Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  Faith Golly drove it. A passenger was on board. Without his missing eyeglasses, Fanta couldn’t tell what flavor.

  Flavor…

  The word came from last night—flavors—the surreality of his meal with Golly slowly coming back to him.

  Faith aimed his feeble car between the white IH pickup and a mud-spattered third vehicle, nosing it into the black throat of Golly’s sod barn. The Tercel disappeared as if swallowed by the earth.

  Fanta stared helplessly into the blur. Who rode in his car with Faith?

  What should he do?

  How could he stop this?

  He hobbled.

  He fell.

  * * *

  Last night, in “conversation” over dinner, he had learned about Jim Golly’s self-prescribed prion-replacement therapy.

  “I have the chronic wasting,” Golly had said. “The Lyme bacilli trashed my immunity, and the infected ungulate prions invaded. I stopped eating venison several years ago, but it was too late.”

  He had orated around a thickened purple tongue, reminiscent of the buck that had attacked the Tercel’s grille. To dress for dinner, Golly had wrapped himself in a filthy tunic that might have once been saffron, and Fanta had remembered the allusion from his recorded rant: the Buddhist martyr Thich Quang Duc, the self-immolating Vietnamese monk.

  “But infected prions,” Golly had declared, “can be replaced.”

  Of course Fanta had no appetite. He had felt concussed and sick. Unable to manage utensils, the diseased man across the table had eaten with his hands in the manner of a blind old circus bear, balling and dabbing and scooping with his jittery, tumescent fingers.

  “Replaced like this,” Golly had said, demonstrating, and one minute later an entire foot-long steamed zucchini had disappeared down Golly’s warty throat.

  “See?”

  “I see.”

  But Fanta had not understood, not yet. He had not been able to stop the trembling caused by something, he thought, in his few sips of wine. Now and then, beneath the table, the mighty dog had licked his burning feet and gone back to sleep.

  “There are alpha and beta prions,” Golly had at some point asserted.

  Nonsense, Fanta had said to himself.

  “We humans have the alphas. The ungulates—the deer, the cattle—have the beta prions. Unless one is afflicted as I am, this is the natural hierarchy of nature. Alpha over beta, in all things epidemiological.” He mashed the word but continued as if he hadn’t. “This prevents horizontal transfer. Shepherds don’t get blackleg. Cat ladies don’t get feline distemper.”

  True and not true, Fanta had said to himself.

  Something prevented horizontal transfer, as a rule of thumb. Something saved humans from goat pox, porcine brucellosis, bovine pleuropneumonia, et al. But that something was not the alpha-beta nonsense hallucinated by Golly.

  “A chronic-wasting man,” he had raved on, meaning himself, “can replace his bad betas by tapping fellow humans for more good alphas, which can be consumed indirectly in the zucchini, the tomato, the melon, in any vegetable or fruit that has been properly farmed.”

  There had been a pre-dinner tour. Golly grew the vegetables he was eating in small rectangular plots seemingly hidden in tall grass and wildflowers across the narrow coulee bottom.

  “Horizontal transfer,” he pronounced, “can be undone by vertical transfer, from lower human to higher human.” He pawed up sweet corn, stripped by Faith from the cob. “As you see.”

  Fanta still had not seen.

  Tapping fellow humans?

  Lower humans?

  He had filled his lungs and spoken.

  “May I have my glasses back, Jim, please? And my car keys and wallet? You can keep the shoes.”

  “Faithy, the man is asking for more wine.”

  By then, Golly had swallowed at least a gallon. Yet he was not so much drunk and oblivious as he was effortlessly dismissive of reality. He was completely at ease with his delusions.

  “It’s time for me to go, Jim.”

  “Faithy’s getting us more wine.”

  Fanta had looked at his plate of untouched food: the stewed tomatoes, the stripped sweet corn, the soft squashes, the oozing slices of melon. He had looked at Golly’s wine-purpled tongue. He recalled a line from the letter he had brought along on his search for FROM HELL HOLLOW.

  Today I partake of the Body of Chris…

  Was he understanding now? Chris without the t? A guy off a street corner, not the symbolic Son of God?

