Bad Axe County

by John Galligan

  “You’re not going to believe this. That game, my brother Bennie hit six home runs.”

  “You’re right, I don’t believe it.”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  “With the odds against that? Yeah. I think you’re full of shit.”

  Dale Hill is easily annoyed. She has known him less than a week, but already Pepper Greengrass has the hang of it.

  “You wanna bet me?”

  “I’m not going to bet you.”

  “Why not? You quit betting? You’re in recovery?”

  “Nobody ever hit six homers in one game, never in the history of baseball. The odds of that are like twenty million to one. It’s bullshit.”

  “Then why don’t you bet me?”

  “Why don’t you shut your stupid blowhole and help me find this place. It’s called the Ease Inn.”

  “Well, OK, I’m glad you quit,” Pepper says. “Gambling isn’t good for you. I read that in my psych class. They say it increases irritation behavior.”

  She unzips and peels off her boots, puts her long brown naked legs up on his dash.

  He grits his teeth. “Off. Put that shit away unless you’re making money off it. Anyway, you can’t afford to bet. You’re already in the hole.”

  This is true. Almost seven days in, Pepper still owes Dale for everything, from room and board at the Pine Cone Motel to what she wears: the pink lip gloss, the leopard-print top, the tall black boots and the short black skirt, the red Shopko panties underneath. But the only way she can’t afford to bet is if she loses. And she can’t lose, because it really happened, here.

  “Come on. Twenty bucks. Give me my phone back. I’ll Google it.”

  Dale leans to squint through his windshield. A frigid mist has spattered it.

  “You’ve got the odds in your favor,” she says, “so why not double or nothing? I’m wrong, I owe you forty more. Just put it on my tab.”

  “I’m not betting you.”

  “You’re chicken. Gimme my phone back.”

  “I’m not giving your phone back. Won’t be any reception in a shithole like this anyway.”

  Pepper Greengrass hooks her thumbs beneath her tiny bra cups and makes chicken noises at the man she contacted via a number she found on the internet, a site called Backpage.com, then met for an “interview” behind the liquor shelf at the exit 37 truck stop outside the Dells.

  He crushes his brakes, backs up, rolls down his window to look at a Kwik Trip gas station, where a dirty red-and-white taxi cab sits at the pump. He hollers at the heavy-shouldered guy in a red ball cap who emerges bearing foam boats of heat-lamp food. The guy freezes. Then he points in the direction they just came from. Pepper watches him stuff the ball cap down into the Kwik Trip garbage. He pulls his sweatshirt hood over his head.

  Dale floors the van through a U-turn. Pepper glimpses that stadium again—yup, that’s it. She puts her legs up on the dash. “Off!” He flails a fist, but she leans away. Sleet strikes the window at her shoulder. There is that sign again: BAD AXE COUNTY LIBRARY.

  “So what, no reception,” Pepper says. “I know a place where we can get Wi-Fi.”

  “I said I’m not betting you.”

  “Triple or nothing,” she taunts him, squeezed against her door.

  5

  Interim sheriff Heidi Kick had debriefed her day-shift deputies and sent them home. Storm or no storm, “No more overtime” was her mandate from the Bad Axe County board of supervisors as they tried to sort out the suspicious spending patterns of Ray Gibbs. Overtime abuse was an easy issue to correct. As for Gibbs’s Public Outreach budget, the board’s directive was “Not one penny more until we figure out what’s been going on.”

  After a face splash of cold water in the bathroom, a preemptive wisecrack from Denise, a glance at the kids’ pictures on her phone, and the clean squeak of her new boots on the tile floor, she was ready to assign her night crew, made up of patrol deputies Rob Schwem and Kevin Eleffson and her Gibbs-tainted chief deputy, Boog Lund.

  “So here we go, guys. This storm is going to hit us with folks coming home from the regional wrestling meet in Richland Center, with all those Amish buggies leaving the Yoder auction. Tonight is also euchre and darts league. Lots of action on the roads.”

  She paused so Schwem and Eleffson could collect their game faces. She had no illusions. Boog Lund outweighed her by thirty years and two hundred pounds and was the only declared candidate for the permanent sheriff’s position. As such, they considered Lund their real boss. She forged on.

