by Chuck Logan
“Man. I needed this.” Harry rubbed his knuckles through his messed-up hair. His sweat smelled good. His skin tingled.
“It’s a relief to be with a guy who doesn’t have problems with sex,” Ginny said as she ran her tongue across his bicep.
Harry grinned. Down the line, of course, lurked the jack-in-the-box nightmare.
“Don’t laugh,” Ginny said. “There’s a lot who do.”
“Like Jay?”
Her brows knitted. “You into comparisons?”
“Everybody’s different, huh?”
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“No.” She crossed her eyes. “But truth and the male ego can wreak havoc on a bedroom real fast.”
Sweat glistened on the milky slopes of her shoulders and hips and pooled in her navel. Down below, the cesarean scar made a crooked welt, deep scarlet in the firelight. His finger followed the slick furrow into her pubic hair.
“Kids?” he said.
“Little girl.”
“Married?”
“Separated.”
“He live in town?” Harry cast his eyes around warily.
“Heck no,” she laughed. “He’s an assistant sociology professor at Moorhead State.”
“Good.” Harry fell back into the covers, relieved. “My luck, he’d be another Paul Bunyan look-alike.” He shook his head. “Hakala, Emery, Cox. Aren’t there any normal-sized guys up here?”
“You,” she said with a sly smile.
He lit two cigarettes and passed her one. They lay side by side and stared at the ceiling. She smoothed the scar on his hip with her fingers, as if to blend the dead tissue into the living skin. She relaxed.
At ease with him and more poised with her clothes off.
“What’s your husband like?”
“He wouldn’t let me smoke in bed.”
Harry turned, supporting himself on his elbows. “Then tell me what Cox is like?”
“Too fast,” she said. “Slow down.” She raised her head to be kissed.
His kiss was mechanical. His mind, which had bucked off during their lovemaking, was back.
She patted him on the cheek and her expression set and tightened.
“How quick it gets away,” she said.
“You’re not really a waitress, are you?”
“Can’t we have this conversation over coffee, say in the morning?”
“Ginny, you took me to that bar knowing Cox would be there.”
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“We sure got his attention, didn’t we? I confess, I’m not perfect.”
“And you’re not a waitress.”
Ginny toyed with the mole on her cheek. “What gave me away?
The Ph.D. in oral sex?” she smiled. “I teach elementary school. Did.
I took a year’s leave of absence from Moorhead public schools when my marriage went down the tubes. My dad’s letting me run the diner till things straighten out.”
“Which one’s your dad?”
“The bank.”
“Christ, your brother’s Jerry the cop.”
“Jerry’s all right. I’m surprised he wasn’t there tonight. He’s sure taken an interest in you, making sure Larry doesn’t catch you out in the dark some night. Just don’t mention the Maple Leafs. He’s sensitive. They cut him from the team his first season.”
“Great.” Harry shook his head. “Why in the hell did you go out with someone like Cox?”
Ginny sat up and pulled the sheets to her shoulders. “He’s a sweet guy. He has these incredibly sensitive hands. Wish he could touch a body the way he touches a piece of wood. He can’t help the way he looks.”
“The sonofabitch is crazy, Ginny. Look in his eyes.”
“What do you expect? He got mixed up with Jesse.”
“You really don’t like her.”
“Actually, I feel sorry for her. She’s got it all. Looks. Brains. In her own way, she has a lot of heart. But she’s this beautiful plane that’ll never take off sitting on the runway.”
“So why didn’t she get out of here?”
“She got as far as Duluth and Larry Emery brought her back,” said Ginny. Goosebumps prickled over her smooth shoulders and she shivered and pulled the sheets tighter. “Larry loves Jesse. Except he loves the wild parts of her and his love winds up like a cage.”
“So she married Bud.”
“That doesn’t mean she got away from Larry.” She touched his forehead. “You know, you have these two lines 210 / CHUCK LOGAN
between your eyebrows from scowling. They go away when you make love.” Her hand was drawn back to his left hip. “What happened here?” she asked.
