Hunter's Moon

by Chuck Logan

  “Talk,” said Becky.

  Hector took another sip of beer. “Lieutenant Maston. You could just see it the minute he showed up. He had that look. That Kennedy light on him. He was going to do everything at least once. The war was his dime store and we was his toy soldiers.”

  A desert hawk drifted over them and Harry watched its shadow sail across the sand and a cloud covered the sun and the hawk’s shadow metastasized and covered everything.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 369

  Hector lit a cigarette. “This is a war story. You know about war stories. That’s where everybody lies.” He smiled tightly at Becky.

  “Just as soon not talk in front of her.”

  “Fuck you,” said Becky.

  Hector appraised her. “You’re tough, huh? Okay, so Maston. At first we thought, cool. He’s a good head. Like he went out of his way to take care of us. He remembered everybody’s name and where they were from. But then stuff started to happen.”

  “What kind of stuff?” asked Harry.

  “Creepy things. Even for over there. We captured this sniper. Some of the guys were gonna shoot him, I mean, he was wounded and all. And he was a fucking sniper. But Maston had this idea—he wanted to hang him.” Hector shrugged and hugged himself like he had bumped into a sudden chill in the 90-degree heat. “He said he’d never seen anybody hanged before. Like curious, you know. Woulda too, if Gunny Cox hadn’t talked him out of it.”

  “What else?” Harry felt the goose bumps start at the base of his spine, radiate out his shoulders, and pop down his arms.

  “There was this ville the zoomies blew to shit, and we made a sweep through it. Some civilians were killed, and ah, some cows and pigs…” Hector licked his lips and drank greedily from his beer.

  “And Maston, he carved this hunk out of this dead lady’s leg and was roasting it on his K-Bar over these embers. He just took one bite though—you know, curious again.”

  They watched Hector drink half his beer. Then Hollywood asked,

  “What about Martin and Lieutenant Maston?”

  “Well, it was like the other stuff. Maybe he was curious. Maybe he wanted to try Martin, too. Just one bite.” Hector shook his head.

  “But Martin never fucked around in the field and anyway, I think he was like, only into niggers. We kidded Martin about it, you know.

  How Maston was gonna stick him on his K-Bar like a weenie and put the fire to him and eat his ass up.

  “But it wasn’t funny. We were all getting strung out.”

  370 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Hector bared his teeth. “They left us out there too fucking long, man.

  We needed a break. Gunny Cox was losing his shit. And the way it got to Maston is…I guess he like, fell in love with Martin. Which was really flaky because Martin was the one holding us all together.”

  The cloud passed and white-hot sunlight transformed Hector Jefferson Cruz’s face into a twitching Mayan sculpture.

  “We were sick. Guys had fevers of a hundred and one, a hundred and two. Guys had dysentery and malaria. Afraid to take their boots off because how bad their feet looked. Maston tried to get us a stand-down. Instead they gave us another brilliant fucking operation.

  Everybody was just too…fucking…strung out.

  “This goddamned hill. Company night position up by the Rock-pile. Everybody was spooked because there were these rumors that the NVA had tanks. My squad got stuck on an exposed finger. The flank. Hanging in the goddamned air. Martin and Maston set up with us.”

  Hector’s voice took them into the time machine. “Gets so damn dark like night is older there. Then the crickets stop and you hear the bamboo clicking, those little rice-propelled fuckers signaling.

  Then the whistles. Tough bastards, they came right through their own mortars. In five minutes we had 50-percent KIA, everybody wounded. But we held. Maston said we had to pull back. Martin said we had to hold that ridge ’cause if the NVA got a machine gun up there, they could enfilade the whole company, it’d be all over.”

  Hector stood up, gesturing with his hands. “Then they came again and it was just too hairy. We grabbed our wounded and booked.

  Maston ran. I ran. We all ran.

  “Martin stayed. On that ridge with the radio and the machine gun.

  The crazy fucker held them off. Cox come by checking the line and found us. He was furious that we left Martin up there. He was screaming and kicking Maston, but nobody was going. So he went back up there alone to help Martin, and Maston kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right if we all stick together.’

