Running Dark

by Joseph Heywood

“You sure this thing will handle it?” she asked.

  “You should have seen my old one,” he said.

  She smiled. “I have.”

  His mouth hung open. “You know where the Rupp is?”

  She nodded. “They think of it as a trophy. They get drunk and urinate on it.”

  Service cringed. Rats. When they got to the remains of the building, he helped her inside, lit a kerosene lantern, and ignited a fire between some rocks on the stone floor. He put a small iron grill over the fire and put on the coffeepot. He had rigged a tarp to make a lean-to inside the ruins, and set it up so that they and the fire would be protected from snow falling through the open roof.

  “This seems extreme,” she said.

  “Coming into the Garden is extreme. I wanted to make sure that you weren’t followed and that we’d have complete privacy.”

  He had balsam boughs stacked on the floor, covered with a canvas tarp. Two sleeping bags were rolled up on the tarp. He didn’t expect to spend the night, but winter weather was fickle and it paid to be prepared.

  He had trapped two snowshoe hares the day before in the swamp behind the Airstream, and now he put the meat on a metal grate over the fire and began to grill them.

  Lasurm watched him go about his tasks, sipped her coffee, and remained silent.

  “You’re thinking about living rough in the Garden?” she asked.

  “There may be a couple of days when I have to,” he said. “There’s a lot of territory down there and I’ve got to cover it on foot. I thought about snowshoes or skis, but I don’t want tracks. It’s easier to cover footprints.”

  “There are several places down there where you can hole up,” she said. “Did you bring maps?”

  She used a pencil to mark the places and described them to him. “You’re going to work at night?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “This place makes me feel uneasy,” Lasurm said, looking around the abandoned, decaying structure.

  He related the story his father had told him years before, and after he stopped talking, she said, “I feel what the Indians feel, don’t you?”

  “No,” he said, pouring coffee for her.

  “You don’t know how to read me,” she said as he turned the cooking hares with his knife. She held up her leg and wiggled her boot. “I can’t say I miss the other one,” she said. “It’s more of an inconvenience than anything. Life is about managing inconvenience . . . would you agree?”

  “I never thought about it.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “I would think that game wardens prefer to swim in either black or white water. For you people, the ambiguity of gray is the real inconvenience.”

  “It’s not that simple,” he said.

  “I’m sure you find gray very frustrating,” she said.

  “What is it that brings out your preachy side?” he asked.

  She laughed. “You don’t need a church to be spiritual.”

  “Like the Indians?”

  “Anywhere was their church, and I’m not preachy. I’m simply comfortable in my own beliefs.”

  “Such as?”

  “Lots of things churchgoing Christians would not agree with.”

  He sensed she was pressing him to ask for more, but he had his own agenda. “You’re gonna run a lot of risk with me in the Garden,” he said.

  “I don’t fear risks,” she said, “but if you’re going to be out nights, you’re going to have to be in by certain hours, or stay out all the next day. People in the Garden aren’t nosy so much as observant, and what they see, they talk about. They say information can move from one end of the peninsula to the other faster than a lightning bolt. We call it Garden speed.”

  Where was she going with this?

  “For all practical purposes, my house is on Burn’t Bluff. I’m two and a half miles from Fayette and the Port Bar, which is a short walk from the state park,” she said. “It’s four miles south to Fairport and seven miles north from my place to Garden.” She drew pencil lines on the map to show him. “If you get caught out, there are several places where you can lay over for the day.” Again, she marked the places on the map and described each one to him.

  If nothing else, Lasurm was thorough.

  “Did you kill people in Vietnam?” she asked.

  “Vietnam is in the past,” he said. Where was she going now?

  “We only left there last year and then with our tails between our legs,” she said. “How does the U.S. lose a war to rice growers?”

  “We didn’t lose,” he countered.

  “Perhaps not on the battlefield,” she said. “But there was no true political commitment or mobilization of national will, and wars are not all won and lost on battlefields. They sent you over there and you fought and you were on your own with not a lot of support from back home.”

  “You’re not really talking about Vietnam,” he said, watching her eyes and trying to read the tone in her voice.

  “What’s Lansing’s commitment to the Garden?” she said. “They send you people in to enforce what amounts to an administrative rule and give you no tools. Why? Is Lake Michigan more important than Lake Superior or Lake Huron?”

  “What are you driving at?” he asked.

  “If you check around the government I think you’ll find that each salmon or trout taken in state waters by a sportfisherman represents about eighty dollars to the state economy. That same fish from a commercial license brings the state a buck and a quarter.”

  “Those numbers are news to me.” Astonishing news.

  “It’s news to a lot of people,” she said, “and if the numbers aren’t a hundred percent accurate, they certainly reflect the magnitude of the ratio. If you’re Lansing, why revitalize commercial fishing? There’s a lot more money to be made boosting sportfishing.”

  He couldn’t dispute her logic, and wondered why he’d never heard such data before.

  “Sportfishing is more important than commercial fishing for the state economy, and tourism is our second-leading business. The DNR planted Pacific salmon to eat the alewives and cut down on the summer die-offs, which stunk up beaches and put off tourists. I doubt they foresaw the economic windfall,” Lasurm said. “Do you know about Jondreau?”

