Ugh.
This was pain talking, the over-exercised rhetoric of loss and grief.
Local Man Wallows in Self-Pity
Fanta watched his headline drift away. Tell the truth, asshole. He was only ever of average ability, average disability, and average courage. He had ended up as an average alcoholic widower, staggering around at the end of his rope, unable to let go. From here he tried again.
He was the common man.
An honest pilgrim.
He the people.
Ugh.
Ugh, ugh, ugh.
Martyr-to-Be Self-Eulogizes
He swallowed a mouthful of Walker, shot smoke from his nostrils, and chuckled darkly at a favorite memory.
Back when his beloved wife, Maryanne, was alive, whenever he had become overwrought at his typewriter and was being a jerk, mixing a metaphor, dangling a modifier, confusing its and it’s—this was the eighties, Maryanne typesetting on the clumsy Compugraphic machine on the balcony over his desk—whenever he botched the angle on a story, waxed too poetic, wrote a steaming dump of a headline, his dearly departed would reach into her bra, extract her foam-rubber left boob—now in his box of recovered personal effects–and chuck it down upon his head.
He chuckled again darkly.
Something had just hit him on the head.
The story was not just FROM HELL HOLLOW.
The story was himself, the veteran-veteran Grape Fanta, finding FROM HELL HOLLOW, meeting the man, engaging him, their encounter, their dialectic, their reconciliation, that was the story.
Could he find the man?
Of course he could.
If he looked, there would be clues in the letters. To the extent that he had ever given any thought to the matter, he had always guessed that his screed-writer was a homesteader, a reclusive subsistence farmer, educated, radical, pacifist, contrarian, perhaps Amish-like in his willful disconnectedness, howling from the wilds of the Bad Axe.
These guesses still seemed right. As the Vietnam War had shredded the nation, as students rioted and cops fired tear gas, there had been a back-to-the-land movement, and after Fanta had returned home and kicked around in despair for a time, the idea of checking out and homesteading, becoming a society unto himself, had beckoned. He had pursued meaning through journalism instead. Maybe FROM HELL HOLLOW had done the same through nature. And look at both of them now.
Fanta’s cigarette ash reached his fingers and he jolted. He tilted up out of his chair and stared dizzily toward his bank of filing cabinets.
A man goes back to the land, the land infects him with spirochetes and prions.
A man seeks sanctuary, sanctuary attacks him.
A man seeks truth, finds pain, and madness.
A man like that, Fanta thought, he and I could talk.
CHAPTER 6
The sixth Busch Light can from Lars Hansen’s lost twelve-pack had been drained and jettisoned on the way down Liberty Hill to the distressed property in the hollow below.
When Sheriff Kick arrived in the farmyard, she found the torn beer box and the other six empties strewn in heavy grass around a body sprawled facedown, unmoving in direct sun.
Sweat in her eyes caused the sheriff to wince and blink for a clean look. It was a young female in plain Amish dress. The girl’s eyes were shut. Her cheek rested in dried vomit. But her nose whistled as she breathed slowly in and out.
The sheriff blinked again. The girl’s face and hands, her bare feet and ankles, were covered with bites and rashes. Her long-sleeved gray dress and black bonnet were stuck all over with the same burrs that were attached to the sheriff’s uniform. A blurt of oxidized fluid had dried across the dull-blue dress, which was freshly wet in back where she had peed herself not long ago. Her dirty feet looked a hundred years old. She had a mustache and a few long black chin whiskers. But her shallow bust and lithe body made the sheriff guess she wasn’t much more than sixteen.
“Hello? This is Sheriff Kick. Are you all right?”
Getting no reply, she looked around. The farm was a dilapidated mess but it still seemed to be a working operation. A swaybacked horse had been tethered near a stand of tall cottonwoods, but the shade had shrunk and left the creature to suffer. From that same brutal glare, a handful of shabby chickens hid beneath an iron-wheeled wagon. A cow bawled somewhere. Both men’s and women’s clothes hung from the drying line, and the sheriff stared at this an extra moment. The Glicks, her Amish neighbors on Pederson Road, never hung men’s and women’s clothing on the same line, as the local bishop had decreed this to be indecent. Several strips of rags, long and narrow, hung with the clothes.
