Harder Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  “Have you thought this through?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Thoroughly.”

  “What if we offered you the detective job right now, today?”

  “I’d ask if I get to kill bad guys and you two would hem and haw and I’d say no thanks. Omaha. Blue.”

  “What the devil does that mean?” the captain asked. “Omaha what?”

  “Time’s up,” she said, getting to her feet.

  Dogskin, the Olympian

  “Mom, Dad?” No response. Where’s the dog? And what’s with the house temperature? It’s fricking sweltering in here.

  Conservation Officer Cindy Poquette had stopped by while on patrol, hoping to score a bowl of soup and check in with her folks. They were in their seventies now, and exhaustingly busy. Where do they find such energy?

  She checked the thermostat. Eighty-one! Jesus, this costs them big time. What is with those two? She was tempted to reduce the heat on principle, but her eccentric parents usually had reasons for everything they did, reasons she as their daughter and only child invariably found wanting.

  Eccentric? Was that the right word? Weird, actually. Dad had changed his name from Harry to Dogskin in the sixties. Her mother Annalee had been know as Dancing Tulip in those days. They had boxes and albums filled with photographs. Annalee unabashedly adored her husband. Every time he came into a room she’d sigh and fan herself with her hand, say, “Oh Lord God the testosterone surf is up.” As their daughter she had to force herself not to heave or gag. How can I be so fricking normal and they so . . . not?

  The names alone made her cringe. Dogskin because her father was hirsute to the nth degree, as hairy as a German shepherd in its winter coat. Even dad’s shoulders were hairy, covered entirely by what looked like hand-hooked needlework. “Source of his power,” her mother would whisper. She had no idea what her mother meant; didn’t want to know. I’m thirty-eight and this is my quandary, not that age has anything to do with it, causatively or correlatively. It was just that I expected to be more comfortable with the whole thing by now. But no, not even close, and this has been bothering me for my entire life.

  Leave or look around? Mom and Dad never left without telling her first so that she could watch over their lake cabin. In winter she drove in with her snowmobile to make sure there were no break-ins. They went down to Arkansas in winter, to fish for trout, they said. Both of them were crazy about trout.

  What if one of the local whackadoodles have busted in on them? This is Iron Mountain after all. It might not be Motown, but we have our own black tar heroin, weed, rock cocaine, speed, homemade crank, the whole menu for fucked-up stew. Doesn’t look like they’re gone, but where are they?

  Upstairs a screaming, drawn-out shriek was followed by a bellowing yell and then an elongated, ululating wolf-howl, like a dog losing its mind and all of this just up the stairs, which she flew up as the screaming continued from their bedroom. “Mommy, Dad!” The screaming and howling continued. She tried the door handle. Locked. Odd. She pulled her Sig Sauer from its holster with her right hand and crushed the door open with her left shoulder, stepping into the room with the semi-automatic up and ready, the old axiom, never look where you aren’t pointing your weapon.

  She looked at the bed, saw both of her parents nude and on top of the covers, her mother astride her father, both of them shiny with sweat. Their dog, Butch Cassidy, ran over to her to be petted.

  “Mom? Jesus!” she said. “I mean . . . Jesus.”

  “We’re doing nothing wrong, immoral, unethical or illegal,” her father said as her mother rolled off him and lay beside him.

  “Good God,” their daughter said. “Cover yourselves. You had the dog so upset he was howling. I mean why is Butch even in here?”

  “Butch is our timer,” her father barked happily at her. “What the hell is wrong with you, girl?”

  “Me? What’s wrong with ME?”

  “There’s no need for that tone, or volume,” her mother said calmly. “It’s Butch’s job,” her mother concluded in her sweetest estrogenic voice.

  “His job, the dog has a job? Since when?” They are certifiable. They are. BOTH of them.

  “He times us and howls every forty-five minutes,” Annalee said. “Why don’t you go downstairs, sugar plum, and I’ll come down and make your favorite grilled cheese Sammy. I have a fresh batch of corn chowder I can warm up.”

  “Good grief,” Cindy said.

  “Sex is our gig, our thing,” her father said. “Always was, always will be. With luck we’ll die quasi cuniculorum fornicatione.”

  “Sex is not a gig, not a thing,” Cindy argued.

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree, sugar plum,” her mother said.

  “I should go, I’m sorry I interrupted your . . . I should go.”

  “No, stay,” her dad said. “Please?”

  Her father was annoying as hell, irritating, self-assured, a real ass. He had been a paratrooper in Vietnam and a hippie after his discharge. He never said anything about combat, though she had found a Silver Star in a box once. All he would talk about were the screwed up logistics. “FUBAR,” he’d yelp. “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.” In the early seventies her dad opened a military surplus store in Warren, near Detroit, and the business had grown to twenty-five cities. He’d sold the business ten years back and media had reported the sale price at an estimated $200 million, but she didn’t know exactly how much. Her folks paid no attention to money, never talked about it, lived a simple life in a simple house, drove a Ford. Dad’s hobby had been militaria and over the years he had collected enough to fill a thirty-thousand-square-foot pole building. The collection was being added to on a regular basis and there was a man named Sam who was their on-site appraiser. Her dad had left high school in the eleventh grade, but loved Latin, which he tended to spout when he was overstimulated, happy, sad, or mad.

