Harder Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  “Asshole!” She yelled out loud. “I’m coming for you, asshole!”

  She heard her radio and stopped. “Two One Eleven, Central. Carolyn Tivoli says her brother, Thomas Hall Arnheim got out of prison last week. His former brother-in-law, Larry Arena owns a 1990 Dodge Ram, black, but it has no plates and was parked in a field near Valuetown. She never loaned her brother her vehicle. He must’ve stolen the plate, she claims.”

  “Thanks, Central. Have you got a physical description for me?”

  “Six-three, 180, heavily tatted, shaved head, nose posts, multiple earrings, age twenty-five.”

  “Got it Central. What was he in for?”

  “Aggravated assault at age eighteen. The trial results were recently tossed and they let him walk.”

  Fucking great. Thomas Hall Arnheim. Why do these pukes always have so damn many names? His tracks were staying due west through a series of drumlins. She kept her eyes between down and ahead and kept running forward to the side of the tracks, right after left, right after left, right after left, of all the careers I might’ve chosen, right after left, and I picked English? Gawd, girl. Look where that took you, right-left, right-left. I love Shakespeare, love him, that whole bloody prejudiced and screwed up time in human history, right-left-right-left, Elizabeth, the virgin queen, antipathy of a virgin, nobody dared remark on, unlike now when characterization was art made by graffiti specialists in public johns. What did the Old Shepherd say in the Winter’s Tale, left-right-left-right, click light on, okay, still got tracks, why ain’t he bleeding more, right-left-right, yeah the Shepherd, c’mon girl, execute, pound that ground, pound that ground, Shepherd, yeah, okay, “I would there were no age between sixteen and three and-twenty, for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancestry, stealing, fighting, left-right-left right, don’t think tired. Don’t think, run, pursue, catch, punish, get control, Hark you now! Would any hit these boiled brains of nineteen and two and twenty hunt this weather? God yes, Dear Will, if you only knew the facts of now, you might even have written just for this night for what am I but a shepherdess in green, left-right-left-right, breathe, breathe, breaths, how . . . long . . . can . . . this . . . asshole run?

  Wait, slow, trail curling again, almost due north now. Is he trying to circle back? Stupid, dude, stupid.

  “Central, Two Triple One, I haven’t heard backup.”

  “They’re at your vehicle, Triple One.”

  Left-right-left-right, up-down, pound, pound, pound that ground. “We may be circling back toward the vehicles, Central. Tell backup to hold there.”

  “Central clear.”

  Left-right-left-right, free of drumlins now, flattening terrain, open country, a field? Odd and far off, lights. What lights? What the hell? She checked the blood trail and boots, bee-lining for the lights, whatever they were.

  Closer now. Small cabin. Damn. His tracks went to the front door, which was standing open. Rifle at ready, slow your breathing, slow your heart, slow your heart, think peaceful thoughts, think midnight mass and after an orgasm. No, too long since either. Slow your breathing anyway, this is the real deal, not some training exercise.

  She stepped inside, rifle pointed, moving deliberately, found a man and woman of fifty in the living room, a younger woman in her twenties, all of them naked and blue from the cold. They all pointed at the back door.

  The older woman said, “He told us he’d kill all of us if we told the cops where he went.”

  “Not to worry, nobody told me anything.”

  “Are you all right?” the man asked, “you’re soaked and you look awful.”

  She passed out of the house without comment, needed back in the cold before her system tried to shut down, outside, found his path, now due north, arrow straight, no veering. She went back to the house. “What’s due north of your place?”

  “Jacobsen’s Farms. Pigs.”

  “How far?”

  “Three miles,” the man said.

  Back on the follow, keep your nose down, left-right, left-right, boots pounding the icy ground, left-right, getitgetitgetit, I feel no pain, I recognize no pain. I am fresh, I am fresh, left-right, left-right, steady breathing, get it right. Don’t fail me, Willie boy, Honor in one eye and death in the other and I will look on both indignantly. For let the gods so spare as I love the more of honor than I fear death. Yah, good shit, the best, left-right, left-right.

  “Central, we’re now headed for Jacobsen’s farm.”

  “Your status, Triple One?”

  She heard deep concern in the dispatcher’s voice. Palpable worry. “I’m just peachy,” she said over the 800 mhz. Liar, liar. “Triple One clear.”

  “How far?”

  “Three miles.” There was a black layer of huffing gray clouds not ten feet ahead and she saw his rifle coming up and laughed, yelled, “I’m inside your reaction circle, ass-jacket.”

  Bullywick struck the man like a linebacker with a grudge, driving him back and down onto ice which cracked and turned immediately to a nasty smelling sludge, swallowed both of them. I am in hell, but I have him cuffed. She yanks him to his feet and she slaps him from frustration, lights him up with her SureFire, sees that his head and neck are bloody, a bloody shirt stuffed in his shirt neck and people had her by her shoulders, pulling her away and she is yelling breathlessly, “There stands a wretched creature, bruised and burdened with adversity.”