Her gaze drifted away. The outhouse path, heading into the shade of a huge old honeysuckle, appeared trodden. People lived here, she suspected, at least one male and one female.
She dropped her bag of beer cans, knelt and touched the girl to reassure herself. Yes, she was breathing.
“Hello? This is Sheriff Kick. Can you wake up? Hello?”
She got her arms beneath the girl and hauled her limply upright, surprised by her weight, worried by her gurgling stomach, then lugged her in a fireman’s carry to the porch of the house, which offered shade but little space amid dense clutter. She pushed aside old boots and harness tack, crates of wilting cabbages, a basket of wilted greens, and laid the girl down. Sweat stung her eyes. She paused to mop a sleeve across her face and gather in a few deep, scorching breaths. She felt a little dizzy as she knocked on the door.
“This is Sheriff Kick. Hello? Hallo? Goedemorgen?”
She reached to turn the doorknob—had nearly touched it when an electrical shock jumped to her sweaty fingers and snapped her hand. Inside the house an alarm bell rang. Her breath stuck as she saw the red stripe across her inner fingers. The drunken girl moaned and shifted on the porch floor.
What had just happened?
Keep breathing, Heidi.
As her lungs hauled at the heavy air, she unsnapped her holster.
“Hallo! This is the Bad Axe County sheriff.”
Was the doorknob booby-trapped? Why? How? The Amish didn’t use electricity—except when they did. Like the Amish couldn’t own a telephone or a car, but they could use your telephone and ride in your car. Their clothing could not have buttons, but safety pins were OK. She had lived around the Amish all her life without ever understanding the nuances of their Ordnung.
“Hallo? Goedemorgen? Ist hier jemand?”
She had no probable cause to enter the house. She walked out into the farmyard. The sawmill had not been used in years. All the wood, both sawed and unsawed, had weathered to gray. The sawdust piles had rotted.
She turned toward the barn. The structure was in the Amish style, plain architecture, unpainted and weathered, just an ordinary barn, yet the silence from the open door made her feel that something was wrong. She used a sleeve to mop her face again. Her lungs labored, her heart sped. Silent barns spooked her, odd for a farm girl, for an ex–Dairy Queen, maybe, except that when she was seventeen her mom and dad had been found shot dead inside their own.
Never mind, Heidi. Turn that off.
As she approached the door, the contrasting brightness was too strong for her to see inside.
“Is anybody in here? This is the Bad Axe County sheriff.”
She took a last breath of sunbaked air and stepped in. Now the air was cooler, but it hardly smelled like a barn. In her mind she should be inhaling the scents of manure and cow piss, hay and grain and milk. But these were only traces beneath the dull artificial smells of metals and plastics. As her eyes adjusted, she saw a cord hanging from an overhead light fixture… as if daring her to tug it.
“I’m here to help. Is anybody back there?”
She hesitated to touch the cord. Then she pulled it. The bulb winked on and a grinding sound began. She found its source: a sawed-off pump-action shotgun fixed to some kind of geared armature, mechanically coming level with her right hip and racking itself to shoot. An instant before the weapon expl
oded, she dived back through the doorway, hearing shot strafe the barn wall.
She lay still for a few moments. The blast echoed in her ear membranes. A red-tailed hawk screamed in the sky. What was wrong here? She rose unsteadily, her feet feeling a long way down. Her eyes found the electrical source. There on posts in the high grass behind the sawmill was a solar collector, homemade-looking, silently gathering power from the sky. The sawmill roof sheltered what had to be the inverter, faintly snapping as it fed a rack of heavy gray batteries.
