Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  “Heidi, no, he’s inbound. The truck was just sighted southbound on Sime Road. He’s heading into town.”

  Her mind froze. Where was she even going? She was only going.

  “Talk to me, Denise.”

  “OK, I’m talking. Meanwhile, Heidi, we’re having a weird string of break-ins that I don’t think we can keep ignoring. Alarm calls first at Liquor City, five minutes later at the Dollar Heaven, eight minutes after that the Supercuts went off. Someone saw two kids on a horse. By the time I sent Schwem over to Supercuts, the alarm at Bad Axe Bowl was going off, so Schwem is headed over—”

  “Denise!”

  “Right here.”

  “The pattern. All Rickreiner properties, inbound from the northeast.”

  “You’re right.”

  Neither spoke for a moment.

  “Never mind the bowling alley, Denise. Redirect Schwem to the newspaper office.”

  “Ten-four.”

  She tried to reach Harley, who didn’t answer, and then she was trying to text him without entering a soybean field at lethal speed when Denise called right back.

  “He’s there.”

  “Who’s where?”

  “I’m getting calls. At the Happy Valley Shopper. The white truck is there. Somebody saw a man in a robe smash the door. Now he’s inside the building with Taylor.”

  * * *

  When after a sickening blur of time she at last cornered onto Second Street, the white truck was parked crookedly over the curb with Deputy Schwem’s Tahoe behind it, red-and-blue lights sparking. Both the building’s door and front window had been smashed. The alarm shrieked over Schwem’s strained voice as he wrangled with Barry and Babette Rickreiner on the opposite curb.

  The instant she saw Taylor’s brown cap with gold letters move across the shadows inside, she felt herself enter sow-bear mode. She blocked the street with Luck’s Tahoe and leapt out with her duty weapon drawn. She ripped open the door of Derp Hubbard’s truck and saw her little boy’s unzipped backpack. No hammer. Extra underwear. An apple. A Ziploc bag of crackers. His favorite Matchbox car, the Torino. Oh, Taylor…

  “Golly!” she bawled from her guts, looking for something to shoot at. “Let him go!”

  Taylor’s cap had disappeared. Nothing else happened. Thank God. She had yelled and waved a gun. Stupid. Starting now, she had to act like the sheriff.

  Trying to hide her shakes, she turned to assess the periphery. A few old-timers had shuffled over from Norse Nook with coffee cups in hand. The custodian and manager of Farmers Bank watched beneath their sign: 6:21A.M. and 94 degrees. A few cars had pulled over on Main Street, drivers stepping out to watch. Jaywalking across the Main Street–Second Street intersection came a slender barefoot kid in a filthy shirt and filthier cargo shorts, carrying a worn black backpack against his or her chest. The kid’s face looked vaguely familiar. But now Schwem was barking back and forth with the Rickreiners.

  “Put that away,” he ordered BARRY HER. The deputy dripped sweat, in octopus mode trying to restrain the on-charging mother and son. The candidate had liberated his sidearm from its thigh holster, a heavy semiautomatic.

  “No, you will not ‘organize a posse to go around back.’ I said put that away. Ma’am, do not touch me. And, sir… Hey, dipshit, I’m talking to you.” Schwem was losing it. “Return that firearm to its holster immediately.” Her deputy caught his breath and found some more suitable language. “For your own safety. And everybody’s.”

  “He has an open-carry permit!” Babette kept screeching. She pointed at the sheriff. “And she’s doing nothing!”

  Schwem spoke like he had grit in his teeth. “Ma’am, if you touch me again…”

  “Kick her out!”

  Abruptly done with Schwem, Babette tried to get the small crowd to chant.

  “Kick her out!”

  This jolted the sheriff back to action. She holstered her weapon and popped Luck’s back end—rifle again, plus loudspeaker—but what was she supposed to do now? Hostage training was long ago, and it was just that, training. Your little boy is the hostage was not covered in the manual. But the number one concept boiled down to this: Don’t force anything. Take your time. Put the safety of non-hostages first.

  “Get back!” she hollered. The strange teen, barefoot in dirty cargo shorts, still coming toward the scene, changed course silently, keeping the backpack close in an odd grip. “All the way back across the street.”

