Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  To survive to my end, I have undertaken a profoundly spiritual therapy, a sharing of souls, from many, One. Today, I partake of the Body of Chris…

  Fanta reached across and nudged the bent page, still getting its breath outside the envelope. So interesting how the t in Christ was missing, and then it showed up below the fold as the crucifixiate extra t in the continuing phrase:… so that I may sustain my appointment with marttyrdom.

  Or was that a fanciful reading?

  Fanta stayed on the tail of the truck. Few ever came this way, he guessed, mostly hunters intending to trespass. The land had always been private, the roads always ill-used, and the few misguided attempts at farming had long been abandoned. Elmo Quarry Pond, a mile or two away, was the only destination Fanta knew of. He had skinny-dipped there in high school. Local legend told of ten-pound ex-carnival goldfish lurking in the pond’s turquoise depths.

  To the bittersweet wail of Stevie Winwood, Fanta trailed through the rugged landscape.

  Well, I’m near the end, and I just ain’t got the time…

  He put his windows down, sensing slightly cooler air. Natural karst geology had sequestered this whole region in steep and tangled forests, flood-scoured coulees, obscure caves, and churlish swamps.

  … I’m wasted, and I can’t find my way back home…

  Indeed, he was thinking. But the white truck had slowed, and now it stopped. Reacting late, Fanta had perhaps drifted too close. He stuffed his brake and skidded on the gravel. The two vehicles idled a few hundred yards apart, Matchbox toys to one another, but Fanta felt enormous and foolish. He should have driven past raising a perfunctory wave. He had given himself away.

  Abruptly as he thought so, the white truck jolted forward, cranked right, and blasted through a shallow roadside creek, bucking and spraying, then plunged into weeds so tall that Fanta could only see the top of the cab as the vehicle progressed.

  Well.

  Had he spooked her?

  In another hundred yards, she drove the truck into hardwood forest and disappeared.

  Puzzled, Fanta eased forward to see. She had turned onto an old logging road, maybe, a faint suggestion only. But he saw neither a bridge nor a ford across the creek, nor evidence that such an accommodation had ever existed.

  As for the land, no ownership was indicated, no posting, no rural address marker. No way did anybody live here. The truck had just blasted off through swells of goldenrod and wild parsnip, leaving only mashed-down parallel tracks that pitched over peak and trough before shanking into the forest.

  Fanta sat a while, hearing “Sea of Joy.” Wasn’t it true? Joy was always keen to drown you, mid-rapture?

  But, OK. He stopped the cassette. Where was this, exactly?

  His joints ached as he reached to sort the heavy book of plat maps from the mess on his backseat. With the tome upon his lap, he flipped pages. This was Town of Leavings. He had stopped in Section 15, facing east. The road she had taken, if it was a road, did not exist on the map. In any case, she had headed north toward Sections 10, 9, and 8, a large property that the plat map identified as owned by Golly Bros.

  The name—Golly—snagged in Fanta’s mind.

  Then he remembered. The Golly brothers? The twins?

  He lit a smoke to think back. His book of maps was old. That had to be the problem. Jim and Jon Golly were long gone, as far as he knew, otherwise that pair would have scored high in his investigative matrix—the dominant twin, Jim, especially.

  Fanta’s phone showed a weak 3G signal. He aimed a swollen finger at his saved number for the Bad Axe County Library. He rummaged through his memory while the phone searched. The Golly brothers had looked alike but behaved differently. Jim was the brash and charming know-it-all, while Jon was the taciturn and seemingly pious go-along who kept his brother in the vicinity of reality.

  “Library!”

  Vigdis Torkelson’s startling bark sounded in his ear over keys clicking lickety-split.

  “Good evening, Mrs. T,” Fanta began, addressing the eighty-something woman who had taught him English lit in high school. “This is your former star pupil and former editor of the former Bad Axe Broadcaster.”

  “Devoured by Babette’s Feast,” she growled. “And hideous, just hideous, that her little honyaker would try to take our sheriff’s job.”

  “Honyaker?”

