Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  Harry threw in the rest of the vegetables and stirred them with a long wooden spoon, added olive oil, oregano, a bay leaf, and a pinch of sugar. He lay two miniatures trees of parsley and cilantro on the block. Minced them. Dumped them in.

  Lost track of time. Emptied the ashtray twice. Brewed another pot of coffee. He added the rest of the ingredients to his spaghetti sauce, stirred, tasted, added spices, and all the rest of the red cooking wine just ahead of an impulse to drink it. Set the burner to simmer.

  Steam brought sweat to his brow and coated the kitchen windows.

  He rubbed a porthole with his fist. The afternoon was one deepening blue shadow.

  Be dark soon.

  Well Bud, here I am, out of the office. In the woods, getting back to nature. He jammed shotgun shells with double O’s on them into the 12 gauge. Wracked the pump action. The steel clashed with the fatality of a gate closing.

  Locked and loaded.

  “Fuck,” he shouted again. While the pasta water boiled, he began to clean the counters. His finger traced the letters in the spattered spices, salt and pepper.

  F-U-C-K. The opposite of death.

  He’d lost his appetite. He turned his back on the kitchen, took a cup of strong black coffee to the table in the den, lit a cigarette, and methodically loaded the double-barreled shotgun with birdshot.

  Harry exhaled, set the shotgun aside, and pressed stumpy 180 / CHUCK LOGAN

  slugs into the pistol magazine. Never liked the .45. Always struck him as an overbuilt American way to end an argument. No finesse, too many catches along the slide. Cock it and the hammer stuck out, caught on stuff. He hefted the pistol in his hand. The other weapons in the cabinet were for hunting. Not this baby.

  He slammed the magazine into the handle, yanked the slide, and thumbed the safe. What the hell, man; you never planned on living this long anyway…

  They came for him at sundown. Harry had turned out all the lights and waited on the porch steps, sipping coffee, smoking a cigarette in his cupped hand. The 12-gauge pump rested across his knees.

  The double-barrel leaned against the porch rail. The .45 was in his waistband and a spare magazine jutted from his back pocket. Probably should have put the Honda in the garage.

  He heard them and then he saw them.

  A dozen riders on snowmobiles, their lights streaking like vigilante torches as they came wild weasel through the black trees.

  Harry’s guts tightened. His heart raced. A qualm of sweat popped on his palms. Then the adrenaline boost.

  Ohhh shit!

  The growl of engines came fast between the cabins and swirled in the driveway. A ragged volley of beer cans and rocks clattered off the porch, windows shattered. Escalation. One of the riders stood up in his seat and threw a long-neck bottle. A smoky sparking arc.

  The corner of the porch burst into oily flame.

  Cox in his biker denim. Playing for keeps. Okay, motherfucker…

  Harry backed off the outside porch, into the doorway of the mud porch, and fired the double-barrel one-handed. Two loads of birdshot skinned off snowmobile suits and metal. Muffled cries.

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  One of the snowmobiles crashed into his Honda. The rider ran.

  Harry dropped the double-barrel and took deliberate aim with the pump. Buckshot slammed into the riderless machine. The gas tank exploded and a shock wave billowed. The mist snapped back full of fire and the Honda’s gas tank blew in a sunburst not unlike a Japanese flag.

  Down on one knee in the doorway with fire licking the side of his face. All flame and smoke and scurrying shadows, but he held his fire. Even in the chaos there were rules. No one was directly threatening his life. He couldn’t bring himself to fire the killing buckshot directly at the milling figures.

  The siren and flasher exploded out of the flickering dark with a whoop-whoop scream as the Blazer, Deputy Jerry at the wheel, did its patented four-wheel skid down the driveway and the snowmobiles scattered like cockroaches in a Raid commercial. The dismounted rider leaped onto another sled, hugged the driver. In a snarl of motors, the pack lunged back into the woods.

  Jerry was out of his truck, yelling on his radio handset. Harry dived for a big coal-scoop snow shovel that leaned against the doorway and hurled shovelfuls of snow at the burning porch. No way. The roof was already kindling.

  Jerry screamed. “Axes! Fire extinguisher!”