  Then time seemed to melt and slip—ten minutes? sixty seconds?—until into her ears and straight into her soul arrived a yowl of pain.

  Where the window glass once read BAD AXE BROADCASTER, EST. 1938, L. FANTA, ED-IN-CHIEF, her child had emerged, yanked to his tiptoes by the fist of a bloated beast in a filthy yellow robe spotted with sweat. Jim Golly held Taylor close against him as a shield. In his other fist he gripped Harley’s framing hammer, cocked above Taylor’s skull.

  She used her loudspeaker. “This is Sheriff Heidi Kick. You don’t need to hurt anyone. Tell me what you want.”

  He seemed at peace. He restrained her squirming little boy from behind and kept the hammer poised as he squinted into the blazing street.

  “As Mother Earth’s demands are urgent,” he called out, “so are they simple.” He held fast as Taylor squirmed. “Noon is our new midnight, people, and it’s time to wake up.”

  So this was Fanta’s letter writer, FROM HELL HOLLOW. Denise’s voice crackled from the radio at her shoulder: “Heidi, you gotta look out for Patience Goodgolly. She’s in town. The report of two kids on a horse, that must be her and someone else. I just heard there’s a bonnet and a long, brown braid on the floor of the Supercuts.”

  “Ten-four.”

  She kept her eyes on Golly. “And right now,” he called out, “Mother needs some of her carbon back.” He paused, looking pleased with himself. “I need some gasoline!”

  He strained to see if anyone moved. The sheriff said to Schwem, “Get it for him.”

  Her deputy seemed rooted, doubting. But she had just felt the arrival of a hunch about Golly, springing from a memory of his rant. Those who face the darkness are meant to shine the light. You will be saved by fire.

  She had to get this right. Don’t force anything. Take your time. As much as her mother’s instinct said otherwise, the cop in her had begun to sense that Golly didn’t want to hurt Taylor. Where was the gain in that for him? Taylor would get hurt only if she rushed Golly, forced him off his plan. He was the hero here, the show. Taylor was the man’s bait, not his purpose.

  She forced her fear into the background and said to Schwem more quietly, “We’re going to humor him. He wants gasoline, get him gasoline. He also wants attention. We’re going to give it to him.”

  She pointed toward the old-timers outside the café.

  “One of those guys has chain saw gas in his truck. Get going.”

  Now her deputy moved. She watched Golly smile.

  “A couple gallons would be good,” he called after Schwem.

  “And now,” he appealed cheerfully to the swelling crowd on the far sidewalk, “who’s going to do the YouTube?”

  CHAPTER 45

  To a boy who runs slower and reads slower than his twin brother, who writes crookeder and spells worse that his twin brother, whose smaller 4-H rabbit has one squinty eye and only half a tail…

  To a boy whose sister will soon be a far better brother than he could ever hope to be…

  To a boy like this comes a special sense about the thin margins of survival. And so he sits on the floor exactly in the spot where the man told him to sit, and he stays there even on broken glass, not moving—though the man has let go of his collar and set the hammer down on Mr. Fanta’s desk—though the man has become busy calling someone on the telephone and drinking liquor from a bottle out of Mr. Fanta’s drawer.

  “Oh, no, don’t bother calling the cops. The cops are already here. Show starts in thirty minutes.”

  Taylor has been in this office before, on
a school trip where Mr. Fanta gave a tour and spoke about old newspapers and then spoke in unclear words for a long time about many other things and then cried. But Taylor had paid attention to what he could understand, and he remembers that this building exists because a rich man built a saloon and a pool hall beneath six hotel rooms. So where Taylor sits is the old saloon floor, which he remembers is from hickory trees, cut down in Town of Zion and made into floorboards by Quaker people. Behind the old saloon in the old pool hall is where Mr. Fanta used to make the newspaper before there were computers. In there, behind a curtain with pictures of ducks, is a urinal the size of a bathtub, and beside that tilts a rust-stained toilet that has a black seat and no lid. The stairs go over the toilet to the balcony above Taylor, where Mrs. Fanta used to work on the very first kind of computer, and that balcony used to be the hallway to the hotel rooms that Mr. Fanta told the class were crammed with old historical papers that nobody cared about but him. Taylor thinks of all this because several minutes ago the man had asked his mother for gasoline, which means he doesn’t know that underneath the hickory floor there would be a simple drain valve on the big tank that Mr. Fanta explained was in the basement, fuel oil to run the boiler that pushes steam to the radiators in the winter.

