Hard Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  “You have your hunter ed card and an adult with you?”

  “I had hunter safety. Officer Sedge taught the class.”

  “She tell you that you have to hunt with an adult until you’re sixteen?”

  “She told us.”

  “Yet here you are alone. What’s the deal?”

  “I’m hunting is all. What’s the big deal? I know what I’m doing.”

  Jeffey Bryan sensed pluck in the girl, some inner steel, and he liked it. Guts young was good.

  “That your van out by the highway?”

  “My pop’s.”

  “Where is he?”

  “With Jesus,” the girl said. “My ma, too. She went when I was seven. Just pop and me since then; now it’s just me.”

  “You live around here?”

  “Near Hulbert Lake.”

  “Thirteen and driving illegally,” Sergeant Bryan said, towering over the child. “Has the DMV issued new regs I don’t know about?”

  “It’s too damn far to walk,” the girl said forcefully. “Me and Pop always hunted here. Pop taught me to drive.”

  “Did you scope me?” he asked.

  “If I had, you wunta found me up this tree,” she said candidly.

  “Do you have orange?”

  “My pop didn’t believe in it.”

  The sergeant took off his ruck and pulled out a hunter orange wool chook, which he handed to her. “Put it on,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Turley, Anastasia Turley.”

  Bryan called Sedge on the 800. “You remember a hunter safety student named Turley?”

  “Anna Turley? You bet. Great kid; why?”

  “No reason, thanks.”

  “Turley,” the sergeant said, facing the child. “Go back up there and hunt, but keep that damn orange chook on. When you drive home, get the hell off M-28 fast as you can after you cross the Hendrie River. Use the truck the rest of this season, but after that you’re grounded till you get your license. Who are you living with?”

  “My aunt, Lattis Earle. She don’t hunt.”

  “Does she drive?”

  “When she has to. She’s real old and cranky.”

  “Like I said, finish your season. I’ll make sure the cops leave you be. You hike back here every day?”

  “No sir, I’m in till the season’s over, just the way Pop and I did it. I got plenty of grub.”

  “You’re thirteen? What about school?”

  “What about it?”

  “You make good grades?”

  “Home school. I’m in all advanced high school courses and a college-level English course.”

  “Who oversees your home schooling?”

  “Was Pop, now me. Computers make it easy.”

  “You ever tempted to cheat?”

  She puffed up indignantly. “People of honor don’t cheat.”

  “Except when it comes to hunting,” he said.

  “Your definition, not mine,” she came back and hung her head.

  “Why’d you stay up in the tree?”

  “High ground, sir; never surrender the high ground.”

  “Your father teach you that?”

  “Yessir.”

  Sergeant Jeffey Bryan stuck a business card in her hand and extended a huge paw. “Pleasure to meet you, Miss Anastasia Turley. I hope you get you a dandy buck.”

  “Thanks for the hat,” she said. “Do I get a ticket?”

  “Nope.”

  “Could you get in trouble for this?” she asked.

  “We both could,” he said, “but not if you don’t screw up.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I promise, sir.”

  Two weeks later Jeffey Bryan got a telephone call. “Sergeant, this is Anna Turley. I got my buck, a ten-point, and I’ve got meat for you. My aunt says you should come to dinner so she can meet you.”

  They made a date. Jeffey closed his phone and smiled. Some gambles were worth taking, especially out in the way back.

  Man in the Woods; Man on the Road

  Loren Degu was headed south on M-77 to join a dozen other officers for the annual group patrol and goat rodeo on Big Mass Lake, an event conservation officers called the Redneck Mardi Gras. It was a gathering of beer guzzlers and dopers with mullet cuts and multiple body tattoos, multiple body piercings, hats facing south, untied boots and shoes, the uniform of shiftless twenty-somethings who would all converge on a sandbar in the middle of the lake, hook their boats into a large flotilla raft, and commence an en masse alcoholic rock-dive into the kingdom of stupid.