  Harry came from the kitchen with an extinguisher and emptied it into the flames. Jerry found a chopping maul and an ax. His boot on Harry’s shoulder, he scrambled up to the porch roof, reached down, and pulled Harry up with him. Back to back, they danced in the flames, swinging at the cedar shakes. Wood chips flew as they hacked the joists that held the porch to the lodge. Somewhere in the frenzy, two firetrucks manned by stout Viking types arrived. They attacked the porch with crowbars, axes, and bigger fire extinguishers.

  Tore the sucker free, nails shrieking in the cold, threw a chain around the whole shebang, hooked it to the back of an engine, and dragged it clear of the main building. The porch joined the bonfire that consumed the Honda and the

  182 / CHUCK LOGAN

  snowmobile. A circle of firefighters doused the pyre in a chemical cloud.

  Deputy Jerry, black-faced with smoke, probed among the smolder-ing wreckage. “What happened?” he demanded.

  “Assholes came through and tried to burn it down.”

  “You ID anybody?”

  “You kidding?”

  The alert young cop kicked at a spent shotgun shell. He evaluated the buckshot stipple in the smoking black hull of the dead Arctic Cat. Bent down, gingerly rubbed away soot, shined his flashlight, and wrote in his spiral notebook.

  “You, ah, shoot anybody else tonight, Mr. Griffin?”

  “Gave them a couple barrels of number eight birdshot. Doubt it even went through their snowmobile suits.”

  Jerry scribbled more notes in his notepad. “We’ll check the hospital emergency room. And I got the serial numbers off this sled.”

  One of the firemen muttered loud enough for Harry to hear.

  “Lucky they didn’t stuff a walleye up his ass and set him on fire after this morning!”

  Jerry grimaced and pushed his Russian-style fur cap back on his sooty head. “Hope you and Maston got your insurance paid up. You ain’t gonna get a lot of sympathy around here today.” Then he waved his pen and notebook at the stuttering embers. “But this is arson.

  That’s serious.”

  “What’s your last name, Jerry?” asked Harry.

  Jerry explored the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “Hakala.”

  “Which part of the tribe you from?”

  “My dad owns the bank.” He coughed and tried to look official.

  “So you gonna come in, press charges?”

  Harry laughed. “What good would it do in this county?”

  “We’ll investigate.”

  Harry turned on his heel, clambered up to the mud porch, and went inside. He sat down at the dining room table and methodically cleaned the shotguns while firefighters sprayed the porch one last time. Then they climbed back on their rigs.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 183

  On the way out, one of the trucks demolished the landscaping in the middle of the horseshoe drive, grinding a five-foot Japanese yew into powder.

  Fucking hayseeds.

  Not Deputy Jerry. He was no country joke. He stood awhile, warming his hands over the collapsed embers. When Harry looked out the window again, he was still there. A few minutes later, calmed down enough to recognize that Jerry’s timely entrance saved his ass, he realized that the young cop was doing his job, guarding him against further harm.

  Harry took him a cup of coffee.

  Jerry sipped, toed a smoking hunk of porch, cast his blue eyes around at the tires still fitfully burning on the greasy chassis of Harry’s car, and said, with deep sincerity, “Mr. Griffin, why don’t you go home?”

  Harry grinned and went back
inside. Jerry left the cup on the mud porch and repositioned his Blazer across the entrance to the driveway.

  The chemical tang of fire retardant leaked into the lodge’s main room through the shattered windows. In the garage, next to Bud’s Jeep, Harry found packing boxes from the new stereo. As he tore the corners out of the cardboard, flattening it, a sheet of stiff paper fell out. A photograph, blurred emulsion, enlarged, printed on 8

  1/2 by 11. Someone had cut the face out of it. Neck and naked shoulders remained.

  Weird? He shrugged and went after the broken windows, piecing cardboard plugs and securing them with duct tape. Then he swept up the glass and aired the place out.

  With a flashlight and the 12-gauge, Harry went back outside.

  Coals hissed in the quiet. Jerry kept watch down the driveway.

  Harry stalked up the trail in the direction the retreating snowmobiles had taken and found fresh tracks that led all the way up the ridge. He followed them to the fallen pine and put the light on the bare wood of the tree stand. The tracks went down the slope into the dark near the swamp.