He closed his fingers over her hand. “I need a little help, Ginny.
What do people really think about the shooting? Why did Chris try to kill Bud Maston?”
“Uncle Mike says Chris was stoned out of his gourd—”
“C’mon, Ginny. I fought King Kong to earn your favors.”
She shrugged. “Chris was different. He was pulled in every which direction between Larry, his mother, and Reverend Karson. Like when Larry and Reverend Karson had their fight about Chris.”
“What kind of fight?”
Ginny made a face. “Chris got in trouble at school—”
“Pulled a gun?”
“No, before that. End of the school year last summer. Don Karson became real…involved…you know, counseling him. Larry lost it what with Jesse leaving him and living with Maston. He dragged Chris out of the church. Karson insists Larry assaulted him. It was a real scene. Karson gave this sermon about the rights of children and abusive men who were too rough on them. Larry walked out and took a bunch of the congregation with him. Jay was the only one Chris would talk to.”
“Doesn’t explain why Chris pulled the trigger.”
Ginny rolled her eyes. “Look. Larry and Jesse had—have this really strange relationship. Chris and Becky were both twisted from it.
Uncle Mike says Chris was shrapnel that finally went off.”
“Where’s Cox fit?”
Ginny sat up and smoothed the sweaty tangles in her hair. “Jay is just this guy who’s been seriously run over by the wheel of life.
He showed up last May, drove into town in a rattletrap truck full of tools, and started remodeling this place.”
“He’s driving a new truck now. Where’s he from?”
“He was in the service, then he had a contracting business HUNTER’S MOON / 211
up in the Pacific Northwest where it rains all the time. Seattle.”
“You wouldn’t know his birth date, would you?”
Slow revelation peeked in her eyes. “So that’s why you got me in bed. Shame on you.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re doing some kind of investigation. For the newspaper?”
“Help me out a little here, will you, Ginny?”
“What the hell. Sure, I did his chart. Aquarius. Jason Emmet Cox.
January twenty-first, nineteen forty-one. You want me to write it down?”
Ginny got up and hunted through the room until she found a pen and stationery on the desk. She wrote briefly and came back to the mattress.
Harry was genuinely distracted, watching her come willowy through the firelight. He reached for her.
“Oh my. One of those city guys who likes to get his ears greasy,”
she sighed deep in her throat as Harry nuzzled, sliding down her stomach.
A clatter on the porch brought him up for air.
He lurched and caught a glimpse of a shadow by the window.
He surged out the door, barefoot on the freezing mud porch. The kindling he’d stacked was toppled and footfalls pounded past the cabins. From the steps, he caught a flash of ponytail in the pole barn light.
“Who was it?” Ginny asked when he came back in.
“Becky Deucette, my guess. Playing Peeping Tom.”
“Crazy damn kid,” said Ginny, summoning him back beside her.
Her hand floated back to its p
erch on his hip, exploring the scar.
“You know, I think you’re all right,” she said.
Later, Harry walked Ginny to her car and she lifted a chaste kiss from his face in the glare of the yard light. A haze of burned wood and tires drifted around them.
“Ginny, you think you could talk to your brother, quiet-like? Find out if there’s really a serious investigation about Chris’s motives in the shooting?”
“You mean spy.”
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“I mean help me out.”
Ginny cocked her head. “I might. If you tell me why you’re really here poking around in things. Is it for the newspaper? Or are you working for Bud Maston?”
“Working? Ginny, I have to know what happened with Chris so I can sleep nights.”
She drew a cool finger down his throat. “You know, I believe you mean that.”
He watched her taillights disappear down the drive. Ginny Hakala did not make a convincing tramp. And Jay Cox wasn’t the kind of guy to quit in a bar fight. The night had been choreographed. He’d underestimated these people. They were handling him.
