Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  “Mmmm?”

  The window fan whirred loudly. Behind it the birds had just begun to sing. She would try to hold her bladder for an hour, all the way to La Crosse.

  “I’m up anyway. I’m going to run to the Pronto and see if they have ice cream. If they don’t, I’ll find some somewhere.”

  “Heidi… what?”

  “Milkshakes for breakfast.”

  * * *

  She checked her Blackbox email for Oppo as the minivan rolled through ground fog on Pederson Road. Nothing new yet, probably not until she got better reception on the ridge. For now, the suggestion that Barry Rickreiner had fed Killex to his pregnant drug buddy, to protect his new marriage and keep the shine on his redemption story, and that he had then talked his way onto the EMS ride to make sure Kim Maybee didn’t survive—this felt too toxic to touch. But did she believe these accusations fell within BARRY HER’s potential? Under Babette’s influence? Yes, she did. Did she find it plausible that the previous sheriff and his chief deputy could have made such a mess of the Kim Maybee investigation? Yes. Like two monkeys fucking a football. Wasn’t she obliged to pull the string that Oppo had been dangling? Election campaign or not?

  Goddamn, she had to pee.

  And she needed advice.

  “Call Leroy Fanta’s cell,” she told her phone.

  But once more the call rang to his message service. Odd, she thought again, that a die-hard newspaper guy wouldn’t pick up for the sheriff. Fanta always had, day or night. Again she asked him to call her back, hit END, and yanked the van into the Coon Valley Kwik Trip, where she hustled to the restroom. She would still buy a test, but as for hormones in her urine she had blown her morning chemistry and the results would have to wait until tomorrow.

  * * *

  In La Crosse, the Walgreens parking lot was nearly deserted. Not that anyone should know her this far from the Bad Axe, but good. She rushed in, then had to wander a bit, searching. When at last she found the tests there were four kinds on the shelf. She studied the box that said 99% accurate, 5 days sooner. That was the one.

  She brought her purchase to the counter, where a broad-beamed middle-aged woman bent over a box of vaping cartridges, muttering as she unpacked them and stocked them on a low shelf beneath the chewing tobacco and cigarettes.

  “Hello?”

  The woman rose and turned—and, after all, the Bad Axe County sheriff wasn’t far enough from home. Sizing up the situation, Harley’s high school prom date, Kiersten Kindergaard, eased into a little grin.

  “Did you find everything you were looking for?”

  “I did. Thank you.”

  “Do you have our Balance Rewards card?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “For each purchase, you get points that you can redeem—”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It’s easy. You just give your phone number and then you get points—”

  “I don’t want a card.”

  “OK, no worries. That’ll be fourteen dollars and eighty-seven cents. Do you need a bag?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Not a problem.”

  As she dropped the test kit into a way-too-big plastic Walgreens sack, Kiersten Kindergaard sighed and said, “Another little one. Congratulations. Some girls have all the luck.”

  * * *

  She exited Walgreens by the main door and a scene on the sidewalk startled her. A sharp-edged heavy chunk of pink granite. A rusty railroad spike. A metal fork. A broken piece of road reflector. Nearby under a dirty blanket huddled a teenage boy, a wide-eyed and unwashed, a skinned-kneed, barefoot child, scrawling with chalk on the sidewalk.

  She stopped and stared. His face seemed tear-streaked but he grinned. He had drawn a many-colored peace sign, three feet wide. The earnestly lopsided drawing made her heart ache.

  “Can I help? I’m a…”

  What did she mean to say? She was a mother? A cop? The cops don’t give a damn. A homeless man goes missing, nobody cares. Did she tell him that she knew of a homeless shelter run by a priest who would watch out for him?

  “Do you need help? Can I take you somewhere?”

  Deliberate as an ocean snail, he withdrew beneath the blanket. Then with invisible motility he moved his wrinkly shell and covered his drawing. From underneath, he hissed, “Chickenshit!”

