by Deb Baker
THREE
Word For The Day
MACHINATIONS (MAK uh NA shuns) n.
An artful or secret plot or scheme, especially
one with evil intent.
IN THE U.P. WE take deer hunting serious. For most of us it isn’t sport, it’s survival. Of course, we make it fun. There’s the hunter’s ball at the beginning of the season, a banquet down at the senior citizen’s center on the last day of hunting season, and a few other events thrown in between. But we can’t afford to fill our freezers with sides of beef and slabs of pork, so instead we hunt and fish like our ancestors, and we count on dressing out at least two deer every season to see us through.
Little Donny still didn’t have his first one, and it was day three of hunting season. If things didn’t improve soon, I wouldn’t have venison through the winter. Even if he managed to get in a shot, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in his shooting ability after watching him target practice last year.
Target practicing is Tamarack County’s favorite hobby when we aren’t hunting. I’ve never been a hunter—can’t stand seeing an animal dying right before my eyes—but I love target practice. Little Donny’s shooting problem exists because he doesn’t show up until hunting season begins, and since target practicing during hunting season will make your neighbors want to hang you in the garage instead of a deer, we can’t work on getting him in shooting shape. I bet Little Donny hasn’t fired his rifle since last summer.
A slew of black flies had hatched out and swarmed around my living room picture window. I pulled the Hoover out of the closet and was sucking the flies up in the vacuum when Little Donny came out of his bedroom dressed for hunting.
“You’re never going to have any luck if you don’t get out to the blind earlier than this,” I said, glancing at the kitchen clock. It was eight-thirty.
He eyed the vacuum cleaner. “What are you doing?”
“Cleaning house. Haven’t you ever seen anyone clean house before?” I bent to my task, working the hose around the edges of the window.
Little Donny watched for a while like he’d never seen anyone vacuum flies before. How else did he think I’d get them out of the house? Open the door and ask them to leave?
He grabbed a cinnamon roll from the counter and his rifle from the rack and headed out in the direction of the hunting shack.
Ten minutes later a process server from Escanaba banged on my door, insisted I sign a paper, and handed me an envelope. “Consider yourself served,” he said.
__________
After struggling through the legal jargon twice and still not fully understanding what I was reading, I picked up the phone and called Little Donny’s father, Big Donny. If anyone could understand fancy legal talk it was Heather’s city husband.
“You’re required to appear in probate court,” he explained after listening to me read the papers. “For a guardianship hearing.”
“Whose guardianship?”
There was a pause. “Yours.”
“Why would I need a guardian?”
“Blaze is petitioning the court to become your guardian. He obviously feels you need someone to take care of your personal finances. Has he talked to you about this?”
“We’ve been arguing nonstop ever since Barney died. He wants me to hand over my money so he can take care of it. He’s lost his marbles.”
“He isn’t seeking placement, which is good,” Big Donny said. “That means he’s not trying to force you into a nursing home.”
“Might as well be. I’m only sixty-six, for cripes sake. I don’t need supervision.”
“If you decide to contest it he has to prove you’re incompetent to manage your own affairs.”
“It says here that I pose a substantial risk of harm to myself and to others.” I couldn’t believe my own son would do this to me. When have I ever harmed myself or anybody else?
“Better get yourself an attorney,” Big Donny advised.
__________
I was sitting at the kitchen table feeling sorry for myself, when the police scanner jumped to life.
I grabbed my shotgun and truck keys and ran for the door.
Blaze’s sheriff’s truck was parked in Chester’s driveway and he stood on the broken porch talking to Betty Berg, who lived across the road from Chester. She used to be a friend to my Star, until Betty played find-the-weenie with Star’s now ex-husband. She isn’t on our Christmas list, that’s for sure.
Blaze watched me drive in, his hands on his hips, his mouth hanging wide open in disbelief.
