Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  Strangely, and without precedent, no.

  And he knew why too: because he felt his most private and most sacred ecstasy—experienced just once before—flooding back into his soul. He had never told Maryanne how the most authentic moment in his life—perhaps the only pure moment in his life—had been rising from the boiling mud of a rice paddy into a hail of Vietcong bullets, rising up and fighting back without regard for rules, safety, survival, hot to wreak death upon others and with exquisite indifference to his own.

  He had never shared this bizarre and shameful experience with anyone. How could he? He had killed other human beings while in a state of ecstasy. Then, after no more than sixty seconds of nirvana and a half dozen Vietcong cut down, he had been hit, a leg bone shattered, and the feeling was gone. He had lain in abject terror for hours under U.S. Army C-123s raining defoliant. Before he knew it, he was back in the Bad Axe, back in the slow and secretly dull grind of living, with his new bride Maryanne to remind him not to piss and moan, to stop yearning constantly for more.

  So, no, he did not miss his beloved at this moment, as his car bumped in beneath a primeval umbrage of maple, birch, and hickory, as his rusty bumper pried through tangled buckthorn and blackcaps, as a profusion of KEEP OUT and NO TRESPASSING signs exploded in his peripheral, because this was a moment truly beyond Maryanne, the plunging again of his exhausted soul into that terrible, secret sea of death-indifferent joy. He shouldn’t be here. So what?

  He leaned toward his window to drink it in. The feverish shade screamed with insects. From above, sunset torched the treetop shrouds.

  Noon is our new midnight…

  Wow. Once more he tickled open the letter for a peek.

  Changes in latitude, changes in attitude.

  Jimmy Buffett, of course. But in the letter’s context, the line read as a prediction of mass movement by climate refugees, a vision of the clashing of displaced peoples with invaded peoples, of global conflagration.

  He flipped the letter over. In his bizarre postscript, FROM HELL HOLLOW had written: Please forward to General Secretary, Group of Eight, Hotel du Palais, Avenue de L’Imperatrice, Biarritz, France. To be opened at noon, August 26, 2019. Dear Mr. Secretary: Look out the window.

  Fanta stomped his brake. A sick whitetail buck staggered toward the Tercel. The creature’s ribs and hip bones showed through a ratty coat hung with odd polyps, warty and black, wobbling as the animal lurched toward collision. The buck’s head lolled. His jaw dripped. Fanta softly tapped the Tercel’s horn, but the deer blundered on until his splintered antlers struck the Tercel and he jumped back in blind fright.

  Fanta gaped in sorrow at the ravages of chronic wasting disease. The buck’s brain, gone spongiform, performed little better than a sopping loaf of bread. The infected prions massing in the tissues of his eyes brought a closing darkness, while fibroid demons tried to escape through his skin. Weakly feisty, the poor creature blustered forward and once more challenged the Tercel’s grille, jousted with his ruined antlers, then careened away into the underbrush.

  Fanta continued, but his sea of joy had begun pitching and plunging steeply.

  We sleep beneath a prion moon, Fanta, a billion misfit molecules hunting each and every one of us. Awake, we can’t see even the biggest broken things.

  He pressed on.

  Like the great martyr Thich Quang Duc, I will bring the light.

  Indeed, that had the ring of something Jim Golly might say. One thing from Fanta’s background research had checked out: Both brothers had been drafted. Jim had fought in Vietnam, been wounded, and been discharged on a psychiatric waiver. Jon had safely pushed paper in Guam.

  Just where the road degraded into rubble and began to rise steeply, Fanta had to stop the Tercel again.

  The white truck blocked his path.

  Abruptly breathing loud and fast, he found himself outside the Tercel, gripping its doorframe.

  “Hello?”

  A barred owl answered close by. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?

  “Hello-hello?”

  He heard the big bird’s wing beats.

  “I’m just trying to say hello!”

