Bad Axe County Read online

  If the Rattlers were the official Bad Axe religion, like people said they were, then their uniform shirts were sacred objects. After Aspinwall Ford sprang for new unies every season, the old road jerseys were auctioned off for fund-raising. Some nutty woman once paid five hundred bucks for number 7, Harley Kick. Meanwhile, the old home jerseys were preserved. Angus found the tub from 2012. He peeled back the lid. Inside, each jersey was sealed in its own plastic bag by the same machine that Clausen Meats used to package beef jerky. His was on top: Beavers 23. It would be too small for him now. He had hardly broken a sweat with it on.

  He sorted out the jerseys that he wanted: Wade Gibbs, nephew of Sheriff Ray Gibbs, number 10; Scotty Clausen, son of the Rattlers’ manager back then, Pinky Clausen, number 4; Sherman Ossie, whose family owned Ossie Implement, number 32; Curtis Strunk, his dad a Rattlers Hall of Famer, number 2. Angus closed the tub and turned out the light.

  * * *

  The cab driver, his face blue from the glow of his phone, had news for Angus.

  “This is Rattlesnake Bowl, also known as Clausen Meats Field.”

  “Some people call it that.”

  “That was the Aspinwall Ford clubhouse, remodeled and rededicated last fall.”

  Angus tucked the jerseys into his bag. “That means Suck’s still playing center field.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Suck Aspinwall. He sucks, everybody can see it, but he still played instead of me, even when I had pro scouts look at me in high school. Shit like that drove my dad and uncle Walt—”

  He stopped. That was not his story. He had been OK with waiting his turn. But the sight of him sitting on the bench behind players like Suck Aspinwall, who came from wealth and status in the community, had driven his dad and uncle Walt out of their beer-pickled minds. Their Beavers pride was a big part of how he lost the life he wanted.

  “I don’t get it,” said the cab driver.

  “Aspinwall Ford.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “This is the Bad Axe. This is coulees. Where did you grow up?”

  “Somewhere else,” the driver said.

  “That’s why you don’t get it.”

  * * *

  Angus had one more errand. He directed the driver out on U.S. 14 north beyond town, then left on County Highway ZZ, then north on Toole Coulee Road. He confirmed that Clausen Meats was still there, just as he remembered it: the low brick building, the retail store in the front, the processing room and meat locker in the back, the fleet of reefer trucks, the roadside sign—a ham, struck with a cleaver—glowing through the slash of sleety snow.

  Back on the highway, Angus told the driver to pull over at the junction with Lost Hollow Road. The junction still lacked a sign because nobody except the Beaverses lived on the road. That suited Angus right now, counting bills into the driver’s hand.

  “With an extra two hundred, in case you need to pull off somewhere and spend the night.”

  “That’s really cool of you.”

  “And another hundred to forget what just happened.”

  “Got it, bro.”

  “Drive careful.”

  He watched the taxi’s red and white dissolve in the stormy distance. He slung his bag over his shoulder, winced it around to where his back could stand it, and from there the pitted gravel road went down, curved, went down again, curved again, and suddenly there was a hush. The coulee walls had cut the wind. Immense soft snowflakes swirled down upon him as Angus Beavers descended into silver darkness, silent but for creaking trees and crunching footfall and the whisper in his mind.

  11

  Around her left wrist Pepper Greengrass wears a thick rubber band, red or blue, the kind that comes around asparagus or broccoli stems at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store in the Dells where her mom works. Pepper’s habit is to snap the rubber band, feel the sharp sting, and listen to a voice say, That doesn’t even hurt.

  After the scene at the library, after Dale Hill tows her out and hurls her into his van, Pepper begins to snap the rubber band against the sensitive tissue on her inner wrist.

  That doesn’t even hurt.

  Dale drives in a silent conniption fit until his rage gets the best of him. Then he jerks the van to the side of a deserted road outside Farmstead. Pepper has been watching wet snow plaster the ribs of Holsteins standing in a field. Dale’s arm lashes out. He snatches Pepper under the jaw.

