Bad Axe County Read online

For a harrowing few seconds she considered whether the bomb threat might be the work of one of her deputies. Gibbs had not looked the other way on stag parties all by himself. Denise read her mind. “I know, Heidi. I know. But here’s the thing—”

  She gasped. She was driving too fast again.

  “Heidi?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Here’s the thing. We’ve got a blizzard. Now we’ve got a bomb threat. We’d like to assume it’s bogus, but legally we can’t. And consider this: do we know the asshole who punched Harold Snustead is at our little party? No, we do not. We’re on a major highway. It goes all the way from the Illinois to the Minnesota border. All kinds of people pass through here. Do we know that he’s a pimp, and she’s underage? We do not.”

  “Sonofabitch.”

  “That we do know. But I have an idea.”

  “I need one.”

  “All we need is a man, a typical local guy, a decent man, but with some balls, who is not at that party right now.”

  Denise paused as if to listen to herself.

  “I know, I speak in opposites, my queen, but if we can just come up with one guy, and give him a camera . . . Buddy Smithback? He doesn’t even need to go in. We just need license plates.”

  “OK. You’re right. I’m heading back.”

  15

  To Pepper’s eye, the barn that she and Dale go into—if you take away the hundred or so grubby white men—looks like the setup for a Ho-Chunk tribal pancake breakfast, the kind of event with a flea market, a kiddie talent show, handshakes from the tribal vice president, and an information table set up by the American Diabetes Foundation. Pepper’s gaze takes in long folding tables and metal folding chairs, bright lighting, concrete floor, plywood stage. A PA system spews garbled music over a voice announcing things she can’t understand. She turns a circle. At the far end of the barn, those are ice-fishing tents, the kind she is used to seeing on frozen Lake Wisconsin. So those are for the lap dances, she figures. At the center of the barn, opposite the stage, men gather around half barrels of beer that are iced down inside sawed-off plastic garbage cans. Others crowd a plywood bar stocked with off-brand liquor bottles and red plastic cups. The hundred bucks includes unlimited alcohol, apparently. At the far side of the stage, on more folding chairs, two girls sit huddled over their tits like they’re scared of what they’ve gotten themselves into. This is where Dale drops her off, bossing her over the din, “Stay here,” then heading for the liquor bottles.

  “Hey, bitches.” She opens strong. These girls don’t get it. “Whatever. I’m just kidding.”

  The girl who finally makes a dull reply—“Ha, ha”—is a heavy blonde with a bruised-banana look. Another girl says to Pepper, “You’re new, right? Where’d you come from? You’re not coulees, right?” She has short thick legs and a bent-looking face under hair that she has dyed cotton-candy pink. This girl volunteers, “She’s from Bishops. I’m from Locks.”

  Pepper says she’s from the Dells. The girls from Bishops and Locks find this impressive. The Dells is Wisconsin’s most famous place. Water parks, casinos, golf courses, petting zoos, go-cart tracks, half of Chicago on drunken vacation, all kinds of bullshit that these girls are lucky not to have. Pepper keeps looking around. Over by the alcohol, Dale exhorts some idea into the ear of an older man who looks gnomish, even next to Dale’s dumpy five seven. This older guy is like a miniman, coiffed with what looks like a toupee, wearing a cheap brown business suit and sensible rubber overshoes.

  Never mind. Pepper keeps looking. One of the lap-dance tents shudders. Out escapes a fourth girl, even bonier than Pepper, ginger haired, wobbly fast on tall red heels, bolting back to home base while her client squirts away into the crowd of men. As this girl arrives, Cotton Candy from Locks informs Pepper, “She came over from Iowa. She’s got ice if you want some.”

  Now Dale steers his conversation partner over. Pepper gets a closer look. There is a man you see in casinos, usually small, usually dressed by JCPenney, usually not a gambler, who creeps around in soft shoes with a smile of fascination stuck on his face and the body language of a Peeping Tom. He dreams of sniffing your armpits. Or he wants to sit where you just sat. All while he wears his JCPenney costume and speaks in harmless drivel. This is that man. Dale says to Pepper, “Sweetheart, this fine gentleman wants to buy you a drink.”

  “But aren’t they free?”

