Bad Moon Rising Page 6

  Noon is our new midnight…

  Thurs, Aug 8, 12:39 PM

  To: Dairy Queen (dairyqueen@blackbox.com)

  From: Oppo (oppo@blackbox.com)

  Subject: Why Would You Not Accept (Free) Opposition Research?

  Objective: Neutralize (minimum) or Destroy (optimal) opposition candidate

  Theme: Kim Maybee (1989–2015), her alleged “suicide,” and her intimate relationship with Barry Rickreiner

  Background (per Broadcaster, coroner’s report): Morning of April 3, 2015, Kimberly Karen Maybee, 26, found comatose in her rented home, Town of Leaning Rock. Transported by Farmstead EMS to La Crosse, poisoning suspected, extracorporeal hemodialysis and resin hemoperfusion performed unsuccessfully. Died of massive organ failure at 11:47 AM.

  Investigation (BASD files): Remains of buttermilk in a glass found inside home of KM contained pesticide 2,4-D (brand name Killex). Investigators also found opiates and opiate-delivery devices and diary with writings expressing thoughts of self-harm. From interviews, investigators determined KM was in suicidal frame of mind. No indications of foul play recorded.

  Autopsy (coroner): Signs of alcohol/drug use. Massive organ failure. Deep bruises on chest, back, and legs. Oh, and by the way: she was four months pregnant.

  Cause of Death (coroner): Suicide by Acute Self-Intoxication.

  Want more?

  Say YES, and stand by for Problems with This Story.

  CHAPTER 7

  The railroad cop who catches Sammy Squirrel trying to hop out from the Burlington Northern yard in La Crosse is an ornery man in a rumpled gray jumpsuit, with a heavy black pistol on his hip, a rifle in the window behind him, and an artificial right arm.

  “Get in.”

  He drives slowly around in his heavy Ram utility truck, making threats.

  “You wanna know what I could do to you?”

  His ID badge reads Railroad Special Agent Ruben Cobb. He seems sixtyish, a small man but tightly bloated, with fresh shaving cuts and a gooey crumb of sandwich stuck in the corner of his mouth. Half a Cousins sub broils between his dash and windshield.

  “You ain’t gonna talk? Well, then, I’ll talk, and I’ll tell you what. If we have to stop a train to remove one of you dirty bastards, federal law allows us to bill you for the costs.”

  Sammy Squirrel looks past the sandwich out the window. It’s so hot that the tree leaves are limp. At least they’re green, though. They won’t burn. It’s so hot that the truck tires rip the asphalt.

  “You know how much it costs for a loser like you to stop a whole damn freight train and throw the schedule off?”

  By now he knows that in the presence of someone like Ruben Cobb, the voice puts up its feet and takes a break. The backpack rides on the truck floor between his scabby knees: his tattered bedspread, his dead phone, his rock, his railroad spike, his fork and shattered reflector, his case of colored chalk. He sits still and grins.

  “It costs a million bucks an hour. You think that’s funny? You got a million bucks? You even got a million brain cells? A cockroach has a million brain cells. You’re wacko, huh? You’re some kind of loon?”

  Special Agent Cobb pilots his truck down a private road between the tracks and a mighty river, brown and flowing invisibly. His rubber hand, stiff and gray, detaches from the steering wheel and lands on the seat between them. It’s so hot that the weeds have fallen over in the ditch, so hot that blue-green scum bubbles atop the backwaters of the river. The sandwich on the dash gives off a smell that Sammy Squirrel can chew.

  “What did you do, kill somebody?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “Ha. Sure. Then where you headed?”

  His hands reply. Peace. Love.

  “Oh, Lordy.” Special Agent Cobb laughs high and squealy. “Son, you were trying to hop a train to Duluth. That where they’re hiding all the peace and the love these days, Duluth?”

  As they drive on, the rubber hand inches closer. They cross the tracks into a small old city where every other building is either boarded up or a tavern. Soon the city trails away and Special Agent Cobb accelerates from stoplight to stoplight through a depressed industrial zone, rusty warehouses and tilting fences pinched against the tracks by rocky bluffs.

  “You hear about the train that went through a forest fire in Idaho, and when it got to the next yard they found three of you assholes in a hopper car, barbecued to death?”

