Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  “You through? I’d like to hit the woods. I’m losing daylight,” said Harry.

  Jerry Hakala sighed with relief and walked Emery out to the Blazer.

  After they left, Harry took the coffee cups to the sink. Something clinked in the one Emery had used. A button. A metal button with a distinctive bellied-out inner curve. The hair at the nape of his neck tingled. It was the missing button from the surplus wool British Army trousers he’d been wearing that morning.

  Harry sat quiet as a stick on the ridge overlooking the swamp with the lever-action rifle across his knees as the damp afternoon freshened, bent back on itself, and crunched with cold.

  Emery had a point. He did need structure. Now it was a footrace to see whether he could solve the mystery of Chris Deucette before the booze took him down. He grimaced at the rifle in his hands.

  He’d meant it, what he’d said to Karson. A Buddhist mosquito had bitten him over there. This tiny inoculation of…

  Wife beater, Emery said.

  Cathedral silence sifted through the tall pines and Harry remembered why he’d quit hunting. Reminded him of ambushes. Why go hunting when there are supermarkets? That’s what Kate, his wife, had said.

  Marrying that woman had been like going through Tet again. A fight in a cramped apartment ended it. She slung an electric frying pan of pork chops at him, he backhanded her

  HUNTER’S MOON / 199

  getting out of the way. An hour later he was in a bar fight. Some asshole pulled a knife. He’d snapped off a pool cue, wound up putting it through the jerk’s neck muscles. Busted. Coulda beat it, self-defense.

  Then Kate filed charges, showed up in court with a black eye.

  Pregnant.

  So his buddies intervened. So Fucking Laos.

  When he heard, Randall thought it was folly, taking Hollywood’s deal to get out of jail early, going back as a contract employee. A paid thug.

  Six months under the Jolly Roger. Ammo flying in, opium flying out. Powered by amphetamines, he’d prowled the Ho Chi Minh Trail with Vang Pao’s Hmong, calling in airstrikes, trying to close down a ten-mile stretch. When he started they were wheeling supplies down on bicycles. By the time he was nicked in the hip and called it quits, they were driving trucks.

  A flock of crows rose silently over the trees and Harry remembered the searching look on the face of that one-legged dude on the street in St. Paul. Those black eyes knew him. Bugged out again.

  Not this time. This time out he was going to win.

  He shivered and walked back to the lodge. Keep busy. He looked up the name Karson had given him in the local phone book. Dialed Karl Talme’s residence. A woman answered.

  “Karl there?”

  “Tonight’s Karl’s group night,” said the woman.

  “What, AA?”

  “No, uh, he and Don Karson, they go to Duluth to this group for men.”

  “They run out of men around here?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Friend of Karson’s. I’ll call back.”

  Weird.

  Then the call came that Harry had been avoiding. Bud. “I want you to leave. Lock up and leave,” he said in a furry, thoroughly de-toxified voice.

  “Who told you?”

  200 / CHUCK LOGAN

  “Karson called me. He’s a minister, right? So they got me out of group. He said you’ve been drinking. That you’re up there looking for a fight. Let the sheriff watch the place. Get out.”

  “Emery’s job is looking the other way. I leave, these bandits will rob you blind.”

  “I don’t care. Just get out of there before somebody else gets hurt.”

  “Hey, Bud, grow some balls!” Harry didn’t disguise the contempt in his voice.

  “You’re back walking on all fours, Harry. You’re going to fuck up. Damnit! Don’t make me come back up there.” Both a threat and a plea.

  “Just worry about getting an injunction against Jesse.”

  “Christ. You really did that? The funeral?”

  “You wanted her served. She’s served. And Becky’s disappeared.

  I told Emery; he didn’t seem too concerned.”

  “It’s like a different culture up there. They have their own way of doing things. I can’t worry about Becky. I have to let go of all that stuff.”

  “Don’t worry, man. I’ll hold down the fort,” said Harry.

  “It’s not a fort…” Then Bud erupted. “Goddamnit, I know what you’re doing. You found some…adversity, and you can’t let it go.”

  His voice accelerated, “Karson told me about you and Jesse. The way—”

  “I gotta go now,” said Harry. He hung up the phone. Almost immediately it rang again. Busy night.

  “Hi, remember me? Ginny from the Timber Cruiser?” said a breathy voice.

