Hard Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  The man let the knife drop, stepped heavily against the camp wall, and slid to the ground. Rodgers got the knife, threw it behind him, and keyed his radio. “Central, Two One Nineteen needs paramedics. I’m about one hundred yards west of my vehicle on the two-track you sent me to. The road’s good. They can drive all the way in.”

  “EMS rolling, ETA five,” dispatch reported.

  Rodgers knelt by the man and patted him down for other weapons.

  “Ohmygod, are you going to help that poor man or just watch him die, pig?!?” the woman shouted in a shrill tone that hurt his ears. She pointed her phone at him. “I’m getting all of this, and it’s going up on YouTube! Everybody’s gonna see what you did! If he dies, it’s on your head, pig!”

  “Ma’am,” Rodgers said, trying to remain calm. “Please help us. Go back out to the road and show the EMS where we are.”

  “While you fucking kill that poor man?!? Ohmygod, when are you gonna help him! I saw you pull your gun. I called for a cop, not some frickin’ park ranger. This man needs real help.” The woman swooped close, held the phone to the CO’s face, and flounced away. “What’s your name?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know my name,” the bleeding man said with a whine to the woman in a weak and pathetic voice. “Do you know?”

  The wound was in one arm and ugly but not immediately life-­threatening. “Sir, I’m going to help you” Rodgers said, as he leaned down for a closer look at the bloody area. “Can you hold up your arm for me?”

  “Okeydokes,” the man said in a singsong voice.

  The cut was long, down the middle of the left forearm. The blood on his face seemed to be from the arm wound. Rodgers broke open his kit, got a sterile bandage, wrapped the arm, and tied off the bandage to keep it in place. To maintain pressure on the bleeding, he took the man’s right hand and held three fingers on the site. “Keep your fingers there. Can you help me do that, partner?”

  “How’d I get here?” the man asked. “Who’re you?”

  “Help him!” the woman shouted as she made another running pass with the phone held out like a weapon. “For the love of our personal savior Jesus Christ!” the woman shouted. “Hey, jerkwad, help the man! He’s bleeding to death!”

  The woman jarred Rodgers’s shoulder on the way past. “Ma’am, you need to back off. If you come close again, you’re going to jail.”

  “A man lies bleeding to death, and this pretend pig is harassing me!” she shrieked at her tiny phone and charged again, this time thrusting the cell phone close to his chest and his metal name tag.

  Rodgers told the man, “You’re not in any immediate danger, sir. It’s going to be okay.”

  “Where are my teeth?” the man asked, his eyes bulging like ping-pong balls.

  Teeth? Ms. Cell Phone swooped in again, and Rodgers caught her arm, stood her up rudely, spun her like a top, and frog-hopped her back to his truck as the EMS came roaring along. He pointed them forward and cuffed the woman to a metal ring on his bumper. “Do not move!” he shouted and went back to his patient.

  “I holded it,” the man said with a nail-in-the-head grin.

  “Good job,” Rodgers said, looking him over for other wounds as two EMS techs moved in to take over.

  “Lots of blood,” he reported, “only one wound I can find, knife’s over there behind us.” He pointed.

  “He say what happened?” an EMS man asked.

  “Confused, probably shocky.”

  “Okay, we’ve got him from here,” the EMS woman said. “What’s with the chick cuffed to your truck?”

  “She reported it.”

  “Why the histrionics?”

  “Don’t have the foggiest,” Rodgers said.

  A Luce County deputy sheriff named Shewbart pulled in and crawled out of his patrol unit, looked at the man on the ground, then nodded toward Rodgers’s truck. “The cuffed one do this?”

  Rodgers said, “No, she reported a bloody man in the woods. When I got here, she got too rambunctious, and I had to restrain her.”

  “You want to file charges?”

  “No, just take her to the county, chew her ass, and let her go. And let her arrange her own transport home.”

  “You know her, eh?” Deputy Shewbart asked.

  “No.”

