Bad Moon Rising Page 4

  “… enough of your bullshit, Sharice in Atlanta. Get your shit together or lose our business.”

  The sheriff stared, always appalled. It was not among her official responsibilities to police fashion, but she could write some heavy tickets right now. Pigeon-toed men weighing under a buck-fifty should not wear flashy western boots. Chinless men should not decorate the problem with string ties. And flaunt your open-carry permit, she thought, go ahead, fine, but the black Gore-Tex thigh holster is bunching up your cowboy trousers and confusing the look. And real men did not cuss out the security system’s customer-service reps into their sparkly new iPhones.

  “Hey, Ma, the idiots just called. False alarm.”

  “What’s-her-face just told me.”

  Barry drilled Skoal juice into his Big Gulp. Loyal Denise had attempted to demystify this pissant’s run for office with jokes withdrawn from her vast mental savings account.

  How does a man decide when it’s appropriate to challenge a woman in power?

  He looks in his pants. If he sees a penis, it’s time.

  But in truth BARRY HER’s run for sheriff had been a while in the works: substance-abuse rehab (year one), tech-college law-enforcement training (years two and three), stints as a volunteer EMT and a part-time township police officer (years three and four). Somewhere during year three, he had ticked the family-man box by marrying a divorcée, Becky Rilke, with three prefab little ones.

  “Are we gonna check the building, though?” he wondered, almost looking at Sheriff Kick on his way to read the mood of his mother.

  Babette’s heavily made-up nose had popped out with fat jewels of perspiration. She needed air-conditioning, fast. “I think she can handle it from here. She’s at her best when nothing happened.”

  All three stood there baking in the enmity and the sun. Then BARRY HER seized the day. “So, hell, Ma, I guess we oughta hit the Ease Inn and get a bloody, then go put some signs around. We just got the new one: WHY ARE YOU KICKING YOURSELF? I mean, instead of just standing here getting swamp crotch.”

  Again he nearly looked at the sheriff. His mother one-upped his crudity.

  “Might as well,” Babette agreed, “since we hauled our stinking cornholes all this way.”

  The sheriff stared at the sides of their averted heads.

  “Don’t drive drunk on my roads,” she said.

  She felt a drip of sweat roll straight down her spine.

  “And while you’re out, come take the signs off my property. Try that stunt again and your stinking cornholes are going to catch a trespassing charge.”

  * * *

  On her way out of town, she passed Farmers’ Buy-Direct and then played eye-tag with the other Rickreiner properties, gaudy and grasping, disruptive trash in the still-quaint Bad Axe: Cash America… Supercuts… Dollar Heaven… Liquor City…

  CHAPTER 4

  The K-9 on loan from the Vernon County Sheriff’s Department, a female German shepherd named Duffy, had found the missing twelve-pack of beer. Or at least half of it.

  That summarized the news.

  The sheriff’s own deputies had found nothing of note along the roadside. Denise had repurposed one to a domestic disturbance call and sent the other three back on welfare checks. But the dog had found six Busch Lights.

  “One empty at a time,” explained the dog’s handler, Vernon County Deputy K. Christiansen. She seemed to be a Lyndsey Luck type, a new hire, trying hard.

  The sheriff felt the heat pulse against her. Both the dog and her handler were flocked with burrs and looked about to collapse. As Duffy panted, her gray-spotted pink tongue hung egregiously out the side of her mouth. Her ribs heaved unnaturally, and she stared fixedly at her cage inside the Vernon County SUV cruiser.

  “Somebody got a pretty good load on,” Deputy Christiansen surmised. She panted too, pointing with a fistful of wire flags across a meadow toward Liberty Hill, several hundred yards in the distance.

  “Blue-and-silver cans. Like connect-the-dots. Going that way.”

  The sheriff looked “that way” and tried to see any kind of trail. But the meadow was wall-to-wall with head-high late summer weeds. Cicadas droned across the distance. Turkey vultures floated over it.

  “I flagged the beer cans,” Deputy Christiansen said. “Duffy picked up a clear trail between them. But funny thing, she couldn’t find the victim’s scent, as far as I could tell. She went straight from beer can to beer can, but she wasn’t happy, like she thought she was doing it wrong.”

