Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

The phone rang. Arnie, his voice tired and irritable. Murphy would be reprimanded. They’d kill the background stuff. Harry could have his two weeks off. The editor wanted a sit-down discussion of ethical guidelines in situations where staffers get involved inadvertently in stories.

  Harry said he’d drop in the office Monday morning.

  “What’s that noise?” asked Arnie.

  “Music,” said Harry.

  “Sounds like that raisin commercial,” said Arnie.

  He sat in bed chain-smoking to blunt the lousy taste in his mouth as he watched traffic crawl along the interstate. Lights going east and west. The moon swung a sickle at the curve of the 35 interchange where the road curled north to dragon country.

  Go back. Yes. For the woman and the truth.

  The night waited like a stretch of tricky open ground he had to cross and his body knew and he clamped his elbows tight to his sides, crossed his forearms rigidly across his chest, and drew up his knees.

  Sleep swung open beneath him like bomb bay doors.

  21

  The jack-in-the-box had slanted eyes and onion breath and carried Karl Marx in his pack and the bastard popped out of the inky rain on springs of fire and steel.

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  And they were all scared, all the young lives that clawed at the melting ladder of a last breath in the muscle-scented night and Harry wet his pants, but it was blood.

  And all the ones he’d killed were there and people he’d seen die and every goddamned corpse he’d ever touched.

  And the explosion embraced him in white line as strict as a winter bush and two South Vietnamese militiamen took the full force of the booby trap that sprung the ambush and he was clubbed into the slime of a paddy dike with their tangled corpses.

  Death was a happy whore on a busy night who put the French kiss to him. He bit off the steaming tongue and spit it back and gagged on a mouthful of digested rice as a dead Vietnamese farm boy’s supper leaked out from the uncoiling yarn of his guts and a slick fishbone sensation tingled along the blood-drenched canvas ankle of his jungle boot and that was vertebrae at the bottom of a chest cavity.

  With the oblong eye of perfect fear he saw the implacable shadows swarm up from the paddies and he saw the thigh muscles bang like slats beneath their muddy shorts and he saw the magazines of the Kalishnakovs in their determined hands curve wickedly and drip with the rain and the VC ghosts wore flesh tonight when they came to finish the job.

  Don’t move, play dead, and hide in the guts and eat the rice. Wash it down with hot sticky blood and the primal ooze of paddy water and stay alive.

  He’d always thought that the angel who drifted across the pond of death and quieted his terror was his mother because she was there, mixed in with the rest. The water where he lay glowed from the still-burning lamps of a ’51 Packard that lurched nose down between the smashed rice stalks with the doors popped open and the dome light still on and a hole in the windshield, passenger side, where he’d catapulted free. And the dome light flickered in the gory ruffled halo of cracked glass that she wore around her face.

  And now he saw in the sputtering magnesium light of a HUNTER’S MOON / 133

  parachute flare that it was not his mother who came with outstretched arms.

  The North Vietnamese soldiers who tried to shoot Randall and Dorothy were there talking to Chris, comparing their wounds. And one of them leaned against the fender of the Packard and Chris put his finger in the hole in the Vietnamese’s chest with fascination on his face at how tidy it was compared to the wreckage of his heart and lungs and the Vietnamese turned to display his dangling scapula.

  Not an angel who lifted him from the killing ground and carried him into the grove of pines. Who pulled him down beside her and threw aside her shining robes. Jesse Deucette had the ram’s head configuration of her ovaries and uterus drawn on her belly with blood.

  Harry lay motionless and patiently let the brew of dread and mosquito repellent dry in his sweat. He stared at the quiet winter moon that hung over I-94 and massaged the starfish-shaped scars that quilted the muscle of his left shoulder.

  And the dream was just another scar that reared up and screamed and bled and thrashed and stank when he was a little too tense. And through the years he’d come to appreciate its symmetry and scored it to the keening cries of grieving Vietnamese peasant women as they prepared their dead for burial; as they placed bananas on the corpses’

  chests to confuse the ravenous Celestial Dog and as they filled the gaping mouths with rice.