  Wanting to bolt upright, Fanta had felt stuck to his chair. He had seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He had felt his pig valve flutter and stick. He had heard himself croak, “Tapping fellow humans? What does that mean?”

  Golly raised his hairless eyebrows. “Food is medicine, yes? Read the Chinese. The fix is in the flavors. But, alas, my vegetarian therapy has been too indirect and too slow. Look at me. I won’t make it the two weeks to get to France unless I accelerate my treatment. But now, Mr. Fanta, you…”

  He canted his skull and peered across the table, seeming to study Fanta closely: My vision is kaleidoscopic… you are carved into a dozen pretty pieces. “You don’t look much better than me.”

  “What is your treatment?” Fanta had demanded. “What’s in the food?”

  “Faithy, give him wine.”

  “Lower humans? Who are they?”

  “Wine.”

  “No. No wine. My glasses, Golly. Give me my keys, my wallet, and my glasses. I’ll follow the road back to where I left my car.”

  “But Tippy doesn’t want you to go.”

  The huge dog awoke.

  “I’m leaving now,” Fanta had asserted, and continued in his dizzy head: And sending my friend Sheriff Kick in to visit you.

  “But Tippy doesn’t want you to leave.”

  He had tried once more with all his might to rise. It was more wine, the next green bottle itself in Faith’s grip, that had clobbered him.

  * * *

  He hobbled—What flavor was arriving?—and fell into the scalding morning sun. With his bruised brain pounding, Fanta watched through a blur as out of the sod garage emerged a dirty-shaggy-hungry kid, some mother’s beautiful lost boy.

  The kid grinned. He had been homeless, it appeared, hard-worn by the road but still at a fresh age, a teenager. He held a tattered black backpack. The child took in Golly—the horror of the man—and he took in the half-buried sod huts amid the isolation of Hell Hollow, and still he grinned. He pushed knotted blond hair from his eyes. His bones and muscles moved. He made peace signs with his fingers. He made a plus sign. Then fixed his hands into the shape of a heart.

  “Amen,” intoned Jim Golly as he shambled forth in his soiled saffron robe. He spread his arms to the boy.

  “Welcome, Lamb of God.”

  CHAPTER 25

  As Sheriff Kick sped her Charger along the highway, she looked into her mirror at young Patience Goodgolly glowering in the backseat, knowing she was closer to sixteen than twenty-one, wishing she could find a way to prove, for the girl’s own good, that she was a minor. She is not a tree, Dr. Patel had said. As soon as Denise came on duty, she had checked birth records in Bad Axe and surrounding counties. Nothing, not a surprise. So Patience Goodgolly was as old as she claimed to be, and per the district attorney, who wasn’t ready to charge her with a crime, she was going home.

  The anxious girl twisted on the backseat to see Deputy Luck trailing in her Tahoe. She was going home, but the sheriff didn’t plan to leave her there alone.

  She has given birth before… possibly more than once.

  The sheriff opened her partition window.

  “So, are you pregnant again?”

  Patience Goodgolly’s head whipped around so hard her bonnet strings slapped her face.

  Now I know she understands me. Armed with this information, Sheriff Kick turned off the highway onto Liberty Hill Road. She slowed to twenty miles an hour to navigate the rutted gravel. Deputy Luck fol
lowed into the Charger’s dust cloud. The girl clenched her jaw and stared sullenly into the mirror. The sheriff leaned, opened her glove box, removed the plastic Walgreens bag, and hung it in the window space.

  “The doctor said you have been before, and you might be again. So there’s something in this sack that might interest you. It’s a way of telling whether you’re going to have a baby or not.”

  She let that settle in, decelerating to roll so slowly that red-winged blackbirds on their second or third broods rose from cattails in the boggy ditch to screech and flutter at the windshield. Farther on the Charger passed a new weed that the sheriff didn’t recognize, tall and fibrous, with an ugly brownish platform for a blossom, invading the asters and the joe-pye.

  “It’s a pregnancy test, and you could have it,” she told Patience Goodgolly, “if you wanted it.”