  He did. “A L’Anse Chippewa,” he said. “We were briefed on the case during training. COs busted him ten years ago for not having proper safety equipment on his boat and he fought the ticket.”

  She nodded. “It happened in 1965,” she said. “The lower court dismissed his case, but he took it to the state supreme court, which found in his favor. This had limited impact in terms of tribal rights, but it helped the tribes see that the courts could be useful. More important is Albert ‘Big Abe’ LeBlanc,” she said. “LeBlanc is a Bay Mills Chippewa. He fished in a closed area during a closed period, and when he was arrested, U.P. Legal Services helped him fight it. You know—UPLS?” she said, lifting an eyebrow.

  He shrugged; he’d never heard of it before. LeBlanc had been arrested while he was in the Newberry district, and a lot of the officers had bitched that it could lead to Indians fishing and hunting whenever and wherever they wanted. There had also been a lot of national publicity and heated editorials about the case. Attalienti’s secretary was named LeBlanc. Was she tribal, a relative of Big Abe?

  “Don’t they teach you people anything in your training? U.P. Legal Services was created by Odd Hegstrom. What we have now is a federal case, U.S. versus the State of Michigan, and in all likelihood the feds will uphold treaty rights as they now interpret them. The LeBlanc case started last year, but there’s no way it will come to trial for another two or three years, and it could be ten years before it all gets settled.”

  “And then?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a crystal ball,”
she said, “but what if the state eventually buys out all those people who still had valid commercial licenses for Lakes Michigan and Huron and lets only the Indians have all of Superior’s waters and certain parts of the other Great Lakes?”

  “That seems like a reach,” he said. But the fewer licenses in effect when this happened, the less the state would have to pay out, and there was little doubt that Order Seventeen was aimed at reducing the number of licenses. Everybody in law enforcement had assumed this had been done to revitalize commercial fishing in Lake Michigan, protecting the commercial fishermen from themselves in the short term to improve their long-term interests—but what if they were all missing the real intent?

  “Talk to your people and see what they have to say,” she said. “It certainly makes for an interesting what-if, eh?”

  It did; and ten years fit the time frame Hegstrom was alleged to have given the Garden commercial fishermen. If she was right, Order Seventeen was the preparatory move to boost sportfishing in Lake Michigan and remove white commercial fishermen. If those fishermen had ten years left to make money, they were going to keep violating, and to hell with what Lansing said. After a moment he concluded that if they were going to violate, they’d try to do it in such a way so as to not jeopardize their licenses. This crude analysis also supported Len Stone’s contention that the whole Garden situation was driven by money. Lasurm knew one helluva lot, but he couldn’t just take her word for it. He needed to probe Lansing and find out what was going on. If he could just figure out how.

  When the meat was done, he cut portions and put them on military mess plates and gave Lasurm salt and pepper. They ate quietly.

  “There’s something about meat grilled outdoors,” she said.

  After their meal, they talked more about logistics while he was in the Garden, and he told her he was aiming for arrival on February 14, so long as the weather was bad. If not, he’d push it back twenty-four hours, or until a time that it got bad.

  “You’re coming in bad weather?” she said.

  “Anything short of a Big Blue Norther,” he said.

  “You really are an interesting man,” she said.

  “Last time we met, you walked out when I showed you the mug shot,” he said.

  “The girl in that photograph is twenty-two. She is my daughter, and she’s a junkie.”

  “She’s the real reason you came to us,” he said.

  “Too bloody late,” she said. “For her.”

  “Who got Hegstrom to take her case?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I can guess. We’ll talk more when you come to the Garden.”

  It was a less than satisfying answer, but he told himself it would have to suffice.

  19

  LANSING, FEBRUARY 10, 1976

  “If the state owns it, Jumping Bill manages it.”

  A Detroit Free Press columnist had once written that finding out what went on inside state government in the capital was akin to going to the moon: a helluva challenging journey to a destination without air, water, logic, or significant gravity. Michigan’s elected legislators were notorious paradoxically for ferocious independence and blind party loyalty. But even some of the most popular elected officials were often ignorant of the engine that ultimately drove the governmental machine.

  One night Service’s old man had come home with a friend, both of them soused and stumbling around like the earth was on gimbals. “Son, this is the most powerful man in Lansing.”

  Service remembered his first impression of Bill Fahey: five feet tall and equally wide, with a thick red nose and diaphanous gray angel hair that seemed to grow in clumps. The little man had grinned and mumbled, “Geez oh Pete, da game warden speaketh truth!”

  “Jumping Bill” Fahey held the official title of state properties manager, a job he had held since 1947. “If the state owns it, Jumping Bill manages it,” his father explained. “He’s the state’s landlord.”

  Service had thought about this some and never quite understood how someone in such a nondescript position could be so powerful; he wrote it off to his father’s sense of hyperbole and too much alcohol in both men.