35
Harry, in Bud’s baggy terrycloth robe, hunched over the dining room table drawing with a felt-tip pen while a CD of Beethoven’s Ninth rebuked the overcast morning.
He hummed along with “An die Freude” as the pen sketched spidery lines in the style of Heinrich Kley.
Jesse, in her moonlight mode, hair uncoiled in serpentine tangles; enough character in the eyebrows and dark eyes to be recognizable.
Siren torso, arms extended, hands open in offering but, where her belly curved down, instead of well-shaped legs, her hips became the twin slat uprights of a guillotine. The triangle where her thighs came together formed the weighted, suspended knife.
At the base of the sketch, a Yogi Bear with a sheriff’s star dragged a tumbril containing a plump Porky Pig. A raven perched on Jesse’s shoulder. Cox.
Harry Griffin’s cartoon theory of criminal investigation. Go with instinct. Offstage a banquet table would be prepared. The Hakala clan, in horned helmets, napkins tucked at their throats, knives sharp, waited to carve the ham.
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It made a great picture. The problem was, Chris wasn’t in it.
And what about Ginny? He studied her penmanship. A distinctive, angular, printed hand. All lowercase letters. jason emmet cox.
Could he know Cox? Some collision from the past during a zombie blackout? Nah. Cox had loose marbles. Or did he? He’d looked the squared-away ex-jarhead at the funeral. Harry shook his head and crumpled the drawing and threw it at the fireplace.
He started another sheet of paper with names and a rough chro-nology. Bud drops out, comes to Stanley. Meets Jesse. They start the development Coop. Blue birds and happiness. Then last summer something happened and everything went kaput and Bud started drinking and getting fat. And Jesse decided to get her pound of flesh.
Harry circled the words: Last summer. Chris: trouble at school.
If they had planned a hunting accident Emery would be in position to cover it up to protect Jesse and Chris. Could Emery get Chris to do that? The Chris he’d met looked far beyond any adult’s control.
Then where did Cox figure in? And what about Emery’s animosity toward Cox? A falling out? Harry shook his head. Too complicated.
Too many people for a plan—he remembered the names on the monument in the graveyard—unless they were all in on it.
He wrote Karson’s name and a question mark. Chris told something to Karson that made him suspect Emery. Below Karson he scribbled the name of the high school teacher, Talme. Check him out.
He came to Becky’s name. Was she hiding something or hiding from someone? Harry wrote: Green Jeep Wrangler. He added Mitch Hakala to his list of names.
Becky was hiding, but she was snooping in windows, too?
Harry walked down the hall and stood before the closed door of Chris’s room. The thing he avoided. He put his hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it.
Start at the beginning. With Chris. The loop of film 214 / CHUCK LOGAN
flickered in memory. The deafening shot. The kick of the rifle.
Doubt. Bud’s weak-ass voice. “I was trying to talk to him.”
They could just be tolerating him out of deference to Bud. All of it…just…shock radiating from his rifle shot that precipitating a messy divorce to a hasty doomed marriage. What if it was just Chris, stoned, on his own, flipping out?
What if I shot too fast?
And Bud was covering for him. Harry jerked his hand from the doorknob as if it were hot.
He dressed, pulled on an orange vest, the fancy lightweight boots Bud had bought for him, and loaded the heavy .45-70. Walk it off in the woods.
But the tiny corkscrew of doubt had grown to meat grinder pro-portions in his brain. Boring in. Whatever Ginny Hakala’s agenda, her memory had been warm on his skin when he awoke. Gone now—what they called mood swings in the sobriety business. He stood in the door for long minutes scanning the blackened debris in the driveway.
Serious shit, man. Shots fired.
The air shattered into a million snowflakes that pinwheeled down and blotted over the fire rings in the slush. Harry stepped into the driveway and tilted his head up and opened his mouth. Felt a snowflake touch on his tongue.
Used to do that when I was a kid.
How much of life had I tasted at sixteen? Adolescent confusion going to black. That’s what I gave to Chris.
This moody shit was what he got for playing with the booze.
