Bad Axe County Read online

  The Rattlers Hall of Famer was uncomfortably surprised to see her at his door. He knew Harley didn’t like him, and he correctly projected the animus onto her. But he recovered and glad-handed her inside his country mansion.

  “C’mere, young lady. C’mere, c’mere. I won’t bite. You gotta see this.”

  “No, thank you. I just came to ask you some questions.”

  He gave her no choice. He galloped his beer-barrel body ahead on crutches, his pinned-up pant leg swinging over the diabetes-related vacancy that had finally forced Rattlers leadership into Harley’s hands. She followed him through a living room where people didn’t live, down a trophy-lined hallway, through a family room for a man who had no family except for his grown son, Scotty, and two or three ex-wives, and finally onto a rear patio that looked over an empty in-ground swimming pool and across a storm-sheeted expanse of pasture.

  “Look at that. I know you’re into horses.”

  What he wanted her to admire was his wife number three or four, who was a hundred yards out astride a chestnut mare that she led across the glinting terrain. The horse stepped out with a clear distaste for the sharp ice crust and the unsuitable footing. Lady Clausen was coercing it into an odd, formal rigor.

  “The Charleston canter. Isn’t that a pretty sight?”

  “You’re right. I am into horses. The horse doesn’t like it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s forcing it, looks like she’s abusing it. But I guess it gets to why I’m here. Does she know where you were last night?”

  “Say what?”

  “Ducks Unlimited? Was that what you told her?”

  He looked away and made a soft rumble inside his wattle of a throat. He took a little hop and a deeper lean into his crutches, which creaked. “Zero to crazy in six seconds,” he said as if commiserating with a third person among them. “Just like they say.”

  Now he looked at her and steered a thin chuckle through his teeth.

  “I give up. What’s this about?”

  “You went to a party in Faulkner’s barn last night,” she told him. “While you were there, you talked to Brock Pabst. You sent him to beat up Walt Beavers.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Pabst told me himself.”

  “Hell,” Clausen said, “I haven’t seen that punk in years.”

  “You saw him last night. He shit his pants pretty good. He told me everything except why, which is what I’m here to find out.”

  “Never happened.”

  She showed her phone: Clausen’s black Hummer with a crust of sleet on the top, Faulkner’s barn in the background.

  “You were there. Brock Pabst was there. Walt Beavers is in intensive care. Those are all the pieces.” She nodded at his wife, out there aggressively goading the horse. “Kiwanis Club? Knights of Columbus? What’d you tell her, Coach? It looks like she’s kinda on the verge of something, if you know what I mean.”

  He leaned into his crutches, making a face that she had seen a hundred times at the rail of the Rattlers’ dugout, a latent explosiveness that kept everyone on edge.

  “Here’s what I think,” she told him. “Something happened after a Rattlers game four years ago, when you were running the team. Then something happened last night to make Walt Beavers worry that it was coming back up. He said something to somebody, maybe to Ladonna Weeks at the Ease Inn, maybe to you at the party, and then you got worried. You sent Pabst to make sure that was the end of it. How about if you tell me what it’s about? Or I can make sure that your wife gets this picture.”

  He muttered, she thought, the word cunt.

  She waited. The snow-removal guy appeared on the drive from the house to the horse barn, slush curling from his blade. Now, as his face was struck by the sun, it was a misshapen red-pink-yellow blur, drilled with black holes. What was that famous painting? The Scream?

  “I hear you’re a drunk,” Clausen said finally. “Drinking on duty. Butterscotch schnapps. That’s pathetic.”

  A streak of sweat ran from her pits to her hip bones. He had talked to Boog Lund. No other way to know that. One question answered.

  “I know you’re suspended,” he continued. “So you’re impersonating an officer. And you’re also extorting me. I should probably call the sheriff.”

  “That’s funny.”

  He snapped at her, “You think so?”

  “Like you say, I’m a civilian. So I think at this point our situation is more like one person lying to another person about something ugly in the community, Coach. They have my blood. There won’t be any alcohol. I won’t be suspended for long. Meantime, I’ll send your wife this picture, so she can leave that horse alone and focus on what’s really bothering her.”