  Sammy Squirrel aims his locked grin off his right shoulder toward the river. He doesn’t feel much anymore except sudden stirrings of deeply buried sadness and rage, and these moments belong to the voice. Now expecting it, he keeps his gaze cast far away and spies amid the shoreline scramble of trees an approaching mass of blue poly tarps, sheets of black plastic, tents of many colors, a homeless camp. His eyes stay on the camp as the truck passes.

  Red light. The truck stops. That rubber hand bumps him on his bare thigh.

  “Burnt bums. Ha! Guess what. Smelled just like chicken.”

  Green light. Another leg bump. Off they go. Sammy Squirrel twists to watch the homeless camp until he loses it in the dense riverbank forest. The truck speeds up.

  Stop this tool. Stop him.

  “You heard about Hobo Heaven? In Washington State? It’s a tunnel in the mountains, eight miles of smoke and fumes. When the train comes out the other side, all you scumbags are dead as smoked fish, every time, gone to meet your maker. Hobo Heaven.”

  Are you chickenshit? Take his gun and stop him.

  Already the homeless camp has faded a quarter mile back. Ahead hangs one last stoplight. Then the road becomes a two-lane highway, heading steeply up away from the river.

  Use your bare hands.

  Loser.

  At the last red light, Agent Cobb prods again with the rubber hand and makes a nervous wheezy giggle. “I’ll bet you’d like a little cash. Huh? Bus money? So you can go find your peace and love?”

  This last stoplight turns green. Agent Cobb isn’t looking at the light, so the truck doesn’t move yet.

  “I’ll bet you’ll take thirty bucks for the bus to Duluth, am I right?”

  Break his neck. Cassie wants you to.

  As the truck begins to roll, Sammy Squirrel jerks his leg away. He lunges across the seat with his hands like claws. He snatches the sandwich, shoulders open the heavy truck door, dives out after his pack. He pops up on the gravel shoulder and runs.

  CHAPTER 8

  Deputy Lyndsey Luck, the first to arrive at the chaotic scene on Liberty Hill Road, knew the difference between heatstroke and heat exhaustion, a distinction the rookie clarified at great length while Sheriff Kick shivered and panted in a swirl of abstract vocabulary, not listening.

  “Bottom line,” her deputy concluded breathlessly, “we either need a third ambulance because you’re heatstroked, or you’re going to be OK in ten minutes. So, may I?”

  When the sheriff nodded permission, the deputy touched her skin, took her pulse, looked in her pupils, asked the sheriff where she was in time and space. Midnight in hell, she wanted to say, but she got the answers right. Yes, she felt cold. No, she did not have a headache.

  “Good news. You’ve got heat exhaustion. That’s the easy one.”

  The deputy led her boss across the road into the ankle-deep creek and sat her down in a reef of lush green watercress. Deputy Luck stripped off her own tight uniform shirt, then her vest, then peeled off her undershirt. She soaked the undershirt in the creek and draped it over the sheriff’s head. As the shirt came down inside out, the wet fabric glowed bright as a movie screen. The sheriff could read its silhouetted lettering.

  DEATH

  ROE

  SURVIVOR

  She flinched and felt her shivers spike. Deputy Luck put her vest and shirt back on. A minute later the deputy returned from her cruiser with the bottle of electrolyte water that she carried everywhere. Slowly, the shivers settled and Sheriff Kick began to feel coherent again.

  The second deputy to arrive, twelve
-year-veteran Rob Schwem, drew his cruiser close by along the shoulder above the creek. Over his idling engine he hollered down, “If it’s that unmarked driveway a half mile back, I went in there a few years ago checking up after a flood. That’s the Goodgolly family. Gabriel Goodgolly and his daughter, Patience.”

  Deputy Luck conveyed the sheriff’s mumbled response up to Schwem.

  “That does not sound Amish.”

  “I hear they converted to Amish. Or they tried to. Where does she want me?”

  Schwem’s cruiser roared away to meet the two ambulances heading for the Goodgolly farm. A minute later, Interim Chief Deputy Dick Bender parked across the road. Bender drove the department’s oldest vehicle, an ’05 Avenger that somehow looked dog-eared. Without discussion, he drew his service weapon and walked out from the overturned buggy into the high weeds of the meadow.

  They heard the horse snort, then a gunshot.