  After he’d quit drinking, the jack-in-the-box joke was that the nightmare liked to hide in the sweet itch weeds where sex tangled up with love.

  So for ten years he’d played hide-and-seek with women. Then he’d met Linda and, with ten years sober as a hedge, he’d wanted to believe he was past it and he’d pleased her with the joy of being free. But the joke was just being patient for the right moment to shove down the visceral plunger and he could feel her insides swell all around him and he was dreaming wide awake that he was back in the gut pile and he’d just told her that he loved her and he’d meant it and the

  134 / CHUCK LOGAN

  joke convulsed with slippery hungry glee: What do you suppose she had for supper? The hydraulics of sex dried up on the spot.

  She’d suggested therapy and she’d wanted to work it out, but he knew she’d never get the joke because outside the womb the only time most men got inside another human being was making love.

  So Harry lit a cigarette to chase the loathing in his mouth and laughed because Linda the feminist thought women should be in combat. And a voice in the back of his mind that sounded like Randall cautioned him. You’re too old, too soft, to play out a hand of blackjack with Jesse Deucette.

  The phone rang just before dawn and the Reverend Donald Karson of Stanley, Minnesota, sounded like he’d been up all night.

  “Bud gave me your number,” said Karson. “He feels a duty to come to…Chris’s funeral. That’s not a good idea, Harry.”

  “When’s the service?” Harry asked calmly as a vision of Jesse floated across the burial plots and stood next to an open grave.

  “Tuesday, eleven A.M.”

  “It’ll be all right,” said Harry. “Bud will be checked safe and sound into a chemical-dependency ward. I will attend the funeral.”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Karson.

  22

  So how serious are you, man—St. Paul serious or Detroit serious? At dawn, Harry in his sweatsuit, put his Nikes to the Sunday quiet streets of St. Paul.

  The snow crunched and the fresh air seared his breath and he remembered how he’d come north to St. Paul, where it was clean, to put the first half of his life to sleep. Almost a Canadian town. Hell, back then, he’d cross the river to

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  Windsor, Canada, and sit in a well-tended park where things were tidy and under control and dream of a better life.

  He headed up Wabasha Street toward the Capitol and came to the Maston Building and slowed to a walk and read the bronze plaque next to the doorway: Maston Foundation. Richard Stanley Maston, Director.

  Two rampant griffins stood vigil over the entrance. Griffins are guardians. Bud said that. The first day they met.

  Well, he’d be one fucked Griffin if he laid down for this one.

  He let it percolate at the edge of his thoughts—Jesse, Emery, Becky hiding in the woods—as he ran up the hill and crossed over the empty moat of the freeway and the Capitol loomed, iced with frost, with a team of gold horses prancing over the door.

  He stopped at a marble bench and a granite pedestal where the statue of Stanley Houghton Walker Maston posed in weathered bronze with birdshit for epaulets. The old robber baron extended one green hand, flicking a spitball in perpetuity at the back of his blood enemy, another statue across the way. Floyd B. Olson, Minnesota’s Red governor during the Depression.

  Well, Richard, you have your karma to work out and I have mi
ne.

  He ran eight-minute miles down Summit Avenue to the river and pushed it on the way back until the nicotine stitches burst in his lungs and the old screws that thrived on pain started turning and he had to keep going to shake the flat out of his ass from all the years stuck at a desk. In front of his apartment, he coughed up a decade’s worth of caution and hawked it into the snow, then he went upstairs and showered.

  Time to call Bud in the hospital. He worked through the switchboard, found the ward and was told that Bud was being carted around for tests.

  With energy shooting from his fingers, Harry cleaned his apartment, laid out clothing, studied a map of Minnesota, and 136 / CHUCK LOGAN

  traced the road north. He checked the balance in his savings account.

  Ravenous, he got in his car and drove east down the Interstate, crossed the St. Croix River, and pulled off in Hudson, Wisconsin, into an empty landscape of cement and brand names. Perkins.