  Changing her voice, she spoke to the dog.

  “You just couldn’t smell him anywhere, could you? But you were such a good girl! You tried so hard! Such a good hot girl!”

  She pointed once more toward Liberty Hill.

  “We went all the way to the top. I would guess the cans kept going over the other side. But it wasn’t your guy drinking ’em and tossing ’em. No scent of him, according to Duffy.”

  Deputy Christiansen opened the rear of her vehicle. Duffy trembled at the sight of the cage inside, eager to escape her disappointing performance.

  “We came back and did a full three-sixty around this spot, but we got nothing and she’s just too hot, Sheriff. The heat index was over 140 degrees before we even started. She went whining around every which way for a while and then she just sat down.”

  The dog looked ashamed as her handler pulled a ramp down and positioned it.

  “OK, girl.”

  K-9 Duffy slunk up into her cage.

  * * *

  A minute later, Sheriff Kick stood alone in the brutal swelter, squinting into the sea of vegetation.

  Kids. Who else would find hot beer and bash straight off into thick weeds to drink it?

  Kids on foot.

  She tried to think of kids in the area, but she hardly knew this far-northeastern corner of the Bad Axe, and she hadn’t seen a residence of any kind since turning off the county highway three miles back. The terrain was thickly forested bluffs flanking rocky, flood-scoured coulees, with swampy lowlands in between. As her gaze followed Liberty Hill Road to the east, she realized that Elmo Quarry Pond was nearby. Two days from now, on their way with their 4-H Club to help out at the annual Bad Axe County Farm Breakfast, the twins were scheduled to make a ritual sunrise stop at Elmo Pond to feed shelled corn to the giant goldfish, supposedly carnival-game escapees, that survived there. Opie claimed to have seen one as big as a suckling pig. This would be the boys’ first brush with the myth. They were excited. Dylan had wanted to set his alarm clock five days ahead of time. Taylor had insisted he would need snacks, water, and extra clothing in his backpack.

  Kids.

  Right?

  It had to be kids who found the beer. The body had appeared and the beer had disappeared in the same vicinity within the same time frame. Somewhere, she thought, there must be at least one kid who knew something.

  Either that or the sun had boiled her brain.

  She retrieved an evidence bag from the Charger’s trunk. The sea of weeds closed behind her as she used a stick to slash her way from marker flag to marker flag, collecting blue-and-silver Busch Light cans.

  One…

  Two…

  Then a third can, drained empty within just a hundred yards.

  Kids, for sure. She could imagine herself and friends finding beer at about thirteen years old. The idea would be to drink as much as possible, as fast as possible, before their incredible luck ran out. Never mind if hot light beer tasted sour as horse piss. There was alcohol in it.

  Twenty scorching minutes later, rashy, sweat-soaked, gasping for breath, now with five cans in her evidence bag and verging on heatstroke, Sheriff Kick reached the base of Liberty Hill. She felt dizzy, temples pounding, and the Charger seemed miles away. But from here on she would be in the shade of the hillside forest. After a short rest, she pushed on to the top.

  She had never been on Liberty Hill. A toppled fieldstone cairn reminded her of the reason for the name. Larger and more populated Vernon C
ounty began just over two miles north, and with campaigning on her mind she recalled Grape Fanta’s story in the Broadcaster about Grover Cleveland. Barnstorming for president in the 1890s, Cleveland had passed through Vernon County giving speeches from the porch of his train car. Some proud Bad Axer had raised a large U.S. flag right here, and the candidate, gazing south across the ridgetops, had spied Old Glory and famously called this “Liberty Hill.”

  When she gazed south, she could see the vast tract of weeds between herself and her Charger at the roadside, and from there the vista skipped across ridgetops all the way to Farmstead. A mile or more to the east she could see a corner of Elmo Quarry—a sheer cliff of dynamite-fractured limestone—but not the deep emerald pond that filled the abandoned gravel pit. Out to the west rolled sister hills of Liberty Hill that had no roads or names. And finally from this height, looking north over rugged ground, she saw a farm.

  She moved herself to see it better. She could make out, half-hidden in the isolated coulee directly below, what looked like an Amish farm fallen on hard times: collapsing outbuildings, a primitive sawmill and piles of gray slab wood, a scythe-cut hayfield, laundry on a bowed line. No power poles or wires. No tractors or trucks. She saw specks, brown and white, in motion.

