Blue Wolf In Green Fire

by Joseph Heywood

  By the time Nantz came into the kitchen wearing only underpants, Newf was back in the house and Cat was bumping against his legs to irritate him. Nantz nuzzled his shoulder and sat down.

  Nantz seldom wore clothes around the house. “You’re almost fully clothed,” he said teasingly.

  “Practicing for the academy,” she said with a smirk.

  It still wasn’t clear to him why she wanted to be a CO, only that she seemed determined, and in their three months as a couple he had learned that when she set her mind on something, she would not be swayed. Earlier in the week he had asked her how she wanted to spend her last day of freedom and she had said, “Eating like a pig and fucking like a nympho.”

  “Nymphomaniacs can’t get off,” he said.

  “Okay, so I’ll be a pseudonympho,” she shot back.

  She sat in the chair nursing her coffee and sniffing the air like an animal.

  “It smells so good in here!” He had never met a woman so attuned to scents and aromas.

  When the two-quart casserole was ready, he removed it from the oven and let it stand five minutes before scooping out wedges.

  “Oh God,” she said with her mouth full. “You think they’ll have food like this at the academy?”

  He laughed. “Overcooked meat, soupy taters, frozen veggies, and semifresh fruit.”

  “Savages,” she said. “I guess I can lower my standards.”

  They ate in silence for a while. “You and Gus will be teaching, right?”

  “I hope,” he said. She eyed him curiously. “The suspension sort of tarnishes me. Cap’n Chamberlin may decide he doesn’t want all you academy virgins soiled by my presence.”

  “Well, the captain better not mess up my plans,” she said. “I’m going to be first in my class to fuck an instructor,” she added with a leer.

  “I don’t know if that will be possible.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t you worry, Detective. I’ll handle the logistics.”

  He opened a bottle of 1971 Cuvée Dom Perignon and filled two flutes. He put small shot glasses of orange juice beside them.

  “Bubbly for breakie. My favorite.” She held the bottle in front of her and studied the label. “You must’ve dipped deep into your piggy bank,” she said approvingly.

  He grinned.

  Her tone turned serious. “You know champers makes me horny.”

  Now he rolled his eyes and grinned. “You are terminally horny.”

  Lifting her glass for a toast, she said, “To us.”

  “To you,” he said, their glasses clinking a delicate musical note. “You’ll do great downstate, Mar.”

  She closed her eyes when she sipped the champagne. “Definitely the good stuff.”

  Nantz ate like she was starved.

  At one point she suddenly put her fork on her plate and looked at him. “Grady, I have something very important to ask you.”

  He put down his fork and looked at her. He had no idea what was coming. With Maridly, it could be anything.

  “When I’m on my deathbed, will you pull the plug for me?”

  “You’ll outlive me,” he said, grimacing.

  “I’m serious, Grady. Will you pull the plug or won’t you?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “Right answer. Next question, will you fuck me in the hospital bed before you pull the plug?”

  He started laughing and couldn’t stop.

  They skipped lunch and loaded her truck with her gear and clothes. As always, she was organized in every way; his only job was to mule her gear down to the truck and store it under the cap.

  It was a warm afternoon for fall, in the upper fifties, and they took his truck to the Mosquito Wilderness, parked, and walked down to the Mosquito River. Brook trout were wearing their spawning orange and were gathered on the gravel runs, the females in front of several males that jockeyed and pushed each other around, trying to be first to spew milt on the eggs.

  “Gawd,” she whispered. “There’s sex everywhere we turn!”

  He spread his jacket on the grassy bank and they sat together to drink in the sounds and smells of the forest. “I’ll miss this place,” she said.

  On their way back out of the tract three hours later, they found Candace McCants parked behind his truck, sitting in her state vehicle. McCants was in her fifth year as a CO. She was Korean-born, a muscular five-six, afraid of nothing, and had inordinate common sense. Unlike other young officers she wasn’t a health freak. They found her puffing on a cigarette.

  “Hi Candi,” Nantz greeted her.

  “Hey,” McCants said with a sly grin and a stare at Service. “Afraid I’m not taking care of the Mosquito?”

  Nantz intervened. “I leave for the academy tomorrow,” she said. “Not that it’s the state’s business, but if you insist on being nosy, we were fornicating like animals beside the river. He does it really good,” she added.

  McCants coughed, grinned, and shook her head. “You two are made for each other.”

  Service turned red.

  Nantz laughed. “Philosophically and physiologically, I can assure you that everything fits.”

  Service felt his blush deepen. Both of the women saw his embarrassment and began to laugh together at his discomfort, the sisterhood at work.

  “Why’d you tell her that?” he said when they were in the truck.

  “We did it in my mind,” she said. “Doesn’t that count?”

  Nantz pottered outside the house while Service made dinner. He had put a lot of thought into the meal and began preparations while Newf followed Nantz around outside. Through the kitchen window he watched Maridly throwing sticks, which Newf retrieved, barking for more. Cat sat on the porch looking disgusted at the dog’s suck-up behaviors. Things seemed so perfect at the moment that Service began to wonder if it would last. It never had for him. Maybe life was not meant to be perfect. He certainly didn’t deserve Maridly Nantz, but now that they’d found each other, he wasn’t going to let her go.