  When he arrived above the creek, Bender said in a raw voice, “Dr. Geyer’s on vacation.” The sheriff waited. Bender always dropped another shoe. Benderisms, she and Denise called his hostile little habit. “I’da thought,” he said eventually, “that the person in charge would have known a basic fact like that.”

  Sheriff Kick peeled Deputy Luck’s undershirt off her head. She went to hands and knees in the watercress, stayed there enduring a weird cramp between her hips, then stood unsteadily inside her wet pants. She waited out a wave of dizziness, then looked up to the road. Bender appeared grim, his narrow shoulders deflated.

  “Thank you for taking care of the horse, Dick. Can you tell whose buggy that is?”

  “It says GOODGOLLY under the dash rail.” Count three. “All you had to do was look.”

  The frightened animal probably tried to go home. It would have found the gate shut.

  “OK,” she told Bender. “Let’s get Roads out here with a front-end loader to pick up the horse. Then diagram the accident and take the buggy into evidence. There’s a rubber boot in there. Make sure that gets bagged.”

  Bender stared through his smudgy glasses, running fingers through his thin hair. She sometimes felt like he was sizing her up for a lampshade.

  “Pick up the horse and do what?”

  “Take it in on Goodgolly’s land and bury it.”

  “Wouldn’t have hurt you to say so in the first place.”

  “Right as always, Dick.”

  The sheriff tested her balance, then bear-crawled up the creek bank onto sizzling gravel. Bender pulled away. A pair of vultures coasted high above the horse. Sirens twined nearby, closing on the Goodgolly farm.

  “Meet you there,” she told Lyndsey Luck.

  She rushed to put on dry pants and chugged a warm Powerade from her trunk. As she got behind the wheel, her full faculties were coming back. The dead man in the ditch had been on the Goodgolly farm. He might have stabbed the old man and stolen the buggy. But then who had shot him and buried him? The old man? Who did what to whom? When?

  She Y-turned the Charger. From this angle she got a weak bounce from the tower in Farmstead to Schwem’s phone.

  “We’re treating Patience Goodgolly as a person of interest in two crimes,” she told him, “homicide and aggravated assault. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

  “Well, that’s the thing.” Schwem’s response crackled back through gaps and static. “Denise reported a stabbing victim sitting on the pot in the outhouse, did I get that right?”

  “An old man, yes.”

  “Well, I opened the door, all I saw at first was a Bible and a hat, and a lot of blood. Then I heard something. Sheriff, now the old man is all the way down inside the toilet pit.”

  She surged the Charger.

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s down there groaning in the doo-doo. He had to be folded up and pushed hard. I can see a bunch of other stuff down there too. A shovel, a rifle, some beer cans. Maybe some clothing—”

  She heard her deputy gag and spit.

  “But there is no Patience Goodgolly,” Schwem continued.

  “She’s on the porch of the house.”

  “Not there, Sheriff.”

  “Look inside the house. Don’t touch the doorknob.”

  “Too late for that,” Schwem told her with a high laugh. “But at least I got my hair permed. She isn’t in the house. Or anywhere.”

  “She has to be.”

  “Sheriff, I’m telling you, if there was a girl here, she’s gone.”

  CHAPTER 9

  In the office of what had become the Happy Valley Shopper, Leroy Fanta lit a new Winston, leaned across his former desk to set the smoke in his former ashtray, and opened another manila file folder labeled Letters to the Editor, this one from 2017. He peered in, accompanied by a Procol Harum cassette hissing forth from his dusty boom box with “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

  A man like FROM HELL HOLLOW, Fanta repeated to himself, he and I could talk.

  But how to find him?

  Well, was he lost?

  Was he hiding?

  Fanta skimmed the 2017 letters, seeing the usual. Taxes were too high. Farmers deserved more government support. People should stop eating meat. People should eat more meat. We should all support the soldiers.

  FROM HELL HOLLOW could have used his real name. Most letter-writers did. Most newspapers did not print anonymous submissions. But in his capacity as editor-in-chief, Fanta had violated this norm. In his view, truth needed both light and dark to fully flower. Whistleblowers, right? Don’t we make laws to protect them? Deep Throat took down Nixon. FROM HELL HOLLOW’s screeds amounted to dropping a big, fat dime on our lethal human weakness for business-as-usual. Let him speak.