  Country Kitchen. Amoco. Anywhere USA. He went into the Perkins and ordered eggs, sausage, pancakes. Poured on the syrup. A man in the next booth was reading the St. Paul paper. Harry glanced at the front page and grinned.

  A grainy AP photo showed corpses in the Third World mud and the headline story in the final Sunday edition was the murder of three American clergymen in El Salvador. The shooting in northern Minnesota was stripped in a small headline at the bottom of the page. Most of the story had been kicked inside.

  For diversion, he wandered down the shopping mall and went to a movie and took a tub of popcorn into the dark to watch a block-buster thriller about a cop taking on a gang of terrorists. Someone was killed in the first three minutes and people kept dying in orgies of automatic gunfire and lots of explosions served up supernovas of flying glass and bodies were dropping, coming apart, impaled, burned, flying into the air.

  Harry had to laugh at the audience, at how they cheered the special effects, oohing and aahing when the ketchup packets splattered in long, drawn-out slow-motion arabesques, hee-hawing at the heroes’ quick one-liners as he reloaded.

  Chris Deucette would have liked to watch the movie with hog tranq boiling in his brain.

  The last pane of glass shattered. The last plume of gasoline burned away, the last car crashed, and the last of a million gunshots echoed over the carnage. The good guy won in the end.

  He walked out of the theater grinning and people in the lobby averted their eyes from his torn face. He passed down an arcade of coming attractions and in every poster movie stars held out guns in the new American handshake.

  Outside, Detroit Harry sniffed the melancholy afternoon. It HUNTER’S MOON / 137

  smelled drunk out. The whole glass world was tipped on its side.

  Get Bud in the hospital first…

  23

  Six pillows propped Bud up in the hospital bed and his hairy gut hung out and his face was the same color as the thick gauze that swathed his wounded side. He spooned soft ice cream over his distended lower lip and watched the Vikings tumble on Astroturf like steroidal Easter eggs. Harry switched off the TV set.

  “Going to that funeral is the dumbest thing I ever heard,” said Harry firmly. “You had a deal with Hakala, remember? You’re going into treatment. Tomorrow.”

  Bud put down his spoon and looked at Harry thoughtfully.

  “I’ve…had time to think. I have an obligation to attend that service.”

  “Bullshit. When can you get out of here?”

  “Tomorrow. You talk to Linda?”

  “She was over, doing her Angel of Mercy number. More like a Cuisinart with nipples.” Harry scowled. “I don’t need people practicing amateur shrink with my life right now…”

  Bud dropped his eyes. “Déjà vu. They really got into that. Murphy tried to talk to me. I didn’t say a word.”

  “It’s already blowing over. Some American church people got killed in El Salvador. That bumped us to the bottom of the front page. Tomorrow it’ll be inside. TV will drop it if nobody talks to them.”

  “A Duluth station had a camera crew out there. I saw it on the news last night. Those yellow ribbons…” said Bud. “I talked to Hakala this morning. They did an autopsy. He was flying on angel dust. Who names drugs these days?”

  “Pick a hospital, with a good impatient program.”

  “I’ve always thought highly of Saint Helen’s. It’s right in town.

  And I built their new children’s wing—”

  138 / CHUCK LOGAN

  “Call them. Reserve a bed.”

  “I’ll call Louise in the morning. She can make the arrangements.”

  Louise was Bud’s personal secretary at the foundation.

  “No, you call, now.”

  “What if they don’t have a bed open?”

  “Pick up the phone.”

  Bud picked up the bedside phone, balked, and appealed, “You think I really need to go, like, in the hospital?”

  “Dial,” said Harry.

  It took half an hour to get the bed reserved. Bud had to call the director of the hospital at home during dinner. When it was done, Bud grimaced and held up a tiny paper cup and peered inside. “They took me off Dilaudid. Fucking Tylenol.”

  “Noon tomorrow,” said Harry.

  “Saint Helen’s, Christ they run their CD ward like boot camp.”

  “Good,” said Harry. “When did Linda say she could have the divorce summons ready?”

  “Huh? Oh. Tomorrow. Why?”

  “Somebody has to put them in her hand.”

