Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  “Good point. Then come back here and direct a search with Schwem, please. We have all the probable cause we need. Take this place apart.”

  She felt a new kind of sick as she reached the porch steps. The yard looked a long way down. She felt overheated again. She grabbed the rail and sat heavily.

  Abruptly her mouth burned with a strange taste, and her windpipe narrowed while her esophagus bubbled and fizzed.

  She spat toward the grass.

  She took her hat off and fanned her face.

  As she unbuttoned her wet uniform shirt, she wondered if she had ruined her phone. She had not. While she had been fighting for Deputy Luck’s life, Oppo had reached out again.

  Fri, Aug 9, 1:33 PM

  To: Dairy Queen (dairyqueen@blackbox.com)

  From: Oppo (oppo@blackbox.com)

  Subject: Two Things

  1. New Rickreiner Tidbits: failed high-school English Lit twice for plagiarizing; failed EMT urine test for using someone else’s urine; failed field-sobriety test by vomiting on Chief Deputy Elvin Lund (deceased) who drove him home to Babette and came away with $500 in Liquor City discount coupons.

  2. Silver Alert: Leroy Fanta not responding to multiple contact efforts since asking for information yesterday PM about Golly Bros. property in Town of Leavings.

  CHAPTER 27

  Fanta made his move. “Why not bring the world to you?”

  Faith Golly had put the boy to work watering sod roofs. Jim Golly, with his dog’s help, towed by the harness handle, had herded Leroy Fanta back to the creek for cooling. The madman had shucked his saffron robe. He sat nude on the bottom, immersed to his eyes like a hippo. Fanta sat on the bank, soaking his hobbled feet. His headache had somewhat receded. His brain had slowly clarified. Lamb of God. He shuddered.

  “Newspapers and magazines are dead,” he made himself declare. He would never believe this.

  “That’s not how it works anymore,” he continued anyway. “We don’t need Life magazine. The world is digital. Everyone is a journalist. People tell their own stories.”

  Since the arrival of Golly’s “Lamb of God,” he had listened long enough—hours, it seemed, dappled shadows traveling across the water—to recall and confirm the specific delusion that drove the man. On August 26, in Biarritz, France, at exactly high noon—“new midnight”—outside the hotel where the G7 leaders would be meeting, Golly would immolate himself—like the great martyr Thich Quang Duc—in defense of Mother Earth. In Golly’s retrograde planning, magazine photographers would be there. After that, leaders would lead, and mankind would be saved.

  But Golly feared he wouldn’t live that long.

  My vegetarian therapy has been too indirect and too slow…

  And you, Mr. Fanta, don’t look much better than me…

  This did not mean that he would be spared, Fanta understood. He was going to die anyway. He had blundered right into Hell Hollow, had interrupted a glorious martyrdom, and Golly couldn’t let him go. Not that he cared much about his own death, Fanta had reminded himself, which had been a work in progress for years. With his remaining powers, he was ad-libbing a half strategy to save the boy, and now he blundered on.

  “Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, those guys can see you right here in the Bad Axe. Justin Trudeau, Shinzo Abe. You don’t have to go to France. You can bring France to you.”

  He could tell that Golly—paddling cool water against his neck goiter—wasn’t hearing. The man existed entirely within the spongiform angel food cake of his brain. Briefly Fanta considered trying to shock him to attention by asking a few of the many painfully obvious questions.

  So Faith will drive you to France in my Tercel?

  Are you going to charm all thirteen thousand security gendarmes?

  Do you think you should wear pants?

  Dear Mr. Secretary: Look out the window.

  Look out the window? Do you think they’ll all be partying together in Angela Merkel’s hotel suite?

  Never mind. In Golly’s obsolescence, Fanta had glimpsed a special opening.

  “Thich Quang Duc,” he proceeded, returning to the Buddhist martyr on fire in the middle of a Saigon street, “would livestream himself on YouTube. The entire world would look into their smartphones and see him burn in real time.”

  This got the man’s attention. Golly rose shedding water and glared through dappled shade. Through his uncorrected blur, Fanta felt the murderous indignance of this decaying hustler, this tumor-clad berserker. Fanta had affronted him.