  •••

  Later, stretched out in an EMT truck, IV in a vein in the top of her hand, a bearded guy looking down at her and she says, “Shakespeare or God?”

  “Quite the gap there,” the man says.

  “Not so much. God gives life and the Bard sustains it.”

  “Good point. How do you feel?”

  “I stink,” she said

  “A shower will solve that problem. Is there no quit in you?”

  “What?”

  “Dispatcher says it was two hours from your first call until the deps pulled you off the fucked up tat dude.”

  “Left-right,” she said. “Times a million or two.”

  “We think you should spend the night in the hospital.”

  “Because of that douchebag? That is not happening,” Tamarie Bullywick said quietly, suddenly feeling unusually relaxed. “Did you assholes drug me?”

  “For your own good,” bearded guy said.

  Bullywick said, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, our little life rounded with sleep and now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince.”

  All through the academy cadets had been made to run as far as they could in twelve minutes, at first just in workout clothes and later loaded for bear. It was the most brutal exercise they did and it hurt every time. Instructors recorded how far you ran in the allotted time.

  Two hours, let them beat that. It was her last thought for a while.

  Basket Case

  Sergeant Cashellen Verlaag could not understand why she seemed to attract eccentrics and nut-bags looking to her for their salvation, but here it was, oh four hundred and it had happened again. Verlaag, nearing retirement as a conservation officer, rolled out of bed and into uniform, and went into the kitchen to start coffee with an ancient machine that sounded a lot like a dog eating dry food from a tin bowl.

  “Mom,” a voice said. Fifteen-year-old Maryssa Verlaag, high school senior, dead ringer for her mother. “Another fruitcake?”

  “Could be,” Cash said. “I got a message from Vipsania Apfel. She claims she’s captured six New World Order soldiers in spacesuits.”

  “You should, like write a book,” her daughter said.

  “Who would believe it?”

  “I would.”

  “You don’t count, hon. You’re my daughter.”

  Next into the kitchen shuffled bed-hair hubby Sig, wh
om she called Nazrat, Tarzan backwards. Sig was the opposite of Tarzan: small, physically unimposing, shy, frightened of almost everything, yet the finest man she had ever met and newly retired as an IRS special agent. “What this time?”

  “Vipsania Apfel.”

  “She’s still around here?”

  “Apparently.”

  “That poor woman.”

  Apfel had been a prison guard in Iraq and had blown the whistle on Abu Ghraib, for which she had been beaten and shunned by the US military. Two weeks before shipping home she had been in Baghdad when a suicide bomber ignited her death-belt, killing forty people and wounding Apfel, who lost all the fingers on her left hand.

  The strange woman had shown up in Iron County in 2006 and Verlaag had run across her in a makeshift illegal camp up on the remote East Branch of the Net River, drying two hundred trout, pike, perch, and walleyes.

  “You do know there’s a limit, ma’am?”

  The woman said, “My appetite exceeds all possession limits. The river and woods are my grocery store and like a smart shopper when you find a lot of something in supply you ought to buy as much as you can afford, or in this case as much as you can dry and preserve for later.”

  Verlaag saw the deformed left hand right away, along with significant facial scarring. Apfel wore a sort of buzz cut, which hid nothing, her skin dark from living rough and in the elements. “How long’s this camp been here?”

  “For as long as I have needed it.”

  “You know you need to have a permit and the limit to camping in a spot is two weeks?”

  “There are too many rules in the world for people to follow and some people don’t follow any rules at all, ever.”

  “Rules have a purpose.”

  “To remind us that we are peons.”

  Verlaag laughed. “Can’t disagree with that. How long are you here?”

  “It is not allowed?” the woman asked.

  “It is, I’m just wondering how long you’re here.”

  “Not long here, I have my own places in the hills far away from the winds and the storms.”

  “You live outside year-round?”

  “Yes, of course, in preparation.”

  “For?”

  “The New World Order, One World Government, black helicopters, they are coming for us. All of us.”

  Conspiracy nut. “You think they won’t find you out here?”

  The woman smiled and showed a sly twinkle in her eye. “You didn’t.”

  “Until now,” Verlaag pointed out, which put the woman into a heavy sulk.

  Verlaag could sense the woman was hurting deeply and in some ways not even close to being in touch with reality. “You need to cut back on fish numbers and move your campsite every two weeks. Please?”

  “You will arrest and incarcerate me, take off my clothes and piss in my face and make me pose for pictures for your friends to laugh at.”

  Verlaag was taken aback. “What?”

  “God intends to punish me.”

  “For what?”

  “Cum paganis satanas, the devil is with the pagans,” the woman said, looking off into the distance. “Abu Ghraib.”

  “You were there?”

  “I blew the whistle.”

  “God should reward you.”

  “I could have and should have made it public much sooner.”

  “But you did it, that’s what matters.”

  “I brought dishonor to my brother and sister soldiers.”

  “Hey,” Verlaag said, “they brought that on themselves.”

  “They will come to get me one day, but they won’t find me,” Vipsania Apfel whispered. “Nobody will find me.”