  He crept forward and looked into the truck cab, seeing the portable cassette recorder on the seat and a bale of recycled newspapers on the floor. In the rear box beside the rusty oil drum he saw a coiled strip of cloth. He picked it up, let it dangle and uncoil, long and narrow and spotted with rusty stains that might have been blood, or maybe just rust—

  His inspection stopped with a sharp metallic double-crunch, same as the cocking of a firearm from a hidden place in the jungle.

  Fanta retreated to his car and sat behind the wheel, twisting his head every which way, seeing no one yet, seeing no way to turn around. He waited, waited. He was terrible at backing up his car even under ideal conditions. But if no one appeared, he would have to try. He twisted again. On the backseat he saw his reporter’s notebook. OK, then. At least he would not have come all this way for nothing.

  A minute later, he left a torn-out page of the notebook beneath the truck’s ragged wiper.

  It seems you want to talk to me. So let’s talk. I’ll be back here tomorrow, at “new midnight” sharp. Leroy Fanta.

  He was turning his suddenly exhausted body when in a raw blur—red hands, silver braid flying—the woman lunged and cracked his head with a rifle stock, then stood over him hissing, the barrel jammed deep into his soft gut. She tossed her head back, aimed her face at the fire-tipped treetops.

  “Papa!” she shrieked. “Papa!”

  Fanta drifted in semiconsciousness, staring up a filthy knee-length dress at her thick and hairy legs. To spare both of them, he closed his eyes. His head was cracked, he could feel it. His brain bled. This was it. He couldn’t rise.

  “Good day,” a man’s straining voice broadcast from somewhere. “Good day to you, sir.”

  The woman stepped off Fanta. He let light back into his eyes and saw a nude and bloated old man limp around the pickup wearing only orange water shoes, feeling his way as if mostly blind. A massive black dog stayed close, the handle on its leather harness just in touch with the man’s wriggling fingers.

  “I was cooling off in the creek,” the man announced, each word a throttled puff through ragged lungs.

  Fanta managed to half sit. The woman kicked him down.

  “Be nice, Faithy.”

  Fanta gaped in revulsion. The man was hairless, spotted all over like an old banana. A great red goiter hung below his ear. Like the whitetail buck, his torso was shagged with sacs of empty gray skin, mosquitoes riding him by the dozens. He released the sidewall of the pickup and thrust an eczematous hand into empty space above Fanta. He was offering to shake.

  “Golly,” he said. “Some might call me the bad Golly. But you can just call me Jim. Or, as Faithy does, you can call me Papa.”

  CHAPTER 17

  In her Bad Axe Hospital ER room, Patience Goodgolly lay dully angry-eyed and pale, hooked to monitors and IV fluids.

  “She’s stable. She’ll be just fine. Dr. Patel has more information, and she’ll be with you in just a few minutes.”

  Sheriff Kick accepted a plastic bag that weighed hardly anything. She told the nurse, “Thank you.” Her hands trembled as she looked in the bag: the girl’s dress and bonnet, nothing else.

  She felt spooked. Thanks to the Tri-County Press reporter from Cuba City who had traveled all the way to a residence in the Bad Axe for a story only to stumble upon Patience Goodgolly, the sheriff’s case had just shanked inward on itself. Apparently disconnected elements—Patience, a white truck, an unreported missing man—had overlapped in ways she could not yet understand.

  Waiting for the doctor, she tried Leroy Fanta’s cell for a third time, but Fanta wasn’t answering. That worried her. A newsman always took calls from the sheriff, even a retired newsman. She left a message.

  “Grape, I need to talk to you right away about this man ranting at you on the telephone. It seems he was
ranting to other news outlets too. I think we need to find this guy.”

  Based on a tip from the Tri-County reporter, there was a chance that they were looking for a Town of Zion resident named Larry Hubbard, who drove an old white pickup. She had deputies searching for him, visiting taverns and fishing piers along the Mississippi. Several of the deputies knew “Derp” Hubbard already from various incidents, but their information was a poor match for the profile of Fanta’s raving caller. So far, Hubbard was a roofer, sometimes, and a milker, sometimes, but more consistently a poacher and notorious drunk. He was a high school dropout and a violent fan of the Green Bay Packers. The first bartender contacted had not laid eyes on him in a month.

