Strike Dog

by Joseph Heywood

  The Upper Peninsula’s DNR law boss took a long time to reply. “Okay, you can come back, but if you need downtime, take it. Just let me know. I won’t ask questions.”

  “You won’t be sorry,” Service said.

  “The night this happened, you said, ‘But she’s a pilot.’ And you said it again today.”

  “She wasn’t just a pilot, Cap’n. She was a damn good pilot, experienced. She was born to vehicles, didn’t panic, kept emotional control when all hell was breaking loose. How does somebody like that lose control of a truck and hit a tree on a dry road? I haven’t seen the report.”

  Grant reached into a neat pile of folders, extracted a stapled document, and slid it across the table. “Straight off the road, down the embankment and into the tree. The cab roof absorbed the main impact, buckled flat. The case is closed—official ruling is that it was an accident.”

  Grady Service had expected as much. He took the folder out to his Tahoe and drove from the pagoda-like Marquette Regional DNR building called “The Roof,” over to an abandoned gravel pit on the Carp River behind Marquette Mountain. He parked in the shade and spent an hour smoking and reading and thinking, and when he was done, he decided he needed to see photographs—but not now. He didn’t want to wallow in their deaths. He wanted to move on and find out why they were dead, and he knew that if he went back to the captain, Grant would be suspicious of his focus. Right now he was glad to have the green light to work.

  One thing was for sure: He was no longer a family man. Now he had only the clan of conservation officers in gray shirts and green pants, a gigantic dog, and a bad-tempered cat. He had been left with less previously. He would make do with what remained.

  8

  SLIPPERY CREEK, MICHIGAN

  MAY 20, 2004

  Today he was finally going back to work. Grady Service woke up thinking not about Maridly and Walter, but about this past Easter night when he had gotten disoriented in the dark and rain as he pursued three people illegally spearing pike at the bottom of the Stonington Peninusula. It had been raining hard, dark, air at thirty-seven degrees, and for reasons he had still not figured out, he had fallen into Wilsey Bay Creek, which was swollen with winter runoff; he had fought, but the current had swept him through a culvert. He had managed to struggle out of the water seventy-five yards downstream, his teeth broken, his pride and body bruised.

  Ten days later he was sitting in an ergonomic tilt-a-chair in an oral surgeon’s office in Green Bay trying to focus on a pair of blue jays feeding on a platform feeder a few feet away. There had been multiple injections of anesthetic into his gums and the roof of his mouth; his tongue felt like a burrito on steroids.

  “We’ll give it a few minutes,” the surgeon said. Service had met him two days before, to “create an extraction plan.” The male blue jay pushed the female aside and pecked her on the head.

  The surgeon and his assistant returned. A tray was rotated under his chin. The doctor poked a metal instrument in his mouth: Service felt nothing. The doctor slid a mask over his nose, jacked open his jaws with clamps, and hung hissing tubes in his mouth.

  “Feel anything?” the doctor asked.

  His mind sorted possible answers: angst, shame over a stupid accident, the curse of poor dental genetics, gravity? What he said was, “Uh-uh.”

  “The gas will take you to the edge of consciousness,” the oral surgeon said. “You’ll be here, but not here.”

  Did that mean the doctor and his assistant were likewise here, but not here? Long ago he and Tree had been on a mission in Laos, watching hundreds of North Vietnamese black ants moving war materiel south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Publicly both countries were saying they had no troops in Laos, and Tree had whispered, “They here, but not here.” That night they had sprung a brief but deadly ambush, leaving enemy bodies there that weren’t there, and bugging out for their extraction point ten clicks west.

  His mind would not settle into that zone where his thoughts would turn off. His girlfriend, Maridly Nantz, was a lot younger and had all her teeth. How would she handle a toothless boyfriend? If he was here but not here, did that mean that the teeth being pulled were not really being pulled?

  “Okay,” the surgeon said enthusiastically, “here we go.”

  We: Did the man have a mouse in his pocket?

  Thirty minutes later his cheeks were distorted with cotton wads and he was biting down on sterile gauze pads as the assistant led him from the surgeon’s office through the waiting room of the prosthodontist, blood on his chin, pink drool cascading. He saw Nantz watching him wide-eyed.

