Bad Axe County Page 11
Angus had watched in puzzlement from the bench. It was just a knuckleball. He had hit himself harder putting a shirt on. But Scotty Clausen and a few others mauled the old-man pitcher, who sat on the mound with his head covered. At the edge of the scrum, B. Greengrass tried to make peace, but Wade Gibbs yanked him back by the ponytail and he spun and dropped Gibbs with one punch. Based on that, Boog Lund bull-charged B. Greengrass, knelt on him, tried to cuff him, but some long-haired little girl about Brandy’s age had appeared out of nowhere and launched herself at Lund’s head and attached herself there, shrieking and clawing and not letting go until some of the Scenics’ women fans took her away. But worse than all of this was watching some of the Rattlers players go after those Bad Axe girls for being friendly with the Scenics, jerking their bare arms, screaming in their faces. Angus saw a girl go down, saw her face bleeding, her shirt torn and her bra showing, saw her crying and limping away.
After the dust had settled, his dad and uncle Walt had dropped Angus and Brandy off at the scrap yard and gone to a party. Angus had dug worms to go fishing in the morning. He had watched TV with Brandy until she fell asleep. He had carried her to bed.
* * *
From then onward, on a loop in his mind for the next four years, it went exactly like this. At sunrise, he wakes to find Brandy in his bed. Stepping onto the porch with his worms and his fishing rod, he discovers his uncle Walt’s pickup drunk-parked halfway onto Lost Hollow Road, a bad place to be with the morning milk truck about to come barreling down the hollow.
He goes back inside, finds Uncle Walt asleep in Brandy’s bed. He finds the key in Walt’s pocket. He heads out to move the truck.
It is a humid August dawn. Fog hangs across the hollow. His dad’s burn pile faintly smolders on its steady diet of trash that lately people have begun to throw onto the property. As Angus comes down the porch steps, two crows lift out of Walt’s truck box. They don’t go far. They make one tight circle and land on the neck of the yard light. They sit there croaking at him.
Because Angus knows crows, he looks into the truck box, expecting that Walt maybe lopped a decent tail off a road-killed coon, maybe ran over a turtle and meant to eat it later. But there is a girl inside. She is sprawled in a twist, mostly naked, looking up.
He can’t have seen that, Angus thinks. He steps back, surveys the scrap yard, his heartbeat suddenly a sour-iron burping motion at the back of his mouth.
He looks again: a girl in only torn pink underpants, blue hair clips, and a necklace, staring up with wide blue unmoving eyes. She seems about his age, about half his size, a small blond high school girl, narrow shoulders, heavy hips, vaguely clotted face, naked breasts like rigid little cones. The necklace is gold. The blue hair clips are shaped like butterflies. It takes this long before Angus understands that she is dead.
Now he is frantic and sick. He sees her neck is purple, twisted like the neck of a sack. Her knees and elbows ooze bloody scabs, picked open by the crows still croaking above. His vision blurs. His stomach bucks. He runs.
* * *
His dad and uncle Walt get sober in a hurry. They didn’t kill her. Angus never doubts this for a moment. They have no idea how she ended up in Uncle Walt’s truck. They remember her from the party, but that’s as far as it goes. They remember a girl like her at the party, stumbling out of Faulkner’s barn with some of the Rattlers—the players drunk and angry—but nothing after that.
Uncle Walt has lost a daughter, Angus’s cousin, a girl he never knew, and when Walt catches up with what he’s looking at, he begins to weep into a hand clamped across his eyes. Angus watches his dad go shaky and pale, like Angus has never seen him. Then his dad shovels Skoal under his lip, taking pretty much the biggest dip in the history of tobacco. His dad is going to think now. His dad is many things, Angus knows, but another man’s fool is not one of them. He will not take credit for a dead girl.
Uncle Walt says finally, “They throwed her on us, Lyman.”
“I seen that,” his dad snaps. “Don’t you think I seen that?”
“Wade Gibbs, Scotty Clausen, them all, that’s the drunk stripper girl they took to Faulkner’s back barn. Curtis Strunk. Ossie. Them four.”
“Don’t you think I seen that?”