  The challenge of a big meal was similar to an investigation. You had to bring several things along on parallel tracks so that they all finished at the same time. He baked a mushroom and Stilton galette, which he would reheat before serving, then made a harvest fruit salad, and started on an oven-braised venison ragout. Once the prelims were done, it would be in the stewpot in the oven for ninety minutes.

  Dessert would be baked apples with Calvados custard sauce, which he would make later in the evening before they went to bed.

  When things were coming together he decanted two bottles of the Armagh, Jim Barry 1998 Shiraz, to breathe and set the table, using Nantz’s china. He mused over the fact that only a few months earlier he’d been using a G.I. mess kit to eat from. When he had moved in with Nantz he had brought virtually nothing but Cat and Newf and some of his gear. He was nearly half a century old and a man without possessions because he had liked it that way. But he also had to admit to himself that he was enjoying Maridly’s things, her comfortable bed, dishes that matched, furniture that fit the contours of their bodies, a lawn, and hot water that never ran out. It occurred to him that he was getting soft and losing his edge, which at the moment seemed irrelevant. Nantz and Newf came in while he was checking the venison, which fell apart under his fork.

  “Mmm, it smells good in here!” she said, grabbing him and kissing him hard. “Will you always be my chef?”

  He put on a disk, The Best of Miss Peggy Lee, and turned up the sound.

  “Is that woman’s voice pure sex or what?” Nantz said. Peggy Lee was one of her favorites.

  When she tasted the wine, her eyes rolled back. “Oh, man,” was all she said. She picked up one of the bottles. “The Armagh. Honey, your piggy bank’s gotta be getting empty. How much?”

 
“It’s not important.”

  “Grady.”

  “One-oh-one.”

  She thought for a minute, then circled the table and threw her arms around him. “Ten-one, the date I start the academy. God, you are such a romantic, baby. Don’t ever change and don’t let the rest of the world know who you really are.”

  They began with the galette, had small portions of acorn squash soup with toasted walnut butter, small harvest fruit salads, and the braised venison. Not much wine remained when they were done.

  After dinner they sat on the couch while Nantz went through her paperwork for the academy for the umpteenth time. “I can’t believe I’m really going,” she said.

  “You’re ready.” He had tried to give her an edge by starting her training as soon as she announced that she had been accepted for the academy. She’d been running and lifting free weights every day. She was a short woman, five-three on her tiptoes, but with large hands, well-developed upper arms and back, and she was powerful. She had the thighs of an athlete and endurance that was remarkable. More important, she was quick.

  He had used a game his father had used with him to develop his hand–eye coordination, tossing colored BBs into the air and yelling a color when he released them. It was her job to grab all of that color that she could, an exercise that most people could never come close to mastering, but she had. In basic defensive tactics, her speed and quick response time served her well.

  Only in her firearms training had he found potential weakness. She handled a shotgun all right, but the forty-caliber SIG Sauer handgun seemed to freeze her. She stuck with it, though, and now she could shoot respectable scores and would be able to avoid rubber gun school, the remedial firearms training that seemed to be the destination of a proportion of female officers. She would face challenges and surprises, but she was ready.

  “I’m going to do my best,” she said. “For us. It would be awful for Grady Service’s woman to disgrace him.”

  “It’s your program, honey. You couldn’t disgrace me if you tried. I seem to do that just fine on my own.”

  She kissed him gently on the cheek. “Are we going to have dessert?”

  He went to prepare the apples and rejoined her while the dessert baked.

  “I’ve got a buzz on,” she said as she started to undress with a gleam in her eye. They finished making love just as the timer buzzed.

  Nantz tasted her apple and sighed. “Almost as good as sex. Almost.”

  In the shower in the morning she said seductively, “Wanna go again?”

  He put both hands up in surrender. “I can’t,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Thank God!” she said, laughing. “If I have to have a pelvic as part of my medical tomorrow I don’t know what the doctors will think! What’s for breakie?”

  “Fried eggs and asparagus, orange juice, and Trenary toast.”

  “No champers?”

  “You have to drive today.”

  “Ever the cop,” she said.

  For lunch he made shrimp and feta cheese pasta and filled a thermos with coffee for her five-hour drive to Tustin. She had been pensive all morning and when he walked her to her truck, she clung to him for a long time. When he looked down he saw tears in her eyes.

  “You can do this,” he said. “You’re ready.”

  She blotted at her tears with the back of her hand and laughed. “Not the academy, you dolt. Us. I can’t stand being apart, I really can’t, Grady. I feel like we’re halves of one person now, joined at the hip.”

  “Wrong location,” he said.

  She punched him lovingly in the arm. “You.”

  “Us,” he said, turning serious. “Us.” No other words would come out.

  She said, “I adore you, Service.” They kissed and hugged tenderly for a long time while Newf sat watching them.

  He stood beside her truck as she started the engine.

