Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  “Heidi—”

  “I have business with Rickreiner anyway.”

  “Why don’t you just deliver it?”

  “Because it’s from Taylor. It’s his all the way. No shortcuts.”

  She saw his eyes agree. He tried to re-gather her in his arms. “But, hon, it’s nine o’clock. Prickreiner’s probably got a load on. He never really quit drinking, I heard. Can’t you do it tomorrow?”

  “I can’t. He might be in danger,” she said. “Not tomorrow, tonight. And he also needs to give me an alibi.”

  “You have deputies. Do you need to confront him right now?”

  Now she pulled away.

  “He’s all mine. I’m not taking any shortcuts either. Taylor will be fine. And if I can eat your mother’s macaroni salad, I can look the devil in the eye.”

  * * *

  In minutes she was loading Taylor and his envelope into the Charger, reassuring him as the locks clicked down. She had buckled his booster onto the backseat, and she talked through the window space.

  “I’m proud of you for being a big boy and doing the right thing. And I’m so glad you got to play in the pool with your brother. Dylan and Daddy are proud of you too. And guess what? Now you can go on your field trip to Elmo Pond and help at the farm breakfast tomorrow.”

  Her little boy gazed back wordlessly into her mirror as she turned out the end of the driveway onto Pederson Road. In a half mile they were rolling past the spot where in late July from a potato field Opie’s friend Rosie Glick had seen him hitchhiking and had run to tell her father. Amos Glick had barreled down the road in his fastest horse and buggy to snatch up Taylor and bring him home.

  “We’re all very proud of you,” she said. “We would have a hundred more boys just like you if we could. But then we’d be too busy, so we’d rather keep things just the way they are. With Opie home, of course.”

  He just stared at her. He was every bit just a common seven-year-old boy, she thought… yet such a mystery, and so… formidable. It was impossible to explain to non-parents how even the littlest children were people. You did not define or control them—not without committing abuse, anyway—and it was equally impossible to explain, she thought, the unrelenting aloneness of parenthood. You created this life. This was yours to care for.

  Am I doing it right?

  About halfway to Rickreiner’s, she frowned and stuck her arm out the window, trying to scoop in moving air toward her sweaty face. Taylor had begun to hum behind her.

  “What are you humming, bud?”

  The answer to that would remain private, apparently. He only vaguely smiled at her.

  * * *

  In another quarter mile, she parked the Charger alongside Rickreiner’s mailbox, in the outer glow of the motion-sensing floodlight that cast its beam across his yard.

  “Hop out, Taylor. Drop it in the box. Shut the box. Hop back in.”

  He did.

  “See? You did it. Now you’re done.”

  She put on her duty hat.

  “Now I have to do one little sheriff thing and I’ll be right back. Just sit tight, bud.”

  She locked him in, then looked back from the floodlit phalanx of red-and-white campaign signs staked in the yard and smiled reassuringly at her son’s face, bunched in the window. She felt weary and tight as she raised her hand to knock. Any sheriff does a thousand difficult things—telling a mother that her son has died. Just another tough moment, Heidi.

  Becky Rilke-Rickreiner answered the door in zebra tights and stood wide and mute behind her screen door.

  “Hi. Sorry to bother you. I need to speak with—”

  “Barry!” she screeched and disappeared. “You won’t believe this! Nine-thirty, you won’t believe who’s at the door!”

  “Two things,” she began when BARRY HER slapped into view holding a beer and wearing wet red swimming trunks, blinding her with his pale, soft, nearly nude body, a grub who would be sheriff. “One, I need to make you aware of a possible threat to your safety and recommend that, until you hear otherwise, you open this door only to friends and family and use caution when going out.”

  The grub rolled his eyes.

  “Two, I need to know where you were between ten A.M. and two P.M. today.”

  “What kinda shit is this?”

  “This? This is what a sheriff does. Take notes if you want.”

  “Threat from who?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Rickreiner, but that information is part of an ongoing investigation. Use caution is all I can tell you. You went to law enforcement school, I’m told, so you know how it is. Stay home if possible. You’re at risk if you don’t. I need an answer: where you were between the hours of ten and two?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Am I wrong? You didn’t go to school?”