  “Bonnie Lahti, known nutso. Got kicked out of a Colorado police academy her first week, lack of emotional stability. She lives near Engadine. Pain in the patoot, and she hates cops.”

  “Thanks,” Rodgers said, stripped off his gloves, put them in a trash bag, and closed it with a tie-off. He put the knife in a clear evidence bag, labeled it, and headed for his truck. “Meet you guys at emergency at Joy,” he told the EMS team. Joy was the name of the local hospital, named after some woman whose history had never interested him enough to learn. Shit got named for rich people’s money, and such history bored him.

  “You get a name on our patient?” the EMS tech asked.

  “It’s just like you see. He’s too confused. See you there.”

  It turned out that the attempted suicide had a record of attempts, known bipolar disease, drug abuse, and a heavy booze problem, a loser’s trifecta.

  Rodgers completed his paperwork and met Deputy Shewbart in the hospital parking lot. “Lahti called somebody to pick her up.”

  “Thanks.”

  “She can go mega-whackadoodle in a heartbeat,” the deputy said. “Click, and she’s off and running!”

  “I saw,” Rodgers said. He spent the rest of the day in the north county checking trout fishermen, wrote no tickets, gave one man a verbal warning for a short fish, and explained how to safely release a fish: “Always wet your hands before handling a trout. Their slime is their autoimmune system. A dry hand will break the seal, could kill the fish.”

  It was nearing midnight when he got home, parked in the trees behind the house, removed his equipment belt, took a shower, ate two leftover pork chops in the microwave, and slid into bed beside Patsy. “Dinner in the fridge,” she mumbled.

  “Found the chops,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “How was your day?” she asked sleepily.

  “Uneventful,” he answered. “Yours?”

  “The usual high school hijinks,” she said with a drowsy chuckle.

  The next night Deven met him at the front door with an almost violent hug. “You are sooo cool, Daddio!” she said and rushed outside.

  Patsy was grinning.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Rodgers asked her.

  “You went viral. You’re somebody now.”

  “I don’t feel sick,” he said.

  “Viral, not virus,” Patsy said. “On YouTube. You don’t know?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “There’s a video of you on YouTube. Posted last night, and there’s already forty thousand hits in less than twelve hours. You’re the talk of the high school and town.”

  He stared at his wife, who led him to her laptop, hit some keys, and pointed.

  The crazy Lahti woman was calling him every name in the book. “Nice,” he said. “CO as storm trooper.”

  “Uh-uh. All sorts of people think that you should get a medal for helping that poor man and that she should be in jail.”

  The next morning at breakfast he held out his arms to his daughter, who rolled her eyes. “Really, Dad? You were viral yesterday. Old news. Today you’re just you,” she added.

  Patsy smiled, her eyes flashing an emotion somewhere between amusement and sympathy. “Coffee on the table, and there’s French toast, Officer Yesterday.”

  Laws of Physics

  They were headed south on US 141 with the intention of cutting northwest on a county road over to Steger Lake, the patrol boat on the trailer behind the truck, sun shining, middle of July, a per
fect Upper Peninsula day, warm and mild with a deep blue sky, blueberries already ripe for picking, and the two officers were talking about taking their wives to pick a few quarts, life proceeding normally, pleasantly, uneventfully.

  CO Hoyt Blossom was driving, Sergeant Arlon Rubadue sitting shotgun; the senior man, Rubadue, had three years until retirement, and life was a perpetual grin.

  Until a large buck, antlers in green-brown velvet, suddenly materialized in the truck’s path. Not there, then there, Blossom thought, like magic, and then he squeaked, “Oh shit” as he hit the animal dead center of the steel deer guard, which would usually shed animals left or right. This time, the deer came up over the deer guard and into their windshield, spidering it to crackle glass, ticked, and spun across the roof, grazed the top of the truck’s tailgate, rose slightly, spun in slow motion the length of the aluminum boat, struck the housing of the forty-horse outboard, and dropped sideways into the windshield of an oncoming Cadillac Seville, all of this occurring in an elapsed time of no more than two or three seconds, after which Sergeant Rubadue said, “You don’t see that shit every day.”