The hawk screamed again as the sheriff stepped back out beneath the ruthless engine of the sun. Through weeds beyond the sawmill she saw a square-bladed shovel stuck up in freshly dug earth and first thought, Shallow grave, his lungs filled with dirt. But the fresh earth was only fill dirt above a narrow trench, leading away through pastureland thick with bull thistle to a wellhead. OK, the trench was bringing power to a pump. Running water? Once more she felt confused about the Ordnung. Were they truly Amish, whoever lived here?
Now, light-headed and panting as she rounded the barn, she could see the outhouse deep in honeysuckle shade. Through its moon-sliver window, she saw light. Closer, she saw a glowing bulb. She drew her service pistol and stepped into the shade, feeling a shiver as she stopped ten feet from the outhouse.
“Hallo?”
Her dizziness, the starkly contracting light and shade—maybe she was seeing things. She stared at the moon-shaped cutout in the door. Yes, there was a light bulb burning inside.
“This is the Bad Axe County sheriff. Open the door and let me see your hands.”
No movement. Silence except for buzzing flies. She closed the distance with unsteady steps and opened the door herself.
The sight stopped her breath. On the toilet hole slumped a man in Amish dress, his trousers past his knees and folded over the tops of his rubber boots, his gray beard so long that it feathered and re-joined blood-stuck around the forged steel shaft of the gimlet jammed into the center of his chest.
She looked back toward the house. The girl lay unmoving amid the clutter on the porch.
No one else had appeared.
The man’s eyes were shut. His lips were mashed together. He breathed faintly through his nose.
She touched the radio handset on her shoulder and heard the hiss that told her no contact.
Could she do first aid? She wasn’t sure what. Maybe unfold him? His bare haunches had sunk through the toilet hole toward the stinking pit. The outhouse was a two-seater and his head had lolled right, dumping off his wide-brimmed straw hat to catch in the second toilet hole beside him. Flies swarmed in and out around the hat. They jumped from his face to his blood-gobbed beard and back. Had this happened overnight? Predawn? It seemed he had been reading. His Bible lay upon the outhouse floor, blood-soaked and swollen, double-thick inside its frail leather cover.
“Sir…? Can you hear me?”
She backed away, touching her radio again. No. She retrieved her phone, held it toward the sky. Not that either. She stepped in something and looked down. From the dried orange crust in the grass, she gathered that the girl had begun vomiting here. After seeing this? After doing this?
“I’m getting help, sir. Hilfe bekommen. Hang on.”
First she untied the swaybacked horse, which rolled its bloodshot eyes and tried to bite her before she pushed its head away and slapped it toward shade. Then she broke into a jog along the farm’s narrow dirt inroad, heading steeply uphill through dense hardwood forest.
As she ran, her body felt both weightless and twice its normal weight, and every intake of air became a deeper communion with the inferno in her chest and the questions inflaming her mind. What the hell had happened? Had the girl gotten drunk and stabbed her father?
The driveway summited at a swing-arm pole gate. As she pushed through, the frame dragged a broken chain. When she let go, the gate coasted squeakily, weighted by fieldstones, and banged shut behind her.
She ran on in frustration. She hadn’t even known that these people existed. They didn’t call 911 with their problems…
After a short downhill curve, the driveway leveled. In another two hundred yards she crossed a wood-plank bridge and stopped at the forest’s edge. As she begged for breath, she realized she had returned to Liberty Hill Road. Three hundred yards to her left, east, she could see her Charger.
An Amish buggy traveled slowly past it, away from her.
“Hey!”
The buggy jolted and sped away, wobbling severely. She goaded herself back to a trot.
“Hey! Stop! Halt! I need to talk to you!”
By the time she reached the Charger, the buggy was a quarter mile gone.
But here she had radio reception. As she raced the Charger to close the gap behind the buggy, she told Denise what she needed—backup deputies, two ambulances, and, since the old man seemed close to death, probably Dr. Kleekamp again.
“Ten-four,” Denise said, hesitation in her voice. “But, wait—an Amish, a buggy, is fleeing you?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Well, don’t spook the horse.”
“Right.” She lightened up on the gas. “Stay on with me, Denise, please.”