I parked as far from his truck as possible to give myself plenty of maneuvering room when I wanted to leave, then jumped out of the truck. I decided to wait for some privacy to confront Blaze on the guardianship hearing issue. Besides, murder was more serious.
“What’s happened here?" I called out. “Who called the report in? Was that you, Betty?” Figures it would be Betty. Betty’s nose was longer than Cora Mae’s string of men.
“That’s right, Gertie. That was me. I came over to peek in the window, just to make sure everything was all right, and imagine my surprise. Come and take a look-see.”
Star should have let her lousy husband have Betty instead of putting up a fight. It would have taught him a valuable lesson. Betty was cute a few years ago, but she’d really let herself go bad. She wore a fuzzy housecoat with yellow and pink flowers and weighed in at a good two-eighty, a real tub of lard, as Grandma Johnson would say.
“Hold everything,” Blaze shouted while Betty and I peeked through the front window. I turned and saw he wasn’t on the porch anymore. He stood by my truck, pointing at it with one arm and waving me over with the other. Like he was directing traffic. “Come back here, Ma.”
I had hoped with the excitement of the break-in and all, Blaze would be distracted from the fact that I was driving, but I wasn’t that lucky. I stepped off the rotting porch.
“Anything new?” he asked with way too much attitude when he saw he had my attention. “You know, anything at all?”
“Let’s save the family chitchat for later. We have a break-in to investigate at the moment.”
“We’re going to talk about this right now.” Blaze, forgetting to lower his arm, was still pointing at the truck with his index finger. “When did you start driving?”
“A while ago. Cora Mae taught me.”
“And do you have a license?”
“What kind of license do you want? A hunting license, or a private investigator license? No, I don’t have a private investigator license. Yet.” The key to winning a round with Blaze is to frazzle him. Once he loses his temper, he can’t think straight and it’s an automatic win for my side.
“No, Ma, I mean a DRIVING LICENSE.”
“You don’t need to shout. I’m not deaf, you know. Of course I have a driver’s license,” I lied. “I went to Escanaba and got one right after you threatened poor Little Donny.”
Before Blaze could regroup, I turned quickly and caught up with Betty, who was still peering through the window. I looked in.
Yesterday the condition of the house reminded me of a football scrimmage gone awry; it was a war zone today. The garbage can had been dumped out on the floor, for starters. Cabinets were pulled open and the contents thrown every which way.
Blaze scurried up behind us. “We’ll finish this conversation after I check out the house.”
I made a mental note to vanish before he finished his quote/unquote investigation.
“Wonder how they gained entry,” our local sheriff said, and began walking around the house. “Well, look at this.” He stopped at the back entrance, eyeing up the door. “Smashed the glass to get in.”
I wasn’t going to be the one to point out the missing glass. Betty took care of that.
“But there isn’t any broken glass on the floor,” Miss Betty Snoop Berg said. “Isn’t that odd?”
Blaze didn’t respond. He tried the door then reached through and unlocked it.
“Wait out here,” he said
, closing the door behind him.
I waited until he rounded the corner and disappeared into the bedroom, then I followed. “You wait here,” I said to Betty over my shoulder. “Like Blaze said. We don’t want any accidental tampering with evidence.”
There wasn’t a drawer or closet or cupboard that hadn’t been stripped. Everything was piled on the floor—clothes, dishes, and papers. Nothing obvious seemed to be missing as far as I could tell, not that Chester had much to steal, but the television was still here and so were the guns in the gun rack.
Blaze and I ran into each other in the bedroom doorway and we both shrieked.
“I told you to wait outside, Ma.”
I decided since Blaze was busy trying to ruin my life, he was through telling me what to do. “If this was a robbery, wouldn’t the guns be the first thing they’d take?” I said. “Proves this wasn’t a robbery. Someone was looking for something.”
Blaze scribbled in his little book, and when he closed it up I could tell he was closing the case. “Kids probably, vandalizing, heard about Chester and knew the place was empty. There’s a group of real troublemakers over on the other side of Trenary. I’ll check it out.” He walked over to his truck, reached in for his radio, and made a call.