  “We’ll get up to seven inches, according to the National Weather Service, and we could end up with flooding as early as midnight if it’s mostly rain. If we get down to thirty degrees and it snows, or if it’s a little warmer and it’s ice, we could have power outages, so be ready for welfare checks. Anything frozen is going to melt fast, so either way we have flash floods to think about, at least through tomorrow night.”

  Chief Deputy Lund grumbled something, left his chair, and headed for the Mr. Coffee at the back of the room.

  “Now, you guys remember last April when the relay got iced over and the radios didn’t work. And as we all know, cell coverage is spotty in the hollows. Obviously we’re going to have to work extra hard on communication.”

  Deputy Schwem put his hand up.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Is it OK to say this?” Meaning he would say it anyway. “You sound just like my wife.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She always wants me to work harder on communication.” Eleffson rewarded him with a snicker, and Schwem beamed proudly. “Just kidding. You forgot to mention the Lutheran potluck in Coon Valley.”

  “Thank you.”

  Eleffson whispered, “You give the little lady up to seven inches, Schwem, she’ll understand you better.” The sheriff grimaced inwardly. She and the geese had nailed it. To cover himself, Eleffson’s long arm went up. “Rolf Dunkel’s funeral was today. Open bar at the VFW after the burial. Dunkel’s gonna have a lot of friends now that he’s dead.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Plus this weekend is Cabin Fever Days at the Ease Inn. So tonight is Cabin Fever Days’ Eve. Tap beers for a dollar.”

  The sheriff chewed her cheek. Open bar, dollar taps, a major storm at freezing point.

  “All important to know. Thanks.” She mapped the county in her head. Farmstead was neatly on the main ridge down the center of it, a little north of dead middle. To the west was the roughest terrain, the deep coulees cutting to the Mississippi—Snake Hollow, Dog Hollow, Lost Hollow—and the rowdy river towns like Blackhawk Locks and Bishops Coulee. She would send her wiseguys that way. “So we’re going to take zones. Deputy Schwem, northwest. Deputy Eleffson, southwest. I’ve got the girls’ volleyball karaoke fund-raiser at the Ease Inn, so I’m going to take northeast, closest to home.” She meant home as in the Public Safety Building, but her family’s rented farm was in the northeast quadrant too. “I’ll remind them at the Ease Inn not to serve minors or intoxicated individuals. Chief Deputy Lund, you do the same at the VFW and then take the southeast quadrant, please.”

  Southeast was Zion, Blue Mills, Mastodon, and other tiny, quiet villages in the usually more law-abiding region of Bad Axe County that touched the level center of the state. The assignment was a courtesy to Lund. He finally joined the meeting, lumbering away from the pot at the back of the room, managing three, not four, foam cups of bad coffee. He smiled as he passed her, retracting his lower lip to show ground-down gray incisors, a look she knew well, having grown up around aging male livestock with treacherous intent. Her dad’s last stud bull, Samson, came to mind.

  She asked Lund, “Did you have something to add?”

  He emitted his who me? chuckle. “Golly. I wish I did.” He played this to the eager grins of Schwem and Eleffson. “But somehow, even though we’ve got us a Dairy Queen running the show, we’re still out of creamer.”

  He cut too closely through her personal space, his
massive body forcing her to step back. She waited with her tongue bit while he distributed cups to the other two. It gave her time to count: after Gibbs’s death, Boog Lund had been acting sheriff for thirty-six days before the county board removed his title and made her interim. As he turned to retake his chair, she snatched the cup he had poured for himself.

  “Thank you, Deputy.”

  Up close he smelled like hashed browns and Brylcreem. Heat prickled under her shirt as she looked him in the eye.

  “From now on, I’m gonna take mine black.”

  She turned to the window to hide the rush of blood to her face and was surprised by snow slanting through the lights over the parking lot. She watched it a moment, sipping the terrible coffee. Her deputies hadn’t caused her sudden spike of discomfort. No, it was the unexpected recollection of Samson the big black bull, isolated and angry and increasingly feeble when his breeding days were done. But it wasn’t the connection to Lund that she was thinking of anymore. A nagging memory from her Dairy Queen days was of Samson staggering along a fence through a snowstorm with a bloody gash between his eyes and one horn shattered.