“God help her poor people.”
Uncle Walt is sobbing as he stumbles to the cab of the pickup, stumbles back with his jacket. He covers the girl where he can.
“God help us too, Lyman, we’re in trouble now. They throwed her on us and they’re gonna say we did it.”
“Hell they are.”
“They know who’s sheriff.”
“I know they know who’s sheriff.” Angus’s dad spits down the front of himself. “You think I don’t know they know who’s sheriff?”
“Wade Gibbs can’t do no wrong, big man for an uncle. Scotty Clausen, a big man like Pinky for a dad, he can’t do no wrong neither.”
Angus’s dad spits again. This time the gob gets to the ground and he paces. He goes back and forth past the tailgate of the pickup six or seven times before he looks at Angus and says, “What they don’t realize is they ain’t the only boys that’s got a big man on their side.”
This leaves Uncle Walt without words. For a long time there is no more conversation except from the crows croaking to get back on her body. Too dizzy to stand any longer, Angus crumples into the huge open space of a combine tire. He watches buzzards sail against a blue-pink sky, wafts of burn-pile smolder drifting up. The next thing he remembers, his dad is saying, “Knobloch. Clinton Knobloch. Lavern Shirley.” His voice rising, ranting. “Doug Ott. Fonda’s kid. Them guys seen the same thing we did.”
“Lyman, they won’t say what they saw.”
“They won’t have to.” His dad snaps at Angus, “Get in the house. Get your sister. Take her fishing. Get. Now.”
Stumbling away, Angus believes he hears a siren. For sure he hears his dad say, “Get your balls back in the sack, Walt. Listen up. I’ll tell you how this is gonna work.”
* * *
Four years later, Angus now believed that he had imagined the siren. He also now understood how his dad had made it work. He knew why Sheriff Gibbs and his chief deputy, Boog Lund, had arrived quietly at the scrap yard in street clothes and civilian vehicles, with Coach Pinky Clausen pulling up behind.
After that morning, the fix had happened fast. By the next Rattlers game, Uncle Walt was in a brand-new uniform in the first-base coaching box. A week after that, Angus was on his way to the same high school baseball academy in Virginia where Scotty Clausen had gone and gotten kicked out. From the academy, with his talent, it was a done deal to get drafted somewhere: Angus Beavers, Oakland A’s, thirty-second round.
“But I never wanted it,” he told his dad again. “You and Walt did, not me.”
He went outside. The storm had mostly stopped. The whole world was locked in ice and felt as if it could shatter. He put air in the tires of the Beavers Salvage truck and jumped the battery. He unzipped his gear bag, assuring himself that the frozen girl was really in there. He turned his sweatshirt inside out, cinched the hood around his head, and aimed the truck for Clausen Meats.
25
For Pepper Greengrass, once she has her vision back, it turns out that she can do this. Just keep hanging it out there, keep it moving. The bright light explodes, explodes, the miniman purring praise and slamming cool white heat against her naked body—not a problem after all—it doesn’t hurt a bit.
By break of day, as soft orange light streams through the cracks of the blinds, she is high on something much better than last night. She is comfortable five minutes at a stretch with her bare ass rooting in the air while the miniman pokes her this way and that, like playing pin the tail on the donkey. This is pure pretend: fuck herself with a yellow zucchini, fuck herself with a jump rope handle, put a camo hat on backward and go down on this other big naked bitch in the room. This is just men, as Pepper knows them. Whatever. Whatever she is high on, she likes it.
She is back on track. Hah! Track! She remembers the last time she went on the Amtrak website to check. The price was $165 plus tax for a one-way ticket from Wisconsin Dells to Whitefish, Montana. The ride was twenty-eight hours and seven minutes. So if that’s all the time it’s going to take, she calculates out loud to Tianna and the miniman, “Then I can go all the way without eating and save money. Right? Then from Whitefish—right?—they’ll have taxis?”
“Would you shut up,” Tianna grunts between her legs.
“I could hitchhike. I could steal a horse.”
“You’re already on a horse,” Tianna mutters.
“I mean, she’s my big sister. She’s gotta be glad to see me, right?”
