles an hour. This time she stood close within its annihilating power. Inside the freight’s crushing passage, inside her rejection of the surrender she once had craved, she heard a quiet voice.
I will find you.
The violent pimp, the troubled girl, Coach Beavers’s zombie attacker, the killer of her parents, her lost and undone self—yes, events and years had scrambled—but softly and succinctly, like a bullet punch of light through the awful din and darkness in which nothing thrived, she heard the voice again.
I will find you.
When at last the train had passed, she moved on. On frozen feet in squishing boots she staggered south along the Great River Road. The flickering pink neon ahead was the sign for Mudcat’s Roadhouse and Marina, a mustachioed catfish standing on its tail and raising a martini. By law the tavern should have closed hours ago, but true to its outlaw status, Mudcat’s still served its clientele of bikers, river rats and fisherman, boyfriends and husbands, still wandering home from the stag party.
“Ahoy!” hollered some black-leathered inebriant from the Mudcat’s party porch, raising his plastic beer cup as she stumbled into the light. He kept hollering and she kept coming.
“Ahoy the Dairy Queen!”
DAYBREAK
Jerry Myad @thebestdefense
@BadAxeCountySheriff why dont you drink bleech and die I will buy the bleech #dairyqueen #kickherout
24
Angus Beavers fit the girl’s wet but still rock-hard little corpse into his gear bag. Curled up, she was about as long as a thirty-four-inch bat. He fit the bag on the floor of the Beavers Salvage truck, passenger side. In the house, his dad moaned against his cold bedroom wall.
“I knew you didn’t burn her,” Angus said. “I knew them guys couldn’t make you do a thing like that.”
He kept talking. It was all on him now anyway.
“I’m gonna give her back. Maybe that’s why you saved her. I don’t know. You save everything. But they’re gonna find her in that locker at Clausen’s where Scotty keeps all that shit he poaches. They’re gonna find her there just like we Beavers found her in Walt’s truck. Let them explain how she got into Scotty’s meat locker.”
His eyes stung. His throat burned from vomit.
“I tried to never blame you and Walt. But you two never had to go to that party. You never had to be there. I’ll guess Brandy goes to them parties now. You don’t even know that.”
He had nothing else to say for a while. He shucked his dad’s damp diaper and tabbed a dry one in its place. He fetched the bottle of cut pills from the dresser top and read the prescription again and got a cup of water and gave his dad a dose and a half.
“I never wanted what I got out of it,” he said. “I never wanted to leave home.”
He stood away in a dim corner of the room and watched the pills work. His dad’s body softened. His toes spread. He moaned faintly.
“I could have waited my turn. I didn’t want to go to any academy. You know what they do at a baseball academy? Baseball. They don’t hunt, they don’t fish, they don’t drive down gravel roads smelling apple blossoms, they don’t go to Mudcat’s for fish fry, nothing. Baseball, eat and drink, night and day. And, yeah, I like it OK, maybe I have some talent, but you and Uncle Walt, you’re the ones who wanted what I got. I wanted what I had.”
He thought a minute. It wasn’t quite like that.
“I woulda had what I wanted.”
* * *
He had been willing to wait. That was his story. Even though at sixteen he was the best pure talent ever in the coulees, except maybe Harley Kick when Harley was young, he had been content to ride the Rattlers’ bench and wait his turn. That was just how it worked. He was sixteen. He could sit, wait until there was a place for him.
But that was not how his dad and uncle Walt saw the situation. What his dad and uncle Walt saw was that Aspenwall Ford sponsored the scoreboard, so Suck Aspenwall played center field, Angus’s natural position. What they saw was that Vossteig Funeral Home paid for the programs, so Vick Vossteig crashed around in right field like a circus bear with his mitt on the wrong paw, yet Angus couldn’t replace him. They saw that weak-armed Scotty Clausen, son of Rattler Hall of Famer and then-manager Pinky Clausen, played so-so in left field, played badly at shortstop when Harley Kick pitched, and peaked at .230 with three or four homers in the cleanup spot, the spot where Angus, with his power, should have been in the batting order. What his dad and uncle Walt saw was that the nephew of the sheriff, little duck-assed Wade Gibbs, was third baseman for life. Brick-handed Sherman Ossie, of Ossie Implement, had a lock on second base. And so on, while their boy Angus rode the bench. What they saw was themselves, Beaverses, getting disrespected, getting the coulee-trash treatment, as usual, like they got when they played, and so his dad and uncle Walt went to games and drank beer and bitched and hollered to no result except Angus’s shame—and that was the story, right up until a night when there was a bad Rattlers loss, a fight, and a party where a girl got killed. Then the story changed.
* * *
“Put Angus in the game!”
It was a matchup the Rattlers should have won easily, a state playoff game against a ragged bunch of Ho-Chunk Indians, the Wisconsin Dells Scenics. But for some reason Harley Kick hadn’t shown up, and without Harley Kick the wheels had come off in a hurry. By the third inning, the home team was down, 7–0.
“Put Angus in the goddamn game!”
Lyman Beavers, a beer cup slopping in one hand, a half dozen empties under his feet, rattled the backstop and yelled at Coach Clausen, who scowled over the rail of the dugout.
“What are you waiting for, Clausen? You’re getting your tail kicked while your best guy is on the bench! You’re a chickenshit! Put Angus in the game!”
Meanwhile, Angus’s uncle Walt operated ass-to-bleacher down the third-base line, no longer able to stand after loosening up via happy hour at the Ease Inn. “Your kid’s a pre-Madonna, Clausen! You couldn’t coach Little League! You’re afraid to put a Beavers in the game!”
The Rattlers were getting humiliated, at home. The Scenics pitcher was an old guy with a keg belly and stick legs. He threw knuckleballs. Their young shortstop, B. Greengrass, hit three homers in his first three at bats, every time sailing around the bases with a big grin and his long black ponytail flapping—disrespecting the game, according to the Rattlers.
Then it went from bad to worse. By the seventh inning, the score was 19–3. The Scenics were drinking beer in their dugout. Some of the Cave Girls—supposed to be loyal Rattlers fans—were hanging
around the dugout corners, having fun, joking with B. Greengrass and a few others. Greengrass had six homers by then. He could really hit. But still it was ridiculous. Everything he touched went over the fence. Then that grin, that ponytail, and after homer number six he put his arms out like an airplane—pure disrespect for the Rattlers and for baseball itself.
“Put Beavers in the game!”
“How long this shit’s gotta flow upriver, Coach, before you do something?”
Angus had watched from a corner of the dugout while the whole place got rowdy. Chief Deputy Boog Lund had moved in on Angus’s dad, commanded him to shut his beer flap. There was a struggle, curses, threats, an arm bar and handcuffs, cheers from the crowd as Lund dragged Lyman Beavers away. Down the third-base line, Angus’s uncle Walt Beavers had begun dancing with a Ho-Chunk woman who was as drunk as he was. Meanwhile, Rattlers players were shouting across the diamond at the Cave Girls, telling them to get the fuck away from the Scenics dugout, and the girls were sassing back, red cheeked with the thrill of it. Then, with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, the game went from bad to worse to ugly: a knuckleball butterflied out of control, hit Scotty Clausen in the neck, and the Rattlers stormed the field.