  The miniman guffaws.

  16

  Squinting against the snow, Angus Beavers used half-buried fence posts to follow Lost Hollow Road. His mind kept starting over. What if he was wrong? What if she wasn’t even there? What if his dad had really burned her?

  He set down the Jumbo Shrimp bag. He unzipped it to verify that the stolen jerseys—Clausen, Gibbs, Ossie, Strunk—were inside. Yes—he had really done that. Yes—that morning he had been in Florida. For the eternity of a minute he stood with his hot skin melting the sleety flakes, his heart thrumming with adrenaline. He was soaked, freezing, burning up, two hours slogging downhill, nearly home. He took full, gulping breaths, tasting the tangy drift. Rust smelled like blood when it was wet. His dad’s scrap yard was just up around the curve.

  He shouldered the bag and trudged on. Soon he saw that in his four years away, Beavers Salvage had become a junkyard. It looked like now people drove by and threw trash off tailgates. They used to be afraid to do that. He plodded past busted patio chairs, swollen mattresses, sacks of kitchen garbage that the coons had torn open and scattered. He saw in the luminous storm-dark beyond the littered ditches that Beavers Salvage now spread across his dad’s entire ten acres, both sides of the road. He ground his teeth to stop a shiver. Cancer, Brandy had said. Everywhere.

  Here was the house. It looked too small to Angus, iced over and slumped inside a reef of junk, its chimney belching smut from the muddy Amish sawmill slag that his dad got from Zooks for free. He climbed the porch and lingered, squeezing his cold-stung hands and gazing out where the yard light cast a pinkish spray of snow over the black maw of the Quonset shed, where Brandy said the freezer was chained and locked.

  But something out there looked different. He kept looking. Some basic feature of the scrap yard had changed in a way that made him uncomfortable. His dad had done something big.

  He stared until he understood. Since he could remember, runoff from farmland on the ridge had carved a head-deep gully through the scrap yard. The flow down that gully was so cataclysmic after heavy rains that Angus had once tipped a fifty-gallon drum of crankcase sludge into the brown torrent and counted less than ten seconds before the drum was swept like a dry leaf across the flooded road and into the meadow beyond.

  That gully was gone. His dad had filled it in. The ground where it had been was a flat downslope. Now Angus knew why he was uncomfortable. His dad had defied gravity and water, and that could not end well. Where did all that water go now? If his dad hadn’t figured that out, then this storm right here, when it melted, was going to cut itself a new gully, maybe right under the house.

  * * *

  He let himself inside. A grown girl he hardly recognized smoked a cigarette in front of an enormous flat-screen TV. Gluey-eyed, Brandy tried to make him out across the dark room, his little sister’s face scabby under thick makeup, her body jammed into tight things to make men look, one pale leg hanging over the recliner’s arm and showing her panties like she was still ten years old.

  “Are you shitting me?” Her voice was sluggish. “What are you doing here?”

  “I quit. I’m home. Where’s Dad?”

  “Are you shitting me?” She staggered up and hugged him hard, butting him in the chest. “What are you doing here?”

  He went into their dad’s bedroom. People who knew Beavers said that Lyman Beavers gave Angus Beavers his strength and size, his speed and his eyesight, and his dad talked this up as if he, not Angus, were the pro-baseball prospect. But when Angus turned the light on he saw a different man, a tiny old invalid curled away in an undershirt and a diaper on
the brass-shouldered bed.

  For a long time he just stared. He never had the slightest idea how to talk to his dad. Probably no one did. Always a good chance of getting hit, at least before now.

  “So then . . . I was looking out at the yard,” he began finally. “And I guess I gotta give you big credit. You filled that gully. Big project.”

  His dad’s chance to boast passed in silence.

  “Gotta wonder where the water goes, though. We got a spring blizzard now that’s gonna melt fast.”

  Angus turned him over. He was skin and bones. His wet eyes looked afraid.

  “You can’t outsmart water. I always heard you say that. So I wonder if you forgot—”

  “Gaww!” A furious sound burst from the back of his dad’s throat, around his dry, immobile tongue. “Gawww!” Like a crow.

  “Dad, it’s OK, it’s me, it’s Angus. Are you in pain?”