  It was not a patrol Degu looked forward to. Sure, it produced some astonishingly stupid behaviors, events, and great stories year in and year out, but he’d rather stay in his own county where he had his own reliably unreliable troublemakers. The truth was that stupid people disturbed and annoyed him more than he could adequately express in words, and to see so many mouth breathers gathered together was the stuff of nightmares.

  But duty was duty, and he was headed south, having come across bad roads from Deer Park. Normally, he had his eighteen-foot aluminum boat, but his sergeant had wrecked it a month ago. North of Green Haven on M-77 a jaybird in a rusty red Volvo wagon jetted around him, swerved wildly, and nearly went off the road, nicking the gravel shoulder, throwing up a rooster tail of dirt and crap, and unceremoniously dropping a beer can on the road.

  Was this guy blind? Degu stopped, picked up the can, accelerated to catch up, got behind the Volvo, and turned on his blue emergency lights.

  The vehicle continued to sail south toward Seney. Amazed that the man seemed not to have seen him, Degu pulled alongside the other vehicle again. The pigtailed driver looked over, grinned, and waved. He appeared to have a giant spliff stuck to his lower lip, his insipid grin suggesting a cocktail of beer and cannabis. Degu motioned for the man to pull over, but all the driver did was to salute, smile, and continue driving south.

  Reaching Lavender’s Corner, Degu used his siren to try to wake up the man, but as they approached a long bend in the road, the driver kept going.

  Degu knew it was pretty much a straight shot from here to Seney, lots of space. The man chucked another beer can, and Degu hung close behind him, lights going until they crossed the bridge over the East Branch of the Fox River. Time to act, Degu told himself.

  The conservation officer again pulled alongside the Volvo and signaled for the driver to pull over.

  The man rolled down his window and tossed a plastic bag, which Degu was certain would contain his drug stash. The officer hit the marker button on his Automatic Vehicle Locator to mark the drop-spot, then called the Schoolcraft County dispatcher. “Two, One Eleven is southbound on M-77 in pursuit of a red Volvo, one occupant, fleeing stop.”

  “You want backup?” the dispatcher asked over the radio.

  “Affirmative. I’m still north of the big curve, and I’m going to PIT him here.” The Precision Immobilization Technique was Degu’s safest bet to knock the fleeing vehicle off the road and end the flight.

  Degu lined up his front right bumper with the target’s left rear wheel and cut hard into him, causing the Volvo to spin into the ditch as Degu braked, stopped, threw open his door, charged the red car, jerked the driver out, rolled him roughly onto his face, and cuffed him.

  A troop in a blue goose arrived as Degu was getting the man to his feet. “He tossed a bag about a half mile back,” Degu told the state policeman. “Should be right on the road.”

  “Drugs?”

  “My guess. Beer in the car. He was all over the road.”

  The troop left to retrieve the evidence.

  This was the area where Schoolcraft, Alger, and Luce Counties all sort of touched each other, and Degu had to think about where he wanted to take
the prisoner and decided on Munising. By the time he got the man lodged and did paperwork, he could beg off the group patrol on the lake.

  A second troop arrived on the scene and asked, “Call a hook for you?”

  “Please.”

  Degu administered a preliminary sobriety test, and the man agreed to take a Breathalyzer, noting, “Ain’t had but a six-pack, dude.”

  The man blew 1.3, his pupils were dilated, and Degu counted a dozen empty cans on the floor of the Volvo’s passenger side. There was a new twelve-pack in a Styrofoam cooler on the seat. “Smoke a little?” Degu asked.

  “Don’t ever’body?” the Volvo driver answered.

  “You’re under arrest. You’re over the blood alcohol content limit.”

  The man shrugged.

  When the Volvo was on the way to Seney on a flatbed wrecker to be impounded, Degu loaded his prisoner into the truck and started west for Munising.

  “Dude,” the prisoner said, “you done run me offen motherfuckin’ road. You, like, scared the shit outen me.”

  “You wouldn’t pull over.”

  The man rolled his eyes. “Like, I had to get south, dude.”

  “For what?”