  “Sure, the astrology lady.” Harry grinned. He picked up the button Emery had left, tossed it in the air. Caught it.

  “You got the whole town talking about you, pinning Jesse’s ears back with those divorce papers. Shooting at those guys.”

  “That why you called, keep me up to speed on the local gossip?”

  “Actually I was thinking of going out to the VFW for a HUNTER’S MOON / 201

  drink, only thing is, this guy I used to go out with might bother me—”

  “And you could use a little male companionship?” Harry grinned.

  It was just the oldest setup in the world, baited with pussy and whiskey. Well, why not, as long as he could squeeze in a few drinks before the killing started. He gave the telltale button a shove with his index finger and wondered what Ginny Hakala’s game was.

  “Fact is, the right kind of male companionship could get lucky tonight.”

  “You always this forward?”

  “I don’t know. Tell you what. You bring the apple and I’ll bring a snake and a tree and we’ll find out. Say eight-thirty…” Her voice dropped a register, somewhere between sophistication and guile.

  “And, Harry, leave the suit home. It’s not that kind of place.”

  33

  Outside, some comedian had pasted a smile face label over the cracked thermometer on the VFW door. Inside, Ginny Hakala sunned her stuff below the bent neon helix of a grain belt beer sign. Her personals ad would be upbeat. “Man wanted; must have muzzle loader that can keep up with my six-shooter. Thirty-year-old single white natural female. Smokes, drinks, never leaves a spec of chrome on the trailer hitch.”

  Here we go. Eyes turned as Harry came down the bar. The men in dirty blaze orange who packed the stools and booths exuded a musk of beer, bar whiskey, the grease pit, cold winter alfalfa dust, deer guts, and heavy machinery. Their stumpy hands had trained for doing shot glass curls by twisting frozen hex nuts off rusted bolts.

  Most wore snowmobile boots and suits, unzipped, arms out, hanging down their backs like capes. Some of them probably had fresh memories of his buckshot whistling over their heads.

  202 / CHUCK LOGAN

  A game was in progress on the pool table. Alabama cursed Neil Young on the Wurlitzer. He did not see Jay Cox.

  Ginny draped sideways in a booth next to the pool table and made no concessions to the weather. Her thin, stiff, oxblood leather car coat popped open to let her cleavage shine and the hem of her black clingy minidress crept high on her blazing thighs. She saw him and crossed her legs.

  Harry grinned, big easy grin. Pretend it’s 1968.

  She’d swept her hair up, went easy on the eyeliner and makeup.

  As he slid into the booth she tugged at the cuff of his sheep-lined Levi’s jacket. “You didn’t wear your suit.”

  “Get yourself an outfit and be a cowboy, too,” said Harry.

  “Dig it. Everybody is watching us.”

  “They don’t look very excited. In fact, I expected it to be louder in here.”

  “Too many Finnlanders,” she said. “We’re into melancholy, big time. There’s a saying. Whatever happens, we’ll be on the losing side.”

  A
waitress appeared. Ginny ordered a Black Russian. “Pabst and a doubleshot of bar whiskey,” the words rolled naturally off his tongue.

  “What I heard is you don’t drink.” She cocked her head.

  Harry took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves. “Just chipping.”

  She traced the griffin tattoo on his left arm with a cool finger.

  “Like your identity there on your arm.” She nodded. “Jay’s got one, too…From the marines. His says ‘Death Before Dishonor.’” She curled her upper lip. “Probably crawled off his arm out of pure shame.”

  Their eyes met and he saw more range in hers than he’d anticip-ated. She let her hand rest lightly on his forearm. With the other she lit a Winston 100 with a plastic lighter and blew a stream of smoke.

  “I’m not dumb, Harry. You and Jay Cox got a thing.” Her secretive smile broadened, revealing the slight overbite. Her fingers lingered, a clairvoyant sweep along his arm.

  “You got any other tattoos? Or scars?” she asked.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 203

  Harry knit his brows in mock concern. “You one of these weird backwoods hippie chicks? Into disfigured men?”

  “It’s a problem,” she said. “Exciting guys have scars and tattoos.

  Unfortunately they also have lots of unresolved baggage. Are you like that, Harry?”

  “For sure.”