Standing on the porch with Two-Ton Mama, hoping she wasn’t about to punch another hole in the porch, I realized that I must have played some role in the stunted development of my one and only son, but for the life of me I couldn’t sort it out.
I was hauling myself up into the truck to make my escape before Blaze finished on the radio when a thought struck me. I pulled my notebook out of the glove compartment and flipped it open to the entries from my search of Chester’s house. I jumped back out and ran to the window for another look. I was right.
Blaze walked over.
“Come look at this.” Outwardly, I tried to appear cool and collected, but inside I was dancing the jig. “Something’s rotten in Finland. There were three weapons in Chester’s gun rack yesterday, and now there are four. Four. Where did that extra one come from?”
“I know I don’t really expect an honest answer,” Blaze said, “but I’ll ask anyway. How do you know how many guns were in there yesterday?”
“I stopped by to pay my respects?”
“And who did you visit with? The ghost of Chester’s past?”
“Well, maybe I stopped by just to look around. Remember I’m part of this investigation.”
“You’re not part of this investigation. And you’re going to stop interfering. Seems like we had a conversation just yesterday about you and interfering. What did you do, run right over here?” Blaze stared at me. “Wait. It’s become clear….”
He hitched up his belt and glanced at Betty. “You can go now. We’re pretty much finished.”
Betty wasn’t about to move from her front row seat at the boxing match, so Blaze hooked his arm through mine and walked me off the porch.
He voice was low in my ear. “Yes, it’s all clear now, like looking through broken glass. You broke in the back door didn’t you? You came over here, probably with the Black Widow, and you illegally broke in. That’s why there isn’t any glass on the floor. You swept it up.”
“I only wanted to look for evidence. The window was an accident. And the house wasn’t torn apart like it is now.”
Blaze released my arm, leaned against his truck, and buried his face in both his hands.
“I’ve got to go,” I said and hightailed it to the truck before Blaze remembered to ask for my driver’s license.
“Tell Star I say hi,” Betty called out, waving a chunky arm over her head.
Right. Sure thing. The nerve of some people.
__________
On the way over to George’s, I made a mental list of the information I had so far. A dead body, footprints cracking through ice, a rifle shell, sudden and unexplained money—if Chester really meant the comment about a place in Florida—and finally, too many guns on the gun rack. It was plain as the nose on Blaze’s face that someone had murdered Chester, and it was obvious that I would have to be the one to catch the murderer.
After almost a year of mourning, I was ready for action, ready to make a contribution to my community. I was on a mission.
Distracted from my driving, I missed the turn into George’s driveway and ended up with the two right tires hanging over into a culvert. I threw the gears into reverse and revved the engine, trying to rock the truck back and forth the same way I’d seen Barney rock it when he was stuck in snow, but nothing worked.
Leaving the truck in the ditch, I walked the half-mile up to George’s house in my heavy hunting boots. I was winded by the time I got there, and feeling every one of my sixty-six years.
George was a jack-of-all trades, and his yard looked like the town dump, littered with car frames and parts, a variety of tractors, and piles of old lumber. Running around in the mess were all kinds of animals. Mules, goats, chickens—you name it, at one time George had it. He also was the unofficial county dogcatcher. Several dogs in wire kennels began howling and barking when they caught sight of me.
I found George in one of his three outbuildings, welding a metal frame. He had on an undershirt, the sleeveless kind. The temperature, I guessed, must be about twenty-five degrees, warming to a balmy thirty or so where he worked. And he’s not even wearing a shirt. What a man!
He acknowledged me with a nod and went back to concentrating on his work. I sat on the edge of a large workbench and watched George’s rippling biceps, then started playing with the equipment lying on the table. I picked up something that looked like a miniature cattle prod and tried to figure out how to turn it on.