  She dialed the Charger’s nose into the Goodgolly driveway. They rolled under a canopy of shade until they reached the swing gate. The sheriff turned her engine off and took her keys. She lugged the heavy gate to the edge of the driveway, where it stopped against a cairn of sandstone slabs. She made eye contact with Deputy Luck: Close it after you. When she sat behind the wheel again and looked into her mirror, Patience Goodgolly held the test kit in her lap.

  Soon the Charger came to a stop in the desolate Goodgolly farmyard. The sheriff cleared her door locks.

  “Would you like me to read the instructions to you?”

  With the box in her fist, Patience Goodgolly burst from the car. Lifting her dress hem, she galloped across the burnt grass and up the porch steps. She opened the door without shocking herself and slammed it behind her.

  Deputy Luck approached the sheriff’s window.

  “Keep her here and keep her safe.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Let’s work on ‘Yes, Sheriff.’ ”

  “Yes, Sheriff, sorry.”

  “You might want to park in the shade.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “No radio or phone in here. If you need help, you’ll have to call from the road.”

  * * *

  “Infection is our biggest worry,” said the nurse hustling after Sheriff Kick down the intensive care unit hallway toward Gabriel Goodgolly’s room, “but it looks like he’ll recover.”

  “He has some things to explain.”

  “He’s on heavy pain meds.”

  “I understand,” the sheriff said. She stopped at his doorway, turning on the nurse. “Some private things to explain.”

  Inside Goodgolly’s room, she carefully parsed the setup on his IV stand. None of it looked new to her. She glanced over her shoulder toward the door. Then she pinched off his painkiller drip and waited.

  Within two minutes, the man’s blue eyes came fearfully open. Again she glanced toward the door, then bored her eyes back into his. They flickered side to side, as if searching.

  “Yeah, you,” she assured him. “This is Bad Axe County Sheriff Heidi Kick, Mr. Goodgolly. Guten tag. I’ve been learning things about Patience.”

  She showed him his pinched-off drip.

  “Do you feel me?”

  He shut his eyes.

  “You’re going to answer some questions.”

  He turned his head. She snatched a handful of rough gray beard and turned it back.

  “I’ve got a whole menu of criminal charges, Mr. Goodgolly. I’ve got murder, assault, kidnapping, incest, rape, and I haven’t even turned the page yet. Let’s start with who you are.”

  He turned his head again. She yanked it back.

  “Your name.”

  He winced. His lips parted.

  “Gabriel.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Gabriel Goodgolly. Before the Lord.”

  “That’s not going to do it. I know about the property deed. Are you Jim? Or Jon?”

  “Please…”

  Please? She flared hot. “Have you been raping your daughter or your niece?”

  He swallowed hard and stayed silent.

  “Same charge either way, so let’s move on. Tell me where the babies are.”

  This time she let him roll his head away. She watched his tears without sympathy. His hands—swollen joints, spotted skin, fingernails like claws—clenched the sheets.

  “Answer me.”

  He whispered something.

  “Louder.”

  “I’m Jon. Jon Golly.”

  “That’s a start. And what makes you the ‘good’ Golly, Jon?”

  He winced. Beneath the sheet his back arched, then resettled.

  “Jim,” he said.

  Her phone stirred: a text message from Deputy Luck.

  “It’s Jim that makes you the good Golly? Where is Jim? What has Jim done to be the bad one?”

  Jon Golly shook his head and whispered. She bent over him.

  “What? Say that louder.”

  “Immunity from all prosecution.”

  He winced and swallowed.

  “Or not one more word from me.”

  She stared at him, for a long moment sucked into a whirl of worry about her own twins keeping one another’s secrets. She lifted her phone from behind her badge.

  I think I might need help because she

  Deputy Luck’s text ended there. She was in trouble.

  Refocused, the sheriff released her pinch on Jon Golly’s drip.

  “Peace be with you, Mr. Golly. While it lasts. I’m coming back.”

  * * *

  She tore her Charger over twelve miles of melting asphalt to reach Liberty Hill Road. She nearly lost it on the first gravel corner, reined herself in over the next two miles until she cleared a rise and saw Deputy Luck’s Tahoe in the ditch beyond Goodgolly’s driveway. She skidded up beside. Her rookie deputy lay in the creek that ran beside the road, a brown mass amid the hard glints reflecting off the shallow current.