  “You’re making something up against me, is that it?”

  “All you have to do is tell me where you were.”

  “Get a lawyer!” screeched Becky from somewhere. “Tell the bitch you got a lawyer and get her ass off the property!”

  He winced. The sheriff said, “It’d be way cheaper just to tell me where you were. You weren’t doing anything you shouldn’t be doing, I’m sure. Anyway, a sheriff’s life is pretty much an open book. Everybody knows your business, all the time. Accountability, right? You’d be practicing for later.”

  The glint had drained from his eyes. “I was here,” he said to the doorframe.

  “Someone to verify that?”

  “Her,” he said.

  “Thank you. Mrs. Rickreiner?”

  “He was here!”

  “Thank you.”

  Back in the van, she told Taylor, “And now Mommy’s all done too. Let’s go home.”

  But the energy had turned strange at home. Harley sat alone on the porch steps. Taylor vaulted from the Charger and hustled away toward the barn to feed his rabbit, a bedtime chore.

  Harley said, “Dylan’s upstairs. He won’t open his letter.”

  Her phone buzzed and she ignored it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “His apology from Taylor. He won’t open it. He got into bed and we were talking about the field trip tomorrow, about the bus ride, how the bus was going to stop so they could feed the goldfish at Elmo Pond. He got real quiet, and I thought maybe he’s thinking Elmo Pond is kind of near where you found the body yesterday. But I doubt he even knows that, or cares. I said, ‘Isn’t it great that Taylor can go along with you tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Let’s see. Show me your brother’s letter. Let’s see what he wrote to you.’ But Dylan won’t open the letter. I might have pushed him too hard. He started to cry.”

  She slumped down beside her husband on the front porch steps. Her phone buzzed again—a text this time, from Denise—and she looked at it with some small sense of relief. Finding Jim Golly from the air would be quicker and safer. It would allow her to plan without alerting him.

  Yes from Crockett Crop Dusting. Meet at the airfield in Lansing, Iowa, 4:30 AM tomorrow.

  She leaned her head against Harley’s shoulder.

  “Dylan is protecting his brother.” He sighed. “I guess. But I just don’t understand why he needs protecting. Gosh. I mean, what’s out there?”

  CHAPTER 32

  Jump! the voice had commanded Sammy Lamb of God.

  This was hours ago now, and miles ago, he thinks—unless he’s gone in circles. After she had taken the ladder away, he had watched the valley sink in shadow and the sky catch fire. The melon plants where bones were buried had disappeared behind fog rising from the creek. He had watched Faith and Papa and the dog walk the old man at the point of a rifle. Across the black grasses and closing meadow flowers he had seen three heads, then two as the old man went down.

  Jump!

  He had jumped from the roof. He had landed on the beaten earth. His leg bones had jarred up into his hips, his hips into his spine, and his neck had snapped back. He had been stunned, pain shooting through his ank
les up his shin bones, his head filling with a sick, dull ache.

  Run! the voice had commanded.

  He had gathered his backpack and begun to limp aimlessly along the dirt path that led to the cistern.

  Run which way? From what?

  Something had crashed through the tall meadow grass, coming toward him. The dog. Two gunshots had cracked and echoed overhead.

  He had limped a dozen more steps without direction. He could not outrun the dog. He had stared at the cistern—cemented stones, head high and round, fed by a joined-wood gutter funneling water down the hillside—then heaved his backpack up and over the rim. He had found toeholds up its mossy stone wall. He had cleared the rim and rolled in, cold water closing over him. The barking dog had sounded squeaky, trailing away. He had held his breath, heard Faith holler past, come up for air.

  The dog was heading up the bluff behind the house, gathering its deep black haunches and exploding upward like a bear through brush and tumbling rocks, reaching the height where the sun still struck with setting light. Faith had carried the rifle past the cistern and ducked underneath the dripping wooden gutter that sluiced in the water. She couldn’t climb with the dog. She had whistled at it. Behind Sammy Lamb of God, Papa bawled a jumble of words and curses as he flailed without help through the meadow.

