Buckular Dystrophy

by Joseph Heywood

  “Don’t know. Have to ask Arletta. She say something about three hundred, but all I heard was number, not no details.”

  “Okay, what besides the obvious do you reap from this deal?”

  “She give me forty dollar per hunter. They buy state license, den I give damage doe permit, which ’pose to be only for da does, but we let da sports shoot bucks and pay by size. One eighty plus costs three K.”

  “You have one eighties on this land?”

  “Nah, but most hunters dumb as bag of rocks, got roses in their eyeballs.”

  “Your cut is forty dollars on a thousand-dollar kill?”

  “I get 10 percent on big ones.”

  “Which you’ve never actually collected, because there are no bucks in that class right around here.”

  Coppish grinned. “See, all you got to do is mention one eighty and dose guys get the tunnel vision, hunt on hope not facts.”

  Caveat emptor at its most elemental.

  Allerdyce said, “Got look for crap when youse buy shit.”

  “Now you know everything,” Coppish said. “We have a deal?”

  “One more thing. Tell me about what you’ve taught Ingalls about how to start fires?”

  Coppish looked dumbfounded. “Why I’d do dat?

  Jesus, am I wrong on this? Is all this here just deer and money greed? Shit. Gut says more, but what and how?

  Service patted his shirt for smokes. Pack must be in the truck. “Let me have one of my smokes, partner.” He’d given the pack to Allerdyce to prevent indulging himself. This way he had to ask if he wanted to smoke.

  Allerdyce grimaced and handed the cigarette to him; Service fished one out, lit up, and stared at the pack for a long time, not sure why. There was a blue state tax stamp on the bottom of the pack.

  Coppish said, “Was all of it her idea. My land, her idea.”

  “Where’s the money go?” Service asked.

  “Some save-dogs t’ing. Were me, I’d give all damn dogs to Chinamen, tell ’em enjoy the meat.”

  “Chuck-nuck,” Allerdyce said, but Service didn’t quite hear the exchange. He was still focused on the Marlboro pack. What the hell is it with these ciggies?

  “You’ll work with me on this?” Coppish asked with hope in his voice.

  “The woman pay you with cash or check?” Service asked, breaking his focus on the cigarette pack.

  “Only cash.”

  “You get receipts?”

  “For this? No way.”

  “You bank the cash?”

  “Govmen’ can watch bank. I got a safe.”

  “Show me?”

  “Got warrant?”

  Service flicked away the cigarette. “We can get one pretty damn fast and get the whole thing in the media too.” He dialed the Dickinson County magistrate, explained who he was with, and was told he was being put through to Judge Cindra Csargo.

  “Don’t know her.”

  “Elected last year; good judge for your lot. She hunts and fishes.”

  “Grady Service,” the judge greeted him. “Tell me what you told the magistrate.”

  He laid it out as succinctly as he could.

  She asked, “You want all buildings on the grounds, all vehicles, and everything that could be related in any way? That work for you?”

  “Might be a little wide, Your Honor.”

  “You do your job and I’ll do mine. A deputy will bring the writ to you in thirty minutes.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  “No, thank you, officer. If you need more, call me directly. I hate cheats.” She gave him phone numbers for home and the court. “Let me know how much cash is in that safe,” she ended.

  He stared at Coppish. “Verbal permission granted, but we’re waiting for the dep to get here with the actual warrant. Unless you voluntarily want to crack open the safe for us and show us what’s in there.”

  “Thousand in cash and ten permits. You gonna take everything?”

  “No. I want you to keep working with Ingalls. Tell me the truth. How many deer have been shot on this property this fall?”

  “Thirty-five mebbe.”

  “All bucks?”

  “That would be stupid management. We make clients shoot one doe for a hundred dollars before they can even look at a buck. And they pay as soon as they pull the trigger.”

  The crop damage program dated back to 1992 or 1993, but Service couldn’t remember exactly when, and it applied more to downstate than above the bridge. The deer herd had grown from a half million in 1971 to more than two million in 1989, spurred on by light winters. The result had been a disaster for some farms and orchards but a bonanza for hunters.