  “Give it back.”

  The crush of his grip makes her talk funny. “Gib wha ba?”

  He sweats. He lost easy money. He punched a sweet old man. His fingers touch her teeth through her cheek. “It’s mine unless it’s paid for.”

  “Whaz yers?”

  His grip narrows until he has her by the bottom lip. He twists the lip like he wants to rip it from her face. Pepper gasps and draws her knees up, stations her tall boots like a shield over her crotch and belly and boobs. With her head twisted, this is when she sees the backseat of the van and is startled. Her backpack is there. But she didn’t bring it.

  Dale’s face looms two inches from hers. She tastes his fingers, Basic Lights.

  “I’m not playing. I own that shit. Put it back.”

  “K, k, sorry, leggo.”

  He releases her lip. She scrapes the kiss, the one she gave the cute old librarian, back across Dale’s stubbled jaw. That restores his property, and now he stomps on his gas pedal. The van snakes back onto the road. “You got help,” he informs her when he is speeding again. “So that cancels the bet.”

  He slams on into the storm, following his own mutter-back of the directions he received from fucking Ladonna at the tavern. The road descends. Pepper snaps her rubber band, snaps it, snaps it—doesn’t hurt—watching through a screen of sleet as leafless woods pass on one side and dripping rock walls pass on the other. The road plunges, twists, plunges again, hairpins back the other way. Finally it hits bottom with a jarring passage across an iron bridge over the sluggish spread of the creek. It is dark down here. Dale jabs his headlights through another quarter mile before they shine on a broken sign that points them onward and says MISSISSIPPI.

  “What the fuck just happened?”

  “River,” Pepper tells him. She snaps extra hard. “Why is my backpack in the van?”

  “None of your goddamn business. This is supposed to be Wisconsin. What the fucking hell just happened?”

  She shivers. She can see the river. Dale doesn’t know what it is. He revs the van’s engine at the shattered sign. Pepper hears her sister’s hesitation on the phone. You’re asking could you come visit in Montana? . . . I guess . . . maybe . . . I mean, does Mom say it’s OK? She snaps the rubber band as hard as it will snap. “As in Mississippi River,” she informs Dale.

  “How the fuck?” is his reply.

  “You went too far west. That’s Iowa on the other side.”

  “The fuck do you know?”

  “My ancestors crossed the Mississippi every summer to hunt buffalo on the plains.”

  “Fuck your ancestors.”

  “You missed your chance,” Pepper tells him. “But you’re welcome to visit the casino.”

  He jerks the van through a five- or six-point turn, manly in intent but not in execution. As his headlights dial back the other way they filter through the storm and strike a wall of yellow-brown rock, layered, clumped with moss and pocked with cliff swallow nests, too tall to see the top of. She is shivering now, can’t stop.

  “If it’s not my business why you brought my backpack, then whose business is it?”

  “It’s none of your goddamn business whose goddamn business the fuck it is.”

  * * *

  One ridge and two valleys later, through what now are snowflakes so big that they drop straight down like gob-spit off a bridge, Dale spots the sign for the road that he has been calling a cocksucker for as long as Pepper can seem to remember. He hits his brakes too hard. The van slides, does a 360, and shanks into the ditch.

  For a while Pepper w
atches the spectacle of a grown man shrieking like a hysterical old witch while he spins his tires and the van sinks deeper. Then she says, “I know how to drive, so let me. Because you’re gonna have to push.”

  He slams his door. Pepper slides over. She feels the creepy heat of him in the seat and the damp grime of his hands on the wheel. She turns the tires toward the road, runs the window down to listen for him. Those heavy snowflakes splatter in, making her colder. She presses the brake, puts the gear into low. “Are you stupid?” Dale screeches. By this he means go, so she gives a bit of gas, just enough to keep the weight of the van on the tires. She eases it up to the road—and suddenly she has maybe five seconds.