  Or maybe the man does know. A boy like Taylor develops a sense of when to be quiet, which is almost always, rather than be behind, or wrong, or both.

  Shut up, a voice often tells him. Just shut up.

  He senses acutely a bull’s-eye on his back, and he often wants to cry like a baby in front of people, the way Mr. Fanta had cried in front of his whole first-grade class. Yet he is neither a baby nor an old man. He is a big and lucky boy, people tell him, loved by everyone, they tell him, but he doesn’t feel big or lucky or loved, and hearing this over and over without believing it feels like the wheel of a great valve screwing down on him and turning him off.

  He has messed up his plan to appear in a hunting mask and hammer-smash the mouth of Riley Rilke-Rickreiner’s stepdad. He never should have said he had the hammer, for one thing. Before that, he should have kept his thumb back, taken a chance, and waited for a better-looking ride. And before that, anyway, the stupid early 4-H bus had come all the way to the house so he couldn’t get his dad’s orange mask from where he had re-stashed it in the newspaper tube at the end of the driveway. So turd-mouth Riley’s turd-mouth stepdad is still out there yelling nasty words at Taylor’s mother, who is angry, Taylor worries, because she isn’t coming in to get him, and she would have come in to get Opie or Dylan or his dad, by now, for sure. In fact—he searches—his mom has vanished.

  So he sits there stiff as a stump in front of the man while not his mother but Deputy Schwem walks up with a red plastic gas can and sets it on the top step. Then Taylor and the gas can just sit there, waiting for something.

  “What time is it in France?” the man asks into the phone. “Perfect. Thirty minutes. New-midnight, French time.”

  CHAPTER 46

  “Heidi,” Denise said, “I just found out he’s called all three La Crosse TV stations.”

  Sheriff Kick had gone around the building to inspect the alley. Too narrow for fire trucks. With her phone at her ear, she started back toward Second Street, feeling seasick with adrenaline as the alley seemed to pitch and roll beneath her. She had to be right. Had to. She could not image life without… could not imagine life going forward if she was wrong. Golly didn’t need to hurt Taylor. That did not seem to be his kind of insanity. She just could not bear…

  “He told them he has your little boy hostage. He told them to come and see the show. Seven A.M., which he seems to think is noon in France, they said.”

  Denise tapped keys and hit switchboard buttons. “Actually it’s two P.M. there. He thinks they care? Or he’s in France?” She said to someone else, “We’re not looking for a girl on a horse anymore. Get here now.” Something clattered. “Heidi, Golly invited the TV people to ‘the summit,’ he said, to ‘witness history.’ And they’re coming.”

  “Send the fire trucks,” she said.

  “The guy from Channel 8 said he was rambling about some burning monk who died in Vietnam fifty years ago and some naked little girl running from a firebombing who survived. What does all that mean?”

  “It means send the fire trucks,” she repeated.

  “Harley’s on his way. I said leave Dylan with the neighbors if he could. Your mother-in-law was yelling. I tried not to tell him very much.”

  “Thank you.”

  As she reached Second Street, a voice behind her said, “Where do you want me, Sheriff?”

  She turned to see Deputy Lyndsey Luck in uniform stepping from the battered gold minivan that served as Farmstead’s only cab. Deputy Luck looked wan and weak, a shell of her sturdy self. Somehow her duty boots must have gotten misplaced in the hospital, because the cuffs of her uniform trousers sat atop light blue terry-cloth slippers. But here she was. The sheriff exhaled and steadied herself. It was a small thing, maybe, but the rookie’s toughness calmed her.

  “You can move people back and set a perimeter at two hundred feet. Nobody but police and fire inside that.”

  She scanned the swelling crowd for the Rickreiners. The jackass who wanted her job had his firearm unholstered again and was asking for volunteers to rush the newspaper office, citing posse comitatus.

  She called her rookie back and pointed.

  “We can’t let him escalate. Give him ten seconds to lock that thing inside his vehicle. Over there, that red El Camino. He takes you to eleven, Taser him, cuff him, and take him away.”