  His thrusting face quivered at the jowls, his lips moving silently. Here came the snow-removal guy on his return trip from the barn. She felt him staring. Three thousand psi sounds about right. Why say that to her?

  Clausen’s throat rumbled more deeply than before, drawing something up. “Be careful, Missus Kick. You’re done in July. I promise. And nothing you do now is gonna stick.”

  “July should be enough.”

  He spat. “And being married to a lady killer like Harley Kick-Ass, you’d better keep this in mind: you’re not the only one with pictures. You might want to quit while you’re ahead.”

  She tucked her arm to stop another streak of sweat. Direct line to Ladonna Weeks too. She and Clausen both wanted her to worry about Harley.

  “Thank you, Coach. I think I have the roster straight now. Now I just have figure out what the game is. This has all been very helpful.”

  * * *

  Back on the ridgetop road, her phone chimed. She dropped it on the seat and played two messages over the speaker.

  “No go, as for talking to Walt Beavers,” Denise said first. “He just stabilized enough that they’re transporting him up to the head trauma center in La Crosse. Meanwhile, Yttri delivered your blood sample to the lab, now he’s meeting with the audit people. Rhino found the store that sold the schnapps bottle. He’s talking to the right clerk now and he’ll call you. Still no word from Dells PD. I’ll touch base with them again before I go home. Finally, acting sheriff Lund is a total dick and we miss you already. Over and out.”

  In the next message, her little girl’s voice drifted up. “Mommy, Granny Belle is smoking in the kitchen and dropping ashes down the sink.”

  She surrendered to blind exhaustion for a moment, unsure where she was. Then she turned toward home.

  34

  Angus had escaped Boog Lund at the river, at the traffic pinch where Gibbs’s old Charger was recovered, but he knew it would not be long before the deputy came for him at the scrap yard.

  Now here he came, the brown-on-tan Tahoe easing down Lost Hollow Road from the west, straddling a meltwater gully in the gravel.

  Angus watched this in nervous silence from midway up the acres of scrap. He had come home to find his dad upright and outside, wearing just a T-shirt and a diaper, pitching garbage into his big pipe, his waterslide. He would not shut up in the house, Brandy said, and so she had pilled him double, and then off he went to throw back other people’s garbage. In the meadow across the road, where Lund’s Tahoe now leveled off, drifted bloated kitchen trash sacks, a shattered plastic lawn chair, a microwave oven gulping as it sank. Angus grabbed his dad by his bone-thin wrist. He pushed Brandy ahead.

  “That there is why,” he told both of them. He aimed his chin at Lund coming. “See that? That ain’t a friendly visit. That’s why you two are going someplace safe.”

  As for Brandy, Angus had come home to find his little sister trying to operate the forklift. She had been planning, she said, to put Brock Pabst’s piece-of-shit car into the E-Z Crusher machine and smash it flat, like Brock told her to.

  “So that means you and Brock did what last night?”

  Brandy had refused to answer.

  “Something stupid,” he had told her.

&n
bsp; He shoved her ahead, looking back. Boog Lund rolled up beside Pabst’s GTO, giving it slow consideration. Next he got out of the Tahoe and took a long look at the big pipe coming out from under the road, spewing brown meltwater and old cornstalks into the garbage already floating in the meadow. Finally he strolled up alongside the Beavers Salvage truck.

  “Get Dad into the Quonset,” Angus told his sister, “and keep him in there.”

  * * *

  He was as ready as he could be. Coming down through the scrap, he watched Lund zip open his Jumbo Shrimp gear bag. Inside now were his Florida clothes, his cleats and his bat, his glove, his pillow, his radio, and the white straw cowboy hat he had bought in Corpus Christi and thought he might as well bring home for Brandy.

  “Like I said, my stuff.”

  “Where’s your family at?”

  “Out.”

  Lund looked up the scrap yard. Brandy had failed to drag their dad much farther than where Angus had left them. There was Lyman Beavers in his diaper, showing Gibbs’s chief deputy his middle finger.

  “Uh-huh. Get in the car.”

  “What for?”

  “Don’t you want to see inside the jail again, just for old times?”

  “What’d I do?”