  Meanwhile, Patience Goodgolly—found by the Tri-County Press reporter inside Hubbard’s cabin—continued to glare emptily at the sheriff. She did not speak English. Or she would not speak English. This still wasn’t clear.

  Beyond the girl’s window, Sheriff Kick watched the Cuba City reporter heading across the hospital parking lot toward her car. Her newspaper had been getting these crazy calls, Maggie Smithback had explained. Except they weren’t that crazy, she said—in case anybody wanted the opinion of a former farm wife, happily divorced and finally doing her dream job. Down around Cuba City lately, she had told the sheriff, hundreds of wells were testing off the charts for E. coli. The region had become a chronic wasting disease hot zone, and just about everybody she knew had Lyme disease. Widen the viewpoint, Maggie Smithback had continued, and half a million bird and insect species had disappeared throughout the world in the last twenty years, while Venice would be underwater in the next twenty. These were facts. So this poor man might be sick, the reporter had explained, but he had not been making stuff up. In fact, she thought he sounded like a prophet. That was why, looking for a story, Maggie Smithback had traced one of the calls to Larry “Derp” Hubbard’s landline. With her editor’s blessing, she had journeyed to his cabin in the Bad Axe, hoping to interview him. Hubbard wasn’t home. So the reporter had snooped a bit, looking into his windows, and that’s how she had discovered—

  “It’s nice to see you again, Sheriff.”

  She started at the doctor’s voice behind her.

  “But we never seem to meet in happy circumstances, do we?”

  “No, but I’m always glad to see you’re still here,” she told Dr. Alka Patel, whose young family had struggled mightily to adapt to the Bad Axe.

  The doctor lowered her voice.

  “So… the patient is dehydrated and possibly malnourished. Also badly sunburned. Her blood-alcohol had to be through the roof because it’s still only down to point-zero-seven. She has no recent injuries that we can tell. However, both her left arm and her left cheekbone have been broken in the past. Her wrists and forearms show clear indications that in the past she has been cutting herself, a sign of severe psychological stress. My most acute concern”—Dr. Patel glanced at the girl, who watched them with a scowl—“is that before we washed her, we found blood on her vagina and her thighs. We documented this. If it turns out to be a criminal case, let us know.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’re ready to do X-rays now, and after that, if you want to do a rape kit, we need to get working on consent right away. When that’s done, we need to keep her calm and restful through the night. Do you happen to know how old she is?”

  “No idea. But maybe I can find out. Can I have five minutes?”

  Dr. Patel smiled wearily. “The nurse will be waiting outside the door. I’ll get the SAFE kit.”

  Sheriff Kick smiled at Patience Goodgolly and moved slowly into the sullen atmosphere the girl projected. The Tri-County reporter had discovered her unconscious on the floor with her hands bound to the frame of Derp Hubbard’s bed. In short order, after Maggie Smithback’s 911 call, Denise had established that Hubbard drove a 1966 International Harvester deep-bed pickup, white, not unlike the picture Father McCartney had shown her, and matching the BOLO they had put out after Patience had disappeared from the Goodgolly farm.

  When the sheriff’s notebook and pen were ready, she called Interim Chief Deputy Bender at the Ezekiel Lapp farm and put her phone on speaker with the volume all the way up.

  “Are we ready?”

  “Funny question when half of us have been waiting thirty minutes.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Dick.”

  He snapped, “No images. Voice only.”

  “I understand. We’re just on speakerphone. Hello, Mrs. Lapp, and thank you.”

  “I’m glad to help.” The Amish schoolteacher added softly, “Wie bischt du, mein Schat?”

  The sheriff kept her eyes on the girl, who clearly understood the disembodied pleasantry—How are you, my darling?—and still scowled.

  “First some questions for you, Mrs. Lapp. Do you know the Goodgollys?”

  “We know of them, yes. A father and a daughter. We see them at the market now and again.”