The camera lowers. The miniman’s face is flushed and damp. “Let’s try something fun, OK? Sure. You betcha.”
“I wouldn’t stay with them forever, just until I get a job.”
“Tianna, darling, can you reach the toy?”
“There’s casinos out there, and there’s always jobs when there’s casinos. Marie’s working in a casino out there.” She tips her sunglasses to study the double-headed latex dick, pink and veiny, coming at her in the grip of Tianna’s fist.
“In we go, make nice faces, very pretty girls, we’re scooting now, coming together like Lady and the Tramp with the noodle, double scoot, very sexy. Tianna, keep your face turned, please. Left side only. Pepper, you’re my money girl. Look at the camera. Very fun. OK, there we go, you betcha.”
It doesn’t feel like her body anyway down there, or anywhere. Good money, right? Sooner or later this puts her on the train. Done deal.
Now Tianna’s cell phone rings. She suctions off the double dildo, leaves Pepper hung like a bull with a bubble-gum pink cock, laughing at the sight.
“You what?”
Tianna shrieks this into her phone. She pries the camera guy aside, going for her cigarettes.
“Jesus Christ, Brock. You fucking what? Can’t you drive yourself? Where’s your car?”
She lights a Kool menthol while she listens.
“Someone stole your car? Seriously? I mean, why? And you did what to yourself? You were supposed be watching Garthy. OK, yeah, sure, Jesus Christ, you’re having a heart attack. I believe you. Sure. Shit.”
She ends the call with an angry stab at the phone. She glowers at her pile of clothes on the floor. Her tits hang slackly as she coughs out smoke.
“You need to pay me now. I gotta drive all the way to Locks and take that idiot to the ER. It was my night out. He was supposed to be Daddy. He went out and got fucked up.”
She jerks her shorts up, crams her tits into a tube top. She demands, “One hundred bucks. Give it.”
This is critical, the money. Pepper sits up, crosses her legs, leans back on her hands. Miniman counts off three twenties. Only sixty. Tianna won’t touch it.
“You said a hundred.”
“Leave early, this is all you get.”
Pepper watches Tianna shift into a different part of her brain. “You little cocksucker,” she begins. Dug into the bad side of her face, her right cheek, are six deep sores in the shape of the Big Dipper. Her nose is bent toward the one eye stuck slightly in a squint. When she squares her face it’s like looking at something from Picasso. “You give me the hundred, like you promised, or I make a phone call and say there’s a minor here.” She turns that unbalanced face on Pepper. “What are you, girly, like, fifteen?”
Miniman laughs, high and anxious and short. He sets the three twenties on a stool, pads away in his soft white socks, keeping his eye on Tianna, opening a camera bag.
“Nobody believes a meth mommy, OK?”
“Fuck you.”
“Take your money now and go.”
“Oh, I’ll go.”
“OK, you betcha. Go.”
Pepper’s head swivels back and forth. Tianna grabs a camera. He points a square-nosed pistol with two soft little hands. Tianna drops the camera on the floor. She kicks it and something breaks off. Pepper is enjoying this. Miniman grabs his sixty bucks back and swears he’s going to pull the trigger if she doesn’t leave. Tianna yanks her keys from her pocket. Her cigarette pack comes flying out of her tube top as she slams out the back door. Her car howls past the window.
Now Pepper has half a pack of menthol Kools. After a quiet minute, she lights one. She blows a cloud and a question toward miniman that he doesn’t seem to hear. He looks exactly like a troll now, slump shouldered, his glasses skewed, panting, a camera strap twisted around his neck. He lifts the window blind and looks out.
“Bitch.”
She asks it again. High as shit. Hardly knows her own voice. Beyond the window all things are pink and orange and sparkly. She can’t remember how the world became so pretty.
“I said, What I gotta do to get her hundred too?”
26
It wasn’t sleep exactly, more like paralysis. She came out of it with a start: Walt Beavers. Bad Axe County had no hospital, so it took a minute to figure out where she was: Vernon Memorial Hospital, in Viroqua, one county north.