“Stay away from that, Gertie.” George pulled off a pair of safety glasses and walked over.
“What is it?”
“A stun gun. I don’t use it much, but it comes in handy if I have a stubborn animal, like that mule out there, that won’t go where I need it to go. Or if I pick up a stray dog and it attacks me. But I never use it unless I absolutely have to.”
“How does it stay juiced?” I said, intrigued with the device. It would fit in my purse perfectly.
“Battery pack. There’s an extra one around here someplace.” George opened a cardboard box and sorted through a tangle of electrical cords. “Here it is.”
“I need to borrow it for a little while.”
“Don’t know why you’d have any use for a stun gun.”
“There’s been a stray dog hanging around by the shed, looks scrawny and wild to me. Maybe if I zap him he’ll decide to move on.” I was getting good at lying, but I figure it comes with the job, a curse of the detective business. I couldn’t very well tell George I was on the trail of a savage killer and I needed protection. My shotgun is handy, but I can’t haul it everywhere, and it’s no good at close range.
“Haven’t noticed any wild dogs over by you.”
“He’s there,” I insisted. “Mean, ugly, and he has yellow eyes. Has wolf or coyote in him, I bet.”
George handed me the stun gun. “Better trap him if you get the chance. He might be rabid. Want a cage?”
“Later, maybe.” I stuffed the stun gun into my purse and I was right—it was a perfect fit. Then I remembered why I stopped by in the first place.
“I’m having family over for supper tonight. Thought you might like to come. I’m making venison steaks.”
“Can’t. But thank you kindly.” George grinned. “Sure do hate to miss one of your family get-togethers.”
I was disappointed since I like to have George at our family meals to run interference for me with Grandma Johnson, who spends all her spare time dreaming up nasty comments to try out on me.
“Will you have time to fix the hole in my barn before they come over?” I asked.
George laughed and shook his head. “No. I’ll stop by and take another look at it, but it’s going to take a couple of days.”
“I have one more little favor to ask.” I explained why
I left the truck at the end of the drive. What I like most about George is that he isn’t judgmental. He accepts everyone for what they are and doesn’t make me feel foolish.
He helped me pull the truck out of the ditch, then followed me home to look at the repair job.
__________
We were standing in the driveway when Little Donny pulled up next to us driving a blue Ford station wagon. I recognized it. Carl Anderson bought it two weeks ago and had been showing it off to everyone.
Little Donny rolled the window down, and you could tell he thought he had bagged Big Buck, our legendary eighteen-pointer. “Look what I shot over at Carl’s place.”
George walked around and looked in the window. I followed. In the back of the wagon, on a wad of black plastic garbage bags, lay a little spike-horned deer.
“A little guy,” George said.
“What? He’s a good size, isn’t he, Granny?”
“I can still see the spots on him,” I said to Little Donny.
Little Donny turned around in the driver’s seat to take a look, and at that exact moment the little spike lifted its head and stared back at astonished Little Donny. You could see that Little Donny would like to have opened the door and beat it out of there, but with George and me looking on, he had to make a stand.
The deer and Little Donny leapt into action together. The deer started pounding on the windows with his hooves. Little Donny flew out of the front seat, opened the back door, and dove in. He grabbed the little buck by the horns and held on.
“Go git him,” George said, and closed the car door behind Donny. I wasn’t sure which one of them George was talking to, and I couldn’t imagine what Little Donny was trying to do.
The deer’s horns were making an awful mess of Carl’s brand new station wagon.
“You call it,” George said to me as we stood, watching.
“The little spike. My money’s on the little spike.”
“Sure win,” George said, then to Little Donny, “Watch the horns, they’re wicked.”
When Little Donny’s nose started gushing blood, I decided it was time for action. I couldn’t send him home to Heather gored by a deer. I dug the stun gun out of my purse, jerked the car door open, aimed at the spike, and zapped.