  “Something that we used to call what is now, I believe, called a jerkoff, or possibly a fuckhead,” said the fearless Mrs. T. “Though I suspect that he is actually much worse. He was my pupil too, you know, three decades after you.”

  “Not to be a tattletale,” Fanta played along, “but the candidate’s newest sign says VICTIM’S MATTER. With an apostrophe.”

  “Perfect.”

  “But hey, Mrs. T, it’s too late to call the county clerk, so I wondered if you could access current land deeds…”

  He gave her the parcel numbers and waited.

  Ah, yes, the Golly story. Or the almost-story. The gregarious brother, Jim, had been irate when Fanta had deep-sixed the profile piece he had been working on. When was this, 1994? They were homesteaders, new to the Bad Axe, and Jim had wanted the attention. Never one to turn down a people piece, Fanta had interviewed the brothers about their saga, which—Jim doing the telling—was that their car dealership in Jupiter, Florida, had been destroyed in Hurricane Andrew, and thus as early climate refugees they had used their insurance settlement to buy land as far away from hurricanes as they could find it. They planned to homestead in the heartland.

  It had begun with all the ingredients of a good feature. The gist of Fanta’s early drafts, pre-fact-checking, was a mildly skeptical introduction to two eccentric bachelor brothers, businessmen from latitude 26.9, who approached “living off the land” as if that were something they hadn’t mastered yet only because they had been too busy selling cars. Fanta intended to imply, gently yet with certainty, that the land would have its say, but that no matter what difficulties the Gollys faced, Bad Axers, a welcoming people, would stand by to support. Warm. Cute. Hopeful. Wish the brothers well.

  But their “facts” had not checked out. Simply put, Jim Golly was a liar. The “car dealership” had in fact been a nightclub that ran strip shows. “Destroyed” checked out, but Hurricane Andrew might have had the help of a professional arsonist, and “insurance settlement,” Fanta had come to suspect, probably amounted to lipstick on insurance fraud. Plus Jim Golly had five DUIs, two assaults, and a drug conviction.

  Fanta had simply scotched the story. Not his business otherwise. Jim Golly had bitched and cajoled until he had seemed to comprehend that Fanta had his facts straight and was doing him a favor. The talkative Golly’s PR campaign had ceased. Jim’s twin, Jon, had seemed relieved.

  Fanta blew smoke toward the creek, wondering if the Tercel could ford it without busting an axle.

  As expected, the land had kicked the Golly brothers’ asses. He couldn’t remember exactly when they had given up, sold out, and left the Bad Axe. Not until after Ronald Rickreiner got his throat slit, for sure, because Sheriff Gibbs had included the Gollys on a list of suspects who were debtors to Babette’s husband and Barry’s—

  “That property is owned by James and Jonathan Golly,” interrupted Ms. Torkelson.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “They hold the deed on that land.”

  “But they’re long gone,” Fanta informed her. “Back to Florida, I think. A decade in the Bad Axe, they decided hurricanes weren’t so bad after all. I recall an Amish family taking over their old homestead.”

  He twisted on his car seat.

  “But that’s around the other side of Liberty Hill. Anyway, that can’t be right.”

  The other end of the call went quiet, even the keyboard. He had just accused Vigdis Torkelson of speaking in error.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. T,” he corrected himself. “Really? This land is still owned by the Golly brothers?”

  * * *

  After the call, Fanta sat throu
gh another cigarette, watching the sky singe red and remembering FROM HELL HOLLOW’s recorded voice.

  Could he be looking for Jim Golly? He felt his favorite thrill, his writer’s hunger for a complex character. He had never liked Jim Golly—who could?—but the man’s fabricating mind had fascinated Fanta. Yes, Jim Golly had gabbled poetry and song lyrics. Yes, he had been strident, ahead of his time, about melting polar ice caps fomenting stronger hurricanes and destroying coastal livelihoods. Jim Golly had impressed him as one of those larger-than-life characters with no niche in polite society—Paul Bunyan with his blue ox, plowing out riverbeds and eating flapjacks the size of football fields—a well-read braggart whose modest twin, Jon, seemed to be less a separate person than he seemed to be Jim’s doppelgänger, Jim’s representative in the small and mundane world where the rest of us lived.

