Bad Axe County

by John Galligan

  “Turn your lights off,” he told the cab driver. “Can I borrow your pen? I’ll be back.”

  He became cold in a familiar way before he cleared the fence. A spring storm in the Bad Axe: four o’clock you stood in shirtsleeves under a fly ball in the outfield, five o’clock you were soaked to the bone with your truck slid into the ditch. He shouldered the loose steel door. With the pen he tripped the plunger on the lock. The door swung open.

  The smells stood him still for a moment. Baseball was baseball—leather, tar, sweat, soil, and grass—but at this moment, finally back home, the familiar aromas stirred him as if they were brand-new. As the lightbulb warmed he saw there had been a remodel of the clubhouse, now padded chairs instead of wobbly wooden benches, now lockers with players’ names on them, a refrigerator, the rattlesnake logo freshly painted on the wall. This excited him too. Before, all he had ever wanted was to play for the home team. It was different now. What he had dreamed of lately was a home team that he could want to play for.

  But he had to hustle. If he got caught here, they would know why he was back.

  8

  Deputy Rinehart Rog maundered down from the dispatch room, pausing for a bisonlike slurp from the bubbler outside the sheriff’s office. He filled her doorway, his great black beard dripping onto the shelf of a gut too large to fit behind the wheel of a cruiser anymore.

  “I just took a call from the library,” Rhino began. “Harold Snustead wants to close early, make it home before the storm gets too bad. But Walt Beavers won’t get off the internet.”

  “Thanks. Denise should be here soon. Then you can head home.”

  “He’s probably looking at porno.”

  “I’ll pay a visit on my way to the karaoke fund-raiser. Thanks.”

  “Sounds like Coach Beavers has had a few.”

  “I’m sure he has.”

  “Weather Service now says up to ten inches. Power lines are down across the river in Allamakee County.”

  “Got it.”

  “Did I tell you Buttercup finally had her baby?”

  “Congratulations. Give her hay from me.”

  “It’s a girl calf.”

  “Lucky you. Girls rock.”

  “Heidi,” he said solemnly.

  “Yes, Rhino? What is it?”

  “No, I mean me and Irma named her Heidi. In your honor. First lady sheriff in the state.”

  She felt a dizzying flush of emotion. The people here, their chronic kindness, exactly how her mom and dad had been, their fundamental goodness and warmth. She forced a smile. “I’m not sure interim counts, but thank you. That’s sweet.”

  He still plugged her doorway, eclipsing the corridor’s light.

  “Was there something else?” she asked.

  “Um, yeah. I figured it out.”

  “You figured what out?”

  “Why Denise and you tell those nasty jokes about ladies. Irma helped me. It’s like flu shots. Then the real jokes don’t make you sick.”

  “You nailed it.”

  “Irma said don’t ever try any jokes like that myself.”

  “You nailed that too.”

  He grinned proudly, saluted her, and disappeared. But one word stayed with her. Sick. Downing Boog Lund’s cup of bad coffee had felt like power in the moment, but twenty minutes later her mood kept falling, her stomach churned, and her nerves jangled. That creepy zombie farmhand who hit Samson in the face with a shovel—what has his name? But she had to get her mind back in the present. Thinking it might help to call home and tell the kids she loved them and good night, she carried her phone to the window, where she could see her night dispatcher, Denise Halverson, banging the old flatbed truck she called “Old Alimony” into the lot.

  As Denise swung the truck around, aiming to park next to the ambulance, a voice behind said, “Sheriff?”

  She turned to find town of Dog Hollow supervisor Bob Check, dressed in a stiff new Bad Axe County jacket and ball cap, both black with orange lettering.

  “Oh, hello, Bob. You’re the EMS captain tonight?”

  “Yours truly.”

  “You guys are going to be busy. I mean, let’s hope not, but . . .”

  The retired dairy farmer held up a folder with a hand missing its two middle fingers.

  “Signatures,” he said. “We’ve got 143. We need 200 to file your nomination papers.”

  She felt a flood of acid rise from her stomach. “OK, Bob. Good work. I appreciate it.”

  His smile was dentures in a half grimace, his face so weather-beaten she could barely see his eyes. But their intense blue was on her directly. “Nomination papers are as good as a hole in a bucket, Sheriff, if you’re not gonna sign ’em. We’ve got seven days left.”

  “I understand. Thank you, Bob. Harley and I are talking about it . . .”

  “That knucklehead.” He widened her view of his dentures. It was a smile, she reminded herself, and knucklehead was a term of endearment. The baseball-crazy Bad Axe–loved Harley Kick. “With a wife like you, he ought not to talk, he ought to listen. We need you, Sheriff. You’re a natural.”

  “Well . . . I’m not sure what I am . . .”

