by Chuck Logan
But it was true. Martin loved men. You couldn’t tell by looking at him. He had the body of a Greek athlete. But he didn’t always look that way. He had been born 284 / CHUCK LOGAN
without all the muscles in one of his legs. As a boy he limped and other boys teased him. But he had an operation because of a new technology that could grow synthetic muscles. The new muscles were stronger than ordinary muscles. Now Martin was the strongest man in the platoon.
Martin didn’t lie about who he was. He was up-front and now all the men knew the two things that he liked above all else. He liked to fight and he liked to suck dicks. But he’d only go out with someone he was in love with.
Martin was in love with Lt. Mitchum. Martin had showed Mitchum how not to be afraid of who he was. They ran naked together through the jungle.
Martin saw Lt. Mitchum come up the hill. It excited him to watch him. Martin loved the way he walked and the way the sunlight outlined his handsome face. He loved the way the sweat ran down over his muscles. Martin pretended his fingers were the sweat, touching Mitchum all over.
Mitchum came up to Martin and squeezed his shoulder.
“We’re in for a rough night,” he said. “The enemy is very strong here and we have to defend the most dangerous part of the hill.”
They smiled at each other. They would die for each other.
There was no greater love.
That night, Martin could feel how afraid they all were. Even Lt. Mitchum. They could hear the enemy moving around in the dark. Getting closer. It was the blackest night there ever was.
Then the enemy came. They fought and fought but there were too many of them and the other men were so scared they couldn’t speak. Finally, even Lt. Mitchum was too scared to even fight. They ran away, even Lt. Mitchum. Martin wouldn’t run. Even though the other men despised him, even though his heart was broken that Lt. Mitchum had left him.
Somebody had
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to stay and keep the enemy from getting to the top of the hill.
Martin was hurt. He was shot in many places. The bullets had torn his new muscles all to shreds and he was a cripple again. But he wouldn’t leave. Even though they’d all betrayed him.
He had to go on. He had to finish what he’d started.
He cried out in his pain. In hatred for Lt. Mitchum who’d let him down, who had betrayed him.
Only one man was so ashamed that he came back. The old Sarge. Together they held the hill and saved the company.
But Martin was dying of his wounds. He was dying in Sarge’s arms. There was no love left in Martin. He’d used it all up fighting. All he had left was hate and pain for Lt. Mitchum.
The old Sarge kissed him as he died and swallowed all of Martin’s hate.
Harry read Chris’s warrior fantasy three times and with each reading he descended another rung into a private hell and the rifle kicked and Chris spun in his awkward snowshoe jig. Eyes wide open, crucified upon the thorns.
Trying to be strong, Miss Loretta said.
The Polaroid suggested a partner. Could this be some kind of al-legory? A love letter? The reference to Mitch Hakala was transparent.
Unrequited? Maybe from Chris’s end. Couldn’t see Mitch…
No. The answer was in the slime somewhere between Karson and Emery…
Something else. Something Chris said that night in front of the fireplace. Harry shook his head as his brain cranked. Metal thoughts grinding, out of oil. Too many cigarettes. Too much coffee.
He took the last of the coffee and sat on the porch steps. Out there, people were stirring in their peaceful beds with nothing more complicated in their heads than picking up their toothbrushes and making coffee. Soon they’d be watching morning television. Linda Margoles would take a shower and
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would draw a sponge along her smooth skin. Dorothy would sit in her roomy kitchen, butter toast, and listen to public radio.
Usually when Harry looked inside himself, he saw locked doors.
Do not enter signs.
He knew Chris better now. Knew what it was like to be different, to move off to the side in the shower stall when they got to snapping towels. To be frightened by the escalating chorus of giggles that formed up the pack. Be an artist. Mom’s wishbone hope.
Calling me chicken, Ma. Fairy. Gotta fight ’em. At the bus stop. In the parking lot. Gotta stand up when everybody is ass in the grass.
Hurt people out there. Americans. The more they scream the stronger I get…
Harry stood up, poisoned with fatigue. He turned and started back into the lodge. The muscles below his left shoulder blade lit up. Danger.
