Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  “Did not,” stuttered Patton. “I tried to blow my whistle like you said, but it had slobber in it and was froze. So I fired three times in the air—”

  “Air my ass, shot right over my head!” Harry shouted.

  “Did not! Then this nut started shooting the woods apart.”

  “Norm,” growled Emery, struggling to keep his voice under control,

  “How come you had you a rifle up there? I said no guns. No guns!

  We’re looking for a screwed-up teenage girl. All she needs is to think people are shooting at her!”

  “Hell, Sheriff, was still light when I got into position, thought I might see that big bastard deer’s ’posed to be in Maston’s swamp.”

  Emery snarled deep in his throat. “Griffin! What the hell were you doing out here with a shotgun?”

  “He’s got a pistol, too, pulled it on me up there.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Norm.”

  “Sheriff Emery, sir,” Harry said with excessive respect. “I heard somebody moving round back of the cabins, went to take a look.

  Last time somebody came through there they set me on fire.”

  Don Karson stepped up. “Still solving problems with guns, Harry?” he asked. Then he turned to Patton. “Norm, you all right?

  You’re not injured—shot or anything?”

  Norm laughed nervously. “I crapped my pants.”

  A ripple of laughter chorused through the crowd of deputies and citizens.

  “This isn’t funny,” Karson was indignant. “Not one damn bit funny. This isn’t a search. It’s a damned circus. What’s needed here is some adult leadership.”

  Emery’s derisive chuckle turned murderous. “Too bad the paper went out of business. You could write a letter to the editor.”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 275

  Karson drew himself up and faced Emery. “People are getting real tired of smelling your whiskey breath.”

  “Get your big mouth out from behind the hem of Jesus’ garment and say that, Don,” Emery said between clenched teeth.

  “All right, you guys…” Jerry Hakala stepped between them. “It’s been a long day.”

  Emery turned toward the Blazer. His shoulder sideswiped Harry, pushing him off balance.

  “Stand by, fucker!” Harry warned.

  Emery spun, his face hideous in the headlights. Jerry shepherded him with a broad shoulder. “Larry…”

  “Just what we all need. A little more violence,” Karson said in a jerky voice.

  Harry watched the blaze-orange posse troop down Bud’s driveway.

  In the lodge, frustrated, he threw the shotgun on the dining room table. He was inside something where you don’t get to think anymore. Like everybody, he was reacting.

  Tell Mom to stop the divorce?

  Numb, with circles of pain ringing in his ears from the gunfire, he looked up Cox’s number and dialed it.

  She answered on the second ring. “Hello?” The first hello was bright and husky. Hope.

  “Hello? Becky? Is that you? Honey?” Desperate hope, then cancel the hope.

  “Who is this?” A tin quiver of fear.

  Harry couldn’t do it. He hung up. It was torture, just like she said.

  Two butterflies stuck on a length of pain. Unable to move toward each other.

  Do the responsible thing. Call Bud. No idea where he was. Harry called Linda’s office. Closed down, the machine on. He tried her home. Another machine.

  “This is Harry. Find Bud and tell him I talked to Becky. She saw the whole thing that morning Chris tried to shoot him. We have a witness. Emery is mounting a search for her. I’m worried she might meet with an accident. Call me ASAP.”

  276 / CHUCK LOGAN

  45

  Harry cleaned the shotgun in front of the fireplace.

  There was no convenient ramrod to swab the folly of shooting up the hill at Norm Patton. Dumb.

  Then shivers. That was killing hate he’d seen in Emery’s face. The bottle of J.D. flickered in the firelight. Just a reach away.

  Pictures, Becky said.

  Okay. His eyes roved the lodge. What happened here in October?

  Abruptly he got up, picked up a flashlight on his way through the kitchen, and pushed through the plastic sheeting that walled off the new construction and entered the addition.

  The light meandered over a carpenter’s belt discarded on the deck, bulging with tools, and shined on Cox’s rusted Skilsaw, abandoned on the sawhorses. If they were cleaning out the place, why would Cox leave his tools behind? He thumbed the rime of rust on the saw blade and evaluated the dust on the blueprints spread on the sawhorses.