She made her arm work and pressed her call button. Her voice was croaky and faint as she questioned the nurse, who said to her, “Mr. Beavers is in the ICU just down the hall. He got here before you did.”
“He’s OK?”
“He’s in serious condition. He can’t talk to you. We’re going to watch him for a bit, get him stabilized, then probably transfer him up to La Crosse.”
“Can you please open the curtain?”
A soft orange sunrise streamed in. Too much time had passed. The nurse said, “Let’s try this again,” and approached with a thermometer. A minute later it beeped.
“Good. You’re back to normal. Your core temperature was right around ninety-five when you got here, that’s mildly hypothermic, and you were exhausted and experiencing some delirium. Mostly you needed to get warmed up and rest.”
“My husband?”
“He was here. We assured him you were going to be fine and he went back home an hour ago. Would you like anything to eat or drink?”
“I’m ready to go.”
The nurse only smiled at her. A few minutes later, as she sipped warm tea, pink-yellow rays shot upward around the spot where the sun had yet to appear. Next the whole sky took on a fuzzy orange glow that suffused downward into a landscape locked in snow trapped under ice. The beauty gnawed at her memory of the bad night hidden beneath. I will find you. She reached for the bedside phone.
“Holy crap, Heidi! You had me worried. Sheesh!”
Denise sounded gassed at the end of her shift. No doubt it had been a long night for everybody. “Oh my God. When they got to you, you were slurring and stumbling around, and Schwem said you couldn’t tell anyone what happened.”
“I’m fine now. I need a dry uniform, a new cell phone, and a car.”
“I’ve already got the extra uniform from your locker and a new phone, backed up from the cloud, on the way. You will be pleasantly surprised by the deliveryman.”
Denise paused then and her voice sounded anxious.
“But, Heidi, really, what happened? I mean, Zion VFD got to Walt Beavers’s place and you were nowhere to be found. An hour later you turn up five miles away, crawling around in the parking lot at Mudcat’s like a possum who got into the sauce. Right now they’re fishing your Charger out of the river. Everybody’s talking about it.”
It occurred to her, as she watched pale blue seep through orange at the highest point of the sky, that she could explain, or not. Time spent explaining, documenting, accounting for several different kinds of recklessness and bad judgment, time invested in the maze of policy and procedure, covering her ass, was time lost against I will find you. It seemed pretty clear to h
er anyway: she was not permanent sheriff material.
“Like Schwem said, I’m not sure what happened. But I’m sure it will come back to me.”
Denise said a lot with her silence.
“Heidi—”
“Denise, I promise. I’ll remember eventually. Right now we’ve got a stag party, a beating, and a girl out there somewhere.”
“Well, meanwhile our favorite chief deputy is acting like Christmas came early.”
“I’m sure he is. How soon is my stuff going to be here?”
Denise sighed. “The uniform and phone, any minute. But as for a car, I’m sorry, Heidi. Anybody has an accident in a county vehicle—I mean, especially if they can’t remember what happened—the county code says desk duty or ride along until an investigation is completed. It’s in our insurance policy too. Marge Joss is all over it. What you should do, as soon as the doctor lets you, is go home and rest.”
“Sure,” she said. “Good idea. Did the Dells PD identify that van for us?”
“Nothing yet. The only other new thing we have is a break-in at Clausen Meats. Some guy in rubber boots and a hoodie put an ax through the front door. Completely routine. No need for you to get involved.”
“Sure,” she said again. She lifted the sheet to look at herself. They had stripped her naked and put her in a backless lavender gown. Her skin was nubbed with goose bumps and her whole body felt stiff. Her right arm thumped with pain. She sat up and touched her bare feet to the floor. She transferred weight and felt good enough to go. Some guy in barn boots and a hoodie.
Denise continued, “But like I said, they’re fishing your Charger out of the river as we speak, Chief Deputy Lund presiding. Please think about what happened, Heidi. Otherwise someone else is going to tell the story.”
* * *
Ten endless minutes later, the delivery Denise had promised finally arrived in the person of Olaf Yttri, her best daytime deputy, bringing her a dry uniform, an operational duty belt, and a new cell phone.