Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  “Yeah, sure,” said Harry, getting on the elevator. It rankled some, having Bud’s style of doing things back in his life so fast. Bud tended to forget that not everybody had his long reach.

  Well, shit. Here comes the fucking bride. Harry went directly to Dayton’s department store. With a smile, he picked out a black, double-breasted suit.

  Later in the day Harry came out of a sporting goods store laden with shopping bags. A cold wind whipped the Minnesota Buck Permit in his hand. He still didn’t believe he was going hunting after almost twenty years.

  Back home, he looked down from his window at foundries of office lights that burned in the gray afternoon. Arctic air had emptied the streets and turned the sky to stone.

  His eyes sought out a particular building, and a specific lighted window on the seventh floor. With an ironic smile he touched the dry fronds of his one houseplant, a spindly areca palm that he always forgot to water; probably because Linda Margoles, the last woman he’d been involved with, had planted it in his bachelor pad like a green expedition flag.

  He genuinely enjoyed the company of women and they, in turn, liked him. The problem was making it last.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 9

  Linda was on his list. He’d left her for last, after buying warm socks, sturdy wool trousers, the deer license, a Buck knife, and a first-aid kit. He picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Law offices,” answered a legal secretary.

  “Linda Margoles,” said Harry.

  “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Harry Griffin.”

  “Harry,” said a wary voice.

  “The plant you gave me is dying.”

  “Like relationships, Harry, they need nurturing to grow. Remember?”

  They had been serious until she’d rushed it and laid a baseline for mapping the future and he’d suspected that she’d like to lock him into her briefcase with the other contracts and fine print. Now she resented their breakup. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Let’s see. I haven’t cut myself and I’m not having my period, so why am I attracting a shark?”

  “I need some information.”

  “Sure.” Clipped, precise, like the severe makeup she had started wearing.

  “Bring me up to speed on divorce law. Like if someone has a lot of bread and he gets married and suddenly he changes his mind.

  How much of a bite is he looking at in court?”

  “Short-term marriage doesn’t generate a lot of marital property.

  Only the income after the marriage counts.”

  “Hmmm…”

  “Does this fatcat have a will?”

  “Must.”

  “Something to think about. He drops over dead intestate and no divorce has been finalized, in the absence of other heirs, the surviving spouse could elect against the whole estate. Somebody we know getting divorced?”

  “Bud Maston got married.”

  “No shit. Keep me posted.”

  “Thanks, Linda.”

  Later that evening, after a solitary supper, Harry pulled his 10 / CHUCK LOGAN

  cold-weather gear from the back of the closet and stuffed it in his duffel bag. He hefted the rifle case to get a sense of its weight and set it beside the bag.

  Then he took a cup of tea to his drawing table where he kept a mirror on the wall as a drawing aid to study expressions. Next to the mirror hung a caricature in which he’d captured himself in fast, nervy line—lean, intense, hooked—plodding with a gorilla on his back who gleefully puffed a cigarette.

  Harry lit up, blew smoke at the nagging sketch, and turned his eyes to the framed photograph on the other side of the mirror. As Lyndon Johnson’s young dummy, he stood in sweat-bleached tiger stripes and a parachute harness, arm in arm with Randall. Dorothy, then a correspondent, had taken the picture on a funky red dirt landing strip outside of Quang Tri City.

  In the photo Detroit Harry bared his crooked front teeth in a fierce grin. Minnesota Harry at forty-two, his muscles still flat as interlock-ing slats, sent back an orthodontically corrected smile.

  He consulted the mirror and wagered with his reflection that he could handle whatever Bud sent his way. His hazel eyes had mellowed—had left tough and were hitchhiking toward wise—but they could still sting with the disciplined snap of sweat hitting a varnished gym floor. His mobile features worked through a repertoire of expressions. Concerned. Quizzical. Stern.

  He preferred it quiet but Bud, drinking, would throw slippery grounders.

  So he whistled a few bars of “Sukiyaki,” some hardball that evoked the beer halls of Fort Benning. Then he turned off the lights and went to bed.

