Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  Harry saw it etched with eyes rinsed from the sprint through the adrenaline shower; prisoner to action, his reflexes decided between two runaway heartbeats.

  A high nasal squeal came from Bud’s throat as he tried to claw his way into a tangle of jackpine, away from Chris and the echo of the shots that still thrashed the air like a barbed cordite whip.

  And then Chris’s manic fingers stopped fumbling. His hand shot forward on the bolt and locked it down.

  “One!” screamed Chris as he raised the rifle and curled his finger around the trigger.

  And the high-resolution shit roared a million miles a second and the sting that turned his blood to burning needless had already shaved a hair off the split second…

  “Two!” A flash from the white of Chris’s right eye. Saw Harry—a chance. No. The rifle never moved off Bud. Eye back to scope, aiming. Only 30 feet to his crawling, flopping target. Couldn’t miss.

  Bud was a blur outside the indifferent steel ring of the peep sight.

  Maybe he looked up. Couldn’t tell. Downhill, don’t overshoot…It was happening.

  “Three!” Chris’s scream blended into the crack of a rifle shot and bark snapped from a tree trunk a foot from Bud’s head where Chris’s shot went wild when Harry took him low in his right armpit and he twirled like a string-cut marionette and time still spread out, jeweled and as perversely beautiful as a peacock fan.

  Yes!

  Harry watched over his sights as Chris’s hat and rifle flew away and his long hair swirled and his arms flapped out and his hands and fingers reached.

  As he spun, Harry could see the expression on his face—

  66 / CHUCK LOGAN

  not the eyes, too far—but Chris’s mouth gaped in a stricken circle and his cheeks contorted in a mask of surprise. He was dead as he made the last quarter-turn of a clumsy snowshoe pirouette and pitched, arms outstretched, into the thorny branches of prickly gooseberry bramble bush.

  Harry watched a clump of snow collapse from the shivering brambles as he came down the slope, swiftly working the bolt, mashing another round into the chamber. Chris’s body trembled and Harry’s rifle came up. Wary. Ready. Just the bush shaking. But Harry came forward cautiously, covering the prone form.

  “Oh my God!” Bud’s scream let time out of its cage.

  No movement from the bush. He dropped the rifle. Running now through the deep snow. Down. Down. Stumbling in the muskeg at the bottom of the ravine. Pine crowns whirled overhead.

  Out of time. And now Harry desperately wanted time. Time to talk. Time to reason. Time to make it better. Fear and shock closed in and a ragged crimson tunnel squeezed his vision. The sun poked through the clouds and the snow glittered brilliant and was blinding except for the red stain that led to Bud.

  Bud’s face was cold in the hot snow, the texture of gray congealed grease going into shock.

  “There’s pieces of him…” gasped Bud, hyperventilating, staring, wide-eyed. “Pieces of him…” His bluish lips were stringy, dribbling blood, bitten through and pulled tight across the chattering red-stained Chiclets of his teeth.

  “Don’t look,” panted Harry as he dropped beside Bud. Soft-nosed hunting bullets didn’t make clean holes coming out. Harry’s hands tore at Bud’s jacket. The damn zipper stuck. Harry pulled out his knife and hacked.

  “His eyes…” gasped Bud.

  “Calm down, damnit.” Fear was very detailed in Harry’s hoarse voice.

  “His eyes…close his eyes,” whispered Bud.

  “What?” Harry turned. Chris’s face had come to rest on its HUNTER’S MOON / 67

  side. The dark eyes were wide open, staring at them. One eyelid hooked on a thorn.

  Trembling, Harry hacked harder at Bud’s coat—destroyed the zipper, ignored Bud’s cries—yanked it off and threw it at the thorn bush. The bloody coat covered the eyes.

  “I…I was trying to…get his gun away and—” panted Bud.

  “He fucking tried to kill you, man!” snarled Harry. He was thinking with his hands and his anger masked a terror that he was about to reach into blasted intestines and the half-digested slop of Jesse’s breakfast and stomach acid. God, if he’s gut shot, what do I do?

  Bud’s sticky red hands seized at Harry’s collar. “Did you have to…have to—?”

  Roughly, Harry rolled Bud on his side, slashed through two hundred dollars worth of Gore-Tex trousers and exposed the quivering flab of his flank.