  “Replenish my stash. I smoked the last coming down here. Dude, you were, like, totally pissed when you pulled me outen my wheels.”

  “You could have killed yourself, me, or others,” Degu said.

  The man rolled his eyes. “Road beers, man. Was only some road beers. No big deal, sayin’? Road beers ain’t, like, illegal; road beers is, like, patriotic, you know, help fight the rechestion and such shit. I’m spending my cash, dude, just how our president Big George want us to do.”

  Stupid people, stupid, stupid, stupid, Degu thought. On the other hand, now he was free of the goat rodeo where this guy’s clones would show in spades. Not a bad trade. “You should have pulled over when I blue-lighted you,” Conservation Officer Degu said.

  The man looked at him, obviously groping for words. “Dude, I knew you was the man in the woods. How was I to know you also the man on the motherfucking road, too?”

  Degu squeezed his steering wheel until his knuckles turned white, but he said nothing and kept his eyes on the road.

  Fences

  Ex-wife Paula had swept up the kid last night and headed to the Mall of America, wherever in hell that was.

  “You think maybe the kid’s a hair young to learn a shopaholic’s habits?” he had asked.

  Paula, with a million-dollar book-learning mind and not ten cents’ worth of common sense, fluffed her thick hair and said indignantly, “Her name is Star, and I am not now nor have I ever been a shopaholic.”

  “Our credit cards and bank accounts tell a different tale.”

  “I told you the first time you dipped your wick out to my old man’s camp I wasn’t good with the numbers.”

  “You’re a CPA and a lawyer! I thought you were joking.”

  “Now you know,” she said curtly, took Star’s tiny hand, and flounced out to her new red Hummer.

  “At least I’m not paying for that piece of shit,” Conservation Officer Ivan Bouffardi said to her back.

  The only pain in the divorce was having Star only half the week. To her credit, Paula had asked for no assets (there were none) or alimony. Her own income was six figures, multiple zeros over his own salary after ten years working for the state in uniform.

  What ate at him most was the faint possibility of his being transferred to the eastern Upper Peninsula. Living here in Kingsford, she was too damn close to the Mall of America in Minneapolis and to the big malls in Milwaukee and Green Bay. He had filed the request before the divorce, hoping that the lack of shopping to the east would reform his then-wife, though deep in his heart he’d known it probably wouldn’t work. Now if he got transferred, Paula wouldn’t be going, and she would make it impossible for him to have Star at all.

  It was too bad, because he really wanted to move. The family hunting camp on the South Branch of the Two Hearted River was his and about as isolated a spot as one could hope for, but the chances of transfer to Mackinac, Luce, or Chippewa seemed slim to none, and after ten years in Dickinson County the truth was that he was worn out. There were days when he had dozens of contacts per day, more than some officers in the UP encountered in a year, and knowing this, it would be nice to have a more human pace, though he wasn’t sure he could adapt to it. Over here there were more lawbreakers, more assholes per capita, and the bottom line was that Bouffardi liked enforcing the law, right over wrong, no gray, yes-no, binary decisions, up-down, one way or the other, and life went on. Above all else, he loathed the differences in legal outcomes that people of wealth seemed to buy for themselves. The inequity drove him crazy, but what could he do about it? He didn’t make the laws or adjudicate them; he simply enforced laws on the books.

  Today’s patrol would take him out to Perry Anka’s 400-acre impoundment in the extreme north of the county near Wild West Creek. Christ Perry Anka was Ironwood-born but had made a fortune in the business of home health care and durable medical goods. Anka, now pushing eighty, had been on the state’s Natural Resources Commission for the past twenty years and was hailed as the state’s premier conservationist, so much so that newspaper headlines around the state had only to refer to “Perry” for readers to know who the piece was referring to.

  Anka was said to evaluate his life based on the number of enemies he’d accumulated. He brooked no fools, toadies, suck-ups, or slackers.

  Once a week in the fall, Ivan Bouffardi took a drive out to Anka’s private hunting ground. Not that the patrol would produce results: Perry had his own private security setup to protect his scientifically managed, fenced-in deer herd. But Bouffardi loved the property and seeing all the humongous animals prancing around.