  At two seconds, she looks into the mirror to see Dale slogging out of the ditch. At three seconds, she understands she has a chance. She has her backpack, all of her stuff, even though she didn’t bring it, and the van is hers if she takes it now, and maybe she can make it all the way to Hungry Horse. At four seconds, Pepper’s hands have left the gears and steering wheel—she is snapping her rubber band: it doesn’t hurt—while in her mind’s eye she is arriving in Hungry Horse, seeing Marie’s face, trying to read if her sister is truly, honestly, happy to see her . . .

  Then it is too late.

  12

  Walt Beavers had bolted without logging out, and his history on the library computer was more eclectic and ambitious than she might have expected.

  He had begun by shopping for insulated boots. After that, he had priced a crossbow. Then he had compared joint-lubrication formulas. After that, he had looked at water volumes at Lock & Dam No. 9 on the Mississippi, probably a place where he liked to fish. After that, like he was sneaking up on it, Coach Beavers had finally opened a porn site. There he had taken just a couple of nips of “Big Boob Teenies” before sending the browser to a website called Backpage.com. And that was a different place entirely.

  The sheriff used her cell phone to call Denise. Instead of hello, Denise answered, “Harold Snustead is going to need surgery.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “So is the cocksplat who punched him, if he ever crosses the path of Denise ‘Thunder Thighs’ Halverson.”

  “I hear you.” She was thinking zombie more than cocksplat, but it steadied her to hear Denise’s sass. “I’m hoping somehow Walt Beavers can lead the way.”

  “I’m staying in touch with the hospital. I’ll let you know.”

  “Good. Here’s why I called you: a website called Backpage.com.”

  “Are you asking me what it is?”

  “I can see what it is.”

  “And?”

  “There’s just this weird feeling I have about Walt Beavers on a sex-for-sale website at the same time as what seems like a pimp and prostitute show up in town. I’m on the library computer, about to go in, following the sticky trail of Coach Beavers. I need a vaccination.”

  “God help you. OK. What’s the difference between a hooker and a whore?”

  “Tell me.”

  Denise gave her punch line a manly oomph. “Frankly, in my experience, there is no difference.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Too abstract?”

  “Yeah. Also, my research indicates they’re called escorts.”

  “How about a limerick?” asked Denise.

  “Have you got one?”

  “You think? ‘There once was a whore from Peru, / Who filled her vagina with glue. / She said with a grin, / “If they pay to get in, / They can pay to get out again too.’ ”

  “Oh my God, Denise, you are a genius.” A decent breath filled her lungs. Her brain felt cleaner. “Keep me posted on Harold.”

  Coach Beavers had clicked efficiently through Backpage.com from “Social” to “Parties” to “Wisconsin”—and, yes, it was a live link, something a sheriff should know about—to “Bad Axe County,” where the most recent listing was a haiku-length notice that said 4/8, dancers, gate fee, Ease Inn for Singapore Sling.

  Based on the computer’s history log, Coach Beavers had been looking at boots again when the black-haired girl had worried him by reading from the Bad Axe Broadcaster about a baseball game in 2012. Sheriff Kick memorized the Backpage.com listing: 4/8, dancers, gate fee, Ease Inn for Singapore Sling.

  She headed out into the storm with the big red book half wrapped inside her jacket. It probably didn’t matter what a Singapore Sling was. Something fruity. A code phrase. As she steered behind slapping wipers toward the south end of town, heading for the Ease Inn, she put the pieces together. The 4/8 was April 8, today. In the context of Backpage.com, dancers probably meant strippers. A gate fee suggested a private event. So, a private party, tonight, with strippers? This man who punched their librarian—was he bringing a stripper? More than a stripper? For Walt Beavers and his ilk to enjoy? She rapped her knuckles on the cover of the red book as it rode on her passenger seat. Was there something in those pages that Coach Beavers didn’t want her to see?

  The roads were bad and getting worse. She whooped her siren and flashed her lights at a grimy red tractor-trailer coming too fast into town. She turned into the lot of the Ease Inn, rolled past the pumps and past the front window of the tavern. The place was busy—dollar taps, she remembered—and she could hear the karaoke leaking out of the banquet room in the back, under way without her. Someone was mangling the Otis Redding great about sitting on a dock by a bay.