  “Ow,” moaned Bud as Harry squeegeed blood away with his palm.

  A small entrance wound puckered in Bud’s left-side love handle, rouged with powder burn. In back, a bigger ragged wound bubbled where the bullet came out in curls of yellow fat that peeled back around the ripped skin. Lucky. Nothing like the hole in the kid.

  “Blubber saved your ass,” said Harry, relieved, jerking off his pack, thankful that he’d brought the first-aid kit. Efficiently he took out sterile pads, gauze, tape.

  “Is…is he…is he?” Bud reared, gasped.

  Harry slapped him hard across the face. “Shut your mouth. Breath through your nose. Do it! All that bullet did was blow a thousand calories outta your spare tire, but shock could kill you, so calm the fuck down!”

  “But you… killed him,” groaned Bud.

  “I fucking know that!” Harry shouted. He dropped the dressing and pounded his thighs with his fists. Seeing Bud’s eyes go even wider into shock at his tantrum, he controlled himself and willed his hands to stop shaking as he washed the blood away with snow.

  Still a lot of blood. Lot of capillaries

  68 / CHUCK LOGAN

  to feed all that fat. Bud screamed when Harry splashed some iodine on his wound.

  Quickly Harry taped on a compress, then he unlaced Bud’s boots and removed his own parka and covered Bud with it. He stood up and lit a cigarette to calm himself and took a quick inventory. Clear the airway. Stop the bleeding. Treat for shock.

  Steam came off him in waves. He was still on fire with adrenaline.

  His eyes stopped on his rifle, half buried in the snow.

  “Don’t touch anything,” he told Bud.

  “What? What?” Bud shook, his eyes welled up.

  “There’ll be cops. Don’t touch anything,” said Harry.

  “If only I coulda talked to him! I was trying to talk to him,” Bud stammered.

  “Get your head outta your ass,” Harry shouted, annoyed. “What happened, Bud? What happened?”

  “He said if I ratted him out he’d kill me, I tried to get to him but the little shit shot me.” Bud blinked several times and shuddered.

  Harry knelt, took off his wool cap, pulled it over Bud’s wild hair.

  He stroked Bud’s face and said, “You’re all right. Just…calm down.”

  “I’m not all right,” Bud heaved and began to cry. “It’s all fucked up.”

  Harry gritted his teeth and held him in his arms as sobs wracked Bud’s thick body. “It’s all right, give it all to me,” he mumbled. What I do. How I keep going when the air is made of tears. Grow gills.

  Do my fucking job.

  Suddenly, fiercely, Bud flung his arms around Harry’s neck and clung in a spasm of fear. As Harry struggled to quiet him, he felt Bud’s torn lips streak his own, tasting of hot, wet, dirty pennies.

  Bud’s mouth worked, pronouncing some silent word as pain and tenderness and relief made a bloody sponge of his face. Harry noticed the salt-and-pepper bruise along Bud’s forehead. Another powder burn that turned the freckles black.

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  He leaned forward to hear and Bud’s sour, harsh breath bussed his ear and tears carved crooked salty channels down Bud’s dirty Kabuki face as he gathered himself and gasped, “You saved my life.”

  “No shit,” said Harry. He was numb. Times like this you had to keep it real simple. No wasted motion. He eased Bud back down and rummaged in his pack, pulled out a space blanket, unfolded it from its cellophane wrap and tucked it around Bud.

  A
sharp volley of gunshots echoed through the trees, off the ridges and from the corner of his eye he caught movement—gray—a shadow darting up the ridge where it wasn’t supposed to be. Could be a deer. Or…Harry crouched alert. His rifle was back by the body.

  His eyes scanned the treeline. “There could be more of them,” he muttered.

  “What do you mean?” said Bud, wide-eyed.

  “That guy Cox…” Harry’s voice trailed off. He stared at his rifle buried yards away. A cliché from detective movies about disturbing evidence. Better leave it for the cops. He reached for Bud’s rifle. “I heard two shots and saw him fire once. Either of those first two yours?”

  “Never got it off my shoulder. Dropped it when—”

  “You sure?”

