Bad Moon Rising
Page 21
There was a fine Benderism, indeed.
But he wasn’t done. She waited.
“And jumping in front of that sonofabitch is what makes a sheriff a sheriff,” he said, looking almost vehemently away. “A fella might even say he felt proud to work for a sheriff like that, being as himself, if he had to, he couldn’t have done it.”
* * *
The heat wave continued through the whole nine days. On the morning of the day that she finally went home, a thunderstorm broke the spell for a short while. Alone in her room, she watched it rain for thirty minutes in drops that seemed as big as marbles, steam rising from pavements and fields back up into the downpour. It felt cooler outside, even through the window. Her eyes were relieved.
While this happened, fifty miles south in Fennimore, where it wasn’t raining, the Grant County Sheriff’s Department got a report of a horse tied off in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot and arrived to find a teenage boy in an Amish dress drawing on the sidewalk. He seemed disoriented and became combative. Officers eventually delivered him to the local hospital, where he was fed, medicated, and observed. Within mere minutes they had charged the kid’s phone and spoken to his mother and knew his name was Aaron Robert Zimmerman, seventeen, from Silver Falls, Oregon, a high school straight-B student until a year ago, now suffering from schizophrenia, alogia, and grandiose delusion. He had told Grant County deputies that he had been homeless and on the road for a week or two, but in fact he had been missing from a juvenile mental health facility since March. As she heard this—since March!—a storm broke inside Sheriff Kick and tears as heavy as the raindrops ran down her face.
* * *
An hour later, it was a hundred degrees again and humid. Harley helped her get comfortable in the relative cool of the shade on the front porch.
“Hopefully he can relax a little now.”
Her husband meant Taylor, whom they could see over by the barn trying to attach a spear, an old tool handle that he had sharpened, to the handlebars of his bike, given that Dylan had just figured out that if he filled his water bottle, put it in the holder, and left the top off, it would keep him cool by splashing up and hitting him in the crotch every time he went over a bump, an invention he planned to showcase when Opie came home.
“Look at us,” Harley said. “All of us just out here waiting when she’s only just left the camp. It’s a long van ride. Two hours is going to take forever.”
She, they were calling Opie these last couple days, falling back into the word like a familiar old chair.
“Well, since we have time, there are a couple things we can talk about,” she said. “If you’re up for it.”
“Beer,” came Harley’s answer, and he returned from the kitchen with a cold can of PBR for himself and a cold brown bottle of Bundaberg ginger beer for her.
She began, “We need to stop hoping that we don’t have to take our little boy to a therapist because we’re worried that it’s a small town and everyone will talk, and because we know he’s not emotionally bulletproof like Opie, and so we’re afraid he’ll carry it the rest of his life. We have to stop the wishful thinking and do our jobs as parents.”
“I know, hon.”
“Who makes the call to the therapist, me or you?”
“I will.”
“As for the Bad Axe,” she went on, “and our continued residence here, we have to face the fact that as smart and perceptive as Opie is, she made it all the way to nine years old without understanding what a lesbian is.”
Harley sighed. “Yeah.”
They had spoken to a camp counselor before telling Opie that her mother had been shot, feeling it was a relatively minor but real family situation that first the camp and then Opie should know about. The counselor had suggested stalling for a couple of days and then talking to Opie themselves, because she—the first telltale she in reference to Opie—was working on something to explain to them.
They had waited nervously. Then Opie’s news had turned out to be that she was not actually a boy, as she had once thought when I was so immature, she said. No, she was a girl who loved girls, loved her best friend, Rosie Glick, to be precise, whom she wanted to marry and have babies with, and this had confused her into thinking she was really a boy in the wrong body, because only boys were supposed to love and marry girls, or at least she had never heard anything different back when I was so immature, she said. At camp a woman with a penis named April—Jeez! The woman is named April, you guys, not her penis! Stop!—had helped her figure this out, and helped her understand that Rosie Glick, or any other girl she loved, might or might not love her back in the same way, and all of this was normal and therefore easy-peasy. As soon as she got home, Opie had promised, she would explain to them the huge difference, you guys, between gender and sexual identity…
“She sounded so happy on the phone,” Harley said. “I mean, she’s a happy kid anyway. But she sounded like her feet were off the ground. It’s great to know who you are, right?”
“My point being,” the sheriff said, “that we have choices. We can leave the Bad Axe.”
“Yes.”
“Which we never talk about, because you and I love it here. We can’t imagine being anyplace else. And we just hope the kids are OK.”
“Yes.”
“So.”
“Yup.”
Dylan hammered over a pothole and squealed as the water hit his crotch. Taylor seemed to get his spear affixed.
“Meanwhile,” she said, “we have another child we hardly ever talk about because the other two are using up all the air, who just goes about the business of being a perfect little boy.”
“Hmmm. That worries you?”
“So you heard me say ‘perfect’?”
“Yeah.”
“I think he feels a lot of pressure not to disappoint.” She paused. Though they were healing well, her wounds hurt and she shifted away from the pain. “His siblings are a load. His daddy is a baseball all-star. His mommy is high-profile.”
Harley squeezed her hand.
“Maybe you should take a job at the bank, hon.”
“Sure.” She squeezed back. “And maybe you should start striking out more, maybe hit about .230.”
“I don’t know how,” he said. “I can’t.”
“And I can’t work at the bank.”
She sighed then.
“Oh, Harley, I just love children. I love our children. I worry about them. Our children, all children, everywhere. That’s not crazy, is it?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s not crazy to worry about bringing children into this world? To not totally want a baby?”
“No, of course not.”
She turned her hand over and knit her fingers into his.
“So, then,” she began, “I have something that I need to tell you.”
“Sure.”
But she was fighting tears and then she waited because she looked away and saw Taylor pedaling his speared bike as hard as he could out their long, long driveway, three hundred yards to the mailbox.
Pedaling, pedaling, farther and farther.
She squeezed her husband’s hand hard, and then harder, her breath stopping as their little boy reached Pederson Road, looked inside the newspaper tube…
Then turned back home.
More from this Series
Bad Axe County
Book 1
Dead Man Dancing
Book 2
More from the Author
The Nail Knot
Red Sky, Red Dragonfly
The Blood Knot
The Clinch Knot
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Galligan is the author of Bad Axe County and Dead Man Dancing as well as five other novels. He lives and teaches writing in Madison, Wisconsin.
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/John-Galligan
@AtriaBooks @AtriaBooks @AtriaBooks
ALSO BY JOHN GALLIGAN
&
nbsp; THE BAD AXE COUNTY SERIES
Bad Axe County
Dead Man Dancing
FLY FISHING MYSTERIES
The Nail Knot
The Blood Knot
The Clinch Knot
The Wind Knot
NOVELS
Red Sky, Red Dragonfly
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ISBN 978-1-9821-6653-3
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