  Maybe it was all his pores cranked open to the barroom scent of tacit danger. She turned him on with a flick of her eyes. She would always turn men on and they would always worship her in private as long as they were horizontal. But they would always get up and leave her for women who were more respectable, conventionally better looking, and lousy in bed.

  Their drinks came. “You know a lot of things,” he said.

  “For a waitress, huh? Who’s almost pretty as long as she keeps her mouth shut.” She mocked the unintended condescension that had crept into his voice. Joke was on him.

  Jay Cox walked into the bar and conversation paused a beat. Half a dozen of the barflies gravitated to him.

  “Here comes trouble,” said Ginny gamely, sitting up and self-consciously fluffing her hair with both palms.

  “What is this, a test?” Harry muttered.

  “Just want to see what you’re made of, Mr. Harry Griffin.”

  Cox pushed between two guys at the bar and ordered a drink. He watched them over his shoulder with sullen eyes. Harry could almost smell the gasoline on him.

  Cox sipped from a shot glass and Harry felt the fight pack in the air, tight as an ice ball. People moved away. The murmur of the barroom picked up a raw, static zing.

  Harry gulped his whiskey and it seared his throat and started a memory dance of physical blows and ignorance behind his eyes.

  Why is it I always pick the bars with tilted floors? Why is it, the one violent asshole in the joint always runs downhill to me?

  Cox, egged on by his huddle of cronies, made his move. He swaggered to the pool table and took a cue stick from the wall rack.

  Slapping the cue in his palm, he strutted in front of the booth. The stick vibrated in his bone-prominent hands.

  204 / CHUCK LOGAN

  “Hiya, Cox,” said Harry. His voice trembled. Scared. Until he got hit.

  Cox panted a stubble ugly grin and Harry noticed a web of scar tissue on his throat that crawled with his Adam’s apple. He was building menace and he had an audience. Christ, they were two middle-aged men. This was going to be real dumb.

  Cox snarled, “Doing your number on him now, huh, Ginny?

  Thought better of you. Out with this guy. Fact is, I bet he don’t even like women.”

  Ginny put a plastic swizzle stick between her teeth, bit it, drew it slowly out. When she was confident all eyes were on her, she delivered her cameo lines in the Stanley soap opera: “Jay has this problem. He can’t let go of anything. He’s insanely possessive.” She smiled sweetly. “Right now he’s got this real dilemma for a possessive man. He’s out at his trailer shacked up with Jesse Deucette and she’s the local nymphomaniac.”

  Cox’s glower flamed into rage. Harry began to shake in anticipa-tion, and Cox took encouragement. He wagged the cue in Harry’s face. A tic-tac-toe streak of blue chalk crossed his scabs. Harry pushed the stick away and stood up. His muscles felt loose, ropes shaking out. Cox was too big, too powerful. The sense of déjà vu almost made him smile. He focused on the stick. Sure worked last time.

  Landed him in jail instead of the morgue.

  Cox grinned. “We got us a sissy boy treehugger here. Lookit the fucker shake.”

  The cue stick lashed out and stung Harry’s chest. Yeah. Now I remember. The muscles across his back flared out tight.

  “Hey, you guys,” yelled the bartender, “take it outside.”

  “Don’t think he’ll make it,” said Cox. “I do believe he’s going to piss all over the floor right here.”

  The cue rapped forward and stung Harry’s chest again. Pain oriented him and the tightness scalded from his back and out his arms.

  Harry grinned, stepped back, and planted his right hip against the pool table.

  The third time the cue flashed at his face, instinct took over HUNTER’S MOON / 205

  and his breath ignited. He twisted, set, blocked the stick and slid up it with his left forearm and clamped his hand behind Cox’s. With a sharp twist he broke Cox’s grip, reversed the cue, and, holding it like a clubbed rifle, pounded the fat end at Cox’s throat.

  Cox drew in his chin and the handle hit muscle. He backed up, stunned, and started to tuck into a fighting crouch. Not quick enough. Harry twirled the cue and did his barroom trick. Stuck the tip in the end pocket of the pool table and snapped it off. Harry uncoiled, holding the shortened stick two-handed and laid the jagged, splintered tip against Cox’s carotid artery.