  “Fuck yes, I’m sure. He fired three times and missed twice. Christ, if he hadn’t jammed up after the second one—”

  “You’d be one dead-stupid-fucking-drunk millionaire, getting me up here in all this. Serve you right, damnit.” Fingers trembling, Harry broke open Bud’s rifle and sniffed the chamber. The cold steel bolt smelled greasy of solvent and oil. Not fired. He unloaded the rifle and quickly assembled a cleaning rod from his pack and rammed the plug of snow from the barrel, flung the rod aside and reloaded the rifle, shoved a round in the chamber and checked the surrounding woods.

  “Don’t do that,” wailed Bud. “You’re scaring me.”

  Harry set the safety and laid the rifle across Bud’s chest.

  Bud clutched it. “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t carry you out of here. I gotta go get help,” said 70 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Harry. “Until I get back, that weapon is the only friend you’ve got.”

  Bud’s eyes bulged at the woods. “Harry, don’t leave me!”

  “Fuck you, you been shot before. Worse than this. Why’d you call me in the middle of the night, damnit?”

  “I was scared. I dunno. Just a feeling. I just wanted you along.”

  “You sonofabitch, you gotta talk to me. What was that argument about?”

  Bud shut his eyes. “I don’t know. It’s nuts…I caught him with some stuff he stole. I told him he had to go to the police and turn it in. It was all settled, we were going to the sheriff, but he wanted to go hunting first. He said the sheriff’d never let him hunt after he turned the stuff in.”

  “What did he steal?”

  Bud gulped for air. “Guns.”

  “Jesus, we went hunting with a drugged-up kid who steals guns?

  Where is your fucking brain?”

  “He went wild. Said to get off his back or I’d never live through deer season. He threatened me, the little asshole, threatened me with a gun. So I tried to take it away from him.” Bud panted, caught his breath and continued. “Shot right at my head, can you believe that? I grabbed at the gun but got tangled in the snowshoes and he stuck it right against me and shot again.”

  Harry shook his head. “Man, you don’t know how close you came to checking out.”

  Bud swallowed. “I don’t believe how quick it happened.”

  But Harry wasn’t thinking about making the shot. He was thinking about the charms of Jesse Deucette.

  “I wasn’t supposed to be here,” Harry thought out loud.

  “What?” asked Bud, gray-faced, eyes huge with confusion and pain.

  Harry shook his head. Not now. His head wasn’t working real good beyond the immediate situation. The immediate situation called for a medic and the cops.

  Harry turned and walked up the slope to the sagging HUNTER’S MOON / 71

  brambles where Chris lay. He lifted the torn coat and stared into the lifeless face. Looked diminished. The dead always did. Like leftovers. Just a kid. Jesus.

  Don’t think about it. Do your job. Get help.

  “What are you going to tell her?” Bud moaned in agony as he hugged the rifle to his chest.

  “The truth,” said Harry, as he took a last, unflinching look at the boy’s corpse. Gently, he let the coat drape over the face. Then he gathered himself and began to run through the deep snow.

  12

  Panic played its clumsy slow-motion joke and tripped him in the underbrush and the knee-deep snow. Snowshoes? No time. Keep going. Brambles whipped his face and he lost his footing again and this time he went ass over end downhill. Getting up, he saw Becky bent over her skis on the snowmobile trail. Her breath came in tortured clouds and she was sticky with snow to her waist.

  “Becky,” he yelled.

  She turned with a waxen expression when she saw him coming full tilt down the ridge. Her face was all wrong, but then he realized that he was smeared with blood. In a frenzied movement she fastened the bindings and grabbed her ski poles.

  “Go,” he yelled. “Get to a phone. Get an ambulance! Bud’s shot!”

  The muscles of her back and buttocks bunched against the clingy metal-gray fabric of her wind suit and rippled as she sprinted down the trail in long strides and her voice filled the woods with an eerie, high-pitched cry. “Mom! Moooommmmmm!”

  And he was spent and he couldn’t keep up and he staggered and tripped again and got up and tried to run on wobbling legs. Finally he came between the log cabins and fell to all fours in front of the porch steps. “Ambulance.” He gasped and coughed as he wiped spittle from his chin.

  72 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Becky stalked back and forth on the porch with her face twitching and her fingers pulling at her hair. Jesse ran down the steps. “I called the hospital…” Her face was bright with slow horror and her jeans were still wet from their romp in the snow. “You’re bleeding,” she said.

  Thinking with his hands, he seized her shoulders and shook her.