  YouTube. Smartphone. Real time.

  These words had reached Golly. Fanta thought of the newspapers he had seen on the floor of Derp Hubbard’s truck. If Golly read other people’s old newspapers, then he recognized these nouns, but he had never witnessed the action of the verbs around them. His notion of how truth was constructed revolved entirely around canonical poetry, news articles, letters to the editor, and photojournalistic essays. The man was stuck in print. And in his gathering blindness it was unlikely that he could read print anymore. He had lost whatever grip he once had. Fanta felt his desperation.

  He also felt his own traction. Thich Quang Duc. YouTube. Now he had to cycle carefully back toward bring the world to you. He had to show he understood, admired, and approved of Golly’s crimes. His lungs felt weak, but he squeezed out the words.

  “You are a very smart man, Jim. And very well informed.”

  Golly, re-sinking below his shoulders, nodded and coaxed fresh currents across the goiter on his neck.

  “You read my Broadcaster series on chronic wasting disease.”

  Golly grunted and nodded again. Across three articles that ran during deer hunting season, Fanta had used the expertise of Dr. Blaine Kleekamp to describe for readers how whitetail deer shed the chronic wasting prions in their urine, feces, and decomposing flesh. Plant roots absorbed these prions, incorporated them into stem and leaf—deer food—which was how the herd reinfected itself. Deer ate themselves, basically.

  “Your scientific knowledge, Jim, is impressive. You’re right that prions can be consumed intact, in food. Based on that, all kinds of things are possible. Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s could be caused by mad cow prions in infected ground beef, and chronic wasting prions in infected venison could have made you sick. It absolutely could be that the Lyme disease spirochetes in you have opened the door to horizontal transfer. Your scientific acumen… Jim, these are marvelous deductions. Breakthroughs, really.”

  Golly grunted and passed gas. The dog moved away and the editor held his breath as a mighty bubble broke the creek surface and dissipated into tree limbs and moth-worm shrouds. Fanta now approached the crux, the insanity, the make-believe science behind Golly’s idea that he could replace his infected animal prions, his bad betas, by consuming clean new alpha prions, from humans.

  “As I said, Jim, I know that white truck. I offered Derp Hubbard twice what it was worth. He didn’t bite. He wanted to be buried in that truck. That just tells you what a no-good bum he was, a nobody. A lower human.”

  Golly raised his naked eyebrows.

  Fanta asked, “So you ate Derp Hubbard?”

  “He was trespassing.”

  “And others?”

  Fanta waited, feeling the dog’s breath on his ear. He tried to guess the time. From where he sat, the sun had just slipped behind the limestone bluff carved from ancient ocean bottom by the tiny creek. Time? Eons.

  “Faith finds people,” Golly said.

  From lower human to higher human.

  “You used plant roots to bind their alpha prions,” Fanta continued, “which you then ate as vegetables? And those alphas are pushing back against your infected betas? I have to say, Jim, that is brilliant. But now you’re out of time and desperate to speed things up. You need to accelerate your therapy. You need an alpha-prion bomb. Here I wander in, but I’m too old, too sick. Do I have that right?”

  Jim Golly swirled creek water with his swollen hands, making it cycle in front of him. He showed his purpled
teeth. Then he lifted his hands and made two peace signs, followed by a heart.

  “He’ll do nicely,” Fanta agreed.

  He had to stop this.

  “But don’t you want to hear about an even faster way? How you can bring the world to you?”

  CHAPTER 28

  With aching arms from hours of labor, Sammy Lamb of God tosses two wet canvas buckets off the sod roof. He remembers that when he works hard, the voice mostly leaves him alone. He remembers hoeing an endless row of beans in the field beyond the window that he broke.

  After the buckets have slapped to the ground ten feet below, they look like two of the many tawny-colored rocks that bulge through the unruly grasses and wildflowers of the meadow surrounding. This place, this farm, seems like some sort of promised land, before things got ruined, before money and greed, before pollution, before floods and fire and disease and war, but he feels too hot and hungry to wonder more about it. He has never been anywhere so hot. He has never been anyplace where the color green burned his eyes. His arms have never hurt this badly. But the woman with I BRAKE FOR PEACE and MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR on her old green car has promised him fifty dollars on Monday and a ride back to the city. Though he doesn’t know what city, or when Monday is, he knows what he will do with fifty dollars. He will send it for the window that he broke.