  Right after he closed his eyes the first snowflakes began to fall.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 11

  4

  The radio announcer crooned his signature chestnut about the early onset of “Macho Winter.” The weak, he promised, would be quickly sorted out. Then his voice turned serious:

  “A winter storm warning is in effect for northern Minnesota. Two feet of snow and winds of seventy miles per hour are expected by ten P.M. tonight north of a line from Fargo to Duluth. On the Canadian prairie, the storm has been upgraded to a blizzard…”

  Harry glanced at Bud. “Maybe we should pull over.”

  Bud stared straight ahead and mumbled, “It’s a gift for our reunion.”

  “…and wind chills of twenty below are reported in the Arrowhead.

  The Minnesota Highway Patrol has issued a warning to motorists to avoid travel in the storm area. This is a life-threatening weather condition, folks, so shake out those winter driving skills and be careful out there.”

  Bud Maston turned off the radio and put both hands on the wheel.

  Mum, elbows locked, he leaned into the storm. The snow started as spitballs and escalated into a Minnesota war whoop; now it looked like a million .50 calibers were blasting fat, white tracers at the windshield.

  Bud carried Chrysler’s biggest engine in a souped-up Cherokee Sport, a deep diamondback tread on his tires and four-wheel drive, and he’d crammed what looked like the entire inventory of a United Store into the cargo hatch. He had coffee, sandwiches, donuts, and a supply of candy bars that he had been eating methodically since they’d headed north out of St. Paul.

  He had everything except an explanation.

  When Harry used to talk the AA party line, they called it Twelfth Step work; sticking your nose into a brother drunk’s derailed life.

  With a guy like Bud, who was a success at everything except living, you had to play it very tough and forget the love. Then there was the turnabout personal angle; ten years ago, Bud had been Harry’s AA sponsor.

  12 / CHUCK LOGAN

  He’d shown up at Harry’s apartment with a heavy shopping bag and a heavier hangover. “See if these fit,” he’d said with lowered eyes.

  Now Harry smelled like a new car. Bud had outfitted him in enough layers of polypro, pile, and Gore-Tex to climb K2. The generosity had erected a barrier. Harry wiggled his toes in his new Gore-Tex boots and resolved to wait until Bud came to him and an awkward silence stretched into hours as they churned north on Interstate 35 East.

  Abandoned cars began to litter the snowdrifted highway and emergency vehicles and tow trucks gathered in covens of blue flashing lights. The infrequent low beams of southbound travelers winked bravely as they crept past. By the time they reached the outskirts of Duluth, the road had disappeared as they blindly followed a pair of red taillights across the hilly tundra.

  Duluth bustled with siege energy. Busy yellow snowplows worked the downtown cobbled streets and heaped up an igloo village of snow banks. North of town, they pulled into a truck stop to gas up.

  Semitrailers, waiting out the storm, crowded the apron.

  “Where you headed?” asked the station attendant when he stamped Bud’s plastic.

  “Stanley,” said Bud.

  “I’d wait,” said the guy, staring. “They pulled the plows off North 61.
Be dark in another hour.”

  Bud shook his head. “People expecting us.” Their eyes drifted to the TV mounted on a wall bracket over the cash register. On the cable hookup to the weather channel, a loop of sawtooth isobars like the bite radius of a shark slung a cold front down a map of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

  Bud went out to the pumps and checked the tires. Harry remembered that he’d forgotten to pack toothpaste and went back in.

  “Stanley, huh?” the guy behind the register mused as he rang up the order. “You from there?”

  Harry shook his head as the guy handed him his change.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 13

  “I went once,” said the guy. “Dry socket. Nothing there.”

  Harry shrugged and opened the door. The guy came around the counter. His chapped face was bitter; his body was caved in by hard labor and a ripple of washboard chest muscle showed beneath layers of quilted underwear at the collar of his grease-stained overalls.

  Harry knew the breed from his own cousins and uncles back in Michigan.