  Coppish sighed loudly.

  “Where exactly does the Peaveyhouse kid work?” Service asked.

  “Cinche’s Bait and Bottles in Gwinn.”

  “Don’t call him or tell anyone we’ve been here.”

  “I tell Arletta, she’ll cut off my balls.”

  “We wouldn’t want that to happen,” Service said.

  “Got mouse in pocket?” Allerdyce asked with a cackle.

  Limpy and Coppish reminded him of battle-scarred alley cats, survivors, the sort of men you might kill but couldn’t break.

  That his partner claimed to have changed lay somewhere between a miracle and a clever image. He still couldn’t decide which.

  “What now?” Allerdyce asked as they headed for the truck. “Deputy bringin’ search warrant.”

  “We’ll get him on the horn, tell him to hold it for later—if we need it. For now, let’s cruise, find a camp to sit on.”

  “You believe what Teddy say about not teaching woman no fire stuff?”

  Oddly enough, he did, and he couldn’t yet say why.

  • • •

  They did not have to drive far. They moved up Kate’s Grade again to a twotrack he’d noticed earlier. He turned down it and drove a half mile along a ridge road that ended in a logged-over opening with an old sign: “Gleeson Creek Wild Man Camp: Invitation Only.” There were three large army surplus wall tents, nine extended-cab pickups, three automobiles, five enclosed ORV trailers, and piles of empty beer cans gleaming in the sinking light. ORV trails spidered out of the camp center, all of them led onto property where ORVs were not allowed to operate.

  “I t’ink dis gone be busy,” Allerdyce said.

  Goat rodeo, Service thought. He hoped the hunters would trickle back but knew they had to be ready for a jam. “How many loaded guns on ORVs?” he asked his partner.

  “Camp like dis? Ever’ damn one of ’em. D’amateurs never speck no wardens come.”

  “And professionals?”

  “Dose jamokes all know just matter of time ’fore game warden pinches dem. Dey pay fine, don’t make no fuss; know it just cost of do business, eh?”

  CHAPTER 32

  Gleeson Creek, Marquette County

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19

  They walked the area separately and found nobody in the camp. Service weighed their options and decided to wait in the middle of the camp. When the hunters returned, he and Limpy would let them come all the way in before stepping out on them.

  “Here’s the routine,” he told Allerdyce. “Shine your flashlight right in their eyes. Say, ‘DNR. Is your weapon unloaded?’ No matter what they answer, you tell them to unzip the case and show you. If you find an uncased gun, make sure it’s unloaded right away and take it with their ID and tags. If you find a loaded gun in a case, same thing. Unload it, take the gun, and get their ID and tags. Keep it all together. Pick up ammo from unloading, and put it with the weapon. Send those who had loaded weapons to a particular area to wait.” Service pointed. “Over there. I’ll send mine to the same place.”

  He took Allerdyce through all the possibilities they might encounter: loaded guns on vehicles or in trucks, no orange, no helmets, no vehicle registrations, concealed weapons without carry permits, no hunting licenses—all the many permutations of waiting for a large number of hunters t
o return to camp after dark. Having briefed his partner, there was nothing left to do but listen, watch for lights, and wait. They were already well after legal shooting hours.

  “Relax, Sonny. Youse t’ink I ain’t been shaked down like ’is ’fore?”

  “This isn’t a shakedown.”

  “Feel like dat when youse on udder side. We check warrants on dese jamokes?”

  “When we run their licenses and tags. All of this is gonna take time. When you first make the stop, give them a few seconds to declare if they’re carrying concealed. If they have a concealed handgun and no permit, take it, unload it, and start a pile. If they have a permit and declare they’re carrying and they aren’t loaded, they’re good to go. We need to get all loaded weapons out of the equation as quickly and safely as possible.”

  “What if dey piss-moan.”

  “Let ’em sing. They got a problem with the laws, we’re the wrong people to talk to. They need to talk to lawmakers. All we do is enforce laws, even the ones we don’t agree with. We don’t like doing that we can resign.”