  HUNTER’S MOON / 371

  “Whole place was lit up with flares and Martin was running the fire from his radio, bringing it in real close. All of a sudden this creepy quiet and we heard Martin scream, ‘All of you but one’…Over and over. The whole company heard him, they thought he was screaming about the gooks.

  “Then Maston went back up there. We heard some shots and then everything was quiet. So we crept back up and got in our holes. Cox was real fucked up, shot to shit. When we put him on the medevac the guys in the chopper got out a body bag. Martin was dead. And Maston was wounded, shot bad in the leg.”

  Hector sighed. “Well, shit, the colonel come out and the general come out and everybody come out and Maston didn’t say shit. Just sat there, refusing to be medevaced, in that hole with all them dead gooks Martin and Gunny wasted piled up around it. And everybody thought it was him out there running the radio, manning that gun that saved the company. So we all rode with it. It was, you know, officer shit. Maston got us safe gigs in the rear. He said he’d take care of us. We heard Gunny Cox died of wounds on the way to Japan. And Maston got nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  Hector flipped his cigarette away. “We didn’t think much of it.

  Officers were always doing stuff like that, writing themselves up for medals. Nobody talked about it. Nobody wanted to hear Martin screaming up there.” He looked at Harry with a jerky smile and asked, “You think there’s a Hell?”

  “I think we’re already there.”

  Hector gnawed his lip. “Cox thought there was a Hell. He was legally dead for three minutes, he said. Went down to Hell. Said they sent him back for Maston. That fucker wouldn’t die. He showed up, a year ago. Tracked me through my address of record from the marines and got my Mom, in L.A., to give him this place. Man, he was intense. Been traveling the country tracking down survivors of the squad. He said him and me were it. All that’s left. The only witnesses.

  “He showed me this Newsweek magazine story about Maston.

  How he was going to run for the U.S. Congress in 372 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Minnesota. Cox was like—driven. Had this picture thing in his old truck. He’d spent years putting it together. All these flicks of Maston, wrote all over to get them, he said.”

  The silence became so dry and hot that the friction of two rough words could ignite the air.

  “Then Cox tells me what really happened up on that ridge. How he was hit and feeding the ammo and Martin was staying on that gun bleeding to death and how Martin started screaming. And his screams got weaker and weaker and Maston came back and got down in the hole with Martin, stroking his face and not doing anything to stop the bleeding. But he did other things…and the guy was dying and that fucker was—”

  “Steady,” said Hollywood, taking Hector’s arm in an iron grip.

  “Fuck you, man,” Hector warned Hollywood, cautioning him with an extended middle finger. Hollywood put his arm protectively around Becky’s shoulder. “Riiight,” said Hector, “protect peaches and cream so she don’t know what it’s really like out there.”

  It was quiet on the desert as they waited for Hector to find his voice again.

  “Cox said that then Maston starts firing the gun. Maston starts calling in the artillery, blowing everything to shit. But all the gooks were gone. How he picks up an AK from one of the dead gooks and shoots himself in the leg—”

  �
�Shit,” muttered Harry. He turned and looked at Becky. She regarded him with wide, solemn eyes and nodded her head.

  Hector shook his head. “Goddamn Cox. Wanted me to go to Minnesota with him. Said we had to expose Maston and keep him out of politics. Make him confess what he did. How we had to go to the president and get Martin his medal, get it away from Maston.

  “Fuck that. Who’s going to believe him? Or me. He’s got to check into a VA hospital every winter so they can change his Thorazine antifreeze. For the last five years he’s been mostly getting his mail in a lock ward. But damn if he didn’t go.”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 373

  Harry stood up and turned away.

  “Hey,” called out Hector. “Did Maston ever run for the politics?”

  “No,” said Harry. “Cox stopped him.”

  “No shit. Gunny Cox did that, huh? Well I’ll be damned,” Hector shook his head. “He said he should kill the sono-fabitch, but he didn’t think he had it in him anymore.”

  “He got some help. It was the wrong kind of help and it didn’t work out,” Harry said.