  Harry stopped ten yards from the gooseberry bramble bush 184 / CHUCK LOGAN

  where Chris had died. The night visitor had collected the yellow police tape, tied it into a large, many-ribboned bow, and fixed it to the bush. Walking closer, he saw a dozen white roses beneath the bow, stiff with freezer burn. Becky. Hadda be. Messing with his mind. First claws his face. Then the strange routine at the funeral.

  Harry played the flashlight beam over the snow beneath the flowers and saw deep slashes in the frozen pink rime. Blotches of coffee-colored urine. An enormous deer track was setting up in the red slush.

  He turned off the light and squatted when something moved in the brush. Pincushion alert, Harry peered into the dark. Really big.

  Thrashing. It stamped and made a blowing noise, like a kid blowing into the neck of a Coke bottle.

  Deer. Maybe Chris’s deer.

  He waited for the sounds to come closer. Finally, unable to be still, he switched on the light. Just a wall of brush, tamarack, and brambles. The sounds moved off, deeper into the darkness.

  He walked back up the ridge, stopping every few feet to listen to the silent tickle of the mist. He imagined Becky, out there tiptoeing in the woods, watching him.

  A wild grind of engines slipped through an eddy of breeze. Faint yells. Snowmobiles threw spindles of light at the far end of the lake.

  Jackpine savages drinking beer in the cold at Chris’s Iron Range wake.

  Back inside, he had the operator connect him with the St. Helen’s CD ward. A nurse informed him that patients could only receive calls between noon and one P.M. He left Bud a cryptic message. Had the nurse read it back.

  “Papers served. The serfs are restless. Things are heating up.”

  They could come back with scoped deer guns. More serious the second time. He pushed fat bullets into the lever-action rifle. No more birdshot.

  As he brewed a pot of coffee, the FM tuner jumped loud and clear and a ghost signal danced in on the ions from Reserve, Wisconsin.

  The fireplace shadows shook with a

  HUNTER’S MOON / 185

  spooky treble of high keening voices and the tachycardia of Ojibway drums.

  Harry built up the fire, selected a thick Civil War history from the bookshelf, and lined up his arsenal by his chair. With the tom-toms for company, he settled in to wait.

  31

  The next morning it was like a basement out. Tree trunks jutted, holding up a cotton ceiling of fog. The damp air reeked of chemicals and charcoal ruin and a black sugar of soot lay on the snow. Harry was in the driveway, sighting in the heavy .45-70 rifle when Don Karson drove up in a Kermit-green Subaru station wagon.

  So they sent the preacher. Soft approach. Harry arched his back to ease the crook in his neck from sleeping in the chair.

  Karson, the serious intercessor doing God’s work on this shitty overcast day, picked his way through the Battle of the Snowmobiles in a tweed sports coat with leather elbow patches and a tightly knotted red wool tie.

  Harry adjusted the rear notched rifle sight with the blade of his Buck knife. “Shoots little to the left,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Last thing you should be doing today is playing with guns,” said Karson in a level voice.

  “Who’s playing?” Harry snapped the heavy rifle to his shoulder and fired offhand at the target he’d tacked to the side of a stump 80

  yards away. He worked the lever, snapped it up, fired again, and repeated the process. The echo of the shots elongated and slapped back against the ridge. Then he yanked the lever, threw the bolt open, and slung the rifle over his shoulder.

  “What?” he asked blankly to Karson’s face.

  “I thought we could talk.”

  Harry pointed to the ebony junk that had been his car. “The Friends of Jesse visited me last night. Anybody in your 186 / CHUCK LOGAN

  congregation like to throw Molotov cocktails from speeding snowmobiles?”

  “You pissed off some people yesterday. Probably the VFW crowd had a little too much to drink.”

  “Probably Jay Cox,” said Harry.

  “You call Emery?”

  “Jerry Hakala was out with the fire department.” Harry turned and walked down to the stump. Karson followed. Harry knelt and inspected his last three shots. Two of them were low, an inch off the two-inch bull’s-eye he’d drawn in black Magic Marker. The third was dead center.