  “Might could be fiffy, sissy pipples wit’ dis mob,” Allerdyce pointed out.

  Still no late shots, or ORV lights or sounds. So far, so good. Like his partner, he had also done the rough math and knew if this crowd was really large, they were going to be forced to call extra help. He decided to plan for the worst. He got on the radio and began checking on the whereabouts of other officers. If they weren’t tied up, he asked them to move his way, just in case. This was standard operating procedure.

  Service called Torvay. “One, One Forty, Twenty-Five Fourteen on D-One.

  “You need something, Fourteen?”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Camp off the Floodwood Road.”

  “We’re sitting on a gaggle at the Gleeson Creek turnaround. We might have a goat rodeo in the making. Your camp a hot one?”

  “Nope; you want me to start heading that way?”

  “Be good; Fourteen clear.”

  “Fourteen, this is One, One Forty-Seven. I copy, also starting your way. I’m not far, up on the Little West Road.” One Forty-Seven was CO Angie Paul, one of the newest officers in the district and rock solid in all aspects of the work, especially dealing with the public. If needed, she’d be the one to keep the peace among the barbarians.

  Service said, “This is Fourteen. Both of you stand off until we get our traffic stacked, and stopped. I’ll let you know with the signal ‘George.’ Come in with lights and music.”

  “One, One Forty-Seven clear.”

  “One, One Forty clear.”

  “Dis is keen,” Allerdyce said.

  “Keen? Nobody uses that word anymore.”

  “Excitin’; dat better?”

  “Thought you’d been through this stuff before,” he whispered to his partner.

  “Alone, not in no damn buffalo herd. I hate crowds, and dis bunch gone be grumpy.”

  “An assertion based on what?”

  “Ain’t no bucks hangin’ on dere buck pole, and we in fiff day of season. Wah, dese boys got no clue how hunt, and dey be grumpy.” Service weighed the information. They might already have moved animals to a processor, but it had been cold and there was no reason to hurry. Old-time woodsmen liked for their meat to hang for a while before butchering. He scuffed the snow under the buck pole, found nothing, no blood, no hair. Nope, nothing shot here yet.

  As he heard the sounds of the first vehicle approaching, Service stopped and said into his radio, “George.” He went about his business, knowing the cavalry was bearing down.

  • • •

  The ultimate body count, when all was said and done, was sixty-one people, at least ten of them from a nearby camp who decided to stop by to visit, commiserate, and share beers. Given sheer numbers, the rodeo’s resolution had been pretty civilized and subdued, Service thought. There were some yappers, which was to be expected. Every group had them, but overall the hunters had chosen discretion over bombast; and when Torvay and Paul pulled in all lit up, the buzzing crowd went silent.

  Service hoped all the flashing lights wouldn’t trigger any epileptic seizures.

  Sixty-one hunters total; fifty-nine loaded firearms on or in vehicles, including all the ORVs and three pickup trucks and all their passengers. There were forty concealed carry permits for the sixty-one hunters, almost all of them packing, and only two adhered to the law by immediately declaring they were carrying and had a permit. Three had concealed pistols but no permits. Magically, there were no outstanding warrants in the crowd, and no felons. Service had his colleagues split all the tickets to speed up the festivities. He confiscated the pistols from the three without carry permits.

  There was not a single deer, and all the hunters were complaining about not seeing deer. A few claimed to have seen some wolves, which caused some of them to double up and triple up in blinds for safety. Fools.

  All things considered, Grady Service felt at peace. The sheer number of tickets didn’t sit well with him, and he knew his young sarge would be strutting like a rooster with his first hen. Sixty-eight tickets from one camp; fifty-nine loaded weapons and more. And they had given thirty-five formal warnings as well.

  Business finally completed, the COs withdrew several miles and parked their trucks. This season was turning out to be remarkable: Knezevich, the Wisconsin big buck shooter; Chern; the damn Peaveyhouses; Arletta Ingalls and her deal at her place, plus her deer-for-bucks scam with firebug Teddy Coppish. It was beyond imagination, so much in the first full five days, and there were still eleven days remaining. This sort of mass encounter might boggle even the most fertile imaginations, but group things like this were not uncommon. The number of people here was high, but the percent of violations tonight was not even a little surprising.