  Whatever was going on here stopped a month ago. When Chris made his threats, when Bud and Jesse decided to marry. Harry squatted on the plywood decking and played the light across the Sheetrock. The light stopped on the diagonal shadow of a ladder behind another sheet of plastic.

  The ladder was placed into a stairwell and led to the second floor.

  Harry swung the light ahead as he climbed the ladder. Cages of naked two-by-fours defined the rooms. Nothing but scraps of lumber.

  Nails and dust.

  A bit of color snagged the light, out on the balcony. Harry stooped to a swatch of red and blue ribbons. High-school track awards. Girl’s events. 440. Half mile. High hurdles. They were fouled with something and stuck together and coated with dust.

  And next to them lay a curl of tan-gray plastic. Little sprocket tracks on one side. He’d been around enough news photographers to recognize 35-mm film. Sometimes they tore

  HUNTER’S MOON / 277

  off the end leader to mark the roll. He stood up and felt along the thick sheeting that walled the balcony off from the main room. The seam was parted. The staples had been removed and placed in an orderly line on the balcony railing. He pushed the plastic apart and looked down on the couches and chairs and his makeshift bed in front of the fireplace.

  Pictures.

  He left the ribbons and the clip of film exactly where he’d found them and went back down the ladder. Now is when you make your mind empty, Randall had taught him that. Just melt open your senses so everything makes an impression. Don’t think. Just see.

  He flipped on the TV and watched the weather report out of Duluth. Another cold front was shuffling in, arrows from the northwest.

  A stack of video tapes were piled next to the VCR. One stood out from the commercial movie names. A tape with a white label hand-written in felt-tip pen: PBS, Clark Group.

  Pictures.

  He poured a cup of coffee and ran the tape. Clark in his buckskin shirt. Another twenty sensitive guys in a semicircle on the floor of the lodge main room.

  Clark moved ponderously across the screen, a fleecy cloud trying to turn into a thunderhead. His sermon was the shadow that dwelled in men. The primal force of their manhood. Harry killed the audio and watched the camera pan the seated men. Uh-huh.

  Don Karson sat next to Karl Talme. Karson’s face was focused, really into this shit. Talme looked politely bored and uncomfortable sitting on the floor. The camera tracked. Bud’s wide back with red suspenders making an X in the middle of his spine. He turned, his face wreathed in the pride of authorship.

  In a corner of the shot, Karson raised his hand and summoned off camera. He slid over to make room. Chris, his hair shorter in length, scrambled across the floor and hunkered next to Karson.

  Karson smiled and put his arm around Chris’s slender shoulders, pulling him close in a hug. Leaned close to

  278 / CHUCK LOGAN

  the boy, whispered in his ear. Chris’s face shone in the camera lights, his expressive eyes sparkled.

  Beautiful kid.

  The angry emotional assumption proceeded at the speed of light.

  Same conclusion Emery must have made. He stopped the tape, ran it back, watched Karson summon Chris, froze the tape there, and studied the skewed image of Chris’s smiling face until the pause function blipped off into static.


  Chris’s death chose this moment to claw its way out of Harry’s chest. When the ghost of the person you kill chops a hole in your heart, he makes it roomy. Big enough to house his unlived life, an addition for the kids…

  And suddenly more damn black clamoring night rushed behind his eyes than in the whole North Woods. No hope of sunrise for it.

  A mighty urge for a drink sliced the darkness like a fin. Dipped down.

  Call some folks.

  Harry picked up the phone and dialed the house on River Road in St. Paul. He needed to talk to the man who he wished had been his father.

  No good. Randall was still in the big city. “How you doing?” he asked Dorothy.

  Her voice caused Harry to wince. Warmly ironic, a little high, she pondered, “My bed is a lonely raft in a rising tide of menopause.

  How’s by you?”

  Harry rubbed his eyes. “My probable-cause theory is falling apart.

  Now I think the local Lutheran minister who’s been feeding me a line on the sheriff is into boys. Coulda been screwing the kid I shot.”

  “Proof?”

  “Just my intuition.”

  “Harry, your intuition has a magical three-second attention span.