  “My pleasure,” Deputy Luck said.

  Now here came Grammy Belle and Harley.

  “Just the way I heard it,” her mother-in-law was saying, “she’s doing nothing.”

  “Ma, stop.”

  “Don’t tell me to stop.”

  Belle was red-faced, sweat-lathered, in full voice around a half-smoked cigarette.

  “That’s my grandbaby in there. Do not tell me to stop. I’m going in to get him.”

  “Stop, Mom.” Harley yanked her back. “Heidi, why is everybody just standing around?”

  She could hardly croak her terrible answer. Her decision was not up for examination or discussion, not even by Taylor’s daddy or his grandma. “Please don’t bother me. I’m working.”

  “Working? That’s our boy. You’re his mother.”

  “Harley, let me do my job.”

  “Ma!” Again Harley had to catch Belle by the arm, stop her from charging the newspaper office in her bikini top. The jolt sent her cigarette flying. Harley stepped on it. “Mother,” he said.

  “I’m not just going to stand here.”

  “Yes, you are. Heidi, what’s going on? What’s the plan?”

  She managed to get a breath to the bottom of her lungs. She had to be right. “You’re looking at the plan. Wait. Watch.”

  “She’s letting him just sit in there with a monster!”

  Just then she heard the fire trucks shrieking away from the public safety building a half mile north of town. They would arrive in sixty seconds and she needed to direct them.

  “Go away, Harley. Now. Take Mom with you.”

  Two minutes later, she had positioned the fire trucks so that TV vans could get around them onto Second Street. Golly hauled Taylor forward and squinted out until he found her.

  “Sheriff, be a doll,” he called, “and leave the hoses on the trucks.”

  She hesitated. Taylor’s cheeks gleamed. Golly raised the hammer. “I mean that.”

  She gave the order and Golly retreated, towing Taylor into the shadows of the office. Then she heard him exclaim happily, “Aha!” She didn’t know what he had found until Grape Fanta’s antique rock music began to swirl out and set an eerily festive mood.

  The sun burned down for the ten longest minutes of her life. The TV vans arrived and set up. A dozen or so Bad Axers held up smartphones, recording. She prayed that she was right. There was no need to hurt h
er child. A chilling reverence had set in. Then it began.

  First, Golly emerged from the shadows of the office behind Taylor dangling from his fist, the hammer re-cocked as a weapon over her little boy’s precious skull. Next step, at the end of Golly’s grip, it was Taylor who picked up the waiting gas can. Now Taylor and the can dangled as Golly awkwardly backed up and then went sideways into the frame of the broken window. From there, he reached back and spun Fanta’s old wheeled wooden desk chair until he had positioned it behind himself. He toppled back into it, keeping Taylor in front. He said something to Taylor. Taylor screwed the nozzle off the gas can.

  His intent appeared: he wanted Taylor to douse him. But it was difficult. Hefting the heavy can, Taylor missed broadly twice, splashing himself and the floor. Then Golly found the answer was to push Taylor to arm’s length, bend forward in the chair as far as his bloated body would allow, and have Taylor empty the can over his neck and head like man getting a bath in a bucket. Taylor splashed more gas on himself in the process.

  Then Golly pulled Taylor onto his lap and showed the cameras that he had a lighter.

  Sheriff Kick expected him to give a speech now. France. Monk. Vietnam. Look at me. Look at us. Noon is our new midnight. The urgency of our war against ourselves, to save the planet.

  Instead he seemed to lose himself in emotion. His head dropped, his gasoline-soaked robe slipped, and for one long minute his warty shoulders shook with what appeared to be grief. He recovered, and as he began to speak, her heart felt as if it would be crushed between her sudden fear that she had been wrong, and her desperate hope that she had guessed right.

  “You may pretend to be astonished, to wonder why,” Jim Golly began. “But you have the facts. I’ve shared them many times with all of you. Not that you didn’t already have them. Not that you don’t live them. You are the facts. You know why.”

  She expected him to cite his facts anyway, to deliver an apocalyptic climate screed like she had heard him raining down on Leroy Fanta. Instead, after a long pause, he said again, “And still you will pretend to wonder why. Oh, how you stroke your precious innocence. But anyway, I’ll show you why.”