  After another forty minutes he walked out to the truck with Nantz trying to steady him by holding his arm. He kept pulling away. The surgeon had extracted twenty-two teeth, upstairs and downstairs, and the prosthodontist had installed new false teeth, insisting as he gagged almost continuously that he would “over time” adjust to them.

  “Don’t smoke, and use your pain meds liberally,” the prosthodontist concluded.

  “You’re handling this pretty well, hon,” Nantz said as they got into the truck.

  “Smoke,” he said, staring out at the late April rain, the word feeling like a foreign object in a mouth full of foreign objects. He could not feel his tongue, lips, cheeks, jaw, most of his lower face.

  “You won’t be able to hold a cigarette,” Nantz said. “You’ll drop it and burn yourself.”

  “Smoke,” he repeated, adding, “Goddammit.”

  She handed him a pack, which he looked at. It was too hard, something not right.

  “Candy smokes,” she said. “They’ll take care of your oral fixation and they can’t burn you. The upside is that you don’t have any teeth for the sugar to rot.”

  He flung the candy into the back. “Could use sympathy,” he said, the multisyllabic word causing him to drool.

  “That’s what pain pills are for,” she said.

  “No pills!” he said. “Embrace pain.”

  “You would say that,” she said, starting the engine.

  Embrace pain. That was the thought in his mind as he climbed into his truck and started the engine, feeling here but not here. This is all you have, he told himself. Get your boots in the dirt, get it done.

  9

  MORMON CREEK, MICHIGAN

  MAY 20, 2004

  Nantz’s last words just about every morning had been to ask if he had his teeth in. The things still felt like alien invaders in his mouth and already had drastically altered what and how he ate.

  This morning he had gotten to the truck and realized the teeth were back in the cabin. He went back, fetched them, and drove off into the unknown, back at work after more than three weeks.

  Grady Service parked his truck in a gap in a grove of aspens, grabbed his ruck, silently closed the doors, locked them, and started hiking west. He considered leaving the false teeth in the truck, but on the long shot that he might encounter someone, he left the diabolical pieces of shit in. The public might be unhinged by the visage of a toothless game warden. The sky was gray and threatening, the air heavy. As he crossed through a cedar swamp, he detected movement. It was a deer, a ribby buck, one-inch nubbins of antlers in coppery green velvet, its hide still winter-gray when it ought to be reddening for summer.

  A two-year-old, he guessed, standing beside a puddle of black swamp water, its legs splayed apart, ears droopy, muzzle in the water. Service passed within ten feet of the animal, which ignored him and continued to drink. Come spring and early summer, deer were often bold, their interest in food after a tough winter overriding any inborn fear of humans.

  There had been neither an unusually deep snowpack over winter, nor abundant spring rain, and what snowpack they did have had melted off slowly, leaving no floods. Even with a workable water level in Mormon Creek, a lot of the local trout-takers and most old-timers wouldn’t venture out to dunk red worms and c
rawlers until after Independence Day. Rivers were usually fishable before the Memorial Day weekend, but locals waited to fish until blackflies were on the wane. Never mind that trout fishing with flies was far better in May and June when Hendricksons, brown drakes, and giant Hexagenia were hatching. There were few Yooper fly fishers and even fewer catch-and-release types. Up here it was catch-and-release into grease, and once a tradition took hold, it was difficult to change the mindset, especially for natives who believed all fish and game that inhabited the peninsula were their personal birthright. At best, Service knew, he might encounter some hardy down- or out-stater after brookies. Most dedicated fly fishers in the U.P. were elderly males, twenty to thirty years his senior. For some reason flies had not caught on with his generation, and he had never understood why.

  It still amazed him the lengths to which some brook trout chasers would go in search of a species of fish where eighteen inches was a lifetime trophy in Michigan. It amazed him, but it didn’t surprise him, because serious brook trout fishers knew that the further you hiked off the grid, the better the fishing was likely to be. Chasing trout, he had decided a long time ago, was a lot like being a game warden. If you kept too close to the easy marks, you missed the good cases, and the bigger fish. The worst poachers, like the best trout, had to be hunted in their natural habitat, which was neither easy to get to nor particularly hospitable after you reached it. Good game wardens and successful trouters learned how to ignore pain and discomfort to do the job, no matter what.