  No, she would not go in and ask for a Singapore Sling. She would get the drink if she asked for one, not access to a party with strippers. She could see through the window that the bartender was Ladonna Weeks, an especially toxic ex-flame of Harley’s. No, she would not go inside at all. On top of swapping paint in a collision with Ladonna, she might get spotted by someone from the fund-raiser.

  She needed a different strategy. Easing past the motel doorways, she noted a few vehicles positioned deliberately beyond the lot lights, where long-haul drivers parked their rigs overnight. She rolled past a blue-and-corrosion Chevy sedan. It looked empty. But inside the next vehicle, a red club-cab pickup, a head ducked down.

  She parked and went to the driver’s window, motioned that she wanted it down.

  “Wow. Brand-new truck. You’re gonna wreck this one from the inside out?”

  She was asking this of Calvin Fanta as marijuana smoke poured out, almost choking her.

  “Come sit in my car,” she said.

  “Aww . . . Missus Kick . . .”

  “Sheriff Kick. Come on.”

  Fanta, tall and knock-kneed, was one of Harley’s high school players, a left-handed junkballer who had graduated last summer, failed to make the Rattlers’ rotation, and now was fading into Bad Axe baseball history. As he sat down in her cruiser, she said, “You were getting stoned behind the wheel, Calvin.”

  “I wasn’t gonna drive like that.”

  “I know. You were going to go inside and drink tap beers for a dollar while the roads got a whole lot more icy. Then you were going to drive ‘like that.’ ”

  “Aww, come on . . . Missus Kick!”

  “Calvin, you’re talking to Sheriff Kick. And that pretty new truck tells me that maybe you’re not just smoking, you’re dealing. I search that truck, am I going to find evidence of that?”

  “Shit.”

  He slumped in defeat, his knees banging her onboard computer.

  “Let’s work together. Here is what I want. Go to the bar and order a Singapore Sling—”

  “A what?”

  She repeated it, a Singapore Sling, a cocktail.

  “Then come back and tell me all about it. Bring me anything and everything Ladonna gives you, except the glass it came in. Remember anything she says to you.”

  “What? I don’t get this.”

  “You don’t need to get it. Here’s a twenty. Tip Ladonna one dollar and bring my change back. Then we’ll talk about how to handle your possession-with-intent-to-deliver charge. You got it? Singapore Sling. Go.”

  She turned her dome light on and opened the volum
e of Broadcasters against the wheel. Why had Walt Beavers shut the book? She began to flip back and forth, looking for the pages where Harold Snustead’s blood was spattered. Then she found them. The spray of blood continued over the two sports pages of the August 15, 2012, issue, and on those pages were the prep football preview, rodeo results, a badly overexposed photograph of a guy with a good-size sturgeon, and, finally, a brief story about a game between the Bad Axe Rattlers and the Wisconsin Dells Scenics. Given the choices of what Coach Beavers might have been concerned about, Gabby Grimes seemed right to suggest that something about this article was the reason he had closed the book and rushed out of the library.

  She squinted at the small print. The game was a Wisconsin Baseball Association first-round playoff matchup, a game the Rattlers were expected to win. But the Scenics, from the Dairyland League, had blitzed the home team, 19–3. That was a shocker. She went back to the top of the article. The game had been on Sunday, August 12. Less than a month before, she had given birth to the twins. That would explain why she didn’t remember. She was on maternity leave from the Dane County Sheriff’s Department. She and Harley were living in Middleton, a suburb west of Madison, two hours away. Harley was driving out here for Rattlers games, staying overnight with friends.

  But a glance through the box score surprised her. Harley had pitched? And given up nineteen runs? Twenty-one hits? Six home runs to one guy? Those were T-ball stats. Her husband must have pitched left-handed. Or with his feet. And that was a story she would have remembered. But what was Walt Beavers worried about?

  With her phone, she took a picture of the story with its box score. She would ask Harley. When she found Coach Beavers, she would ask him too.

  * * *