  She went downstairs, took off her duty belt, and hung it over a chair back. She sat at the kitchen table trying to calm herself, saw the five-gallon jug in the corner, still full of half-dollar coins. Those quarters had made her rich during elementary school at St. Skosh. Several times a week her dad would grab a hand full of the coins, walk out on the back porch, fling them into the woods and yell, “Coin hunt!” and she would scramble out to search for them, never stopping until she found all twenty of them, which made for a five-dollar reward, huge for a kid. But sometimes she found them quickly and went back up on the porch and found the door locked and she’d yell and yell and nobody would open it and finally she learned to take a seat and wait until somebody remembered her and opened the door again. She’d tried the front door a couple of times, but that was always closed too. Weird, but lucrative, and she liked to think that her ability to find the half-dollar coins had in some way helped her be more observant and helped her to develop the skills she needed for a career as a conservation officer.

  Her mother came downstairs in a diaphanous kimono and red mules

  “Mom!”

  “What?”

  “You two need to act your age.”

  “We are. We’re the new forty.”

  “You’re pushing the old eighty.”

  “Oh honey, you’ve always been such a horrible prude. Not that we would demean you for that. We love our little girl.”

  “Your little girl is thirty-eight now.”

  “We still love you.”

  Her father joined them. “Your mother’s right, our little prude. It was always well . . . cute. Honestly we thought you’d grow out of it and be more like us in your full womanhood.”

  “You two! Do you have any idea what the neighbors think of such goings-on?”

  Mother Annalee said, “Of course I know what they think. Ginny, Karla, Judy, Brenda, Ruth, they all want to know what I feed your dad, and they all want the recipes.”

  She reached for her duty belt.
/>
  “Stay stay,” her dad implored with his hangdog look. “It was time for a break. We’re between sets.”

  Arching an eyebrow at her father. “Sets, what kind of sets?”

  “You know, two-a-day training.”

  Mulling this, she asked, “You mean . . . you . . . have sex twice a day?”

  “No,” her mother said. “We make love a lot more than that, but in two two-hour sessions a day. It’s fun and healthy.”

  Felt her jaw drop as her mother rambled on. “Well it’s always been twice a day, hasn’t it, when you were growing up, unless Dogskin could get home for a nooner. We loved our nooners in those days.”

  “Don’t forget after-schools,” the father said. “Those were the best.”

  “After-schools?”

  Her mother looked from her daughter to the big glass jar and squealed, “Coin hunt!”

  She felt nauseous. “That was about sex?”

  “You never figured it out?” her mother asked.

  “Training for what?”

  “You attitude is just why we haven’t told you,” her mother said. “We knew you’d be upset. We’re training for the senior world sex games.”

  Her father added, “For Branson, next May, it’s a huge deal. It’s not open to anyone. You have to qualify.”

  Mommy said, “It’s like ice-dancing, you know, without the ice?”

  I don’t want to hear this, she told herself. Then, yes I do. “I don’t get it.”

  “You have to perform at a sanctioned qualifying meet,” her father said.

  “Qualify, like compete for a score?”

  “Oh yes,” her mother said, “and the style judges are very exacting.”

  “We’re ranked number one in the Eight Decade Class,” her father said, “but the judges are talking about elevating us up to the championship flight to compete for the overall gold.”

  She had to think this through, calmly. My mother and father . . . “People . . . uh . . . watch . . . uh you . . .”

  Her mother said, “Fucking? Of course, sugar plum. How else could they judge our style?”

  Am I really having this conversation with these people. With my parents. If they are my parents? “Do you like, send them a video?”

  Her mother laughed. “No honeybunch, it’s a live competition and timed on a sanctioned competition bed.”

  She hefted her duty belt and buckled it in place around her hips. She stumbled toward the back door trying not to break down in tears.

  Her father followed her outside in his skivvies and L. L. Bean moosehide slippers. “When God gives you a gift,” he said, “you have to use it or lose it, deus autem dat gratiam te ute vel perdiderit.”

  She looked back at him from her truck, a gaunt skeleton of a man matted in dark hair, Sasquatch on the back porch. “You are not my parents,” she said out loud, threw the truck in gear, stomped the accelerator, and burned rubber racing away from the house.

  Game for Names

  “Norge, your name is Norge?” The probie was a tall drink of water, not the slightest bit gangly, but snake-eyed, cold snake eyes.

  “Right, Norge, Margethe, they call me Mossa.”

  “Do snakker norsk giordu?”

  “I barely speak English,” Norge said, shaking her head. “I know people who speak Norwegian, but never had the urge myself.”

  Rule out Norwegian heritage as common ground. “Yut-yut, Didi Kort,” the woman said. “Your field training officer.”

  “They told me I’d have Kenny Kander for Phase Three. I had him in the first go around.”