  Bud pulled his sheets around his shoulders and snuggled deeper in his pillows and his eyes drifted out the window and watched St.

  Paul light its lamps against the desolate twilight.

  The El Salvador killings and Washington reaction dominated the six o’clock news. Video footage of a muddy field filled the screen with adobe-colored earth and heavy, moist saffron air. The Latin cops wore white shirts, tight gray pants, and sunglasses. Their slim physiques, long black hair, and large pistols were reminiscent of the Vietnamese Special Police.

  Harry understood the scene on the TV. The friction of living in a match factory with open vats of gasoline led to a certain fatalism and sensitivity to the spark of violence.

  But that violence was tied to social and political forces.

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  The scene up north was Perry Mason shit. Stuff he didn’t understand.

  He’d have a clearer picture when he talked to Reverend Karson.

  Randall called and said he had a care package from Dorothy.

  Harry told him to come on over. Thirty minutes later, Randall showed up with a casserole. Harry put it in the fridge.

  “They killed the story,” Harry said.

  Randall’s eyes wandered the apartment, paused on the travel gear laid out on the bed, and returned to Harry’s face. He raised an eyebrow. “How was last night?”

  “Wet,” said Harry.

  For a long time they watched each other; a conversation with their eyes that went back over the years. The older man sought a patience in the younger man, an acceptance. Harry felt a flush of envy. Every line in Randall’s face bore the name of a battle or a great man. He’d done it all.

  Randall slowly shook his head. “Look. Bud’s a devious fuckup.

  His life is a wreck, so he’s trying to avoid it by worrying about you.

  He called. He’s concerned you’re not working the AA program.

  Quote, that your life is starting to get unmanageable, unquote. He says I should tell you to go to a meeting.”

  Harry laughed. “I’m checking him into a treatment program at noon tomorrow. You telling me to go to a meeting?”

  “I’m telling you to pay more attention to your blind side.”

  “This is for real. People up there want to see Bud dead.”

  “And you owe him so much. Why is that? Because he helped you sober up, get a job? You would have done that on your own. He cultivated your friendship. It wouldn’t have happene
d normally.

  There’s something off in the chemistry.”

  Harry shook his head. “Bud had shrapnel pulled out of his ass in Third Med at Dong Ha just like you and me. He left the best part of himself on that ridge in Nam when he got the Congressional…

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  “That’s romantic bullshit. The Purple Heart’s the only medal you can’t fake.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Randall shrugged. “I pushed paratroops for twenty-five years. Bud isn’t like you. He’s a taker, not a giver.”

  “Bud’s all about giving. It’s what he does for a living.”

  “He gives advice and money, neither of which cost him squat.”

  The air turned brittle. Harry shook his head. “I gotta do this. This is my fight.”

  Randall pointed a finger in an uncharacteristically rude gesture.

  “Your blind side is your loyalty. It’s exaggerated. It saved Dorothy and me, and it’s still exaggerated.”

  “I stepped into the middle of something. I’m going to walk out the tracks.”

  Randall stood up and put on his coat. “What about the woman?”

  “She’s part of it,” said Harry ambiguously.

  “You’ve been sitting at a desk for ten years. We’re not who we were, thank God. You could tangle with some real rough-cut people up there. Loyalty isn’t just a blind side. It’s a predictable pattern.

  Remember patterns?”

  “Riddles don’t help me right now, Randall.”

  “You’ve got it fucked around in your head to where your buddy is up to his ass in shit and you can’t let him down. You can’t run away. This has nothing to do with Bud, this is a bad old tape about your father.” The finger stabbed again, lecturing.

  Harry was starting to get pissed off and the flash of anger raised the shadow that dwelled deep in his muscles. The story in his family was that his dad’s physical gifts were terrifying in a man, but just about right for a wild animal.

  His voice snapped. “You taking up amateur psychology in your old age, Randall?” It came out flat and nasty, a particularly brutal resentment between a younger man and an older man. Between a father and a son.

  Harry had never seen Randall show anger. He parried HUNTER’S MOON / 141