  Jumping Bill came around regularly after that, and Service eventually discovered that they had become pals after his old man wrote the man a ticket for shooting a deer ten minutes after shooting hours had ended, and Fahey had paid his ticket without bellyaching. Out of this unusual meeting, a friendship was born. Fahey was originally from Gladstone, and still had a hunting camp north of Rapid River. One time Service had queried the old man about his other friends and discovered that his father had written tickets on every one of them, usually after they had become friends.

  One morning Service got out of bed to find his father and Fahey drunk on the kitchen floor, a stringer of gutted and dessicated brook trout between them. Service had washed the trout, rolled them in cornmeal, and fried them. The smell brought the drunks back to life, and when they crawled into chairs, he served them trout for breakfast, setting a bottle of Jack Daniel’s between them.

  When his father died, the governor had attended the funeral and had heaped praise on the officer who had been drinking on duty and stepped in front of a truck. Service never doubted that Bill Fahey had somehow engineered the governor’s appearance, and it was then that he began to suspect that Fahey’s power was something more than mere drunk-talk.

  When Service graduated from the Michigan State Police Academy, Fahey showed up for the ceremony, red-faced and mumbling, stinking of gin, food stains on his twenty-year-old tie. He’d not seen or talked to Fahey since his father’s funeral, and was surprised to see him. He was even more surprised to see Colonel Edgar Browning Proctor, the top Troop in the state, fawn all over the little Yooper, who rarely uttered a complete—much less coherent—sentence.

  Fahey pumped his hand, grinning and slurring, “Geez oh Pete.”

  After the ceremony, Proctor (who was called EBP behind his back—for “extra big prick”) had pulled Service aside.

  “You’re a friend of Fahey’s?”

  “My dad was.”

  “Your father?”

  “Frank Service.”

  Proctor had gaped at him. “You’re Ironfist Service’s son? I didn’t know,” the state police commander said. “I was post commander in Iron Mountain, and I knew your dad. If you’re half the cop your father was, I’m glad we’ve got you in the Troops.”

  Fahey told him after the graduation party to look him up if he ever needed anything.

  Until now there had been no reason.

  Fahey answered his own phone. “Properties, Fahey.”

  “Mister Fahey, it’s Grady Service.”

  “Geez oh Pete,” Fahey said. “How does it feel to ramrod the Mosquito?”

  “Good,” Service said. Had his father’s friend been keeping track of him?

  “Geez, you sound good,” Fahey said. “What can I do youse for?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about something,” Service said.

  “Not on the phone,” Fahey said. “Face-to-face. You comin’ down to Lansing soon?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Geez oh Pete, I’d better fix dat, eh? You’ll get a call, okay?”

  Two hours later Attalienti telephoned. “You’re going to Lansing tomorrow,” the acting captain said.

  “I am?”

  “Metrovich just called me. The director has requested you as our liaison with SPO on a special project.”

  “SPO?”

  “State Properties Office.”

  The current director of the DNR was John “Jungle Jack” Curry, who had come to Lansing in 1967 from Alaska where he had been the number-two man with Alaska Fish & Game. The Michigan salmon program was attributed to the director, and officers told Service that even Curry was caught by surprise at the p
rogram’s success. The salmon had been planted with no firm idea of whether they would survive or not. The program’s main goal was to reduce alewife overpopulation. It was also common knowledge that Curry had not shown a lot of concern about the Garden situation.

  “Why me?”

  “SPO has decided to conduct some kind of real estate and asset audit, and the director wants someone to run interference. Metrovich got the impression that State Property asked for you by name, and, if so, Jungle Jack’s not one to buck the flow, so you’re going. The request is highly irregular and Cosmo and Curry both have their antennae quivering with suspicion. I’m sure Curry doesn’t want some dirt-boot CO dealing with another agency, but he’s too savvy to cross swords with the property kingpin. You’re to meet a man named Fahey at Lou Coomes restaurant in north Lansing at noon tomorrow. Fahey’s the director of State Properties. I were you, I’d head down there tonight. The weather from the bridge down to Grayling can get ugly. After your meeting you are to report to Curry and Metrovich.”

  Service started to laugh and stopped when he realized that Fahey’s little exercise in muscle might just have earned him a couple of enemies in his own department. “Goddamn Lansing,” he said out loud.

  The restaurant was not far off US 127 and had a towering neon sign that looked like the gaudy trail of a comet. The restaurant was filled with men in dark suits.

  The maître d’ eyed Service’s uniform and said, “This way, Officer.”

  She led him to a private dining room where Fahey was already seated, a napkin—already stained—tucked in over his tie. He had a drink in front of him and a large bowl of olives stuck with green and white toothpicks.

  “Geez oh Pete!” Fahey greeted him. “You made it.”

  “You made it happen,” Service said.

  “Easy enough when you’ve been around as long as me. In your dad’s honor we’re gonna have an old-fashioned U.P. lunch—cudighi on Finnish rye, smothered in onions and hot Italian mustard. The cudighi comes from an old Finn up to Lake Linden. People back home are always sendin’ me stuff. I get a box of Trenary Toast once a month, but one of my staff members broke a tooth so that gets tossed soon as it arrives.”