  Looking into both new and remembered snow, she now recalled a face. Who was that twitchy, sniffly guy with the pale eyes and the crooked smirk, the one her dad had fired for smashing poor Samson in the head with a shovel? He had claimed self-defense. He made threats as he was thrown off Cress Springs Farm. There was a zombie with a motive. She would put him on her list. But what was the name that went with the face?

  Shit. She had dribbled coffee down her shirt. She heard chuckles.

  Boog Lund said to the others, “Hey, whatever puts hair on your chest.”

  6

  Dale Hill hits the brakes and wrenches the van into the Ease Inn. This is a truck stop, a mini-mart, a tavern, and a motel, like the place in the Dells where Pepper Greengrass met Dale six days ago, except even under its harsh plaza lights, this place has a run-down, soggy look to it, a yellow-brown color scheme gone dumpy, a lariat-and-horns Western theme that fails to match the muddy field and the grain depot that Dale’s beams highlight in the background.

  He pulls through the pump area into the tavern lot, stops the van with a jerk that tosses his pack of Basic Lights to the floor. She retrieves them, replaces them on the console, squares them with her fingers lingering. Dale gives her a look of hard suspicion. Thunder rumbles over. Wet snow splatters the windshield. Pepper says, “What? You told me not to. I’m a good girl.”

  He pulls his keys. He slams his door. He ducks around the van’s front end into a plastering gust. Pepper cracks her door and calls after him, “Come on! Bennie Greengrass! Six home runs, twenty bucks, triple or nothing!”

  While Dale is gone she thinks back to the game. It was a night game, under the lights. There was a water tower above the third-base side that must have said FARMSTEAD. She had climbed to the tip-top of natural stone bleachers that were carved up a bluff, under pine trees. Bats chased insects through the lights. The crowd was rowdy. Bennie gave her money and she had feasted on popcorn, a hot dog, and a blue-raspberry snow cone. She had possessed a stolen cigarette and lighter in her sock. She was going to be twelve in two days—three twelves, she remembers—so that made it August 12, 2012. When she smoked that cigarette, people stared. There had been a fight after the game. She and Bennie had celebrated his ridiculous six home runs by barhopping all the way home, taking a nap at a rest stop, eating burgers for breakfast at Culvers in the Dells, that whole night a wonderful blur and the last time she remembers her brother alive.

  She retrieves Dale Hill’s pack of Basic Lights from the console. She sticks one between her glossed lips, lights it with a Bic mini from the bottom of her tiny red purse. The van gets cold fast. She smokes and rubs her bare thighs. She thinks about Montana, real lariat-and-horns country, where her sister Marie is. She considers how Big Sky Country might be different. Probably no signs that say WE HAVE CHEESE CURDS and UFF-DA! and TURKEY PERMITS HERE. She wonders where that Greyhound bus is going, pausing with a hiss at the highway intersection before wallowing into the push of the storm.

  On the phone the night before Pepper ran away, her sister had finally let it drop where she and Kevin and the kids had disappeared to last year: Hungry Horse, Montana. Right away Pepper had found it on a Google map, out there 1,379.3 miles to the west. Kevin was driving a tour bus in Glacier National Park and Marie was waiting tables at a casino on the Flathead reservation. Marie had never said, Come on out. Pepper had listened for it, but she had never heard any kind of solid invitation. Still, she reminds herself now, a one-way Amtrak ticket from the Dells to Whitefish, near Hungry Horse, is only $165 plus tax. Once she pays back what she owes Dale, she can make $165 in a snap.

  He does not ease out of the Ease Inn. He charges back against what is now sideways snow, his blazer flapping to show how he keeps his phone in a holster on his belt like a big boy. Pepper hasn’t seen her phone since he took it away five minutes after she met him. He slams back in, empties his fist of a drink coaster and a teeny paper umbrella.

  “Gate fee,” he fumes. “Can you believe that? For a party in a barn?”

  “How much?”

  He glares back at the tavern. One irritation behavior of Dale’s, noted by Pepper, is berating service people—waiters and cashiers and bartenders—and demanding their names.

  “Your online post didn’t say shit about a gate fee, Ladonna.”

  “Maybe you could win it back off me.”