Harry spun. Larry Emery stood 100 yards away in his red Mackinaw, unmistakable among the snow-draped pines. He lowered the scoped rifle. The red blanket quivered. Like a goddamned ghost, Emery disappeared.
All right, Emery—you and me!
47
Harry grabbed his hunting knife, found a white sheet in the hall closet and slashed a hole for his head. At the fireplace he scrawled a quick winter-camo pattern with a chunk of charcoal, threw it over his parka, and pulled on his boots.
Not the only one who can play snoop and poop in the woods, Emery.
Pack? No time. Going out the door, he barely remembered his hat and gloves. He hefted the heavy lever-action rifle and sprinted into the woods on sheer adrenaline.
You been hunting that kid, you fucker. Why don’t you try hunting me?
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He picked up Emery’s tracks and slowly started up the ridge. Walk three steps, stop, listen, scan 360 degrees. Boonie Walk, an Austral-ian conceit of fieldcraft he’d learned.
He wiggled on his belly through a stand of dwarf pines and saw Larry Emery’s red square back dip over a hill 200 yards away.
Emery took a trail that skirted the ridge and twisted through the ravines. Harry came to a sign disfigured by a rusted stipple of buckshot. Snowmobile logo in a circle behind a diagonal slash.
Hiking trail.
Emery traveled at a smooth trot, working a pattern through the trail network. Harry kept the 200-yard interval, his lungs banging against his ribs. Snake breath. Formaldehyde sweat gushed in his eyes. Keep going. The old tie breaker. He can do it. You can do it.
Emery left the trails and climbed the ridge and the silent chase ate up the morning. No watch. No compass. Hour and direction lost in the swirl of exhaustion. Emery skirted the ridgeline and went down the other side. Oatmeal for sky. No sun. No shadows. Just follow.
Back on the trails, the red target stopped. Harry squatted, caught his breath, and relaced his boots. Within a minute, Emery moved again. He’d paused at a county road. An unfiltered cigarette butt smashed the snow. Across the road, an empty pint of Old GrandDad lay in his tracks with amber beads of liquor still wet on the bottleneck.
A couple hundred yards down the road Harry saw a country mailbox, set on an overhang to let the snowplow through.
More switchback hills. Swampy, thick second growth. Jack pine.
Off Bud’s land. Emery removed his Mackinaw and tucked it under a bough. His slate-gray shirt blended into the snow and Harry closed the distance, afraid he would lose him in the hills. Once he thought Emery might have heard him. He fell back. The track of a plow blade wound through the trees. Road? No, a driveway. Power line running in. Emery went back for high ground. The tang of wood smoke stained the air.
The big trailer had a screened-in porch on one side and an 288 / CHUCK LOGAN
addition on the other with a stovepipe off the addition putting out the smoke. Jay Cox’s truck. Jesse’s Escort. A Quonset garage had been converted to a workshop and looked full of power tools, lumber.
Emery lay motionless, scouting the trailer.
An hour passed. The sun made a platinum smudge in the clouds and disappeared. The wind came up. When the plume of smoke came directly at Emery and Harry, Harry took advantage of being downwind to calm himself with a cigarette.
&nb
sp; The trailer door opened, the sound out of sync with the distance, and Jay Cox stepped out, clad in blaze orange. He shouldered his rifle and walked to his shed where he pushed out a fat-tired three-wheel scooter. He mounted it and putted down the driveway.
Harry kept his eyes on Emery. What would he do? Go after Cox?
Go down to see if Jesse was in there alone? A meeting?
Emery moved almost immediately, scrambling to where he’d left his coat. He put it on and began to walk in the direction Cox had taken.
Harry waited another thirty minutes to see if Emery would double back. His eyes snapped back on the trailer.
She was in there alone.
He circled, staying in the cover of the trees, and came at the trailer from the end where there was only one window, the curtain drawn.
He hoped that Cox didn’t keep a dog. A dog inside the trailer would be barking already. No dog, decided Harry. From the edge of the trailer he could see through the framed eight-foot-high thermal windows, twelve of them, four to a side, that formed the addition.