I could smell that new car smell and something else. I sniffed. Something like burnt wires.
Little Donny let go of the horns. His head hit the car window with a thud like a bird flying into a window. He started twitching.
George opened the back hatch and the deer uncurled itself from the wagon and zigzagged with flying leaps out to the woods.
We helped Little Donny into the house when he could finally stand up. His hair sprung from his head like he’d been hit by a bolt of lightning, and he couldn’t talk without slobbering.
The good thing is, now I know it really works.
“Next time you shoot at a deer,” I advised him, “make sure it’s dead before you load it in your car.”
__________
Little Donny sat on the couch, his hair every which way, when the family began arriving. He still couldn’t talk, and his eyes were unfocused. George had said a hasty good-bye after making sure Little Donny didn’t need medical attention.
Star drove over on her ex-husband’s ATV, wearing a fake fur jacket she had dyed orange for hunting season, a pair of mukluks, and a sassy orange and blue feather hat. Star, my baby, had turned forty-one in September, which she took hard at the time. She obviously is bouncing back. Petite, like me, she looked real spiffy in her new jacket.
She carried in a bowl of creamed rutabaga, set it on the table, and hung her jacket on the coat rack by the front door. By then, I saw Blaze and Mary drive in.
I wouldn’t say it out loud, but Mary’s the mousiest, plainest-minded woman I’ve ever met. You could meet her ten times in a week and never remember her from one time to the next. She named her daughters after her—Mary Jane and Mary Elizabeth—and they’re both just as drab.
“Can I help?” Mary asked after she hung up her coat.
“I’ll let you know in a little while if I need help. Right now you just have a seat in the living room and make yourself comfortable while I pound these steaks.”
I picked up a hammer and began thumping the meat. Most people, unless they’re old timers or are trained by the old timers, don’t know how to cook good venison. A steak, in particular, is tricky. First you have to pound it with a hammer on both sides until it has holes clear through it like Swiss cheese. Then salt and pepper it all over, and quick fry it in butter. The butter’s important. If you use oil you’ll ruin it. Afterwards the cook gets to sop up the pan drippings with a piece of bread.
I consider myself a pretty good cook.
“What’s wrong with Little Donny?” Star called to me.
“Nothing’s wrong with Little Donny,” I said.
“His eyes are twitching and he won’t say anything.”
“He’s tired. He had a hard day hunting and all.” Maybe I should have laid Little Donny out on the couch, closed his eyes, and said he was sleeping. Leaving him propped up was a mistake. “I’m going to start frying the steaks. Tell Blaze to mosey over and pick up Grandma Johnson.”
As we were putting the food on the table, Blaze arrived with his grandmother in tow. We grabbed our seats and dug right in.
“Why don’t anybody ever pick me up till the food’s on the table?” Grandma Johnson wanted to know. “I like to visit too, and I know all a you was here ahead a time.”
We concentrated hard on our meal, pretending like we hadn’t heard.
“And what did you go and do to your hair? Every time I see you, you’ve done something foolish to yourself.”
My mother-in-law is ninety-two and doesn’t appear to be running down. She still keeps her own house, with everyone taking turns stopping in and helping out. If you ask her the secret to living a long life she’ll tell you it’s what you eat—lots of vegetables and suck candy. You know, she’ll say, that hard stuff like anise and butterscotch.
But I think she stays young taking potshots at me.
“Come and eat,” I called to Little Donny. “Won’t be anything left if you don’t hurry up.”
“Noth righth now,” Little Donny said.
“I’ll make you a plate for later.”
“Place is going to pot,” Grandma Johnson said, swinging her head around like that possessed girl in the Exorcist. “I bet Barney is turning in his grave over the looks of this place. Did you see the hole in the side of the barn, Blaze?”
Blaze doesn’t like to be interrupted while he’s eating, but Grandma Johnson’s hard to ignore when she’s right in your face. His mouth was stuffed with potatoes.