  Once more an airplane drones just beyond the narrow wedge of sky above. As the woman has instructed him to do, he ladders down and conceals himself where his backpack rests beneath the shaggy eave, under drooping grass and wildflowers. Anyway, he needs to escape to shade and let the numbness recede from his arms. The buckets are heavy. The work he was hired to do has turned out to be hauling water from a stone cistern along a path that corners several mud-block buildings, one structure to the next, each half-buried into the bluff that climbs through thick buzzing forest to the sky. He hauls full buckets up a homemade ladder onto the roof over the main house, where he gives water to the parched sod. From up on the roof, the collection of grown-over buildings and weedy gardens almost disappears into the meadow.

  The woman, Faith, toils inside the structure next door, a low lean-to that stoops her almost double as she guts out plum tomatoes and drops them into glass jars. She pauses at the snarl in the sky and swings her head to find him. She is making sure that he has come down off the roof, he thinks. She stares exhaustedly through him while a small yellow plane gaps the valley, flings its oversized shadow down the near bluff, across the meadow, then up and out.

  But she still stares as the buzzing engine recedes, her face sagging, her hands hanging heavy, wetly red. He gives her a peace sign, then a plus sign, then makes a heart with his two hands paired. She drops her head and snicks her blade across a whetstone and resumes knifing tomatoes.

  Sammy Lamb of God. He likes it. Best yet. It sounds like the spiritual answer to exploding sheep. Cassie said that fighting for the future, for all living creatures, was a spiritual duty.

  He travels to the cistern, fills the buckets, and climbs back into the almighty sun. He sloshes out water as instructed, starting at the point where the roof merges with the hillside, one bucket per one square foot of thirsty sod, working left to right, then starting over. When his buckets are empty, he gazes over the other sod rooftops, then across the irregular grid of small rectangular gardens half-obscured by tall grass and flowers leaning over them.

  He can’t help it anymore. He descends the ladder with the buckets, rounds the house beneath its eaves and starts along the arbored trail as if bound for the cistern, but then he drops the buckets and forks off at a crouch through the high flowers and grasses, disturbing them as lightly as he can until he intersects a garden he has spotted from above: bright green with the lacy tops of carrots.

  His heart skittering, he yanks up four thick ones and devours them soil and all, unbreakably grinning through the dirt on his teeth. Then he hears rustling in the grass and up rises half-chewed carrot in his throat. He had promised not to steal again but then he did. He had fought the police and awakened in a hospital, unknown to himself. Within an hour of being awake, the voice had arrived to tell him who he was.

  Do-nothing.

  Sleeping while she burned.

  You know how people are.

  You know what they’ll do.

  You know what she wanted. Stop them.

  His darting eyes come to rest in the next garden on familiar round-lobed leaves. He sees they shelter yellow-striped green melons. He pivots slowly on his haunches to confirm that he is hidden. He listens for the rustling again, listens. He shouldn’t steal. Chickenshit. He crab-runs across the carrot rows into the melon patch.

  The wilting leaves prickle and cling to his skin. He searches for a ripe melon, but they all seem too small and hard. As he sifts through the sticky leaves and hollow prickly vines, the soft earth depresses unevenly under his crouch, tipping him off balance as his heels sink. A low woof turns him. Tipping back while flailing forward, he takes up two fists of melon vines, flails, gets half-upright, and then as the dog woofs again he topples onto his back, the full leverage of his fall ripping up an entire plant by its wide web of roots.

  The tangle drags over him, reeking putridly and shedding dirt. He recoils as across his face drag five ligamented fingers, entwined in root hairs, then the gooey puzzle of a wrist, the wrist gripped by heavier roots and dangling from a radius bone stuck with mealy tissue to its ulna. This rotten mess lands upon him. He hurls it off and thrashes to his knees. Before him boils a cavity of dirt, nubby white worms wriggling everywhere.