  * * *

  “Call Leroy Fanta,” she commanded her phone yet again just minutes later, because southbound on the highway, heading home with a heavy heart, she had just honked at the editor’s old green Tercel heading the opposite direction into La Crosse. She thought Fanta looked more than usually disheveled as they whipped past each other and she caught a glimpse of his long gray hair tangling in the window breeze.

  She left a new message: “Grape, is everything OK with you? That was me honking. I have some historical stuff to ask you about, so call me back.”

  She let a long moment pass, a long bolt of asphalt beneath her, feeling speechless but not complete.

  “Grape, please, I’m worried.”

  She saw an email had dropped in from Oppo, sent at 4:33 A.M. Not now. Not on the highway.

  She touched speed-dial 1.

  “Denise, never mind, please, why I was in La Crosse, but I just ran into someone who needs Father McCartney.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Sammy Hot Dog throws his bedspread off and fills his lungs with a gasp. The street and sidewalk are empty again. The drugstore parking lot is empty again. The woman in the smock still watches him out the window. He knees back from his drawing and stands. He has added something—actually subtracted something—that he remembers Cassie often said.

  He sees his ragged image reflected, superimposed over her blue bulk behind the glass. While they stand fixed, the reflection shows a car puttering past behind him. The woman inside makes a sour face, shakes her head, and turns away.

  The car softly beeps.

  Chickenshit. You do nothing.

  Beeps again.

  He turns and squints against the hostile brilliance. A rust-riddled old green car has stopped along the opposite curb:

  CAUTION: I BRAKE FOR PEACE.

  The car backs up a few feet in his direction.

  Stops.

  Beeps once more.

  He shades his eyes. A second faded sticker tilts his rigid grin:

  MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR.

  “Are you looking for work?”

  The driver calling to him is a hippie woman with a thick gray braid. She rests her forearm in the open window and waits for him to cross the street and come abreast.

  CHAPTER 23

  Heading home, Sheriff Kick read Oppo’s latest on the screen of her phone with the minivan rolling along Pederson Road. The dawn fog had dissolved. The eastern coulee wall cast a jagged shadow across the Glicks’ potato field, the sunstruck plants wilting precisely as the shade line withdrew. The six barefoot Glick girls were out there already, bent in their curious right-angle posture, picking beetles off the leaves. Amos and Dawdy Glick and the two boys were in the apple orchard on the rise behind the house, spraying something—vinegar, probably—on the caterpillar tents that had appeared overnight. A few hundred yards on, a freshly road-killed doe lay mangled in the ditch.

  Oppo’s “Rickreiner Fairy Tale” told of events that occurred in the Bad Axe while she was in high school down in Crawford County. But even before BARRY HER’s campaign and redemption story, she knew by osmosis that his father had been murdered, possibly by a farmer who had owed him money. She never knew that suspects had died from mysterious Kim Maybee–like symptoms.

  Something orange caught her eye in the newspaper tube beneath the H+H KICK mailbox. She stopped the van and stepped out into a wall of green heat. The tube still said Broadcaster, though lately an unwanted Happy Valley Shopper had begun to appear inside it. But this wasn’t Babette Rickreiner’s Shopper. What she extracted turned out to be Harley’s blaze-orange three-hole ski mask, for deer hunting in extra-cold weather. Had he dropped i
t on the road—in August?—and some Good Samaritan had picked it up and put it in the newspaper tube?

  She climbed back aboard with the mask and started down the driveway. Was Oppo suggesting that Ronald Rickreiner’s murder was still an open case? That his son and wife had taken revenge on suspects in the same way that Kim Maybee had died? Had other suspects been poisoned and lived? Was Oppo implying this by telling her that twin brothers named Golly, in debt to Ronald Rickreiner but long gone from the Bad Axe, still owned property around Liberty Hill? And the father and daughter living there now were named Goodgolly?

  What the hell was that about?

  “Call Leroy Fanta,” she told her phone a fourth time as she parked the van in front of the house next to her brown-on-tan sheriff’s Charger. No point in leaving another message. She hid the pregnancy test inside the Charger’s glove box, safe there until tomorrow morning.