  Now the voice from the telephone message came back to Fanta.

  Noon is our new midnight.

  If FROM HELL HOLLOW was Jim Golly, Fanta mused, then with that one phrase Jim Golly had shucked the known universe inside out like an old paper sack. Day devolves into night, night into day.

  That’s what poets did. Yeats. Milton. Lorde. Oliver. Mrs. T had taught him that. Poets knocked you down. Poets lunged into the road, made you hit them with your car, made you stop and back up to see what you hit.

  Prions Spirochetes. Ehrlichiosis.

  Poets infected you, triggered fever dreams that showed you the truth. Poets crawled under your skin and made you tear yourself open to bleed them back out. Poets were often massive assholes too.

  You work for Koyaanisqatsi, Incorporated.

  Fanta grinned and said aloud, “The hell I do. But nice try.”

  He swished back a hefty shot of Walker and stared through the tall weeds into the moth-shrouded forest. Then he shrugged.

  Big deal. So I bust an axle?

  CHAPTER 15

  “When, Sheriff?”

  The man’s voice rose angrily.

  “When?”

  With the description hair on fire, Denise had perfectly captured runty, rusty-haired, overboiling Father Paul McCartney, hardly thirty years old, director of Our Lady of the River Catholic Mission.

  “When-when-when does somebody step up and do something?”

  She felt tired, anxious about Taylor, desperate for Harley to get home, worried what Belle might say to him about her fabricated affair with David Morales and her potentially real pregnancy. Was Taylor hearing the Morales rumor? Did that explain his trouble?

  She stared at Father McCartney in his Roman collar, cargo shorts, striped tube socks, and Teva sandals. She appreciated his concern for the homeless, but she didn’t have the energy for his histrionic language. Who, specifically, did the reverend father want to do what?

  “Father,” she said, just managing to stay patient, “we found a dead man this morning. What we are doing, the Bad Axe County Sheriff’s Department, is we are investigating a homicide.”

  “Investigating,” he repeated sourly.

  “That’s correct.”

  He had already implied a difficult history with the cops in La Crosse, who didn’t take his concerns seriously. He had already made it clear that before her desk stood a warrior, prepared to fight all comers. Good for him. She felt this sincerely. But she was not his bone to chew.

  “We are investigating one homicide, in our jurisdiction.”

  “Five men!” he exploded. “Five of God’s children since last summer, disappeared into thin air! When do we stop investigating and do something?”

  So he proposed that she should stop investigating? And do what? What kind of something?

  She held her tongue. Denise, sensing her need, had brought her an ice-cold Mountain Dew as she ushered in the priest. Sheriff Kick sipped from the bottle and looked away. Denise was heading off-duty now. Beyond the sheriff’s office window, etched against the vehement red surrender of the day, her lovely friend trundled out into the soybeans, uprooted the BARRY HER and WHY ARE YOU KICKING YOURSELF? signs and delivered them to the dumpster.

  Feeling renewed by this, the sheriff asked Father McCartney, “What makes you so sure that those five men didn’t just move on? They’re homeless, transients. Isn’t that what they do?”

  Her question tormented the young priest, the paucity of her understanding apparently beyond reply. He paced back and forth in front of her desk, muttering and fulminating. Bless his heart. She meant that. He cared. More people needed to care.

  “What makes you think there might be crimes involved?”

  He drew a long and weary breath. “Sheriff, I have been serving the homeless community since Jesus was a boy.”

  Less than ten years, she guessed, given his age. “Thank you for your service.”

  “I recognize when a man has turned the corner in his spirit and begun to change. These five men had stopped moving on. They had stopped running from the Lord. They were sober. They were working and saving money. That they would disappear under those conditions is suspicious, is it not?”

  She didn’t feel sure but declined to debate. She pushed Dr. Kleekamp’s photo of the dead man’s face across her desk.