  For Finbar and Missy Ribey of Green Bay, Wisconsin, it seemed for an instant like the end of the world as their windshield shattered into their laps, and they slid onto the shoulder, where Missy wrestled the Caddy to a stop, the deer’s antler stuck through a hole in the windshield, and blood, tissue, and hair spewed everywhere. They were on the way home from visiting their daughter at Michigan Tech, where she was chasing a doctorate in electrical engineering, a long pursuit that might even end this fall after the girl had spent three tax-sucking years in the goddamn Peace Corps on some South Pacific cannibal atoll the size of Door County. If the girl finished the degree, it would be a long overdue miracle, Missy was thinking, when the deer slammed into them.

  Blossom and Rubadue were at the Caddy almost immediately, checking the passengers, expecting carnage, and finding instead a distinguished-looking couple with immaculate silver hair staring straight ahead as blood dripped silently through some cracks in the windshield. Rubadue tapped the driver’s window, which came down silently. The woman had been driving. “You folks all right?”

  “We’re a little shook up, but we’re fine,” the male passenger volunteered. “No, let us amend that to more than fine, and let us instead proclaim us spiffily fine,” he added. “Or call it extremely heavenly excellent if you insist on labels, though I don’t hold with supernatural creators, at least not any the average primitive mind can grasp.”

  “We’re fine,” the woman said, finding her voice and rolling her eyes. “Thanks to God. Please don’t start spouting, Fin.”

  “Here, you confront my problem head-on, Officer. This gorgeous female creature, whom every man would want, medical doctor, Ph.D., lawyer, and all her high-falutin’ intellectual training prevents her from seeing reality, know what I’m saying?” Finbar Ribey told Hoyt Blossom, who had the passenger door open and was checking the man for injuries.

  Blossom sort of nodded, had no clue what the man was trying to say, and wondered if he’d banged his head.

  “Don’t be a fool, Fin,” the woman grumbled.

  “Therein the prejudice of ologies and isms, the in-place, artery-­hardened belief systems of entrenched science and religion,” the man said.

  “I’m going to call EMS and a hook,” Blossom told his sergeant and went back to the patrol truck.

  “We’re perfectly fine,” the driver told Rubadue. “I’m a physician.”

  “See?” the passenger said. “She claims she’s a doctor, and you accept it on face value. But I declare a cervid projectile was dropped by an alien space vehicle, and I am assumed to be a whackadoodle.”

  Rubadue found himself enjoying whatever this was turning into. “Alien space vehicle? You mean, like a UFO?”

  Finbar Ribey smiled benignly. “UFO is a sadly outdated term, shunned by the cognoscenti. To be precise, it was a small Yankee Class Vector 7 that lifted its invisible force shield to discard the cervid. They do this after the experiments are complete. I saw the whole thing. It materialized from nowhere, struck your truck roof and the outboard motor, which spun it down into our path. If you examine the carcass, you’ll find they took the animal for interspecies experimentation and, having gotten what they needed from it, dropped it back to earth. Nobody’s fault. It’s just how the universe works.”

  Rubadue asked, “If they’ve got a spaceship, don’t they got, like, stuff to, you know, like, get rid of, you know, stuff?”

  “Undoubtedly,” the man said. “But put yourself in their gravity boots. You’re a megajillion miles from your mother ship, or your home planet, and why waste energy? It’s a lesson mankind could stand to learn from them.”

  “Okay,” Rubadue said. “You sure you folks don’t need some medical attention?”

  “Our sheepskinned expert says no, and in this I shall defer to her judgment, despite the fact that she will never acknowledge, much less defer to, my knowledge base.”

  “Cryptozoology is bunkum,” Missy Ribey said. “A sham world for fools without intellectual ballast.”

  “Then let us examine the carcass,” Finbar Ribey demanded and nearly fell out of the Caddy as CO Blossom returned just in time to prop the man up on his shaky legs.