  Predictably, Wooten showed up, having seen the trucks gathered on his Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL). The young sergeant was on him immediately to get his paperwork in. “Tomorrow, right? Tomorrow? It needs to be tomorrow, or all the paperwork will clog up the court.”

  Service said. “We’ll turn in the paper work in chunks, not all at once, and this will keep the court docket from clogging up.”

  “What’s going on with that Croatian you got? Do you have any idea how big an arrest that was? Huge, ginormous, a miracle.”

  “Del Olmo and Grinda told me that. I never heard of the guy.”

  “But everyone knows about the Croatian,” Wooten said excitedly.

  “Not me.”

  “Iron County officers have been after him for years and years.”

  “Yah, well.”

  Service yelled to the other COs and nudged his partner. “Been instructive, sports fans, but this old fella and me need to head for home. We need our beauty sleep.”

  “It okay break contact wit youse’s guys?”

  “We’re good.”

  “Where’re the smokes?” Service asked.

  Allerdyce dug around and found a pack. “We need stop, get more.”

  “No problem,” he said, looking at the pack as he lit a smoke.

  “All sergeants is dicks,” Allerdyce offered.

  “Hey, I was a sergeant.”

  “Not long enough make youse a dick.”

  “I’ll consider that a compliment.”

  “Din’t know youse was needy kind.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Serious, needy make you look pa-tetic, and nothin’ knock down man’s dauber more den pa-tetic legend.”

  “Did you catch what Teddy said when I asked him about teaching Ingalls to make fire?”

  “I heard. He sound s’prised.”

  “You buy it?”

  “Don’t matter what I t’ink. Youse da man.”

  “I think I believe him. You want to pick our route home?”

  Allerdyce pointed. “That away, Mr. Sulu.”

  “Never knew you were a Trekkie.”

  “Lots youse don’t know. Youse t’ink dat Sulu is girl, Sue and Lu? Or guy, or one
dem cut-paste pipples?”

  “Cut-paste?”

  “Yah, transenders. God put here one way, does cut-paste make nudder way.”

  “You dwell on such things, do you?”

  “Dawn to dusk.”

  “It’s neither right now.”

  “An’ I ain’t t’inkin’ on night-shooters and transenders.”

  “Focus, partner.”

  “Wah.”

  The deer season was going pretty well, especially for them. But there had been two burns on his property, and he was no closer to solving those. Until he did, he was worried about Friday. He’d thought it was Ingalls behind the fires, but now he wasn’t sure that was the right road.

  CHAPTER 33

  Stalling Road, Dickinson County

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20

  When you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll, and the camp roundup had given him a large burst of adrenaline. How could they go straight home when they were both still geeked up?

  There was almost no snow on the roads as they moved eastward. It had either melted off, been worn off by vehicular traffic, or not that much had fallen here. People who didn’t live in snow country never understood the randomness of it, or the vast number of microclimates that dotted the Upper Peninsula and could make weather drastically different only five miles from where you were.

  Service pulled off Stalling Road onto a logging road through an area that had been selectively cut two or three years ago and was just beginning to provide a lot of new browse for animals. The magic formula: Browse in fields was bait for deer, and deer browsing in fields were bait for violators. They drove dark, and it felt as comfortable and familiar as day driving after so many decades of running without lights. All their windows were down. Allerdyce rode with his eyes shut, and Service knew his partner was focusing everything into his hearing. As they moved along, there was a snap where no snap should have been; he stopped the truck and looked over at Limpy.

  “I hearded it,” the old man said; he cracked open his door and slid outside. Service saw a dim red glow behind the truck, a small red penlight in his partner’s hand. He was gone two minutes max, slid back into the truck, whispered. “Da get-guy out fetchin’. Two-stick set, one dis side make da noise, one udder side to mark spot. I put new stick where we broke old one.”