  He switched on the beside lamp. On the dresser he found a bottle and a pill cutter. The label on the bottle said Oxycodone 80 mg / one tablet every six hours. The bottle was one-third full of half tablets. The refill was more than two weeks past.

  “Are you in pain, Dad? What’s going on with your pills?”

  Not getting more than another “Gawww!” for an answer, Angus backed out and closed the door. Now he studied the mess, really seeing it for the first time. The house was pretty bad when he lived here, pretty bad ever since his mom passed when he was little, but never like this. The kitchen, living room, and hallway were full of plastic sacks, booze bottles, packaging, shoes and clothes, all things left where they fell. As if triggered by his scrutiny, Brandy got up from the chair. Clumsily, as if her depth perception were off, she prowled the front window that looked onto Lost Hollow Road. The dress she wore grabbed her on the backside. Angus winced at the profile of her spackled face, the red lips, the plum-black fingernails, the green bead stuck through her raw and sniffling nose. He opened the door to his old bedroom. It had become a bin for the Amish slag wood for the stove. Mice scrambled in the pile. Angus was not expected back. He saw that. He closed the door.

  “What?” Brandy demanded.

  “Who are you waiting on?”

  “A friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “Nobody you would know.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “A party.”

  “A party where?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “When was your friend supposed to be here?”

  She turned in sudden fury, flinging her arms and stumbling on thick rubber heels that looked like dirty cheesecake. Mom’s shoes, Angus remembered.

  “God! I don’t know, OK? I’m just supposed to be ready.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “Are you sharing Dad’s pills with this guy?”

  She turned to look out the window, showed her heavy ass, her birdy calves.

  “Because that stops right now. What’s his name?”

  She kept looking into what was frozen rain now, stained pink by the yard light, nothing else to see.

  “Is Dad’s truck running?”

  “Do you think I’d be here,” his sister fumed, “if Dad’s truck was running?”

  He checked inside the refrigerator. A jug of orange juice had settled out and gone green across the top. In the door were five eggs and something half eaten inside a crumpled Subway wrapper. In the freezer he found a half gallon of vodka, almost empty, an open bulk package of frost-fuzzed hashed browns, and a dozen or more rock-hard items wrapped in white butcher paper sealed with Clausen Meats stickers. It was pure Bad Axe, Angus thought, the smallness of the place, that his dad would still be a customer.

  He dragged his Jumbo Shrimp gear bag like a big wet slug across the kitchen floor. He moved aside the jerseys—Clausen, Gibbs, Ossie, Strunk—making sure Brandy didn’t see. He lifted out the foam boats of chicken nuggets, mini egg rolls, and spicy fries that he had gathered under the heat lamps at the Kwik Trip. He wasn’t hungry but he dipped a nugget in barbecue sauce and crunched it in his mouth, getting Brandy’s attention.

  “When your friend gets here, I expect to meet him.”

  “Expect away.”

  He watched her go hard for the food. Their dad hollered “Gaww!” again. After a minute of chewing noisily she looked up at Angus with sauce on her lips, her eyes exhausted. “I heard you ask him what he did. He’s trying to tell you garbage.”

  “Why is he trying to tell me garbage?”

  “He’s proud of it. It’s like a waterslide, but underground.”

  “A waterslide?”

  “He buried a big pipe where that gully was. The water off the ridge goes into that big pipe now, and under the scrap yard, all the way under the road and out into the meadow. You should see it. All that water just shoots out. It makes a little lake in the meadow. Then it runs into the creek.”

  “He dug the road up?”

  “He dug the road up. He fixed it back, but the county still fined him. Not that he paid.”

  Angus watched her attack a chicken wing like a hungry cat. He gave her a napkin.

  “Why garbage?”

  She looked at him blurrily. “You see all that garbage people throw by the road?”

  “I did. People used to be afraid to do that. What about it?”

  “When we get a big flood of runoff from the ridge, he takes that garbage up there and drops it into”—she belched unashamed, still his little sister—“drops it into the pipe. He has a hole in it up there by the Quonset.”

  Angus was only half seeing what she meant.

  “A hole in it?”