  Hector perused Harry’s face. “You probably amused him. You musta looked real good to that sicko bastard. Like death warmed over.”

  Harry walked off a few paces and squatted. He put a hand out to steady himself. Texas harvester ants scurried between his fingers.

  They were sturdy and fierce-looking and as heavily armored as bronze warriors. The word marines formed in his mind as he picked one up between his thumb and forefinger. He hardly felt the sting.

  Chris had tried to be the hero of his story after all.

  Out of reflex, he reached for a cigarette. He understood the habit of smoking. As long as you had a cigarette you were never alone.

  There were times when being alone with your thoughts could kill you.

  Randall was next to him, his face braided in the heat. Harry stood up and Randall embraced him with iron strength in his withered arms. Then Randall stepped back. Dry-eyed, implacable. Randall’s generation didn’t show their feelings much. They’d lived them.

  He remembered what Randall had tried to teach him. Words spoken long ago in the tropical heat, in the shadow of another mountain range.

  Just because you discover that everything you know and believe is wrong doesn’t give you an excuse to quit living.

  “This won’t change anything, Randall. He’s got me boxed. I’m going down for two murders.”

  A transit of admiration flickered in Randall’s spooky eyes. “Maybe not.” He turned and studied Becky.

  374 / CHUCK LOGAN

  60

  Chato, Arizona, had two gas stations, one convenience store, three taverns, and the motel. The motel room’s back door opened on a sand-choked patio and the sand led to the town’s former business district, where siding hung from the original adobe walls.

  Farther into the desert, the skeleton of a coal chute stood guard over abandoned railroad tracks.

  A scrawny chicken pecked its way across the patio. Twenty yards away two Mexican kids with starchy bellies hung over dirty under-shorts played in a rusted-out 1957 Chevrolet.

  Down the highway, under a Fellini-twilight tiara of pink and blue neon, a fat man in bib overalls played an ancient upright piano on an open court behind a cantina.

  The air conditioner didn’t work and they all dripped sweat. Hollywood questioned Harry and Becky about the sequence of events at the trailer. He particularly didn’t like the part about Jerry Hakala seeing Harry with the gun, or the over-powering and kidnap of the policeman.

  Patiently, he tried to walk Becky through it from the beginning.

  “Did your brother go into the woods that morning planning to kill Bud Maston?”

  “To fight him. To make him leave Mom alone,” said Becky.

  “Becky, you’re going to have to tell us exactly what happened. It will all come out in court,” Hollywood explained.

  “I don’t want to go to court,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Randall signaled with his eyes to ease up. “Okay,” said Hollywood,

  “so what did you see in the woods?”

  “They got into an argument.”

  “Could you hear what it was about?”

  She shook her head. “Bud hit him and Chris tried to fight back and Bud grabbed his gun and it shot in the air. Then Bud pulled the barrel into his side and held it there. They were HUNTER’S MOON / 375

  struggling, but Bud had his hand on Chris’s on the trigger. It went off again. He pulled open the bolt and stuffed it with snow. Then he pushed Chris down.”

  Her voice quickened. “Chris was trying to load another bullet but his gun wouldn’t work because it had snow stuck in it. By then, Bud was screaming, laying in the snow, but now he had his own rifle pointed at Chris. Just when Harry came over the ridge, he threw his rifle away. Chris got unjammed and aimed at Bud and you know the rest.”

  Harry saw it. Bud, the unlikely high-wire artist, methodically growing his love handles to cushion the bullet and meticulously planning the timing, lining up all the trapeze bars for his circus of the real and thrilling to the split-second risk.

  “Why didn’t you go to Sheriff Emery?” asked Hollywood.

  “I was scared. I thought Bud brought Harry to kill us all.” Becky buried her hands in her hair and when she looked up, her eyes were two sores. “Don’t you see? I did something, too…and he took pictures of me…and now part of…of what happened has even gotten back to my boyfriend.” She shut her eyes and shook her head violently and ran next door to her room.