I briefly thought about confronting Blaze about the court papers right at the dinner table, right in front of the entire family. But I wasn’t sure they’d side with me, especially Grandma Johnson.
“First thing tomorrow I want you to fix that hole for your ma,” she continued.
“Yes, Grandma,” Blaze said through his mouthful, glancing at me. I gave him a cold smile.
“I hear you’re helping on one of the cases,” Mary said to me.
“Not anymore,” Blaze said.
“This apple pie is pretty good, considerin’ how bad your baking usually is,” Grandma Johnson said. “I used to feel so sorry for Barney, havin’ to eat what you baked.”
A piece of apple pie with whipped cream topping called to me from the table. I had an uncontrollable urge to smear it in Grandma Johnson’s face. Picking up the plate, the desire became stronger and stronger, but Mary must have read my mind because she softly called my name. When I looked over, our eyes met, and she shook her head. Okay. When Grandma Johnson leaves maybe I’ll zap her with the stun gun instead. I set the plate down.
“I love the pie,” Mary said. “The crust is just right.” She took another bite and hummed. Humming during a meal is a family tradition. If a meal is just right, the whole family takes tu
rns humming. Except of course Grandma Johnson, who never hummed a note in her whole life. “Blaze said he had the rifle shell you found out at Chester’s hunting shack tested. Isn’t that right, Honey?”
Blaze leaned back in his chair and glared at his wife. Apparently he didn’t want me to know how the case was progressing.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well nothing. There weren’t any prints on the shell.”
“The next step is to figure out what gun it was fired from.” Though I was disappointed, I was still trying to be helpful in case Blaze didn’t know the next step.
“Already did that. It was fired from Chester’s own rifle, Ma. Nothing suspicious about it at all. Chester was probably target practicing before hunting season. That shell could have been laying there for awhile.”
“How do you explain away the footprints coming from the creek, Einstein?”
“Chester’s.”
“What rifle was it fired from?” I asked.
“Top one in the gun rack.”
“Didn’t I tell you someone put a weapon in there after Chester died?”
“I only had the shell tested to prove you wrong,” my son said. “And you are wrong. Nobody put a rifle back. You’re wrong.”
“Building evidence against me, are you?”
“I don’t need to, you build it against yourself.”
Blaze and I were having a stare-down. We used to have stare-downs when he was a kid, but those were for fun. This was different. Blaze’s stare was telling me I was getting old and feeble-minded and a pain in the backside. My stare was saying he sure wasn’t Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson. More like Don Knotts in Mayberry RFD. And a lousy son to boot.
He looked away first.
It was snowing hard outside by the time the table was cleared and the dishes washed and put away. Star roared away on her ATV, and Grandma Johnson headed for the bathroom. Little Donny slept like a baby on the couch, and Blaze sat in a chair, a pained expression on his face like he’d eaten one piece of pie too much.
“One of these days,” I said to Mary after Grandma closed the bathroom door, “I’m going to tell her off.”
“You think I’m deaf,” Grandma Johnson called. “I can hear a cooked noodle hit the floor from across the house, and I heard that.”
Mary and I laughed, and I took a good look at her for what might be the first time. She was plain, all right—nobody would ever call her pretty—but she had a rosy face, like she was happy all the time. She and Blaze were having some trouble with one of their daughters. I keep telling them she’s just young.
I remember being young and it’s a tough business. I wouldn’t go back there for all the Christmas trees in Tamarack County, although I wouldn’t mind shaving off a year or two. But being sixty-six has its advantages. You don’t let anyone tell you what’s what any more, and you don’t have to pay so much attention to laws and rules. Break one and everyone just chalks it up to hardening of the brain. I like that.
At least I did until Blaze decided I really did have hardening of the brain.
Before drifting off to sleep, I realized I’d forgotten to use my word for the day. I guess I was thrown off by Blaze’s disloyalty to his own mother.
I have more on my mind these days than I used to.