  Because of the state’s law enforcement manpower shortage, he had, since the first of the year, continued to double as a detective for Wildlife Resources Protection, the Department of Natural Resource’s statewide investigatory unit, as well as handling slices of Marquette, Delta, Schoolcraft, and Alger counties in a more-traditional game warden role. It felt good to be back doing what he knew best, but all winter his gut had churned with foreboding, a feeling that something terrible was looming. Even in the wake of the deaths of Maridly and Walter, the feeling persisted. What could be worse than losing the two people who mattered most to you? Don’t think about it, he told himself. Keep your mind in the game.

  It had been several years since he had been into the Mormon Creek meadows area where an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp had once stood. As he passed it he thought about the Creekateers, a jug band made up of CCC men back in the late thirties. Why had he thought of this? He had never actually seen or even heard the band, only of them—and only from his father and his hard-drinking cronies. It struck him as odd to think of something his father liked. For the most part he rarely thought about his old man, had no reason to. Don’t let your mind wander, asshole, he lectured himself again.

  The old camp was only a few miles north of Nahma Junction and US 2. Mormon Creek originated in a swampy marsh south of Lost Lake and flowed south for a mile or so before sharply turning east to dump into the Sturgeon River. All that remained of the camp was a crumbling stone foundation, spackled by patches of scratchy gray-green lichen. There were no vehicles parked along the way, and this allowed him to concentrate less on violators and more on fishing possibilities.

  He liked what he saw, and cut southwest on foot down to the creek and made his way across squishy, bouncy, sphagnum moss meadows toward the headwaters, more interested in what bugs might be hatching than in any major expectation of encountering fishermen. He used a small digital thermometer to check the water temperature: fifty-seven degrees, just about perfect for brook trout. And it was unseasonably clear if you ignored the tannin that stained the water the color of liquid rust year-round.

  Most trees had some new leaves, but serious foliage was still to come. The sticky May air was in the low seventies, and the humidity brought forth blackflies that landed on his hands and neck looking for places to nail him. Unless the area got significant rain soon, the fire danger was going to soar, and with the state’s severely pinched budget, there were fewer fire officers to manage the blazes. Service wondered if this summer would be spent more on fire lines than regular law enforcement duties. Nantz had been a fire officer when he met her. “Stop it!” he said out loud.

  When it began to drizzle he hoped it would continue, and when he heard thunder rattling to the west he smiled and returned his attention to the water. This time of year fish were starved from the long winter, and thunderstorms seemed to turn them on—until the storm got overhead. If the wind stayed down after the storm passed, the fish would start eating again. He took comfort in knowing the cycles and moods of fish and other creatures. Knowing such things helped him to find violators and poachers, who often also knew the same things.

  He stopped below a riffle in the narrow, meandering creek, hunkered down, lit a cigarette, and watched and listened to the softly chuckling water. The rain was light, the thunder distant, and he guessed the cell would pass north of him, which would be good for fishing. Caddis flies began to emerge and frantically pop through the surface film. A few flies were soon followed by a steady flow of bugs, and as some of the insects got trapped in the surface film, trout began to rise and slurp cripples for quick meals. Because caddis tended to emerge from the nymphal stage to dun, and hatch more energetically than mayflies, trout tended to go after them aggressively. It was like mealtime in a boardinghouse: Grab fast or go hungry. More than once he had seen trout come entirely out of the water, taking such bugs in splashy somersaults.

  Squatting beside Mormon Creek watching trout feeding on small black caddis, he reminded himself he could be content doing this for the rest of his life. He loved being a conservation officer, and after his unexpected and unwanted promotion to detective, he felt he was adjusting to the new job and learning to enjoy it, but he didn’t need work to define himself. He knew that if the job ended tomorrow he’d be content wandering the Upper Peninsula’s hundreds of miles of beaver ponds, pothole lakes, streams, and rivers, searching for brook trout. Being alone in the middle of nowhere was one of the greatest gifts of both his vocation and avocation, and he appreciated the solace and the silence. He could heal out here.