Today is day one. One day sober.
The snowmobile trail stretched before him. He knelt and tried to pick out Becky’s footprints. Fresh snow blurred the crusted impres-sions. He got up.
Annoying damn snow. Got at his eyes. He blinked away moisture.
Heavy walking even in the light boots.
Exhausted before he’d even started. He found a stump and sat down. Snow. No sun. Black trees. Lonely out here.
HUNTER’S MOON / 215
He imagined the forest without humans in it. A world in which he did not exist.
And he could see how people went crazy. They suddenly just felt the full weight of life. Scales and a ruler. How much you weighed and how far you’d travel between the womb and the grave.
Christ. Maybe this is how Bud feels all the time. Fuck that.
Bring him up here to help some kid, Bud’s nutty idea. Well, he’d helped all right.
Damnit! I saved his life. Kid was going to shoot him again.
What would a father do? Take a chance and yell, “Son. Put down the gun.” Try to talk, like Bud. Take a bullet and still try to talk?
He imagined it. Yelling in his loud voice that could carry over gunfire. Put it down, kid!
Harry shook his head. There hadn’t been time. He couldn’t see it going down any different. He took off his gloves and touched his eyes. Not the snow. Tears.
Snap! Branch breaking in the crisp air, maybe 30 yards away…
Movement in the trickling snow. Oh boy! Off balance. Not ready for this. Something cutting through the brush. Deer? Not a deer. A person watching him? A running figure blurred in the trees.
“Hold it,” yelled Harry, bringing up the rifle.
Becky Deucette froze in place, mired in knee-deep snow. She wore a black watch cap, a baggy army field jacket, and the damn dirty wind suit.
Harry lowered the rifle, shouted, “It’s all right, kid. I won’t hurt you.”
She bolted and Harry ran after her.
She made it to the snowmobile trail and opened her stride. But she was clumsy in snow-pac boots. Still, no way he could match her encumbered with a rifle. She opened the distance.
He dropped the rifle and sprinted. Their gasping breath came closer together and she slipped and lost her balance in a skid. Harry tackled her.
216 / CHUCK LOGAN
They rolled over, grappling, and he felt her young body burn throug
h her clothes as she arched up and her pelvis bucked, trying to throw him off.
“Knock it off,” panted Harry.
He pinned her arms into the snow and surged down. She struggled, knees gripping, trying to get her feet under her.
She clenched her teeth and her dark eyes smoldered and hair twisted across her face in greasy unwashed ropes. Squirming, she almost threw him and her jacket rode up, and shoving her back down, Harry tore her bra. One of her breasts bobbed in the cold.
The skin there was incredibly smooth and the brown aureole puckered and the nipple was rigid as a coffee bean.
She strained, laying the whole length of her body against his. She thrust one last time with her hips.
“You gettin’ a hard-on?” she sneered. “You’re stronger than me.
You could make me do anything you want.”
He released his hold and sat up, straddling her, holding her in place with his thighs. He panted, “You been watching me, haven’t you? At the lodge last night.”
“I saw you with that whore Ginny Hakala, you bastard!” She swung a short chop with her right hand. Harry caught it in his fist.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was out running. I run along the snowmobile trail.”
“Not dressed for running.”
“Dress any way I want.”
He let her hand go and she struggled up on her elbows. “Get off me,” she said. “I’m getting snow down my pants.”
He pulled away and stood up. “Do yourself up,” he said curtly.
Her eyes raked his face. “Get a good look?” she asked.
He pushed her back up the trail while she worked with her bra and pulled the coat around her. He picked up the rifle.
“You going to shoot me?” she asked in a petulant tone.
Harry rolled his eyes and slung the rifle over his shoulder.
“Where we going?” she asked.
HUNTER’S MOON / 217
He pushed her ahead of him. “Get you warmed up. Then I’m taking you back to your mom.”
“She’ll love that,” she said contemptuously.
He pushed her. “Move.”