  “Trouble with me,” said Harry, “is I’m real good, but erratic. Always envied people who were steady. You strike me as a steady sort of man, padre.”

  “Someone should teach you respect for the dead, Griffin.” Karson drew himself up and Lutheran steel glinted in his blue eyes.

  “Lot of shoulds. Let’s just say I don’t confuse the living with the dead.”

  “That was sacrilegious, what you did yesterday.”

  “I guess that depends on your religion.”

  Karson studied him. “And what kind of religion raised you?”

  “Born again buddhism, small b,” said Harry.

  “I take it you don’t believe Jesus Christ died for your sins.”

  “A lot of Vietnamese died for my sins, padre, yours, too.”

  “You desecrated that boy.”

  “Whoa…I respect the process of dying,” said Harry, “when it happens, but I don’t confuse that with burying the gum wrapper in a hole in the ground. I think the Tibetans are more honest and practical. After they have their ceremony they take the body to the edge of town and toss it out for the animals to eat. Sometimes the young monks cut off the choice portions of meat for the critters prowling around.” Harry looked Karson directly in the eye. “They sit among the bodies and meditate on the impermanence of life.”

  Karson made a face. “I keep seeing that woman, losing her son, getting divorce papers slapped in her hand at his funeral, HUNTER’S MOON / 187

  and then having the body roll out of the coffin…the suit slipped around when they put him back in and there were these big staples holding his chest…”

  “Get off it, Karson. She didn’t lose her son like you lose a pair of socks. He tried to kill somebody.” Harry tapped Karson on the chest right in the middle of his red tie. “And Jesse Deucette would steal a hot stove.”

  He motioned for Karson to follow him into the lodge. They walked across shards of glass, through soggy embers, and up the jury-rigged steps Harry had hammered together to get up onto the mud porch.

  Harry brought two cups of coffee to the table in the den and shoved the shotgun, the .45, and a cleaning kit aside to make room.

  “You expecting a war?” asked Karson.

  “I’m not going to be run off, you can tell them that.”

  “Don’t you think there’s been enough macho bullshit?” Karson sat down and loosened his tie. He reached in his coat pocket and took out a pack of Winstons. They lit up.

  Harry sighed and looked ar
ound. “Bud must have had some wedding. Chris with a needle stuck in his arm, Becky with her tits popping out.”

  “The kids didn’t attend.”

  “Anybody interview them before the fact? You know, discuss the seriousness of the marriage vows with them? Didn’t it register that Bud has been falling-down drunk?”

  “Hard to tell with Bud. He has…excellent social skills. Everybody up here drinks to some extent.” The minister paused. “You were drinking yesterday. I could smell it on your breath.”

  Karson’s remark landed on target. Gravity replaced the banter in Harry’s voice. “So where do you come down on the question of Jesse? Does she have carry-on baggage or steamer trunks full of skeletons?”

  Karson measured him. “I tried to tell Bud that Jesse and Larry Emery have a peculiar way of fighting with each other. That she might marry him to spite Larry.”

  188 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Harry raised his eyebrows.

  Karson continued. “Bud said he’d take his chances.”

  “No shit.”

  “They were quite a team when they first started going out. They opened the development Coop downtown and came up with this ambitious plan to convert the paper mill to a hydrogen peroxide closed cycle system. No more pumping dioxin into the lake.” Karson smiled. “Those were exciting times. Jesse can be very convincing.

  She used to sing in the choir. She has a beautiful voice.”

  “What she’s got is a beautiful ass. And the will to use it.”

  Karson cleared his throat. “She has a promiscuous edge. But that’s just part of her.”

  Harry scrutinized Karson for thirty seconds. Karson sighed and cast his eyes back, remembering. “Then last summer it all started falling apart. The Coop, the plans—”

  “Coffee and cookies is over, Karson. Did Chris act alone?”

  “Things can get murky. Mistakes were made,” said Karson.

  “Things don’t get murky. Things happen. The way we think about them might get murky, like when we don’t want to look at them straight on, when we deny, or lie or forget.”

  Karson bit his lip. “Bud’s in the hospital and you served the divorce papers. Maybe you should go home. I could come down to Saint Paul.”