  He had ducked back underwater and held his breath until he couldn’t. When he came up, Papa leaned against the cistern, wheezing, not three feet away. The dog descended in a cascade of loose rock. Papa had gasped at Faith, “Bring him back or it’ll be you.”

  “Who’ll cook me?” she had growled in response. “Who’ll cook for you?”

  “I’ll tear you like a vulture.”

  He had ducked under again. When he came up, Faith and the dog were gone. Papa gasped horribly beneath the eaves of the house, spitting after every breath.

  Underwater, he had put his backpack on and crab-walked to the opposite side of the cistern, where the water poured in. He had risen under the spout, chinned himself, thrown a leg over, heaved out, then scrambled up the gutter like a monkey as it zigzagged up through thick forest along the steep hillside. From where the gutter ended at the spring that fed the cistern, he caught a glimpse of Faith and the dog hunting him through the gray grasses at the high end of the meadow, like he was a pheasant.

  He was hidden, but he had nowhere left to go. So he had waited there for night. Chickenshit, the voice had caught up to remind him. Cassie never ran from anything Cassie ran into the fire for her horses.

  But you told me to jump.

  Yes.

  You told me to run.

  Yes. And it is also me who chases you. I am them and I am hunting you. I am inside you and outside you now. I am everyone and everywhere. You can’t escape.

  He had opened his backpack and taken the shattered highway reflector, had scraped and torn the skin of his forearms like Cassie taught him until they bled into the spring and gently trickling water was the only sound he heard.

  * * *

  A long, blank time later, still hot, when at last a flesh-colored moon in partial decay had risen overhead, he had scooted back down the gutter to the cistern. Listening from there, he had heard through the dirt walls of the house a terrifying commotion, Faith shrieking and Papa bellowing, the dog woofing excitedly, things falling and breaking.

  With a memory of this morning, he had eased off the cistern’s rim to the ground. The rough road he had arrived on had exited the forest between two huge stumps. From there, to his first glimpse, the cluster of low, grassy-topped structures had looked like a hobbit shire in Middle-earth, a paradise. Now he was groping through moon shadows along the forest’s edge, looking to escape through those stumps again. A door squealed open.

  “Tippy! Get!”

  The beam of a flashlight had struck him in the back, casting a black ghost of himself forward as he fled.

  * * *

  Finally, slick with sweat and dry with thirst, no more breath to run, he lies heaving and bruised where he fell among the scoured rocks and tumbled timbers of a deep dry wash.

  You can’t escape.

  After his first fifteen seconds of flight, he has never outrun the dog. The dog has been with him this whole time. But it has always waited, panting, growling, and snapping, for the woman to catch up. So Sammy Lamb of God has limped and rested, limped and rested, night heat somehow heavier than day heat, an hour, two hours, a redundant terrain addled by moon shadows, uphill scrambles and downhill plunges, holes that look like shadows, shadows like holes, always fetid water on low ground, tilting hummocks, sucking mud, swarming mosquitoes, then another brushy climb with thorns tearing at him, going in circles, he fears, with the dog trotting menacingly behind him, now and then baying to guide Faith as she lumbers and crashes along. The dog can go forever, so it is her against him, who can last longer, and it seems that she will never quit.

  Finally she is near. He can hear her staggering strides, her laboring lungs. Then he sees her zombie shape lurching downhill toward him. The dog shows her. She aims. Then something rolls beneath her and she falls, firing the rifle into the treetops. He starts to crawl down the gulch. She fires again, hits rock. He finds the breath to scramble out and rise to a crouch behind a tree trunk. He turns his back to her, sees a lane to the bottom, and lets gravity pitch him headlong downward. The dog gallops easily at his heels. But the bottom is a bog. He staggers ten strides into muck and sinks to his hips. He is stuck.

  I am everyone and everywhere.

  The dog paces the margin of the bog, then hurls itself at him—and is stuck too, all four legs, teeth snapping just out of reach. Now here she comes, sidestepping down the hillside, hugging tree trunks, with the rifle slung on a strap over her shoulder.