A nude copper shadow rippled through the tinted glass as Jesse moved into the addition drying her hair with the end of a towel.
Harry pulled back behind the end of the trailer and gripped the rifle with both hands and willed his heartbeat to slow down. Then he rounded the trailer and gained the screened HUNTER’S MOON / 289
porch in long strides. Through the porch. The door opened to his grasp. He was in.
“Hello,” she called out over the whine of the hair dryer. “Jay?”
A couch and chair. TV. Coffee table. Shelves held more books than Harry was prepared to think that Cox was inclined to read.
Flat cardboard boxes adorned with the script of a Duluth women’s apparel shop were strewn on the couch amid tatters of beige wrapping tissue that gave off a new expensive scent. The table was littered with brightly colored travel brochures, scattered among plastic pill containers. “Mexico” in warm terra-cotta type. Harry picked up one the bottles. Elavil. From the Twin Ports VA Clinic in Superior, Wisconsin. Cox’s name typed along with a lengthy description of doses and contra-indications.
Travelers checks. Thick booklets of hundreds. Two airline tickets.
Northwest. Dulu th to Ixtapa, Mexico. Somebody was headed to the beach to beat the winter blues.
The electric whine shut off. “Oh my,” said Jesse.
She merely stepped into the doorway, but she danced in his vision, his own backroads Shiva, with her hair down and her bare shoulders more rounded than he pictured them and her skin as pale as blooming peonies and the clustered triangle between her legs as black as ants.
Her face had mellowed, no longer drawn in sharp lines, and a burnished quality had replaced guile and grief in her dark eyes. The look evoked a memory of his mother’s eyes. Against all odds. Hope.
“Marie Bursac,” said Harry.
Jesse smiled. “Smart, aren’t you? It’s Jessica Marie. And Bursac was my mother’s name.” She shook her head. “I knew you’d come eventually, but I really thought you’d dress better.”
“Sit down. Put something on.”
“Which should I do first?” Stretch marks drew faint ironed-on purple bruises down the curve of flesh below her 290 / CHUCK LOGAN
navel and delicately webbed above the nipples of her breasts. “Bud send you or are you on your own errand this time?” she asked.
Too hot in the trailer and her naked optimism smelled faintly perfumed and as flimsy as the wrapping paper on the couch. He began to sweat. “Is Becky in danger?”
“Becky’s onstage.”
“She says you should stop the divorce. Don’t take the money.”
“My God.” Painted thoughts rolled on her eyes like fruited symbols on a slot machine. She stopped them on the jackpot. “The money’s all I’ve got. They’re just kids, they can’t understand that.”
Unnerved by her lapse of tenses, Harry shifted the rifle, keeping the muzzle angled away from her. She put her hands on her hips.
“If you’re going to shoot off your gun, go ahead. If not, get out of the way. I have to get dressed. I have an appointment with a lawyer.”
“Did you know that Chris thought he was a homosexual?”
She walked past him, moving the rifle away with her index finger.
“C’mon, Harry. You mean that silly business with Mitch Hakala?
That was just boys playing. That’s old thinking from the Kinsey days. Calling a boy queer just because he has an experience to or-gasm with another boy.”
“Did Karson seduce Chris?”
Jesse sniffed. “My God! Are you serious? Don Karson is a…prude.”
“There was a fight last month at the lodge. You called the cops because Chris was threatening Bud. And you let them go hunting together?”
“That wasn’t me. Larry and Bud worked that out.”
“Whose idea was it to go hunting?”
“You’re thinking city. It was supposed to be a way to make up.
And it gave Larry an excuse to spend some time with Chris.”
“Goddamnit! Emery’s out there hunting your daughter like she’s some animal.”
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“Yup. She’s got his full attention, just like she always wanted.
Good old reliable Larry,” she said sarcastically. “Reliable now for Becky. For Bud. For Chris…sure wasn’t there for me, that’s for sure.”
She shot a venomous look out the windows. “Made me drive that goddamn Ford all these years. Every woman in town’s got something better. Giving orders all the time. All because I wouldn’t marry him.”