  “You’re a gal who’s got her head screwed on tight.”

  “I’m glad it looks that way. Thanks. This interim job is a privilege. I just don’t know that I’m ready to do it permanently.”

  “You’re exactly what we need”—as he leaned closer and lowered his voice, she smelled hay on his clothes, meat loaf on his breath—“to eliminate a gut worm like Boog Lund.”

  That startled her. Gut worm.

  “I’m vermicide?”

  As Bob Check guffawed, the wind hitched. Lightning crackled, vivifying acres of snow-crawled sky and colorizing Denise as she speed-waddled in. The sheriff watched her dispatcher handle her snacks, her thermos, her spinal pillow, her paperback novels, her Aaron Rodgers bobblehead. Somewhere, secreted among her daily luggage, was Denise’s tin of wintergreen Skoal, illicit in the “tobacco-free zone” she was about to enter.

  “Anyway, as you can tell,” Bob Check continued, “a bunch of us feel strongly. We want you to run against Lund—and beat the skin off him.”

  What should she say? “Harley and I are discussing it, Bob. Thank you. Seven days?”

  “Right. And we’ll have enough signatures by tomorrow. One of us will bring the papers by and hopefully you’ll be ready to sign—”

  A scorch of lightning stopped him. They both looked out the window as the trailing boom sent hail plunging faster than the snow.

  “Opening day of baseball tomorrow,” the old farmer remarked. “So a storm like this is a Bad Axe tradition. Problem is, this year the ground is saturated. My crick is over the bank. I’ve been telling my daughter to get the cattle off that low pasture before they drown. The storm is the easy part. This is all going to melt.”

  Denise burst through the back door.

  “Rider on the storm! Fat bitch, incoming!”

  The sheriff attempted a deep breath. Out the other door went Rinehart Rog, hatless and in short sleeves, snow and hail sticking in his beard as he shambled to his truck. She raised a wave, wishing him a safe trip home. She turned and Bob Check was leaving her doorway, reminding her with the folder of signatures before he headed toward the fire-and-rescue end of the building. The sheriff went the other way and caught up with Denise offloading her snacks into the squad room refrigerator.

  “Thanks for being early. We’re patrolling quadrants tonight.”

  “Ten-four, my queen.” Denise closed the refrigerator. “Are you OK, Heidi?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look like you saw a bogeyman. Can I goose ya?”

  “Well . . .” She thought about their elderly librarian. “Harold Snustead does like to recommend early-reader books about female heroes, like what I need is a dose of the Amelia Earhart story, which is actually about a woman who disappeared into a black hole.” She gathered air to continue. “But Harold means well. So have
you got a gentle one?”

  Denise stuck a finger her into her cold plump cheek and tilted her head to think.

  “Hmm. Something quaint, yet offensive. Sure. Why did God invent high heels?”

  “Hell if I know why She would do a brutal thing like that.”

  Denise giggled. “High heels were created to benefit our work in the kitchen, so that we can reach the dishes on the top shelf—but hang on, I’m getting a 911 call.”

  Denise barreled down the hallway. The sheriff could hear her big voice responding to the caller. “Oh, dear. That’s awful. But he’s gone now? You stay safe, little one. I’m sending an ambulance. And Chief Deputy Lund is nearby. He’ll be there right away.”

  Denise barked at Bob Check over interoffice to activate his volunteer EMS crew to the Bad Axe County Library. She reappeared breathless. The sheriff stiffened.

  “Heidi, it was that little Grimes girl who kinda lives at the library. Some shithead freak came in there with a girl and he punched Harold Snustead in the face. He’s on the floor in a big pool of blood. Lund just left the VFW. I figured I’m gonna send him.”

  A shithead freak and a girl? That sounded familiar.

  “I’ve got it,” she told her dispatcher. “I was headed to the library already.”

  9

  The blood came from the librarian’s nose, which appeared broken, and also from a cut on his scalp, where Harold Snustead had hit his head as he fell. Gabby Grimes, a seventh grader who took sanctuary in county buildings, had apparently seen it all but wasn’t quite making sense. A man had punched Harold Snustead in the face. Then he had dragged a long-haired girl out of the library. This is what Sheriff Kick understood so far.

  “Catch your breath, Gabby. You’re safe. Mr. Snustead is going to be OK.”

  She hoped he was going to be OK. She had outraced Bob Check’s volunteer crew to the library by five minutes and counting. Meanwhile, Bad Axe County’s seventy-six-year-old librarian had roused himself to his desk chair, where he sprawled with his head tipped back. His blood grew sticky around the sheriff’s boots as she applied pressure with a pinch between his eyes while holding a blood-sopped wad of tissue against his head wound. It appeared from blood tracks that he had been assaulted in the library’s common area, near a table that supported an oversize book with a dull-red cover.