  It had been a strange encounter, one of many over Verlaag’s career, and she had never seen the woman again, though she heard occasional reports of a hermit woman all across the north county hill country.

  “What’s she want?” Sig asked. “And do you want your brekkie?”

  “Peach pancakes in the microwave. I’ll take them and a thermos of coffee on the fly.”

  “Is this an emergency, then?” her husband asked.

  “I haven’t talked to this woman in six years and she calls me out of the blue. I’d say yah, it’s an emergency.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She gave me GPS coordinates.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It should be enough,” Verlaag said.

  “You want company, Mom?”

  “You have school,” she told her daughter.

  “Don’t be a grouch. I just thought my mumsy might like company.”

  “Thank you. I don’t.”

  “What exactly does the woman want?” Sig asked.

  “She wants me to take custody of six Nazis who are soldiers in the New World Order. In spacesuits. All women.”

  “Mom, that’s like crazy,” her daughter remarked.

  “Not to her, it’s not,” Cash said.

  “How did she call from the woods?” Sig asked.

  “Superpowers,” their daughter interjected. “Maybe she’s a superhero hiding from the forces of evil.”

  “Apparently Apfel is not the only person around here who is out of touch with reality.”

  “Mom, that hurts my feelings.”

  Verlaag kissed her husband and whispered hungrily, “Nazrat.”

  Sig grunted, “Bundolo! Kreegah!”

  “Attaboy, don’t lose that thought.”

  “You two are totally bogue,” their daughter said disgustedly.

  “Bogue’s still in vogue?” Cash asked.

  “GOMB, YOLO, Mommy-O.”

  “This from my daughter who struggles with French?”

  “What it is, Mater mein.”

  Verlaag loaded her four-wheeler into the bed of her Silverado, stopped in Crystal Falls to fill her fuel tank, set GPS coordinates into her Automatic Vehicle Locator system, and her dashboard Garmin GPS, and headed north. “Central, DNR One One Fifty is in service.”

  •••

  Working her way north she set her 800 mhz radio to a Lansing DNR frequency. “Station Twenty, One, One Fifty is in service. Anything shaking?”

  “Negative, One One Fifty, Twenty clear.”

  “DNR One One Fifty, Central.”

  “One, One Fifty.”

  “We’ve just had a report from the Feds of a lost balloon, something to do with an around-the-world race, the balloon in question last seen over Minnesota.”

  “And?” Verlaag said.

  “Feds say it could be down somewhere in the northwest county. They have some sort of GPS tracking unit aloft, and this is where they think they lost the signal.”

  “Coordinates?”

  “BOLO only at this point.”

  “What’s this balloon look like?”

  “Three hundred feet of Mylar holding up an insulated, pressurized gondola, crew of six.”

  “Pressurized. Does that mean regular clothing or special?”

  “Spacesuits the alert says. With helmets.”

  Verlaag laughed. Six women in spacesuits. “Would this be an around-the-world race for women balloonists?”

  “It would. How did you know, One, One Fifty?”

  “Central, I think I’m on my way to fetch them as we talk. I’ll update her status later. Want my destination start coordinates? I’ll have to leave the truck and take the four-wheeler.”

  “Ready to copy coordinates, One, One Fifty?”

  Verlaag passed the numbers and said, “One, One Fifty clear.”

  “Good hunting, One, One Fifty. Central clear.”

  Around the world for women only? I love this planet a world where even women can partake in totally meaningless whimsical activities.

  Central dispat
ch was on the horn again thirty minutes later. “One, One Fifty, Central. Homeland Security is dispatching choppers and personnel to the target coordinates.”

  Homeland Security? Shit. “Negative Central, negative. Tell them to standby and wait until I verify this thing. Right now it’s all tentative, copy?”

  “We’ll tell them, Central clear.”

  Homeland Security helicopters? This will send Vipsania right off the deep end.

  After snaking her way across the north county’s two-tracks into the northwest wilderness, Verlaag pulled over and perused maps. The coordinates were right on the line with south Houghton County, about three miles south of a landmark called Finnlander Ridge, and right on the Ontonagon-Iron County line, an area COs called the tricounty corner, which was nasty, mostly vertical country. Her best bet looked like an old tote road snaking off Forest Highway 4500. Is this where Apfel’s been all these years? It was an area far from anything that might even be loosely construed as civilization.

  “Station Twenty, One One Fifty will be out on my four-wheeler and away from my vehicle.”

  “One, One Fifty, be advised Homeland Security is alerting us to a possible border violation with suspects in northwest Iron County.”

  Border violation? Good God! “Negative, negative, is your El-Tee in?”

  “Affirmative.”

  A calm male voice came across the radio, “One One Fifty, Twenty One Hundred.” The RAP room supervisor had been a topnotch field CO, and was also a military combat vet.

  “Twenty, One Hundred, can you get Homeland to stand down? I had a call from someone in that area claiming she has contact with a crew of six Germans and a balloon. I’m headed there now. The informant is hinky—a conspiracy nut. Choppers will spook her at best and God knows what at worst.”