  Once in a while some local jerkoffs from Norway, Channing, or Sagola would try to get through the wire, but it was futile. Perry’s fence had electronics that would be state of the art even at the dang Pentagon. Anka once told him, “That system tells me when a chipmunk farts,” and chuckled until he was red in the face. The chance of finding an intruder on Perry’s property was close to nil, but it would make for a relaxing day in the truck, some time to not think about Paula and Star or the transfer deal.

  Leekie Annisdottir was on duty at the gate. A onetime downstate Pontiac cop, for several years Leekie had been on Perry’s security force, which consisted of six people, three men and three women. The compound was guarded and monitored twenty-four/seven.

  Annisdottir buzzed open the gate and ambled over to the truck. “Walking or driving today?” she asked.

  “Driving.” Bouffardi looked at his watch. “You on till fourteen hundred?”

  “Had the nights last month, twenty-two hundred to oh-six. That shift’s not for me. How’s your kid?”

  “Went with Paula to the Mall of America,” he said, groaning.

  “I feel your pain,” the attractive guard said. “Sounds like your ex is starting your little one early.”

  “Seems like,” he said.

  “How long the girls gone?” she asked.

  “Four days, back Monday.”

  “Got no plans myself, case you’re up for a diversion,” she said.

  Surprised, he said, “I’ll keep that in mind.” Several times over the past months, it seemed to him that she had hinted at the possibility of seeing him, but this was different, blunt, right to the point. He always answered in the negative, begging off. This time he said, “Your place or mine?” What the hell; I’m divorced, right?

  She arched an eyebrow. “You sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t make me no never mind,” she said, “but I got a fully stocked fridge and kitchen, I love to cook, and there’s even a king-size bed, not necessarily in that order.”


  He felt himself blushing. “Your place, then.”

  “Two miles out of Foster City on C.R. Five Oh Nine . Bright red house, the only one for miles,” she said. “

  “That’s close to work,” he observed.

  “What Perry demands.”

  “For you or for everyone?”

  “Everybody on the security team lives within twenty miles.”

  “How come?”

  Annisdottir shrugged. “The rich don’t explain themselves.”

  “I hear you,” he said.

  “Till later, take care, Ten Days.”

  “Say what?”

  “Everybody in the county knows, Ivan. How you caught some filthy rich shithead from Green Bay with two illegal does, and he hired big-shot lawyers who kept getting postponements after you got to court, and that started eating up your duty time. Ten times, dude. That was damn stubborn, the stuff of legend. Word is the judge called you into his chambers the tenth time, but nobody knows what got said.”

  What the judge had said was, “Son, this damn defendant’s got pockets so deep his hands brush the heads of Chinamen. He can outlast you and me, and the whole damn state, if need be.”

  “Not me, he can’t,” Bouffardi told the judge.

  “Gonna irritate your management some, I guess, all that field time lost.”

  “The man wants his day in court. And I do, too,” he told the smiling judge.

  The trial began on the eleventh date. The jury was out exactly sixteen minutes and found the man guilty on all counts. “Not important what got said,” Bouffardi told Annisdottir.

  •••

  Ten minutes later, Bouffardi found himself unable to focus. All he could think about was Leekie and her alluring voice. Shouldna said nothing, he chastised himself. Shoulda left things the way they are.

  Perry had twin trout ponds on the property, one of them planted with big brown trout. Bouffardi liked to walk to the larger trout lake, have a pipe, enjoy the solace at a shed Perry called the Gillie Hut. Here he would take off his boots and socks when the weather was nice and relax.

  His family on his father’s side descended from one Corporal Jean Nepoma Bouffardi, a soldier in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. At the battle of Friedland, his ancestor had both arms and legs blown off by artillery, but a day later one of his arms had been found, still clutching his pipe. From then on French soldiers called their pipes bouffardes. Ivan liked to think Jean Nepoma’s singlemindedness came down to him genetically, as did his love for a good, relaxing smoke.