  “That’s him, ain’t it? Do-good Bud Maston,” he said with a razor-thin smile. He pushed past Harry and hawked up a gob of spit and gave it to the wind in Bud’s direction. Harry watched the gobber freeze and roll as it hit the snow. Walking away, he heard the muttered: “Fat rich fuck couldn’t buy his way into Congress, huh.”

  The money. Bud had spent his life trying to lose his rich-boy shadow and when the test came, it had eaten him whole. He didn’t have the million-dollar harelip when Harry met him. Then, he was just another guy back from the war. But the money was waiting.

  Old Minnesota money plundered from the Iron Range starting back in the fur trade, then timber and mining. The Mastons had exhausted the iron in the Nanabozho Ridge, cursed the wrecked strip of land between Lake and Cook counties with their name, and sought to wash the sweat and blood from their loot through philanthropy.

  Bud was the last Maston and he had so much money that he gave it away for a living, as director of the Maston Foundation in St. Paul.

  Bud might have overheard the station attendant, the way he winced into the churning twilight. Spray some freckles on young Orson Welles playing Citizen Kane, that was Bud a year ago. Now his patrician face had swollen with an alcohol bloat and all that drive had turned to lard.

  He wore a blaze-orange vest over an olive-drab commando sweater that bulged tight, like a green innertube around his waist.

  He’d gained fifty pounds and grown his copper-colored hair shaggy, down to his slab shoulders. A scraggy beard hid his strong chin, his long fingernails were cracked and rimmed with grime, and a button on the fly of his jeans was undone. He was not wearing a wedding ring.

  14 / CHUCK LOGAN

  He swung his face toward Harry and his blue eyes could have been painted by van Gogh—contrived to be more brilliant than real life—the way they throbbed, bloodshot with pain. But he didn’t say a word.

  They got back in the Jeep and drove north and left human scale behind with the lights of Duluth and fell under the power of Lake Superior. Highway 61 squeezed to two lanes and swerved through cuts in the Precambrian hills and pine thrust up and disappeared as the snow came faster, hypnotizing them, and they lost the light and pushed on, all alone, into howling, tunneled darkness.

  A slow hour out of Duluth, Bud pulled onto the shoulder and put the Jeep in neutral. Twenty feet ahead in the high-beams, barely legible in the flying snow, a highway sign shuddered in the wind: Entering Maston County.

  “You drive,” Bud said.

  They changed seats. Harry put the Jeep in gear and felt his way in four-wheel drive along the slippery highway that had narrowed to a dogsled trail, winding through the pines. Drifts snaked across the road and Harry accelerated to crash through one that almost breasted the grill.

  They careened out of the drift into an open area and the crosswind wrapped them. “Whiteout,” Harry muttered and fought the wheel.

  “This is the last open spot; we’re good,” said Bud.

  The Jeep lurched and the shoulders of the storm crowded in, predatory, waiting for them to make a fatal mistake. They crossed the open ground into the cover of the trees where granite hills blocked the wind and Harry could see again.

  A yellow sign flashed at the side of the road: MOOSE AREA. DRIVE

  CAREFULLY.

  Bud sighed, draped one hand on his belly, munched on a Snickers bar, and finally broke the trance of the storm. “I really appreciate this,” he said.

  “Does she have a name?” asked Harry.

  “Huh?”

  “Your wife?”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 15

  “Of course. Jesse.”

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  “Local VFW. She was tending bar and—”

  “A bartender? You married a bartender?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Bud countered defensively. “She’s not one of those Type-A bitches with an MBA. She’s a…real woman.”

  “You going to tell me about it?” asked Harry.

  Bud sighed again, fumbled in his pocket, put a filtered cigarette between his lips and forgot to light it. “She’s got two kids. Twins.

  Sixteen years old. Boy and a girl. The girl’s all right. The boy, Chris, I’m having trouble with.”

  Harry reached over, popped his Zippo lighter, and lit Bud’s cigarette. Bud took one drag, made a face, rolled down the window, and threw it out. Harry frowned, waiting for more. Bud looked away. He opened his hand and a glob of the Snickers melted across his palm.

  Bud went to Harvard and his family had a county named after it.

  Harry graduated from the auto factories of Detroit and the U.S. infantry and didn’t know his father’s real name.