  Cox poised on the balls of his feet with the cue lodged secure at his throat just a shiver away from serious damage as rage did a somersault in his peppery eyes. With a mad grunt he pressed forward, thrusting his throat against the jagged wood. Blood streaked his neck.

  Cox’s mad eyes baited. “You ain’t got the guts,” he sneered and he looked like he’d push the sharp end through his own throat to get at Harry. Harry hesitated. Cox knocked the cue clattering against the table. His knobby fist cocked at his shoulder.

  That’s when Harry moved ahead of the punch, dropping slightly on flexed knees. His right hand snaked between Cox’s legs, grabbed a handful of denim, zipper, and nuts and mashed and wrenched up and Cox was in dance class, levitating with a strangled howl. All he needed was a tutu and toe shoes. Harry released his grip. Cox staggered back against the pool table, gasping. Harry glanced down the bar. Everybody slunked over, looking down their noses into their glasses. Broke-dick silence.

  “Okay, break it up. Fun’s over,” drawled an amused voice next to Harry’s ear. Emery. Doing his silent approach. Harry turned. Emery smiled. He was alone, Jerry was nowhere in sight. He wore hunting duds and snow clung to the cuffs of his trousers. Just in from the woods.

  Emery moved Harry aside and stepped up to Cox. “Wanna push somebody around? Come push me. One teeny little push.

  206 / CHUCK LOGAN

  I wouldn’t mind, Jay. Fact is, coming from you, I’d kinda appreciate it right now.”

  Cox was still game. Harry saw the bartender look around nervously. These two tuskers could wreck the place.

  “Was between me and him, Larry,” Cox said in a labored voice.

  “Bullshit. Leave it alone. Tell Jessica I said for her to do the same.”

  Cox gnawed his lip and glared at Harry. “Got no quarrel with you, Larry.”

  “That’s big of you, Jay, seeing’s I’m the fucking sheriff!”

  Cox appraised Harry. “Next time,” he promised.

  “Ain’t gonna be no next time. Now get outta here,” said Emery, who put his hands on his hips and narrowed his eyes at the crowd.

  When Cox had left through the front door he spoke softly. Nob
ody had trouble hearing. “Now listen up. No more fun and games on Maston’s land, you hear?”

  Then he slouched, hands deep in the Mackinaw pockets. He pulled out a rolled-up paper and closed his right fist around it. With deceptive speed, he dropped his shoulder, rotated, and slammed the fist into Harry’s stomach—knocking the breath out of him and nearly lifting him onto the pool table.

  “Police report for your car insurance. Been meaning to give it to you.” Emery grinned. “Now pay for that cue stick and get the hell out of here.”

  Harry gasped for breath, peeled two twenties off the roll in his jeans, and threw them on the pool table. Ginny stepped up and handed Harry his coat. “C’mon, hon, let’s blow this pop stand,” she said briskly as she helped him toward the door. She rolled her eyes back at the silent crowd. “Now that’s what I call foreplay,” she chuckled, running her tongue over her teeth.

  Emery tipped his hunting cap to Ginny and his face resumed its mournful repose. “Y’all have a good night, now.”

  Outside, Harry sucked in huge draughts of air. “What the hell happened to Cox in there? You see the way he threw himself at that stick?”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 207

  “Poor Jay,” said Ginny with a sad shrug. “Off his meds since Jesse’s been messing with his mind. Too bad. He’s really this sweet guy.”

  “Huh?” Harry grumbled, one hand to his belly.

  “Don’t feel bad,” said Ginny helpfully. “No shame in a run-in with Larry Emery.”

  34

  Once Harry got past the blood bruise on his stomach, it was fun. Racing back to the lodge, Ginny riding his tail in her red Camaro. Laughing through the door, building the fire, and turning off the lights. Undressing.

  He discovered her body and his own dog-happy arousal. Between the fight and getting naked he had acquired nineteen-year-old eyes.

  Glowing nineteen-year-old skin.

  She held up a twinkling tinfoil square and Harry groaned.

  “This is your basic casual encounter. And this is a rubber,” she said.

  Still fun with galoshes on.

  Before the problems began, Linda Margoles used to accuse Harry of being addicted to mood-altering flesh. Not true. Addiction was a struggle to stay ahead of physical tolerance. Good sex doesn’t go away after the first time and you never get used to it, and done right, it was still the only race where both people get to win.