  “A hole in the ground over the pipe, and then a hole in the pipe, the top of it. You drop something down there, Angus, it goes for a long dark waterslide under the yard and under the road and ends up in the meadow.”

  “And he drops garbage in there?”

  “Right. When there’s enough water flowing in the pipe. It goes underground and shoots out the end of pipe and flows across the meadow and gets in the crick, and the crick takes it back down Bishops Coulee. Get it? Dad sends the garbage back to the assholes who dumped it here.”

  Angus remembered what their dad had said a thousand times: This is a scrap yard, not a dump.

  “He’s real proud of it,” Brandy said. She had tears in her eyes.

  * * *

  Angus let her eat. He found a headlamp with semiworking batteries and went outside in one of his dad’s jackets that smelled like grime and rust and sweat and old cigars. He wanted to see what Brandy meant. He followed the feel of aggregate beneath the icy snow up toward the top of the scrap yard and found the short patch where the pipe wasn’t buried. Down about waist-deep, his dad had peeled open a six-foot steel culvert, like peeling the top off a sardine can. Angus aimed his headlamp. Brown water trickled along the bottom of the pipe. He tossed in a matchbook from his dad’s coat pocket and watched it get carried away.

  OK. He got it now. Give shit to Lyman Beavers, Lyman Beavers gives it back. Maybe he and his dad were on the same page after all.

  * * *

  The old chest freezer was in the Quonset shed, chained and locked, still humming. Angus found bolt cutters, and he found a rusty ax. With the bolt cutters he severed the chain, but the lid was frozen shut. He found a hand torch and traced blue flame inches from the seal. He knocked the lid upward with the butt of the ax, broke the grip of ice. He raised the lid.

  Inside was a glacial mass of fish fillets, several hundred pounds, God knows how old. His dad, his uncle Walt, experts, just ask them, know-it-alls on the topic of baseball, of course, but also on fishing, hunting, trapping, on the drunken killing of every live thing they ever touched. They had been so easy to blame.

  Angus was just raising the ax to hack at the fish when he heard a horn blow. As he came to the mouth of the Quonset shed, he heard the front door slam. He held on to the ax and came slipping downhill through the scrap in a hurry.


  “Hey!”

  Brandy cleared the cinder-block steps clutching a little silver purse. She skated on those wedge heels toward a rust-bombed GTO with a homemade plywood spoiler.

  “Hey! No, you don’t!”

  Brandy fell on the ice. The driver blew his horn again, raced his engine. With the ax in his fist Angus came as fast as he could, but from too far. Brandy scrambled in. She had said Angus wouldn’t know her friend, but he did know the gaunt figure in the hooded jacket, smirking at him as the car swerved away.

  That was ex-Rattler Brock Pabst.

  As Angus stalked back to the freezer, he was shaking. He was so blind his first blow was backward, with the fat end of the ax. If Brock Pabst’s jersey wasn’t one of the Rattler jerseys he had stolen, it was only because Pabst wasn’t one of them on that particular night. But there were lots of nights, lots of parties, and that was his sister.

  He turned the ax around and swung the sharp end with all the angry strength he had.

  17

  Pepper Greengrass, many times in her short life, has observed this in men: drop a guy like Dale Hill in alcohol, he swells up like a sea monkey.

  His neck thickens.

  His man boobs harden into muscles of the mind.

  He sucks breath like killer weed, forced to wince from the tremendous impact of himself. When he speaks he looks around like people want to steal his words.

  With her second red-cup vodka mixer from the JCPenney miniman, Pepper watches this and overhears Dale say, “I hear you. I do. But I’d like to clear the purse for the dance contest first, you know? Cover the damn gate fee—hundred bucks, can you believe that shit?—and cover my gas to get here.”

  “OK, yeah, you dang-darn betcha . . .”

  In keeping with his brown suit and rubber overshoes, the miniman speaks agreeably in an Old World cadence and accent. Pepper wonders: Swiss? Norwegian? Is he German, like her mom’s mom? His yeah sounds like yaw. His face is pale and plain but fixed in that smile of astonishment. He finds Pepper’s eyes and winks. She hears him tell Dale, “OK, yaw, sure thing, every person likes to maximize a situation. However, I would like to move before the storm gets worse.”