  After that you need a seeing-eye dog.”

  “You could be right.”

  Dorothy sighed. “My man done stood me up, stayed on in D.C.

  with the boys. I had a bubble bath and three glasses of wine. Now I’m reading Anne Sexton.”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 279

  “Hope you have the razor blades locked up.”

  She laughed. “I’m in my comfy bed. You’re up in the chiller-diller woods. Why don’t you give it up, Harry, walk away.”

  “Can’t. There’s rules, Dorothy.”

  “Are there? Sometimes I think there’s just lines painted on the road. All we do is hope everybody stays in their own lane.”

  That struck him as very funny, very apt. He thanked Dorothy and hung up. What you get for messing in other people’s lives. For trying to figure them out. You cause accidents.

  Peering into the embers in the fireplace, he recalled the painting that had hung over Chris’s bed. Saturn devouring his son. Emery, Cox, Bud. Chris wanted a father and his mother went on The Dating Game. What was scarier than looking too deep into a human family?

  He was seeing through the hole that killing Chris had torn in his life. Young civilizations looked through that window and saw God.

  Older ones just saw the void.

  Harry saw a bottle.

  He got a tumbler from the kitchen, sat it down on the cluttered table in the den, and poured it half full of whiskey.

  Looked harmless. The golden eye of your favorite dog. Faithful, obedient. Forget the last time it bared his teeth.

  The glass leaked a water ring on the pages of his detective musings, the names crossed out and rewritten, the arrows going in circles.

  All the dots that refused to connect.

  The .45 made a steel angle next to the glass. Scraps of cardboard from ammunition boxes, shotgun shells, and rounds for the .45-70

  thick as brass fingers littered the table. Stumpy bullets for the .45

  nestled, spring loaded in a spare magazine. He’d cleaned out his pockets. Change among the bullets. Keys. A wadded roll of $100

  bills.

  Another bad night in America getting ready to happen.

  Harry reached for the glass. It was evil out and he didn’t want to be alone. There was company in the alcohol. Ghosts 280 / CHUCK LOGAN

  mostly. He could almost hear the runaway train of the first half of his life.

  He arm wrestled with the glass. One last grab for something to brace on, ’cause this time he wasn’t playing with edges. This time he was going in, down, to the bottom.

  He moved the glass back and forth across the table, pushing aside a stray .45 round, two quarters, a dime. The goddamn button Emery had found in the snow…Gouged in the wood grain, painstakingly carved with a knife, the blocky vandal letters shouted: Huzzah!

  The archaic cheer brought a sad smile as he hoisted the glass.

  Kind of prank he might have carved as a kid—always off in a corner reading books, dreaming of battles and chivalry…

  Well no shit! Back in the game, he rose and hurled the tumbler across the lodge. Glass shards exploded off the fireplace.

  The class picture Talme showed him. The writing on the back.

  “Next year on to the ablative,” he said aloud.

  The kid wrote.

  Maybe journals or a diary, just like Harry had kept at that age, and Chris would hide what he wrote—hide it so good that Jesse, cleaning out the place, would never find it.

  Harry dumped the liquor down the sink. This time he rinsed the bottle out with water. No diving for corners in the garbage pit. Deep breath, let it out. He walked down the hall and turned the knob on the door to Chris’s room.

  46

  The heat vent was shut off and the cold room was stripped clean except for the Iron Cross that hung from the light bulb. Harry closed his hand around the German doodad and squeezed for some lingering presence of Chris Deucette.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 281

  The closet doors were pulled open on their tracks, the shelves empty. The wire hangers tangled like bad nerves. The mattress was bare. The desk barren. Nothing in the drawers. Strips of tape stuck to the walls where posters had been torn down.

  He felt around the mattress and box springs for any sign they had been altered to create a hiding place. He checked behind the desk, the edges of the carpet. Place was clean. This is crazy, he thought, sitting on the floor, smoking a cigarette, trying to make his mind fifteen years old—sixteen. Trying to reconstruct the glitter in Chris’s eyes, talking about guns in front of the fireplace. The fascination.

  He tore the room apart.