  Her phone stirred again. The rest of Lyndsey Luck’s text had just arrived.

  offered me a glass of buttermilk

  CHAPTER 26

  “Ambulance and backup, Denise. Liberty Hill Road, same damn place as yesterday.”

  She jumped from the Charger before it stopped moving, reaching back for PARK.

  “And get a deputy to the same farm as yesterday. It belongs to Jon Golly. Get me everything we have on him and his brother, Jim. Run both names through CrimeNet.”

  She plunged down the bank and crashed into the creek. Ankle-deep was plenty deep to drown in, and Lyndsey Luck lay on her face. The sheriff hauled her rookie over and dragged her by her shoulders onto cobble. For a weird instant they stared into each other eyes, as if neither believed the other existed on the same life-death plane. Then Deputy Luck convulsed and spewed a multicolored geyser that hit the sheriff’s chest and face. The deputy took two retching gulps and tried to exhale. Then her eyes widened and she froze. Her heart had stopped.

  The sheriff lunged, dragged her to higher ground, and fell upon her with chest compressions while her mind searched for what she knew about poisoning and came up with nothing. Between pumps she dug two fingers down Luck’s airway. Something was stuck down there, too deep to reach. The sheriff tore her deputy’s uniform shirt and vest off, pumped, rooted with her fingers and poked the obstruction deeper, pumped, gave up, and put her mouth over the deputy’s, pinched her nose and inhaled hard, then pumped, pumped, for so long that her body and Luck’s body seemed one. She had no idea how much time passed before she felt pressure, crowding, annoying interference.

  An EMT shoved her aside.

  “Sheriff, help is here.”

  She collapsed into a reef of watercress. For a while her phone had been buzzing.

  She gasped, “Go ahead.”

  As she listened to Deputy Schwem, she closed her eyes against the relentless assault of blinding light and searing air. Via the faint signal bounce around Liberty Hill, Schwem was telling her that for the second time in two days they had lost Patience Goodgolly.

  * * *

>   The swing gate was open. The clothes were off the clothesline. On the grass in the shade of the cottonwood lay a drinking glass, empty, filmed with drying butterfat.

  The ambulance still wailed in the distance as Deputy Schwem emerged from the barn.

  “Solar power,” he said. “I’ll be darned. And there’s this weird electric robot thing in there.”

  “Did it point a gun at you?”

  “I think it tried. But it didn’t have a gun.”

  “She has it, then. Did you find that old horse?”

  “Negative.”

  “Then she’s on it. Anything to see inside the house?”

  “Buttermilk.”

  The sheriff felt woozy as she climbed the porch steps. Beside the kitchen sink was a drinking glass from the same set as the one on the yard, but full. Beside it stood the quart jar of buttermilk, now half-full.

  “Jeez,” Schwem said, “who poisons somebody?”

  “I think it must have been meant for Patience,” the sheriff said.

  Sie nett, Mrs. Lapp had told the girl at the hospital that morning. Always be nice to people in the uniform.

  “I don’t think she meant to poison Deputy Luck. I think she didn’t know there was poison and meant offering a drink to be a thoughtful gesture. Then she saw what happened and she took the opportunity to run. Take the jar and the glass into evidence. I’m guessing it’s something like Killex. Search the house and property for a pesticide container, but my guess is whoever did this didn’t leave one behind.”

  She turned at the sound of boots on the porch. Interim Chief Deputy Bender entered the Goodgolly home. He went straight to the glass of buttermilk and sniffed it. Then he looked at her through his smudged glasses, seeming to measure her for a bolt of upholstery. She awaited her Benderism.

  “Came to help you chase your tail,” he said.

  “Thank you, Dick. Please head back out to where you have reception. Tell Denise to put a BOLO out for a young woman in a long dress and a black bonnet, riding a swaybacked brown horse, carrying a sawed-off shotgun.”

  “Pretty hard to lose something like that in the first place, some might say. Twice.”