  Chickens?

  Nothing else moved. It looked like desolation, like despair. Or was that a faulty judgment by her frazzled modern mind? What was wrong with a slower pace and a simpler life? Wasn’t living off the land and depending on no one a cornerstone of American identity? Her thoughts had drifted back a hundred-plus years—subsistence farming, rustic isolation, Grover Cleveland for president—when her phone stirred beneath her badge.

  “It’s Dr. Kleekamp, Sheriff.” The medical examiner sounded rattled. “I’ve got some results. Bear with me here.”

  “OK. Go ahead.”

  Kleekamp exhaled with a whoosh of relief, in exactly the manner of a rookie coroner who had just sawed through his first human sternum.

  “First, I’m gonna agree with myself that he was homeless. Indications of liver disease, gum disease, lung infection, frostbite, brain contusions, basically the works. He was in real bad shape for at least several years.”

  She waited, thinking of the priest from La Crosse and his concern about the vanishing homeless. But she knew Kleekamp hadn’t called just to reinforce his own guesswork.

  “And?”

  “Well,” he said, whooshing again, “I disagree with another thing I thought at first. I do not think someone brought him in and dumped him off dead in that ditch. I think he was alive in the Bad Axe, alive when he landed there. And I think you should have found his other boot somewhere nearby.”

  “Why?”

  “He walked around that terrain for a while. After he was shot.”

  “Because?”

  “I’ll stand to be corrected by a forensic botanist,” Kleekamp said, “but he’s got trefoil burrs in his underpants, and he’s got wild parsnip seeds all the way down in the toe of that boot. He’d been walking for a while.”

  She glanced at her uniform: burrs everywhere. Her pant cuffs were full of seeds and other shreds of desiccated matter, and something prickled inside her socks.

  Kleekamp said, “He was on the move, Sheriff. He had covered some ground. But with both boots on, because his left foot, the one without the boot, is in exactly the same condition as the right. From that, I conclude the other boot came off close to where he died in the ditch.”

  “OK. That makes enough sense.”

  “And then I’m gonna guess that your searchers found some disturbed ground close by. Maybe a large, shallow hole?”

  Her breath caught. A grave? Touching her stomach, she stared down at the worn-out farm.

  “Am I right?” Kleekamp persisted.

  “No. No, actually not. The dog got no scent of him in the area, and we found pretty much nothing. Some empty beer cans. Did you find any alcohol in his system?”

  “None. He had a meal in his stomach. All vegetable. No alcohol. You didn’t find a hole in the ground within a couple hundred yards away? He couldn’t have gone very far in his condition.”

  “Which was what?”

  “These two gunshots were from close range, but neither one hit anything immediately fatal. Still, with internal bleeding, he couldn’t have lasted more than thirty minutes to an hour, at the very best. Even if he hadn’t also been…”

  Kleekamp’s voice faded. “Hang on!” At a distance, she heard him throwing up.

  “OK,” he restarted, sounding embarrassed. “I just cut open his lungs, and I’m looking inside them one more time, and unless I don’t know what I’m looking at…”

  He paused to swallow, and just then the sheriff caught a flicker of something blue-and-silver far down the steep slope toward the farm. She wasn’t really listening as her medical examiner explained about aspirated dirt… that he had only one way to explain how a man could have this much dirt in his lungs—

  She didn’t need to hear it. She had been there.

  “He was buried alive,” she interrupted.

  She had surprised Kleekamp into silence.

  “He was shot twice and buried alive,” she said, beginning to move. “He escaped his grave somehow, traveled on foot, then not on foot, and landed in that ditch.”

  She wasn’t sure how the phone call ended. All she paid attention to now, descending toward the isolated farm, was the glint ahead of a blue-and-silver beer can.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Liar,” began the same caller’s voice the moment Grape Fanta picked up the phone.

  “Corporate tool,” the caller added, a fiery lash to an old lefty such as Fanta.

  Fanta said, “Well, now it sounds personal. You probably don’t realize that you and I are on the same side—”

  The man talked over him.