  She rolled down the window.

  He said, “I’m proud of you.”

  She looked at him, tears cascading from her eyes, nodded and pulled away, but stopped after a few feet, jumped out and ran back to him, hugging him with such power he almost fell.

  When she got back into the truck again, she stared at him with her focused look and said, “I’m going to drive down to that academy and knock their dicks off.”

  4

  It was his fiftieth birthday and Grady Service was alone, missing Nantz and feeling down. She had been gone nineteen days and it seemed like forever.

  It had been a typical morning in his new job. An e-mail from the director of the Ralph MacMillan Center at Higgins Lake reminded DNR personnel of the meeting facility. Service didn’t blame the guy for trying to keep the center full. Under Bozian, budgets were always at risk. At one time the RAM had been earmarked almost exclusively for DNR use, but DNR budgets had been chopped and the RAM had been forced to look elsewhere for users. Now on rare occasions when DNR personnel needed to use the place, there wasn’t space.

  A half dozen e-mails came in from headquarters in Lansing pointing out deadlines for various reports.

  He had another e-mail from Glen Sheppard, editor of The North Woods Call, asking for the name of a man at Wakely Lake who was developing a new form of bluegill popper.

  An e-mail from Parks and Recreation provided a preliminary report on summer state campground use and explained that the new advance reservation system for camping permits was a success in its first season.

  There had been eight phone calls. He passed a question about deer hunting in the Mosquito to McCants after fighting the temptation to take care of it himself. A woman from Gwinn called to complain about illegal trash dumping on state property. A magistrate from Escanaba called for clarification of a ticket Service had written last spring. Lansing called to say they were forwarding a pile of computer reports of nonresidents who had used false IDs to buy resident hunting and fishing licenses.

  Pure scut work, the whole lot.

  Too damn much time talking on telephones, he told himself. Twenty years on the job and he had been reduced to this. A recent talk with Hoagy Chalk still lingered in his mind. Chalk, the commercial fish specialist assigned to Naubinway on Lake Michigan, had stopped by for a beer a few days after Nantz left for Tustin.

  Having spent many years in open boats on the Great Lakes, Hoagy was always tan. He was a short man, built like a miniature sumo wrestler. He had been in Vietnam as a Navy river rat, been wounded twice, and came home with a Silver Star.

  “You hear about Laurie Aho?” Chalk asked.

  Aho was a retired CO who had covered the Keweenaw for years, a dour Finn who did his job and never had much to say. Aho’s wife claimed they would sometimes go months without passing a word.

  “The cancer got him,” Chalk said. “Another horseblanket into the ground.”

  The little fish specialist didn’t wait for a response. “Guess we’re both getting to that age,” Chalk continued. “I see these old horseblankets going and I think I’ve gotta get out of this shit so I can live a little before I become worm chow.” He took a slug of beer and burped. “I’ve put in my papers, Grady. When I go, you’ll be about the last of the Vietnam guys left,” he announced. “When are you going to hang it up and get a life?”

  Service grinned. “They’ll have to carry me out in a box,” he said.

  Chalk didn’t laugh. “It’s getting tougher out there, Grady. It’s a game for the young officers, not old dinosaurs like us. Hell, those kids look at us like we’re horseblankets.”

  Service had never thought of himself as a dinosaur or a horseblanket. Horseblankets, what the real old-timers were called, worked 24/7 and never stopped chasing a poacher until they had him in court. In those days juries often decided the outcomes and more often than not they let the worst poachers off, fearing retribut
ion if they brought in guilty verdicts, but that didn’t stop the horseblankets from hauling the same perps in over and over. Some of these contests raged on for years and took on legendary status. The real dinosaurs were his father’s contemporaries, the generation of COs who had been through the Second World War and did their jobs without complaint or expectation of better pay, much less promotions.

  “You learn to work smarter,” Service countered.

  “Maybe,” Chalk said. “Right now hanging it up seems the smart thing to do.”

  It had been an unsettling conversation. He had called Maridly that night and talked to her about it.

  “You should hear the way they talk about you down here,” she’d said.

  “I can imagine.” He’d been in and out of hot water throughout his career.

  “The instructors believe in you, Grady. They tell trainees about you, how Grady Service does things.”

  “How will I know when it’s time to retire?” he asked her. He couldn’t imagine it being an arbitrary date on a calendar.

  “You’ll know, honey.”

  He wondered if he would. Was he really the last of the Vietnam guys? It was a disconcerting thought.

  Captain Grant had called Service at the house while he was lifting weights at 6 a.m. and told him he wanted him to move his office to Marquette to be nearer to him. Rationally the decision made sense. His office was a cubicle in the District 4 office in Newberry and he was seldom there. Another change, he thought. Everything was changing around him, people retiring, retirees dying.

  Later Lieutenant Lisette McKower called to wish him happy birthday, saying nothing about his office move, which left him wondering if she knew. McKower was the senior officer in Newberry. Then Candace McCants dropped by unexpectedly with fresh cinnamon rolls from Gerties in Kipling and they drank a pot of coffee.