  The three men stared at the gore after the officers took photos, pulled the carcass down off the Caddy, and lugged it into the ditch. “You can see bone fragments,” Ribey said. “The aliens break them to measure tensile strength and record parameters and other physiological values.”

  “You know these aliens?” Rubadue asked.

  “Of course not,” the man said. “It’s common sense, a simple process of deduction and analysis.”

  “But you told us we can’t understand the aliens with our primitive intellectual development,” the wife said from several feet away.

  “I guess I heard that, too,” Rubadue said.

  “Kudos for a fine job of listening, but I do not include myself in that general declaration. You see, I’ve been trained by the best.”

  “Who trains the trainers?” Rubadue asked. “Seems to me your aliens had to intervene somewhere along the line; otherwise, how would teachers know now what to teach others?”

  “Not to put too fine a point on this, my new friend, but I presume neither you nor your august partner has the training to understand nuclear physics, yet, and this too is an assumption, you must surely accept the existence of nuclear weapons. My field is more arcane than nuclear weaponology.”

  “What school?” Blossom asked.

  Finbar Ribey rolled his eyes. “That question is irrelevant.”

  Blossom said, “I hope it’s not one of those online for-profit schools that run up debt for students. We heard about a woman over to Iron River who spent eighty grand for some advanced science degree but couldn’t get a job because the school’s curriculum wasn’t accredited.”

  The man sulked. “My program is fully accredited,” he said, “and all doubting Thomases are like plagues of locusts on the earth.”

  A long black RV pulled up behind the Caddy, and a muscled young man bounced down, talked to Missy Ribey, and came over to the men. “Finbar, Missy tells me you’re becoming contentious.”

  “Not in the least,” Finbar Ribey said. “We are embarked upon a fine and stimulating intellectual discussion here. I’m presently showing these fine officers of the law the clear evidence of alien experimentation on the deceased cervid.” He pointed at the carcass.

  “The bone splinters I see are typical of any deer hit by a vehicle,” Sergeant Rubadue said. “Flesh and bone are no match for a steel mass and momentum.”

  “But you are no doubt referencing earthbound physics,” Finbar Ribey countered with a shrill voice. “Such science has no more validity in these circumstances than old wives’ tales about vampires.”

&nb
sp; “I’m just saying what I know after seeing hundreds of deer−vehicle collisions.”

  “You refute my training and authority?”

  “No, sir, just your conclusions—and only in this instance.”

  “Doctor, you badged cretin,” Finbar Ribey barked nastily, his gentle demeanor gone.

  The young man said, “Okay, Finbar, that’s enough stimulation for today,” and firmly grasped Ribey’s upper arm.

  “Am I to be placed in the mother ship?”

  “Yes, sir,” the young man said, “straightaway.”

  “And my wife, the illustrious academic?”

  “She wants to remain with the wreck to see to repairs or replacement.”

  “Not another Cadillac, my darling,” Finbar said, holding up a finger. “Clearly these things have been earmarked as targets by our alien visitors.”

  The RV driver said, “Yessir, Dr. Ribey, whatever you say.”

  The man gave the two conservation officers a leer and a strange Nazi-like salute. “You see, this young man accepts my title and my authority.”

  Finbar climbed into the RV, and it drove away.

  Missy Ribey got out of the Caddy and lit a cigarette as the wrecker pulled up. “Where are the most dealers, et cetera?” she asked Rubadue.

  “Probably Iron Mountain.”

  “Got to call my boss to haul that far,” the wrecker driver said.

  “Do call him,” Missy said. “I’ll be paying cash.” She turned to the officers. “I hope my husband wasn’t too much of a bother. I got him out of the institution in Appleton to visit our daughter.” She looked Rubadue in the eye and said disgustedly, “Aliens, for God’s sake. The man failed at everything he ever tried to do, so I guess he had no choice but to escape to something where no earthly measurement is possible.”

  The wrecker driver came back. “Boss says we’re good to go.”

  “Permissible that I ride with you?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Hop on up while I get your Caddy on the flatbed. It won’t take long.”

  “Do I need to make a report or something?” she asked the conservation officers.