  Tree had once told him he’d been born two hundred years late. They had been on a fifteen-day recon in the tri-border area at the time, a place cluttered with triple canopy jungle, plastic-wrap humidity, swarms of carnivorous insects, bad water, poisonous snakes, smells only maggots could embrace, and trigger-happy Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army regulars.

  “You get off on this shit,” Tree had said. “And that ain’t normal.”

  It was not so much that he got off on it as he knew what his job was, and had the freedom to do it. Service smiled at the memory. Tree had grown up in the city, but he was a natural outdoors, and if not for keeping peace on the home front, he’d still be humping the woods as a CO and complaining about how much he hated it. The two of them shared a passion for fly fishing and brook trout.

  When the caddis hatch began to wane, Service continued downstream, careful to watch where he put his feet lest he drop into a sinkhole or through one of the quivering, porous humps of muskeg tussocks that covered the meadows and lined the banks. The footing only looked solid, a potentially lethal illusion; it was strictly veneer over bottomless, frigid black loon shit.

  A half-hour after the caddis petered out, a few dark Hendrickson mayflies began to rise and the fish, which took a while to catch on to what was happening, eventually noticed and began to rise steadily along the length of a long, curving dark slick with dense logjams and thick tag alder cover on both sides. Because of the state’s budget crisis, all conservation offices were working eighty hours every two-week pay period, but being paid only for seventy-six. And, like every state employee, every so often they were taking unpaid furlough days off, accumulating 104 unpaid hours over the year, which could be taken as vacation, or banked for retirement when it would then be reimbursed. If the state could afford to pay then, a big if in the minds of many state employees, who dutifully took orders from elected politicians
, but rarely trusted them.

  Like Social Security, the state’s future fiscal health was anything but secure. The budget crisis had been brought on by recently departed ­governor Samuel Adams Bozian, who had decimated the state, hit term ­limits, and moved on to greener, higher-paying private-sector pastures. Few people other than hard-core Republicans regretted Bozian’s departure, and although Democrat Lorelei Timms had been easily elected over a Bozian protégé, she remained unproven and was starting deep in a hole, with a helluva steep hill facing her.

  Service’s next furlough period would be on the weekend, and with two regular pass days tacked on, he would have four days to spend with Nantz and not think about anything except fishing and each other. He corrected himself. He would be alone for the furlough. He could no longer allow himself to think in terms of they. Life was reduced to him and the job. Still, this was a very sweet-looking spot, and probably tomorrow night there would be a spinner fall at dusk—if the wind didn’t come up or the temperature drop precipitously. Most mayflies lived only forty-eight to seventy-two hours, and if they didn’t mate and the females deposit their eggs, the whole purpose of their short lives was wasted. He could understand their desire to get on with their biological imperative. He sometimes thought his own drive to defend natural resources was biologically driven. Certainly he was no less zealous than his old man, who had been a CO before him. The difference was that the old man was rarely sober, and it had cost him his life. Jesus! Nantz and Walter. Why? Goddammit, why had she gone to Houghton and come back through Palmer? And why the hell had Walter been with her?

  He was tempted to contemplate life from the perspective of an insect, but decided against it. Life was life: You got what you were born into. If there was a God, did he choose which spirits would be bugs or humans? The Indians believed that all things, animate and inanimate, had spirits, which he thought probably meant souls. Certainly, all living things were part of the cycle of life and death—but rocks? This was the problem with codified religions. When you began to try to dissect them in detail, they didn’t quite work, and invariably that’s when the most fervent types went to their fallback: You just have to believe—to take things on faith. He wasn’t one to blindly accept anything on hope alone. He conceded that he could be deceiving himself, but he had also concluded over more than fifty years of life that a man made his own opportunities and luck, and if not, it helped to think so. Was this faith or hubris? He didn’t know. Had Nantz made her own bad luck? He could not, would not believe this. No way. She was the best.