  But was the man escaping contact, or seeking it? Was his anti-Fanta vitriol a bluster, or a threat, or was he sending out cries for help? Was he directing Fanta? Or misdirecting him? Or both? Or none of the above? This would make an interesting front-page story.

  Local Madman Seeks Same

  By this time more than a little drunk, the ousted editor composed this and other mock headlines as he worked his way through 2017.

  Local Dead Man Suddenly Full of Piss, Vinegar, Johnny Walker Red

  If that nasty little toad Babette Rickreiner could publish a pretend newspaper, he could write pretend headlines. He could rant and prance, swoon and mutter. He could fudge his promise to the sheriff and defiantly haunt the front window when the candidate’s cover-story family, Becky Rilke-Rickreiner and her marshmallow brood, schlepped past en route to the public pool.

  Bad Axe Voters Seek Whiter Shade of Pale

  He could loom and fog the glass like a bogle.

  * * *

  In a little less than two hours, while handyman Jim Steffke fixed the back door, Fanta had culled FROM HELL HOLLOW’s letters to the editor, photocopied them, replaced the originals, then annotated each copy and placed it in a folder, gradually constructing a mental matrix to guide his journalistic manhunt.

  At noon-thirty, he took a lunch break: a chocolate bar, more whiskey, a smoke, and a self-scathing mock headline.

  Longtime Vegetarian Counts Tobacco as a Vegetable

  Pre-Vietnam, all the meat he could eat.

  Post-Vietnam, never another bite.

  Go figure.

  Should he find it odd, he wondered, how FROM HELL HOLLOW raged at him, of all people, Grape Fanta, champion of the loser, truther to the tool, hugger of the tree, hunter of the Tofurky, outcast in the land of his birth for all deviancies above-listed, and more?

  No. It wasn’t odd, he decided.

  It was perfect.

  His correspondent was a wounded man, jilted by his dreams, howling into a mirror.

  Fundamentally, Fanta thought, in seeking his ranting letter-writer he was seeking himself—if, forty years ago, instead of choosing to seek salvation in newspaper truth-telling, he had sought salvation by embracing the land—if, instead of Happy Valley Shopper firing him and changing the locks, his dream-bending demise had turned out to be tainted we
lls, infected meat, and bug bites.

  Fanta did a little more research: farmers’ market registrations, permits for small-time agro such as beekeeping, membership rosters of the local Lyme disease support group and the local anti-vaxxers group, phone calls to a select list of bartenders, a survey of public records for arrests on anything drug- or alcohol-related.

  By early afternoon, with his file folder of FROM HELL HOLLOW letters in hand and a particularly stirring 2019 specimen on top, he was locked and loaded.

  Seen out the office window, the display in front of Farmers Bank said 1:27 P.M. and 102 degrees.

  Ha. Weather. Don’t give me weather. Give me climate. Don’t give me your little tiny time. Give me now.

  He took a final few nips of Walker, then experienced a nostalgic crying fit while using his cozy old toilet for the final time.

  At last, he set sail into the dangerous outside air.

  Several Local Back-to-Landers Short-Listed for Melancholic Delirium

  * * *

  There was no breeze, not even a whiff on the ridges. The Brobdingnagian windmills along Jegers Road were stuck in the sky. In farmers’ yards, the SUPPORT OUR TROOPS flags hung as limply in Fanta’s view as the facts and the reasonings behind them. Cattle stood in trout streams or shoved for real estate on tiny islands of tree shade under gypsy moth shrouds. Good word by FROM HELL HOLLOW, he mused, to describe the gray clots of fibrous webbing suddenly everywhere in the Bad Axe, inside of which the moth larvae stripped leaves from the doomed trees. Shrouds. He drove slowly through his changing world. The rusty green Tercel’s AC roared, its trail of drips mingling with transmission fluid, engine oil, and whatever else the ancient car leaked lately.

  Fanta’s first choice was Darvin Montag, who had scored highest in his FROM HELL HOLLOW matrix. But he knew he had figured wrong the moment he saw that Montag’s mailbox had been lovingly crafted to look like a miniature Norwegian storehouse, fondly called a stabbur.

  He paused the Tercel to knock back a bit of extra Walker from the bottle in his glove box and have a look. A man could only support one true hobby, he theorized. Especially a madman. Wisconsin’s own Ed Gein, for example, did not both construct lampshades from human skin and craft quaint nostalgic mailboxes.