Sweat burned her eyes. She took turns smashing one shut and keeping the other open. The Charger’s wheel felt slick in her hands as she followed the road along a meandering creek. At last she eased up behind the buggy, twenty yards back, hoping to come alongside.
“I’m on his bumper,” she told Denise. “But this is a first.”
Normally an Amish driver would slow and move his outside wheels onto the shoulder, but this one accelerated and stayed centered on the narrow road, not letting her around.
“He won’t pull over. What now? I can’t do siren and lights.”
“Loudspeaker?” Denise suggested.
“That might freak out the horse,” she worried. “And these ditches are steep. I’m going to wait. Maybe he just doesn’t realize I’m here.”
But she didn’t believe this. The driver knew. Then she finally held both eyes open long enough to notice that a shattered spoke caused the left rear wheel to spin in figure eights. This was what wobbled the buggy, and she could see its canopy shredded along the left side. Weeds and brush dragged from the undercarriage, shreds flying loose as the horse began to gallop.
She told Denise, “He knows I’m here.”
She switched on her speaker. Her voice blurted harshly out.
“This is the Bad Axe County Sheriff’s Department. Stop your vehicle.”
Whether that spooked the horse or whether the driver whipped it to go faster, the creature surged into another gear. The buggy followed erratically, skimming and jumping among the ruts in the road, with a corner ahead. The sheriff glanced at her speed: almost thirty.
“Denise, that backfired. Now he’s fleeing for sure. I’ll just fall back and follow wherever he’s going. That poor horse can’t run much longer. We’ll talk when he stops.”
But the horse didn’t slow down. The buggy skidded into the corner, then tilted onto its outer two wheels, showing its underside stuck with wild foliage ripped from the earth. In the depth of the corner, with the buggy twisting hard, the horse threw a wild-eyed look over its shoulder. Seeing the Charger, it gathered at the haunches and lunged for even greater speed. The buggy tipped all the way over, slid on its side, and went airborne over the deep ditch, taking the bellowing horse with it.
Sheriff Kick stopped the Charger.
She whispered, “Fuck.”
“Heidi, what happened?”
She touched her wet forehead to the backs of her wet fists around the wheel.
“Heidi? What happened? What do you need?”
She racked her radio handset angrily. She used her phone instead to call back Denise.
“I still need all that stuff I asked for a minute ago. Plus a large animal vet with a euthanasia kit.”
She climbed from the Charger. The horse had torn loose. As the sheriff slid down th
e ditch, the animal struggled up and limped away on three legs, lathered and wheezing and rolling its eyes at her. His front left leg was broken under the knee.
“I’m sorry, boy. I’m so sorry.”
The buggy had landed upside down, one wheel still spinning.
She found no one inside it.
The frightened horse must have been pulling it empty, ghosting about this deserted region of the Bad Axe at least since dawn, because caught beneath the brake bar, where a driver would sit, was a boot.
A rubber boot—a Ranger—the left boot, cracked and split by age. The seat was smeared with what looked like dried blood. Her victim had been driving this buggy before he ended up in the ditch.
But that was all she had. She collapsed into the weeds. Her face had gone numb. Her heart fluttered and she shivered. Her thoughts became mired and sluggish. She heard a vehicle slow on the road above, but she could not convince herself to stand. Whoever it was would stop and help. She couldn’t stand and wave. She couldn’t move.
Yet the vehicle didn’t stop—and this rallied her. A sheriff’s cruiser, an upside-down Amish buggy in the ditch, a limping horse in the meadow… what kind of person doesn’t stop to offer help?
She crawled up the ditch bank. But her vision had blurred. The vehicle was too far gone. An old white truck, maybe?
She slid back down, collapsed beside the overturned buggy, and looked about helplessly. With the sun directly overhead, she had not one centimeter of shade to crawl under.
As she faded into shuddering blindness, a phrase from Fanta’s caller, FROM HELL HOLLOW, came back to her.
Bad Moon Rising Page 5