  “Yut, plans do sometimes change. The Viper got tagged by Lansing for something more important, and they assigned you to me. You can think of me as Kenny if it makes you happy.”

  “Doesn’t matter who, I guess. Do I address you as FTO?”

  “Only if you want to really annoy me. Just call me Didi. Phase Three, you understand the rules?”

  Norge nodded. “I have the principal responsibility to do the job and you observe and step in only to save my butt, which is why you’re in civvies.”

  “Are you feeling nervous?” Kort asked. The recruit looked like she’d never been nervous about anything.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re either nervous or you’re not. Nervous is like pregnant.”

  “I guess I’m not nervous.”

  “Listen Norge, I’m going to give it to you straight. The truth is that you’re a controversial figure. Great skills, maybe even unmatched at this stage, but you’re a loner and that’s put the serious bother on everyone in Lansing. You’re a serious, no-mix, no-blend, no-help loner. You ring all their alarm bells.”

  “No help?”

  “Other recruits say you don’t step in. No initiative, no teamwork.”

  “I thought the idea was to graduate on our own merits to establish we can each carry the load.”

  “Well, I guess that’s right, but what about all the officers who haven’t been to the academy. Will you assume they don’t need your help?”

  “I haven’t assumed anything. They made a big issue about weeding out people who can’t do the job and most of the things we do down there are scored individually, not with other cadets.”

  Kort, fifteen years in uniform and not a DNR Academy graduate thought: A bit of emotion in that response. I just touched something. Promising.

  “The job requires self-starting, initiative,” Norge said.

  “Yut-yut, but it’s more than that. You have to be there for others and they have to be there for you. That’s the bottom line for all of us. It’s like marriage without sex. Tell me what happened with Bailyn.”

  Norge shrugged, didn’t answer right away.

  “I’m not the Inquisition,” Kort said. “Just curious. It’s getting a head up toward a legend. A woman kicks a male cadet’s ass and then he resigns. That shit just does not happen.”

  Norge sighed. “They had us boxing. Bailyn came up one bracket and me up the other. I watched him crush his opponents, knew he was a lot stronger than me. I went right at him, put a shot on his Adam’s apple, one to his guts and an uppercut to his jaw, and over and down he went.”

  “Out cold, the story goes.”

  “Yes.”

  “The story is you cheated.”

  Norge frowned. “There’s no cheating in a street fight. There’s win fast or get murdered, nothing in between.”

  “Nobody knew you boxed professionally.”

  “Only eight fights.”

  “All of which you won by knockouts we subsequently learned. You never mentioned professional boxing during interviews. It came right out of left field and it’s left people wondering what the hell else you’ve kept back. Trust is at stake in this, Norge.”

  “I needed money. I used another name. My friends, family, nobody knew. I fought in Illinois, near Chicago.”

  “Why the secret?”

  “It was personal.”

  “You could have kept on fighting?”

  “I fought enough, made the purse money I needed. I was done. Is this a problem?”

  “Is it?”

  “I did nothing illegal, immoral or unethical.”

  “You never told anyone about it when you were supposed to lay out your entire background during interviews.”

  “I never told the interviewer about the first blowjob I gave my boyfriend either, so obviously there must be some sort of reasonable limit in what one must reveal.”

  Kort couldn’t help chuckling. “Point taken. You married?”

  “No.”

  “Ever?”

  “Never.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Ah a girlfriend then.”

  “Same answer, what the hell is going on?�
��

  Kort thought. Direct and tightly wound. The report she got was that Norge was near the top of the class in everything, physical and mental, and on those parameters she looked topnotch, but everyone around her and above her questioned her group commitment. Won’t or can’t play with others, the report said. Stayed on her own on weekends, never mixed with others at night, kept her nose in the books. Twenty-seven years old, four-year Army vet, college grad with a 3.8 GPA and a major in criminal justice, all-conference basketball player three years, 170 pounds of sinew and muscle. Perfect on paper, but she gave off vibes that kept people at a distance. She feels okay to me.

  Captain Pete Kalvelidge called her two days ago. “We’re putting you in for Kander.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing, but you’re a tougher FTO and we need this probie under the microscope, see if she can handle the job. My guess is that she’ll fold the first time the feces fly. Push her hard, no mercy. She either measures up, or she doesn’t.”

  Kort had hung up and opened a beer. Kalvelidge’s attitude is a solid mark in Norge’s favor. The captain is a douchebag, a conference room warden with minimal field experience. He earned quick promotions because he was glib by half and unusually facile with numbers. Kort couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the man, and to most officers with their boots in the dirt every day, he was less than dirt, totally lacking their respect as a person. Only his rank got respect, and that for order and nothing else.

  “Fall,” Kort said. “We ought to find something shaking.”

  “We? I thought you’re along just in spy mode.”

  Whew, sharp, fast tongue, weak filter maybe. “Figure of speech, Norge.”

  “Kings are in and on their redds,” Norge said.

  “And you know this how?”

  “I checked rivers on my way up here yesterday to meet you.”

  Good initiative. “Where should we go?”

  “Slapback River.”

  “You looked there? Most people don’t even know about that one.”