  Lund shoved him. Angus didn’t move much. Lund reared back and blasted him with both palms in the chest. Angus had his feet set this time and he didn’t move a bit. On his own, he turned against the Tahoe and spread his legs. Lund slapped him down.

  “Unregistered vehicle, no driver’s license, fleeing an officer. Being the latest dumbfuck Beavers to cause trouble. Have a seat in the car.”

  * * *

  As Lund drove up out of Lost Hollow, Angus felt an old fear hatch like a worm in his heart. He had been a third grader when Gibbs had put his mom in a cell. Angus, his dad, and baby Brandy had gone to see her one time. Since then jail meant this to Angus: his mom had never been the same. After jail, she wouldn’t let anybody touch her. She had lived just one month more.

  But Lund headed southeast, away from town and the jail, toward the bluffs along the river. The melt was on. The ditches were full. The sun was out but the roads were skimmed with water. Everything gurgled and dripped. Lund eased the Tahoe along just beneath the speed limit while he made mocking chitchat about last night’s storm, the wet spring overall, the saturated ground, the rain in today’s afternoon forecast, the flood that was slowly building around them. Angus stayed silent. Ten minutes, twenty minutes. Finally Lund stopped in Bishops Coulee at the Pronto station. He chuckled, looked at Angus in his mirror.

  “If I recall, it was a six-pack of beer, a box of maxi pads, and three cans of cat food.”

  His mom had been arrested here, at this Pronto, for shoplifting. She had scratched the face of the officer who arrested her. That was why she went to jail.

  “Look there, Hotshot.”

  He was pointing his chin at the window of the Pronto, the deals written on butcher paper in large red letters.

  “We can’t just have cheese anymore. We gotta have organic local hippie cheese with fungus in it. We gotta drink hippie beers named after somebody’s goddamn acid trip.”

  Angus’s mom had worn a ring in her nose and didn’t shave her legs. She had tried to make wine. They sat there another minute, Lund texting someone on his phone.

  “What am I forgetting?” he wondered at last. “Grain Belt, pussy pads, cat food . . . and what else?”

  His text pinged as it left. He chuckled.

  “Oh, yeah, and Lady Speed Stick.”

  * * *

  He steered the Tahoe away from the river. Sandrock Road took them back up through the bluffs and east along the border of Bad Axe and Crawford counties, where Battle Bluff towered, sunstruck in the windshield. But Lund went around the landmark, into the coulee to the south. There, Rademacher Hill Road was pitted with deep puddles and sawed through with blades of rushing meltwater. The undercarriage of the Tahoe hissed and rattled. Lund whistled the Clausen Meats jingle. At Red Mound, he turned into the cemetery.

  Angus’s mom was buried here. Lund drove right between graves and stopped where he couldn’t help but see her stone.

  CHEYENNE BEAVERS. FLEW TO JESUS. 1971–2004.

  “Doggone it,” he said after a minute. “See those?”

  He was pointing into the sky, bumpy and gray to the northwest.

  “Are those rain clouds already? I tell you, Hotshot, we oughta sue Minnesota.”

  Angus stared at the dates. She had gone into the jail at thirty-two years old, spent her birthday in there, come home quiet and jumpy, and died at thirty-three. He had been eight, Brandy four. No one ever told them how she died.

  Lund said, “I’m just gonna assume, Hotshot, that you came back to take care of your family. Like you said, your dad being sick and all.”

  He snicked his teeth. Angus stared at the roll of fat on the back of his neck.

  “And if we start with that, then anything else you might think you’re doing is probably a mistake. Any other choices you’ve been making are probably the wrong ones, things that would probably hurt your family instead of help. Are you with me so far?”

  Angus did not respond. Lund picked up a Broadcaster from the seat beside him. He shook the newspaper wide and laid it against his steering wheel and began to read last week’s news. A minute passed. He turned a page. Another minute. He turned another page.

  “Well, it says here that I’m the only candidate that’s filed for the sheriff’s job, the election in July, and there’s only a couple days left to get in. So it looks like I’m the one. You follow me, Hotshot? You’ll want to make good choices. You hear what I’m saying?”

  He started the Tahoe. His eyes came into the mirror. “One more stop.”