  They’d both lost parents when they were young and they’d both been busted up in the Big Hit-and-Run-Accident over in the rice paddies. Linda Margoles made a witch’s ride across Harry’s memory.

  They both had bad luck with women.

  Before Bud got the money, they had been roommates and best friends. Then Bud came into his inheritance and took over the foundation and began to change. The phone was always ringing.

  He had all these events to attend. His flair for giving spirited banquet speeches did not go unnoticed.

  Bud Maston sobered up into the most socially adept person Harry had ever known. He knew innately where everybody was and what they needed and had an uncanny knack for graciously positioning himself with perfect timing to provide it. This personal quality proved to have a downside called politics.

  Bill Tully, the Godfather of the Minnesota Democrats, had 16 / CHUCK LOGAN

  sized him up. He has looks, he can talk, he’s a war hero. He has the bread. And the guy really fuckin’ cares. He could stand for national office.

  Harry had watched the shadow of power come to a point in Bud as an army of freebooting hacks eyed his fortune and told him it could be done; Congress two terms, then a shot at the Senate.

  Asked his opinion, Harry flat out told him it was a mistake. Bud had looked right through him the way the first Mastons must have gazed at the virgin North Woods—with a lust that was as scary to the touch as their ax blades. Bud began putting Harry on hold.

  A year ago, Bud flashed ahead in the polls going into the Democratic primary for the U.S. Congress seat in St. Paul. He had social magic and polish and that gregarious sweat people love to breathe.

  And a bottomless campaign chest. The mob picked up the blood scent of doomed charisma and chanted: “Bud, Bud.” To Harry it sounded like: “Jump, jump.”

  His face appeared in Time and Newsweek, a new Democrat who was compared to Governor Kerry of Nebraska. Accused of being another bleeding-heart liberal, he began to wear his miniature Purple Heart pin in his lapel.

  The Congressional Medal of Honor he’d won as a marine lieutenant in Vietnam hovered over the campaign like a halo of stars on a field of blue. Bud never discussed it.

  But Harry knew a few things about his old roomm
ate. He knew that behind the elegant public persona, Bud camped precariously at the edge of a black pit inside himself. In most people, the cynical enzyme that filters out human suffering accumulates with age. In Bud, the process was reversed. It was only a matter of time before the political carnival snapped him. He had the best pollsters and consultants that money could buy.

  What he needed was a friend.

  The insiders whispered and the media hinted at clinical depression when Bud suddenly went into a social coma and quit the race.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 17

  He didn’t even make a public statement. The campaign sent out a terse news release that he had reconsidered for personal reasons.

  When the hoopla died down, Harry found him, haunted and disheveled, in his apartment on the top floor of the old Rivers Hotel overlooking the St. Paul riverfront.

  Bud just raised his hands, lowered his eyes, and never said a word.

  Harry had not consciously tried to convey it, but, thinking back, the last expression Bud Maston had seen on his face was “I told you so.”

  That’s where they’d left it, a year ago, when Bud drifted into exile up here.

  Harry didn’t understand depression. Not really. It was a condition he linked with drinking, with hangovers. With setting yourself up to lose.

  “Turn’s coming up. Highway 7,” said Bud.

  Signs winked in a fit of snow—ACE HARDWARE, BEST WESTERN, some churches. To the right, Harry glimpsed shadows of red brick and bare windows. There was supposed to be a big paper mill somewhere. A Holiday gas station levitated in a furor of candle-power, flickered, and then disappeared into the agitated blankness on the edge of Lake Superior.

  “Stanley,” said Harry.

  “Yeah,” said Bud. “Tobacco Road North since they closed the mill.”

  “You had something to do with that, didn’t you?”

  A little testy, Bud said, “Hell, they were polluting the lake…”

  The only thing moving, Harry turned left on Highway 7.

  “Hope the plows have been out,” said Bud.

  They climbed slowly up the south slope of Nanabozho Ridge and passed meager tiers of houses with windows illuminated by the soulless waver of TV screens and entered a gauntlet of giant, wind-staggered pines.