  Methodically, he ripped up the carpet and yanked the shelves from the closet. Then he did the same to Becky’s room. In Bud’s room, he took all the clothes out of the closet, out of the drawers. He was looking for a notebook, a diary. Frustrated, he kicked at the scattered clothing and went back down the hall.

  Nervous sweat coiled in his armpits as he rifled the desk in the den. Lifted the computer to look underneath…

  Harry stared at the IBM.

  Dummy.

  Chris probably never owned a pen. He had a computer. All the drawers in the desk came out. All the floppies. He flipped on the PC and began opening files, going through the disks, one by one.

  Business correspondence. Budgets, proposed expenses, and spreadsheets that costed out the creation of Snowshoe Lodge. Hours in front of the screen pushing the keys. The computer sat like a squat plastic cyclops and defied him.

  Harry sagged in the chair and ran his eyes over the long shelves of books that lined the den floor to ceiling. Smart kid might hide it in plain view, where he could smile to himself when people walked right by it.

  He made a pot of coffee and turned on the tuner. Radio Free Ojibway tiptoed in the static. Russell Means cut in and 282 / CHUCK LOGAN

  out, giving a speech. Harry started on the top shelf, opened every book. Thumbed through the pages of books that had gathered Brahman dust in an Ivy League dorm.

  He ruffled the pages of The Iliad; paper swollen and gray from mildew, the cover chewed by jungle. Cam Lo, 1969, written on the flyleaf. Tossed it aside. Conrad, Camus, Bellow, Malraux littered the floor. The books of his own youth.

  The drums got the range at 3 A.M. and came hoofing out of the ionosphere—loud—wailing. They carried him out onto the porch.

  Giddy with black coffee, he sucked down a recharge of fresh air and listened to Glacier Lake sigh, waiting for the ice.

  He found it just before dawn, in a much-handled copy of Neuroman-cer by William Gibson.

  I’ve seen pictures…

  The diskette was taped to a postcard and a photograph. The card was a close-up of Michelangelo’s David, the head, torso, and hips.

  Wit
h red felt tip, two cherries and a sprig were drawn on the statue’s left hip. The Polaroid was something else…

  “Jesus,” Harry’s breath rattled. Chris posed like the David in bad light, against a rock background. Looking off camera, one arm raised to his shoulder. Slender, ribs showing, penis tumescent. Tattoo on his left hip. Two cherries and a green sprig.

  He inserted the disk in the PC and opened the solitary file, which was titled: “Martin.” With the Ojibway drums pounding in his ears, he read:

  The Life and Death of Martin

  Men lie. Especially they lie about war. They lie about how they get their kicks, too. Some men will be sneaky about getting you to suck their dick, then they’ll lie about it later.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 283

  When someone you love lies, that’s worst of all. Martin had these thoughts as he walked through the red dust toward the hill.

  Martin was a soldier. All the other men in his platoon talked real tough about what they’d do when they met the enemy. Martin figured they’d all run away.

  The enemy was strong. He controlled the land. It was the land of Martin’s ancestors. Everybody said they wanted to fight, to take back the land for the people. But Martin knew beneath their talk they were chicken. When it came right down to it, Martin would have to do the hard work.

  The Sarge walked next to Martin. He was old and instead of guts in his belly he had whiskey. He had been in the war too long. The Sarge hated Martin. He hated him because Martin was beautiful.

  And he hated Martin because he didn’t approve of Lt.

  Mitchum being in love with Martin. Lt. Mitchum was popular.

  He was the platoon leader. He was tall and handsome with blond hair and a wonderful smile. He wasn’t like the other men. Martin could talk to him. It didn’t bother Lt. Mitchum that Martin was different.

  Brambles of nicotine lacerated Harry’s breath and a powerful sense of trespass came over him, reading this dead boy’s innermost thoughts. He sipped lukewarm coffee and forced his eyes back to the orange letters glowing on the screen.

  They started to climb the hill. The old Sarge carried a heavy pack and he fell down. Martin picked him up. Sarge pushed him away. “Don’t touch me, you faggot,” said the Sarge.

  Martin forgave the Sarge, who was old and afraid of everything.