  * * *

  He drove off Red Mound, schmoozing about the weather again, about last spring’s flood, about some farmer’s drowned cattle found against a rolling dam three miles down the Mississippi. He drove Angus up the coulee parallel to Lost Hollow, to the gate of the Battle Bluff overlook. The gate was locked, not Memorial Day yet. Lund unlocked it and bumped the Tahoe up the narrow dirt road a quarter mile to the top. They arrived at a small open space of root-threaded limestone where a few red pines stood over a feeble shelter and a picnic table. Nearby were the remains of a campfire, a dozen or so beer cans and broken bottles, and the Blackhawk monument, the plaque that stood before the overlook. Lund drove up close.

  “Why don’t you get out and enjoy the view.”

  Angus opened his door and went to the rock retaining wall. Most of the Bad Axe spread out before him. To the west, to the left, he could see the Mississippi. In the other direction, he could see the ridges and the hollows extending east until Wisconsin leveled out. But straight ahead, north, he figured, was the view that Lund wanted him to have. You could see Beavers Salvage from up here. You had to look straight down, almost lean over the wall. That was Lost Hollow down there, that narrow coulee, that little creek, that meadow. That was his dad’s property, directly under Battle Bluff.

  It had been a long time since Angus had seen it from up here. They used to picnic on the bluff when he was little, when they still had a farm, not a scrap yard. Angus used to throw pinecones off the edge, right here, imagining he could splash one in the creek. He had learned that was an illusion. It was a long way down. Then, when his mom died, they had stopped coming up here. Seeing the land below, the farm that had turned into what clearly was a junkyard, his throat filled and his eyes blurred.

  But then as Angus watched, something separated from the mass of junk. An old red pickup with a snowplow blade pulled away from the scrap yard. Where was his dad’s Beavers Salvage truck? Who was that pulling away? Angus felt frantic suddenly. What had he missed?

  Lund said, “If you can’t make good choices for your family, Hotshot, if you’re gonna pull dumbass stunts and get them hurt, you might as well ‘fly to Jesus’ right now.”

  He was smiling out the Tahoe’s window.

&
nbsp; “From right here, off that wall, like your hairy-assed mommy did.”

  Angus knew then what had just happened down at the scrap yard. He vaulted the wall, landed on the scree of broken limestone, skidded, fell, skidded, ran, crashed through a lap of brush at the bottom. He forded the flooded crick, up to his armpits already. He wallowed across the filling meadow. He climbed up beneath his dad’s spewing pipe to the road.

  The Beavers Salvage truck had been hammered by that snowplow blade into the greater mass of junk. He went into the house. His dad and Brandy hadn’t stayed up in the scrap yard like he told them to. His dad was beneath the kitchen table, moaning and slowly wheeling his feet, gashed on the back of his head. Brandy’s door was locked. Angus kicked it in. She was rolled up in her blankets, her eyes swollen, her neck abraded, her tattooed ankles sticking out as she kicked at him and sobbed. “Why are you here, Angus? What did you come back for? What did you do?”

  He snatched an ankle.

  “Who was that?”

  “What the fuck did you do?”

  One of her ankle tattoos was a snake, a rattler. He had seen it before.

  “You’re a Cave Girl now? OK, then that’s what I came back for.”

  “Get out!”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know who it was! What the fuck did you do?”

  He let her go. He climbed through the scrap yard, clawed through the shrinking snowdrift in the shadow of the Quonset shed. The girl was still where he had buried her.

  Her neck had drooped, her chin had puddled between her collarbones. Her dead blond hair had thawed into grizzled rags that blocked her face. She had begun to smell, a gummy smell, faintly like oatmeal. The hair clip, the blue plastic butterfly, had slipped down to where it clung above a knob of ice in her hair, about to fall.

  With a clumsy anxious hand Angus fixed it. He felt the crunch of brittle fibers inside the friction of the clip. Her gold necklace had come unstuck from the mealy flesh of her naked chest. For the first time Angus saw that its pendant was a word. He reached, stopped himself, reached, and plucked the pendant from between her breasts. As he raised it to read, the chain was still frozen to the back of her neck and it broke away in his grasp. Now he held it dangling in the sun. The pendant said Sophie.