  “Yay!” Dylan cheered as she came in through the mudroom. Noisy box fans blew air across the kitchen. “Milkshakes for breakfast!”

  Shit. Instead of ice cream, she had brought back Harley’s orange mask.

  “Um… ice cream is all sold out.”

  “You were gone for an hour and a half,” Harley observed with a head-tilt and a squint. Her van-cooled body had begun to sweat. A brand-new baseball trophy stood on the table.

  “Don’t tell me you were MVP.”

  He shrugged. “The ball keeps hitting my bat.” He put his hand out for the mask. “Where’d you find that?”

  “In the newspaper tube.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You tell me. Ice cream is sold out everywhere. So instead I’ll make chocolate-chip waffles.”

  “Yay! Yay! Chocolate-chip waffles!”

  Harley said, “Hm. OK. You do that. While I feed the animals.”

  He stepped close and whispered under the fan noise as he kissed her on the ear, “You’re acting weird, hon. I haven’t seen my mask since last winter. Obviously the boys were playing. Don’t forget I’m on your side. And remember we need to talk about the 4-H trip tomorrow.”

  When the waffles were on the table, with link sausages, butter and syrup, a pitcher of cold milk, a bowl of blueberries, and coffee for Harley and herself—everybody with their bare feet in the fan breeze under the table—she began a family discussion of Taylor’s situation, starting with the fact that he had not yet composed his notes of apology for pushing Barry Rickreiner’s stepson and wife into the pool yesterday.

  “I understand,” she said, “that some people might seem like enemies because they don’t want me to be sheriff anymore.”

  “It might seem like they’re attacking your mommy,” Harley clarified. “But this is, um… normal. That’s just how it’s done. It’s called politics. We’re just not used to it around here.”

  Dylan stared wide-eyed back and forth between them. Taylor glared down at his waffle from close range.

  “In politics,” she expanded, “one side always tries to say why they’re the best and the other side is the worst.” God, that sounded stupid—yet all too true. “But in the end, we’re all trying to do our best. We all want what’s best for everybody.” That was stupid too—and not true.

  “But you don’t say he’s the worst,” Taylor pointed out.

  “Hon… is someone saying bad things about me? I mean, besides putting out those silly signs? Those are just signs.”

  Harley said, “Is someone saying bad things to you, Taylor Kick, or to you, Dylan Kick, about your mommy? That’s what Mommy means.”

  She ground her teeth because Dylan had also looked down at his waffle and both twins had gone silent. In other words, yes. She could feel Harley wanting to share a look, but she kept her eyes fixed upon the boys. She had no idea exactly what they were hearing, or how they would process the kind of rumors that were out there. She needed Opie, who excelled at age-seven psychology and could reliably parse out what the twins were thinking. If the boys were getting bothered, she had to push back. She wasn’t sure where Oppo was leading her, but if Rickreiner’s campaign was hurting her kids, then bring it on.

  “So anyway,” she groped, “two wrongs don’t make a right. We all know that. But for sure, it’s OK to be upset when you feel hurt by someone. It’s OK that Taylor got angry. It’s just not OK how he showed he was angry. And now he isn’t quite ready to be sorry for his actions. Am I right, Taylor?”

  Her little tough guy frowned and shrugged and meticulously impaled one blueberry on each tine of his fork. It escaped no one that Dylan had done this same thing a few minutes ago.

  Now Dylan tried to help his brother out. “Sometimes I’m not ready to be sorry either,” he said. “Sometimes everybody’s not ready to be sorry.”

  Taylor didn’t bite. Harley said, “Trying to say how you feel can be hard. I know it is for me. I know that when boys feel bad, they sometimes try to hide it. I sure do.”

  At this, Taylor thrust his blueberry-tipped fork explosively toward the center of the table.

  “Look!”

  His brother grimaced.

  His dad, hiding the same feeling, said, “Very cool.”