  “Are they… are the Goodgollys Amish?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But, the lifestyle…”

  “They are English who tried to join the Amish. But they have wrong ways. Our bishop has instructed us to shun them.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  Mrs. Lapp remained quiet for several seconds. The phone speaker crackled faintly.

  “The man has said Ohio and given an Ohio name. But this is one of their wrong ways. Our bishop has discovered from speaking with plain folk in Ohio that this is not true, and he tells us these people are the Goodgollys. He orders us to stay away from the Goodgollys because God will punish them for their sins.”

  Watching Patience Goodgolly’s expression, the sheriff concluded she understood at least snatches of this.

  “Young lady, I need to ask you some questions.”

  Mrs. Lapp conveyed this. The girl’s reply was barely audible. “Lauter, bitte,” requested Mrs. Lapp. The sheriff moved her phone closer.

  The girl repeated at a slight increase in volume. Mrs. Lapp cleared her throat and began to translate uncomfortably.

  “You wear pants, she said. She will not talk to you. You can talk to me, and I can talk to her, but she won’t talk to you.”

  “Because I wear pants?”

  Mrs. Lapp double-checked. “Yes.”

  The girl spoke again.

  “And also, she says, because you carry a gun.”

  Mrs. Lapp listened to more.

  “She also says she doesn’t like you. She believes that you wear pants because you fornicate with women.”

  The sheriff bit her tongue. The girl now flung her sheet toward her knees as if too hot, revealing her scarred wrists and forearms as she glowered toward the red sky at the window.

  “Please ask her how old she is.”

  Mrs. Lapp did so.

  “She doesn’t know how old she is.”

  “What happened to her father?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Who took her away and tied her up in that house?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Where did she get the beer?”

  “On the road.”

  “Why was she on the road?”

  “She was walking.”

  “Why was she walking?”

  Patience Goodgolly turned her head and glared directly at the sheriff as she spoke.

  “She said…”

  Mrs. Lapp hesitated. A nurse stepped in.

  “She said that she was walking because she can’t fly.”

  To hide her surprise, the sheriff picked up her phone and saw that a notification had appeared. Harley had come home. Thank God.

  I heard what happened at the pool, he texted. Taylor is still upstairs mad as hell. When will u b off?

  She exhaled and stepped toward the window, trying to bring her focus back. Because she can’t fly. It wouldn’t work to press the girl while she clearly felt angry and stubborn. It would be better to wait until her medical condition and age were fully known. B
ut what next? In the parking lot beyond the window, hordes of some large insect had appeared to swarm about the newly glowing lights. The sky above looked infernal.

  Off soon, she texted Harley. Home in 30.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Lapp.”

  “I told her to be nice,” said the Amish woman. “Sie nett. I told her you were not the kind of sheriff we always had before. I told her to always sie nett to people in the uniform.”

  “Thank you. OK, Deputy Bender, we’re done for now.”

  She touched her speed dial for dispatch.

  “Any luck on Larry Hubbard?” she asked Rhino.

  “Even his own mother hasn’t seen him since he went turkey hunting in May. But several folks believe they’ve seen his truck around since that far back, though they can’t say for sure that Hubbard was the one driving it. One witness said they thought he had grown his hair out.”

  “How about our warrant to search his house?”

  “We got it. I sent Schwem. Rotten food in the fridge. Nothing else so far. But Schwem’s just getting started.”

  “OK. The news here is we’re going to do X-rays and a rape kit, and then we’re going to let her recuperate through the night. I want a deputy…”

  She hesitated. With Schwem occupied by an unexpected chore, she was officially shorthanded, and another pressure-cooker night would trigger all the usual calls. But Gabriel Goodgolly lay in postsurgical care three doors down, potentially stabbed by his daughter, who at the moment had fixed the sheriff with what felt like a death stare.

  “I want a deputy here, Rhino. In ER, to spend the night right outside this girl’s door.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Leroy Fanta became aware again when the massive black dog collected a mouthful of his right thigh.

  “Tippy, off!”

  The dog released him. His glasses were gone. The woman gripped them as she turned out his pockets, gathering up his change, his pills, his flip phone, his overstuffed wallet.