  He has one minute, maybe. If he wants, he can reach the dog’s heavy leather collar, the woven-leather handle that Papa grabs to be towed. Or he can reach several of the heavy broken branches that litter the rim of the bog. He catches the narrow tip of one and pulls the branch to himself and threads three feet of the narrow end through the harness handle. He jams the ragged point down into the muck. The dog squirms and yelps. With his weight on the thick end of the branch, he levers himself, belly flops, strains, and reaches another branch farther out, hauls and claws and worms his way to solid ground. She fires again but doesn’t hit him.

  He limps on and on into screeching, howling night, long after the sounds of the chase have faded. Once, he staggers out of the forest to the edge of a cornfield, a vast, black-silver abnormality straining at the moon. He follows its outer row to a road, walks along heat-exuding asphalt, but a car approaches—everyone and everywhere—and he bolts back into the alien corn. Later, scratched raw by leaf blades, he follows a cold creek, rinsing arms and legs and face in it, drinking from it, hobbling on its sharp stones. But then an engine roars above his gulping breaths, headlights fracture black forest, tree limbs shatter, and a white truck crashes through, Papa’s swollen head moonlit in the driver’s window. He hurries back the way he came.

  Later still, utterly empty, he surrenders to a soft patch of hot earth, curls upon his bedspread, and crashes into sleep.

  He awakens to a bestial snort and a barrel in his face.

  He is caught again, he first believes.

  But it is an old horse, lathered and blowing. Standing beside it is a barefoot girl in a long dress and a bonnet, her raw thumb on the hammer of a short-nosed shotgun aimed squarely at his face. He can’t erase his rigid grin, even when she reaches into her dress pocket and shines a small flashlight on his raw arms.

  She lowers the gun. She peels her sleeves back to show him.

  Neither says a word.

  She turns in the moonlight and vaults aboard the horse. She scoots forward. He rises, shoulders his backpack, mounts behind her, and rides with his arms around her hard, narrow waist.

  Sat, Aug 10, 2:13 AM

  To: Dairy Queen (diaryqueen@blackbox.com)

  From: Oppo (oppo@blackbox.com)

&
nbsp; Subject: Opposition Research

  Found Hubbards truck and Fantas car way back in

  CHAPTER 33

  Way back in… where? Why didn’t Oppo finish the message?

  The plane went up predawn, its navigation lights strobing green and red through clouds of rising river fog. As the tiny vessel thumped through air pockets, Sheriff Kick vomited into a Piggly Wiggly sack while a pilot from Iowa named Jack Bristol hollered tour-guide information.

  “That’s the Guttenberg Dike down there!

  “There’s the Bishops Ferry Pronto station! Great cheese curds!

  “As the crow flies, a guy can hardly sing ‘Happy Birthday’ between Iowa and Wisconsin! Gotta pull up or hit these bluffs! That’s Battle Rock! You ever been on Battle Rock?”

  As soon as the plane had climbed high enough to clear the Mississippi bluffs, Jack Bristol abruptly swooped low and with a deafening hiss unleashed plumes of Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki across treetops in Town of Irish Ridge.

  “It’s completely harmless to humans!” he yelled over his engine and propeller.

  “Very low toxicity!

  “If you eat fresh fruit or vegetables, then you’ve eaten plenty of this stuff!

  “And look at you! You’re fine!”

  He pulled up and looped back through his plume. She thought she tasted rubber, and overripe bananas.

  “We only spray at dawn and dusk!

  “Or if there’s no wind!

  “Lately there’s no wind! We can spray all day!”

  He hauled back on a lever and released another gusher.

  “Die, you sonsabitches! Die!”

  She twisted shut her barf bag and tried to focus on the horizon. She had never seen the Bad Axe from above. Her place on earth was both a mote and a motherland, draping itself in every direction over the planet’s disappearing point. As she stared, the fragment gnawed at her. Found Hubbards truck and Fantas car way back in… What was Oppo doing out at 2:13 A.M.? Who was Oppo?