  “Bud’s shot,” he said in an icy voice. “And if I’d of spent another ten minutes doing it like dogs, he’d be dead.”

  “Oh God,” Jesse’s eyes went vacant.

  “Not that bad. He’ll be all right,” he panted.

  “I’ll get something,” said Jesse, but she couldn’t move.

  “No. No. Wait for the ambulance,” said Harry. “We need some cops.”

  “Cops,” said Jesse, paralyzed.

  “Mom, we gotta get out of here,” wailed Becky as she paced in a caged circle and opened and closed her fingers and plucked at the air.

  “Where’s Chris?” asked Jesse starkly.

  He pushed her away. “He tried to kill Bud. I had to stop him.

  There wasn’t any time…”

  “Where’s Chris,” she whispered fiercely. “Where’s my boy?”

  Harry looked straight into Jesse’s clouding eyes. “He’s dead, Jesse.

  Chris shot Bud and I shot Chris and he’s dead.”

  Then it was faces by Diane Arbus in a wraparound funhouse mirror. Becky’s features elongated into horse eyes swollen in fury and terror and Jesse’s teeth and gums enlarged as her lips contracted and pores cratered her skin.

  Becky came off the porch and grabbed at Jesse and yanked her away from Harry, “Mom, don’t you see? He’s going to kill us all!”

  and her hysteria erupted from inside her but the shock was hitting Jesse from the outside in waves that glittered like rain on a marble statue and it was as bad a moment as he had ever known.

  But he got on them and shook them by the arms: “Calm down.

  We need a medic.”

  “Don’t you touch her,” Becky screamed and jumped in HUNTER’S MOON / 73

  front of her mother and she charged in a blur of gray and they went down in the snow and her fingers raked his face, tearing the skin, barely missing his eyes. “Killer,” she screamed over and over. “Killer!

  Killer! Killer!”

  “Stop this,” Jesse ordered, trying to get her arms around Becky.

  Harry had blood in his eyes as Becky squirmed beneath him in a manic flurry of fists, elbows, and knees. Finally he pinned her arms and Jesse started to bolt toward the woods. “I’ve got to go out there,”

  she panted.

  “No,
not till the cops get here.” And he tackled her, and Becky came at him again. The siren was faint, between the shouts and grunts of struggle. Then louder.

  Jesse’s hair was still down, with a wild shine from their lovemaking and warm in his hands when he yanked her head back. “You bitch, you tried to kill Bud,” he whispered fiercely.

  Terror softened her lips and swelled them and tears brimmed in her eyes. But she met his glare straight on. “And any doctor who examined me right now would diagnose rape the way I’m wracked up,” she whispered right back. Their lips were an inch apart and they breathed the supercharged air from each other’s lungs. Becky lunged away from them and rolled over and came to her knees and pressed both hands to her ears and screamed: “Why are you whispering?”

  A whirling blue strobe from a police flasher slapped Jesse’s face and the Maston County deputy’s Chevy Blazer practically ran the three of them down as it slid to a sideways stop in the drive. The first thing the deputy saw when he bolted from the car was the blood all over Harry’s face. The first thing he heard was Becky’s high quavering scream:

  “Killlerrr!”

  13

  Eight A.M. in Maston County. The low clouds sagged with arsenic amber, black, and gray and Harry 74 / CHUCK LOGAN

  hugged himself and shivered at the top of the ridge. Nauseous, he wanted to brush his teeth real bad.

  The deputies strung piss-yellow tape through the trees to cordon off Chris’s body, the spot where Bud had fallen, and the slope leading up to Harry’s deer stand in the down pine. The tape billowed slack, then reared and snapped in a gust of wind. Shots popped several ridges away where someone was shooting at deer, not people.

  Harry started at the reports and the Maston County Sheriff’s deputy who was the first to answer the call placed a steady hand on his arm. In his Prussian blue winter uniform, the cop made a trim cutout against the poison sky.

  Four Highway Patrol deputies, another local deputy, the sheriff, and the medics from the ambulance were down below with Bud.

  More cops were back at the lodge seeing to Jesse and Becky.

  The sheriff, a tall man in a red Hudson’s Bay mackinaw, stood near the orange blob of Chris’s body, keeping everyone away from the tracks in the snow that choreographed the fatal seconds in the ravine.