  “It always said on your masthead ‘We the People.’ I sent you a letter. You didn’t print it. I sent you another letter. I didn’t see that either. All I see is what’s for lunch at the nursing home. Beer and trucks for sale. Who hit a deer, and how much property damage, that’s the important thing. The deer are sick by the millions, Fanta, but you’re keeping your little scorecard on collisions with automobiles. Insurance. New bumpers. How much smaller can you think? Changes in latitude require changes in attitude, Fanta. That’s what my letters were about. Noon is our new midnight. We’ll be sub-equatorial before we wake up. You used to print the people’s letters. But profits over people, that’s your game now. Well, I’m the game changer.”

  As the caller broke into a wheezy cough, Fanta used the opening to talk back.

  “Listen, friend, I’ve gladly printed your letters. I agree with a lot of what you have to say. But what’s happened here at the newspaper is that it’s not even a newspaper anymore. You apparently haven’t heard that—”

  The voice came back, nearly shouting over Fanta as if the man were deaf.

  “The G8 summit is in two weeks, Fanta! You know what they’ll be talking about? How to drive down oil prices—”

  “Actually it’s the G7 now,” Fanta put in. “Russia’s out.”

  “Oil prices! Not the climate refugees, Fanta, not the billions of displaced people soon to be on the move. When I think of this—”

  “Those are issues that I’ve always—”

  “ ‘—a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of man—’ ”

  “I’ve read Yeats too, my friend.”

  “ ‘—while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.’ How about the shadows of the gypsy moths, Fanta? Shrouds in the trees. They’ll strip us bare. But it won’t matter. We’ve already sold our soul. Feedlots on the ridges, E. coli in the aquifers, spongiform in the brain. And now the goddamn ticks are going to kill us with a new spirochete.” The caller’s labored in-breath whistled. “But… oh, well, at least lawn mowers are on sale and there’s another pancake breakfast. At least
we’re racing tractors on the fairgrounds. At least—”

  A grinding patch of static cut off the speaker. Unsure what had happened, Fanta used the opportunity to say, “Well, now, I’ve been infected by Lyme disease myself, so—”

  “—instead of the truth. You’re a corporate tool now. You work for the forces of destruction—”

  “The hell I do. I—”

  “You work for Koyaanisqatsi, Incorporated.”

  “The goddamn hell I do. You have no idea—”

  “—afraid to print my letters. The People’s letters. We the People, Fanta. If things go according to your plan, the People die, and only the rich will make it through the night. Well, let me say this: They had better goddamn hope so. The sun is upon us. Noon is our new midnight. Like the great martyr Thich Quang Duc, I will bring the light.”

  Another static hiss and some fumbling.

  “Can I talk now?” Fanta asked.

  A solid click.

  “Hello?” Thich Quang Duc rang a bell. Vietnam in the sixties. The self-immolating monk. “Listen, how about you tell me who you are? You’re the fella that signs off ‘FROM HELL HOLLOW.’ Am I right?”

  The second click was the hang-up, he understood, because next came the dial tone.

  Fanta stared at his antiquated answering machine. Aha, he realized. I’ve been talking back to a recording. A recording playing to a recording. One cassette tape to another.

  The guy had recorded himself reading a letter and played it over the phone into the machine.

  Fanta sat back in the old desk chair that after decades had become an extension of his aching, creaking body. He lit a smoke and sucked on his Walker bottle. He put his feet up, his journalist’s brain coming alive.

  FROM HELL HOLLOW.

  What was the story here?

  God, how he loved to ask that question.

  Whose story was it?

  The lovely subject-object dance. Viewpoint. Where did the storyteller stand? How did the story and its teller connect?

  Vietnam? He considered the intriguing eligibility of his own narrative as a parallel: A Bad Axe farm boy, 1969, proud to be drafted, returns home damaged by a futile and fraudulent war, having slaughtered fellow humans, inhaled Agent Orange, lost a kidney and a bone-hunk from his right leg, transforming into the kind of young man that no one around the Bad Axe ever expected to see, a longhair with DOW SHALT NOT KILL on his Volkswagen bumper, an angry voice in the taverns saying un-American things. And from there forward, in exchange for one of the smallest salaries in the history of journalism, the former farm boy spends the next forty-plus years breathing fire from the rooftops…