  “Is this someone you recognize?”

  The priest’s eyes closed. His lips moved silently for several moments. When he opened his eyes again, they were blurred with tears.

  “Of course. That’s Daniel Greevey. Danny.”

  “When did you last see Danny?”

  “July the twenty-sixth, five-thirty in the morning, drinking coffee as he walked out the mission door into the sunrise.”

  His precision seemed defiant, as if challenging her to question the symbology of his last Daniel Greevey sighting. The priest gripped his hands together and awaited her response.

  “Where was he going?”

  “To the job line.”

  “The job line?”

  “Corner of Industrial and Third, about a mile from the mission.” He touched Greevey’s paper face. “Men who want work line up there on the curb five days a week. People who need help, contractors, homeowners, landscaping crews, drive up, make an offer, off they go. Danny…”

  Outside, Denise’s truck door slammed. Off she went. Down the hall, Rinehart Rog, Rhino, settling in for the night shift, had turned on his radio to a Milwaukee Brewers game.

  “Danny was working,” said Father McCartney. “He was going out every day. He was putting money in the bank. He was clean and he was getting good with the Lord. He walked out the door on the morning of July twenty-sixth, and he never came back.”

  “Did you—”

  “Yes, of course.”

  She sipped Dew.

  “Just like I notified the police when the other four men disappeared under the same exact circumstances. The cops don’t give a damn. A homeless man goes missing, nobody cares. Easy targets.”

  This she believed: easy targets.

  “So what do you think happened to Danny?”

  “I have no idea. Except he got picked up in the job line.”

  “Tell me more about the job line.”

  She heard Velcro. Up from a cargo pocket came his cell phone.

  “I’ll show you.”

  He squared the phone on her desk.

  “I’ve been to that curb, taking pictures, asking questions, every day since Danny disappeared. If the police won’t solve this, I will.”

  He began to flip through photographs so fast she couldn’t follow. Down the hallway, a thin voice on the radio described Ryan Braun hitting a long fly ball… going, going… caught. Please hurry home, she silently begged Harley.

  “According to what I hear,” said Father McCartney, “and what the La Crosse cops refuse to hear, is that at one point or another, every one of the men I’ve lost got into… into this…”

  The priest stopped his spin of images.

  “This vehicle.”

  He swiped back to a long shot of an old white pickup.

  “Excuse me, Sheriff.”

 
Rhino’s massive frame filled her doorway.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt. We just got a call from the Tri-County Press, the newspaper down in Cuba City.”

  She frowned. Cuba City was sixty-some miles southeast of Farmstead, across major highways, across the wide Wisconsin River. Cuba City was another world.

  “Can I call them back?”

  Rhino frowned and fiddled with his thick bison beard. “Um, I think you’d better take it.”

  Father McCartney rolled his eyes with dramatic effect as if to say, Brushed off again.

  Rhino watched this and applied his placid gaze an extra instant to let the father know he might be out of line, making faces at the boss. Then her dispatcher’s explanation rumbled out.

  “From the description, Sheriff, it sounds like one of their reporters was up here doing a story and just stumbled onto that Goodgolly girl we’re looking for.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Fanta double-hit his Walker for courage, then backed up his Tercel and took a run at the shallow creek. A crashing splash, some crunching and grinding, some weird slippage that felt like his own body coming unglued—and then he had made it across, with both axles intact and no worse damage than a galloping pulse and a funny wobble in his pig valve.

  Once a fresh smoke burned, he aligned his tires with the truck’s path through goldenrod and eased it into gusts of pollen and swirls of insects.

  He felt unusually alive as leaves scratched and squealed along the car’s flanks and bees thumped the windows. The flagrant sky slipped overhead, dry things snapped beneath the tires, and the contours of the rocky earth gently pitched the creeping Tercel this way and that. It was his habit and perhaps his obligation to miss Maryanne, his beautiful and feisty late wife, anytime he felt himself approaching a “sea of joy.” But, presently immersed, he asked himself a jaunty question: Did he miss Maryanne right now?