She caught herself. “The man is a drag.”
“Tell me about Tip Kidwell.”
The painted drum rolled in her eyes. “I’m like you, Harry. I never look back.”
He shook his head. “You’re some kind of goddamn monster.”
“Oh yeah?” She glided past and trailed a hand across his jeans.
“Who’s that for? Godzilla?”
Damn. Put them in the same room and the flute started.
He leaned the rifle against the wall and lowered himself to the rocking chair in front of the wood stove. Jesse moved off the porch, into the trailer, and hangers rattled in a closet. He yanked off the silly camouflage and unzipped his parka. Snow melted off his boots and ran in giddy rivulets along the shiny oak grain.
Jesse reappeared in panties light as foam on her shadowed tummy.
She pulled on clean ironed jeans and tucked in a crisp beige blouse and stroked her hair with a brush. She tossed her head. No braids.
No bra. Free.
Snowflakes began to crash silently against the tinted windows.
“You make a lousy go-between, Harry. You’ve been out of touch, Bud and I agreed on a figure,” she said brightly. “One zero zero zero zero zero zero. How do you like those measurements?”
“Bullshit.”
“Hey, I talked to his lawyer. Bud said you used to go out with her. She sounded like a real nice girl.”
Her smile mocked and her husky voice did that bourbon trickle in her throat. “Is she? A real…nice…girl?”
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Now there were Christmas lights in her eyes as she laughed at the expression on his face. “Bud’s coming up. We’ll settle it all then.”
“Not if I can help it,” he said.
“You can’t stop it. It’s ticking along like a Swiss clock. I’m finally getting out of here. Away from Larry Emery.”
She pulled on a pair of snow boots with tufted liners, put on a bright red parka, and slung a purse over her shoulder. New clothes, new purse. Harry inhaled expensive leather and the mysterious interior scent of cosmetics. Her soap and body lotion. Her crazy smile like burning wires.
She withdrew a tube of lipstick. “Come with me,” she said impulsively.
“Huh?”
“To Mexico. You have a passport?”
“At home. In Saint Paul.”
; “Go get it.”
“So I won’t be around when you guys kill Bud?”
“You’re so melodramatic. You’re just like Jay. Your head’s all jammed up. Didn’t you ever just want to be…happy?”
Harry squinted at her. “What’s with Cox? First he gets in a fight with me at the bar, then he acts…real friendly?”
“Decided you were just stuck in the middle.” She knelt before him and put her hands on his thighs. Looking into her sparkling eyes, it occurred to him how wrong he could be. Nothing shrewd. No cares.
All she could think of was her ticket out.
Blaming her. Emery. Could that be his ticket out. From the simple truth? He saw in the alluring mask of her face a mother who couldn’t accept that her son had been cut down.
It hadn’t really hit her yet. She’d taken her tragedy to the mall and went shopping. Doubt eclipsed him as he felt all the lives toppled over by the bullet that killed Chris.
He lurched forward, seized her shoulders, and shook her.
“He’s dead. Chris is gone,” said Harry. Nothing showed in her eyes but the bright images of his own face. He started to sit up, to push her away.
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“Hush,” she ordered, “just hush.”
Deftly, with a metal hiss, she drew down his zipper, and freed him from the tangle of his underwear. Her fingernails teased.
Harry slapped her face. She slapped him back. A carnal greeting.
“We know each other, you and I,” she said gaily. “I’m your missing rib.”
She twirled the bottom of her lipstick tube and daubed it on the glans of his penis. Her dark head tipped forward, took him in her mouth, and rolled in a figure eight.
Just a quick visit that inflamed him. When she looked up, she was smiling, and she had her lipstick on. She stood up briskly, shouldered her purse, and walked from the room. “I’ll come see you tonight and we’ll work on the rest. Turn out the lights when you leave,” she said.
He walked toward the wooded hills in back of the trailer and put one foot in front of the other, aimlessly, in the blowing snow. Where he’d sought enemies, he’d found afflicted people. This whole week, not even people. Dogs running loose, a foam of pain dripping from their jaws.
All he had to show for the day was lipstick on his dick.