  Then the tall grass shivers and parts. The dog has found him, so close he can smell its black breath. Faith follows with her red knife.

  “Didn’t!” His words burst. “Monday!”

  He points. Bones!

  She kicks dirt over the decomposing arm. With her knife, she steers Sammy Lamb of God back to his buckets. When he has climbed the ladder and stands numbly trembling on the roof, she takes the ladder away.

  CHAPTER 29

  Sheriff Kick had driven past Leroy Fanta’s house in Town of Hefty—his car was not there—and then called him once more, unsuccessfully. Coming into town from that direction, she had made an appearance at the cooling center in the high school gym to thank the volunteers. From there, being just two blocks away, she had taken a domestic disturbance call—a newly separated young couple, fighting over custody of an in-window air conditioner. Next, she called the hospital: Deputy Luck was stable. Finally at the Bad Axe County Public Service Building, she had changed into a clean uniform, brushed her teeth, challenged her unhappy stomach with a few swallows of Mountain Dew, and checked with Denise on the BOLO for Patience Goodgolly.

  “A clean whiff,” Denise said. “Nothing. She’s staying off the roads, I guess. Or hiding in the woods somewhere. So you’re headed back to the hospital? Talk to her dad? Or uncle? Whichever?”

  For a moment the sheriff’s throat burned too much to speak. Outside the dispatch window, the flags hung limply. The shrubbery drooped. Heat waves wriggled on the highway. The slant of shadows made the sheriff squint at the time on Denise’s computer screen: it was already nearing four o’clock.

  “Yes.”

  “OK, then, so you asked me to run the records on Jon and Jim Golly. Jon is clean as a whistle. Jim was discharged from the Army for unsuitability—that’s usually behavior—and went on to be a five-time repeat drunk driver. He beat up some guy on a beach, and some other guy outside a nightclub, got three months in Palm Beach County Jail for the second one. He did five years’ probation for possession of a Schedule II drug. I did some digging. You wanna guess what drug?”

  * * *

  Once again, leaning over his hospital bed, the sheriff turned Jon Golly’s head by his Gabriel Goodgolly beard.

  “We have a deal,” she told him.

  His blue eyes came open and looked zoomy. Probably his pain meds were taking him on a trip. She gave the beard a sharp upward yank to let him feel the violence brewing in her heart.
I don’t know exactly why yet, but I would love to rip your head off.

  “But if one syllable of what you tell me turns out to be a lie, your immunity goes poof and I’ll use every scrap of truth to put you away. My dispatcher just told me about your brother’s military discharge and his criminal record in Florida. No lies and no half-truths, Mr. Golly, do you understand?”

  He nodded that he did. For a moment her adrenaline flagged and she felt ill again: fluttering sensations below her ribs, the not-quite urge to gag, the sense that she was about to fall from a great height. She backed away, used her palm to rinse her mouth at the sink. Had she ingested poison clearing Lyndsey Luck’s airway? Was she feeling it?

  “First of all, what’s gone on between you and the Rickreiners? You and Jim, and Ronald, Babette, and Barry?”

  His mouth came open and his tongue moved, but nothing came out.

  Catch your breath and ask a proper question, Heidi. One at a time.

  “Did you know Ronald Rickreiner?”

  He moved his head vaguely.

  “Yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Starting when? And how?”

  “Me and… me and Jim… we hadda buy on credit…”

  He puffed weakly from the lung not punctured by the gimlet.

  “Hadda bad year, winter just about killed us, we hadda buy seed and diesel… and machine parts, chemicals, feed, firewood…”

  She waited. His eyes seemed to sink inside his face.

  “We fought about it. I thought God would save us. Jim said nature didn’t give a damn for God or no one. Jim won. Jim always wins. We took Rickreiner’s terms.”

  “Which were?”

  “Forty percent interest, lien on the property.”

  “You couldn’t borrow from a bank?”

  “We… we couldn’t deal with any banks. We left some things behind in Florida, put it that way. We took Rickreiner’s terms and two years on we still couldn’t pay and he came back and threatened us with the lien to take the only thing we had, which was the land. So, Jim…”