  “Give her a few minutes, Harry,” said Randall. “Then go in and just listen to her. She’s about to talk.”

  Harry drifted with it while Hollywood and Randall haggled about the law. He didn’t hear the words, only the intensity of their voices and, the way they held their bodies, it could have been twenty years ago, they could have been weighing the best way to approach a hostile village.

  They decided to call Mike Hakala in Maston County and let it all hang out. Hollywood picked up the phone. Harry went to the ad-joining room.

  Becky was in the shower and a cloud of moisture preceded her when she came out of the bathroom saronged in a towel. The towel swished against her thighs and a peek of pubic hair caught a thread of fire off the lowering sun.

  “Put some clothes on,” he said.

  376 / CHUCK LOGAN

  “I want to dry off,” she said. Her face was baby-butt moist and shiny. “You’d feel better if you cleaned up,” she said.

  Harry didn’t want to feel better.

  Becky tilted her head. “It won’t help. What that guy said. He’s just a junkie. A nobody. There’s only one way for us now.”

  She leaned her damp body against him in a chaste embrace, went up on tiptoe, and kissed him with affection on the forehead. Then she sat in a chair next to the air conditioner and toyed with the off-on toggle switch.

  “Out of order,” said Harry.

  “Figures.” She sighed, fanning her face with her hand. The chair jerked back under her weight and disturbed the folds of the cheap polyester curtains behind it. The chintzy abstract curtain design shivered a foot above her head and a large pale-green praying mantis flexed its lethal mandibles and settled back into anonymity.

  He stared at her.

  “We have to finish what Chris started,” she said frankly.

  “I wish it was that simple.” He shook his head. “There are rules, Becky.”

  “Oh, right! After listening to what that Hector said, there’s no rules and there’s no God.”

  Becky pursed her lips and looked out at the desert. “I know I’m going to cry about it, but not yet. I get into the trailer and down the hall and when I try to open the door to the bedroom the door’s locked. I can’t get it open.”

  Harry sat down on the bed and waited. For a full minute the only sound was the hot swish of tires passing on the highway and the faraway tinkle of the piano.

  Becky sagged in th
e chair and fingered one of her mother’s cigarettes from the crush-proof box on the desk next to her chair. She lit it and French inhaled. The smoke trailed up over her head and the mantis moved an inch.

  “She wouldn’t marry Dad. She always married the wrong goddamn guys,” she said irritably. And then, meeting his hard, measured gaze, she raised her voice. “Don’t give me

  HUNTER’S MOON / 377

  that. If I’d talked, there could be a trial and I’d have to be in court and a lawyer would ask me…questions. By the time he got through nobody would believe anything I said. He’s got us, Harry. I thought it all through.” She took a deep breath and said, “The only way to stop him is to kill him.”

  Harry watched shadows walk out from the mesquite. “How do you propose to do that?”

  She lowered her eyes and sulked. Randall and Hollywood stood on the patio, listening through the screen door. Quietly, they entered the room. Hollywood asked, “Why wouldn’t anyone believe you?”

  Becky hugged the towel, walked to the bathroom door, and turned.

  “Because I saw more than just Bud and Chris fight. I saw it all from the beginning. If I knew about it and didn’t tell, that makes me part of it. Bud planned it that way.”

  They waited while she changed into a pair of jeans and a blouse and fastened a bone necklace around her throat and methodically braided her black hair.

  “Mom had one of her fights with Dad and she moved Chris and me to Grandma Loretta’s and she rented an apartment in town and started tending bar at the VFW because that would really piss Dad off.

  “One night she took us out to dinner and there’s this guy with her who turns out to be Bud Maston. Chris and I were impressed. We’d seen him on TV and his picture’s in the hall at school.”

  “When was this?” asked Harry.

  “A year ago almost exactly. He was thin then, and really funny in a sad way. Mom wasn’t tense around him like she was with Dad.

  “He took us places—skiing, we even went on a dogsled into the Boundary Waters. But always out-of-the-way places, because Bud was sensitive about publicity after the political thing. But he kept his hand in. Pretty soon he and Mom were making all these plans about the town.