  His mommy said, “Tell you what. Tomorrow is the 4-H trip, right? You guys are going to get up super-early and go help set up the Bad Axe County Farm Breakfast at the Olsons’ farm, right? I know you’re excited about that. And on the way you’re going to stop at Elmo Pond and feed the giant goldfish. Oh, my gosh, some people say that when they got dumped in the pond they were the size of your thumb, and they grew to ten pounds. That’s exciting. Maybe you’ll see one.”

  She paused for air. Taylor had dropped his scowl and both boys looked at her in perfect eager twinness, equal in their anticipation. She made eye contact with Harley. He read her mind and nodded.

  “So it’s going to be like this,” she said. “That trip is a privilege, and privileges become ours when we earn them by doing what we’re supposed to do. So, Taylor, if you want to go on the field trip tomorrow, you’ll need to have your apologies written by then.”

  Another pause. Her heart thumped. Her stomach had begun to feel weird again.

  “Does that sound fair to everyone?”

  Dylan nodded.

  Harley nodded.

  “Taylor?”

  “Look!” he insisted, thrusting the forked blueberries farther toward the center of the table, his face bunched and sweaty. “Look!”

  “We see, honey.” She swallowed a lump of distress. “That’s awesome.”

  Then Taylor dropped the fork, pushed his chair back, and stomped up the creaky old stairs to the boys’ bedroom. The door slammed. Harley unplugged a fan from the kitchen wall and followed him up.

  As soon as he dared, Dylan said, “Good job, Mom. He’s doing it.”

  * * *

  Toward the end of her journey into Farmstead, she took a call from Dr. Patel about Patience Goodgolly.

  “This is Sheriff Kick. Go ahead.”

  “Good morning, Sheriff. First some good news, I think. She allowed us to fully examine her for injuries. We found no indications of forced intercourse. We don’t believe she was raped. At least, not in the conventional sense.”

  The sheriff stiffened and gripped her steering wheel.

  “What do you mean, not raped in the conventional sense?”

  “Well, first of all,” the doctor said, “the young lady is not a virgin. She has no intact hymen. And the blood on her was not from tearing it. She is either menstruating, Sheriff, or she’s pregnant and she’s spotting. But she wouldn’t let us draw blood.”

  “I see.”

  “If we knew how old she was, and if she was a minor, there could be a statutory rape charge, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So if we suspected pregnancy in a minor, maybe then we could establish yes or no with a blood test, for purposes of a criminal investigation.”

  She had that right. “Dr. Patel, isn’t there some way you can tell me how old she is?”

  “She is not a tree,
Sheriff. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty. And she has not lived a normal life, so external indications may not be reliable.”

  Now entering Farmstead, the sheriff stared at the bank sign: 8:17 A.M. and 96 degrees. Overnight, the gypsy moth caterpillars had completely webbed the fledgling maples that the city had planted along the sidewalk in April.

  Dr. Patel continued. “We found what appear to be cotton fibers inside her. This would suggest that she is, or was, menstruating and was using something nontraditional, or perhaps just non-modern, to absorb.”

  “Yes. Yes, I see. So that’s the good news. I’m waiting for the bad news.”

  “I’m not sure if it’s bad news, Sheriff. But we can tell you that this young woman has given birth before.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Possibly more than once,” the doctor said.

  No one spoke on either side of the conversation.

  “And finally, Sheriff, one of the nurses on duty this morning speaks German, and she is at this moment translating for your deputy, who I believe needs your assistance right away. Miss Goodgolly is now communicating adamantly that she is twenty-one years old, and that she wants to go home, and that seeing as she has not been charged with a crime, nobody can stop her.”

  Another pause.

  Dr. Patel added, “Which, as I understand the law, is correct. So we’re releasing her.”

  CHAPTER 24

  In the vivid morning light, the surfaces of Hell Hollow looked a long way down. Captive but still alive, dizzily upright upon his sock feet but hobbled at the ankles like a horse, Leroy Fanta didn’t dare move for fear of falling.

  Through a blur both visual and cognitive, with a tremendous headache and a flinty taste in his mouth, he watched his old Tercel tremble into view among the sod structures that made up Jim Golly’s hidden Middle-earth.