  “The bitch tells me, ‘Unless you’re going to the party to dance, everybody pays.’ La-fucking-donna. I go, ‘I’m going in there to dance? I own the dancer. I’m management.’ ”

  “How much?”

  “Is that my cigarette? Little thief.”

  Pepper releases the cigarette from her lips and holds it out, half smoked. Dale throws it out his window. “You’re gonna be real sorry,” he warns, “next time you steal from me.”

  You can’t hurt me, Pepper tells him silently.

  “How much is the gate fee?”

  “A hundred bucks cash just to get in, for a spectator, like I wanna watch your skinny ass up there with a bunch of Holsteems.”

  “You wanna say Holsteins.”

  “What?”

  “Holstein is the kind of the cow you mean.”

  “You wanna get hurt right now?”

  “Come on. Bet me. Bennie Greengrass. August 12, 2012. Six home runs. Twenty gets you sixty.”

  “How you gonna prove it?”

  “I saw a sign for a library. They’ll have Wi-Fi. Give my phone back and let’s go Google it.”

  Pepper watches his eyes. She hadn’t known Dale Hill past those first five minutes before she knew this: a deep fear of missing easy money drives everything about him. Her stepdad, Felton Henry, a long-haul trucker who gambles all over the country, is just this way.

  “You don’t have twenty,” he accuses her.

  She uncrumples two tens from her purse. Dale swells up. He snatches her hand, but the wrong one. She holds the money over by her door. He squeezes hard, folding her bones.

  “The hell you get that?”

  “You can’t hurt me. I stole it from my mom.”

  “Every cent you make is mine.”

  “I stole this before I accepted you as my personal savior. But OK, how about quintuple or nothing? You win, you put that whole gate fee on my tab.”

  He throws her hand back. “Never, ever touch my cigarettes.” He glowers through his windshield into the storm’s enclosing swirl. “So where’s this fucking library?”

  Pepper celebrates with a grin into the snow. “So does that mean we’re on?”

  7

  Angus Beavers directed the cab driver along a stealth route to the baseball field that players called The Hole. From the Kwik Trip, this meant heading out of town on the highway about a half mile, then turning west on Viking Road into an onslaught of wind and sleety snow. Where Viking crossed Third Avenue, he told the driver to turn left. Another l
eft turn put the cab in a dark alley behind a pair of defunct grain elevators. From there they snuck behind the library and trespassed through the parking lot of Bad Axe Manor. The driver crept the cab along with his phone in his hand.

  “According to this, The Hole is not a place—and now I lost the signal.”

  “Just keep going through this parking lot—”

  “It says No Thru Traffic.”

  “It says Manor too.” It was a government home. Angus pointed from the backseat. “Around the building where those big trees are. You’ll see the outfield fence. That’s The Hole.”

  The driver hunched closer to his windshield. The cab’s headlights struck the outfield fence, then filtered through snow into the stadium sunk inside a bowl of limestone, its bleachers chiseled into soft blond rock collecting whiteness. “Just follow the fence around—”

  “Drive on the grass?”

  “Follow the fence around. That’s the clubhouse over there.”

  “OK. I see it. A clubhouse? And the high school plays here?”

  “No. The high school has its own field. This is semipro. Stop here.”

  Though the clubhouse was always locked, to Angus’s knowledge it had never been secure. The Rattlers were the adult summer league team, but Angus had made the roster when he was sixteen, after his season as a high school junior, when he had hit .397 with twelve home runs and run the forty-yard dash in 4.5 seconds. A Minnesota Twins scout had recommended more playing time against better competition, but while Angus could have started at almost any position and batted at the top of the order, he had hardly seen the field. The Rattlers were men like Harley Kick, ten years older, at least. Angus mostly sat on the bench, glad to be there, watching and learning the game, waiting his turn, listening to the older players. This is how he had heard about the technique that Scotty Clausen, Wade Gibbs, and some of the others had used to jimmy open the flimsy clubhouse door. Those guys took girls inside the clubhouse at night, so they claimed, and banged them ceremonially on the wobbly benches or the cold floor or among the boxes of old uniforms in storage. This was how Angus learned about the Cave Girls. He felt ashamed now to recall how eagerly he had listened.