  “Gabby, what happened over there?”

  Wide-eyed, the girl tried to answer. She was a spindly waif in old clothes and broken glasses, a ponytail wrenched across her tiny skull. Deputies answered regular domestic disturbance calls at the Grimes home on Kickapoo Street.

  “It was . . . old newspapers. Mr. Snustead . . . he was helping her get information.”

  “Helping who?”

  She shrank a little. She ungripped her damp white hands to show that she didn’t know. “This tall girl with long black hair.”

  “How old, do you think?”

  Gabby shrugged. “High school? She wore a really short black skirt, like, a leopard top, and black boots.”

  “How tall?”

  Gabby stood up and showed her. Taller than either of them. “And pretty skinny.”

  “OK . . . and what did the man look like?”

  The librarian gurgled blood, like he wanted to answer. Gabby waited a moment. Seeing Harold Snustead couldn’t speak, she said, “Short. Kind of chubby. He was wearing a blazer and jeans. His head . . . was shaved . . . like my dad’s.”

  “Did you see what vehicle they came in?”

  Gabby hadn’t. The librarian managed to shake his head. He hadn’t either. The sheriff made her guess: dark blue van with dealer plates. Shaved head, hollow eyes, ugly, ranting mouth. She shifted in the blood puddle to reach a fresh handful of tissue off the desk.

  “Was anyone else in the library, Gabby? Did anyone else see this?”

  “Coach Beavers was on the computer. Mr. Snustead said I could stay until he locked up, he could give me a ride, but he wanted Coach Beavers to get going.”

  The sheriff reflected on Walt Beavers for a moment. He was “Coach Beavers” because he dithered around in the first-base coaching box for the team that Harley had long starred for and now managed, the Bad Axe Rattlers of the Mississippi Valley League. She had asked Harley once, but he couldn’t explain how a rummy like Beavers had been entrusted with such a sacred duty. Harley had inherited the situation. This is the Bad Axe. That was all he had to say.

  The sheriff looked around the library.

  “Are you still with us, Mr. Snustead?” He had closed his eyes. He didn’t answer. “Gabby, did Coach Beavers see the man punch Mr. Snustead?”

  “Yes. But he left right after that, when I was calling 911. He wouldn’t go before, but as soon as I said Deputy Lund was coming, he just zipped right out of here.”

  “Do you have any idea why the man punched Mr. Snustead?”

  She watched fear flicker through Gabby Grimes’s eyes. The girl’s dad made a practice of punching her mom. Her mom never cooperated with the sheriff’s department.

  “You’re safe, sweetheart. It’s important that you tell me everything you saw.”

  “She . . . That girl had a phone, and she was trying to use the Wi-Fi to look up something about a baseball game. A Rattlers game. But Mr. Snustead told her the Broadcaster only went online last year, and then he got her this book of old newspapers. That one over there.”

  “But why would that make the man punch Mr. Snustead?”

  “She made him mad. She was teasing him, I guess.”

  “Teasing Mr. Snustead? No? You mean the girl was teasing the man she came with?”

  Saucer-eyed, Gabby nodded. “She won a bet from him, I think. He was mad because Mr. Snustead found her that book with the newspapers, and then he found the article she wanted. It had her brother in it. That was what the bet was about. I guess she was happy because she won money, so she kissed Mr. Snustead.”

  Hold on. What? Beneath the gob of tissue, his bloody skull tipping up and down, the elderly librarian had tuned in enough to tell her, “Yes, she kissed me.”

  “Why did she kiss you?”

  His mouth opened. That was all he could do.

  “Gabby?”

  “She said, ‘Thank you for helping, you’re so cute,’ and she kissed him. Then the guy just, like, wham, he pounded Mr. Snustead right in the face. Then he grabbed her phone and yanked her out of here, and I called 911.”

  “That was good, Gabby. You did the right thing. So when did Coach Beavers leave?”

  “The lady on the phone told me Deputy Lund was coming. As soon as I said that, he went over really fast and closed the book of newspapers on the article they were looking at. Then he took off.”

  “Do you know why he closed the book?”

  “I don’t know, I mean, the Rattlers lost? He heard them talking about it? And he didn’t like it? He’s a coach, right?”

  Finally in came the EMTs, stomping wet boots, the creases in their jackets spilling snow. Bob Check’s crew consisted of Kent Tainter and Lana Kussmaul. As those two connected their eyes to the sheriff, she absorbed the moment—that double take by Boog Lund supporters—Oh, yeah, you, but not for long.

  “Hurry home, Gabby. Here’s my card with my cell phone number on it. You can always call if you think of something else. If I need to, I’ll come by and talk to you later.”

  Gabby Grimes collected her things and pushed out the doors. Kickapoo Street was only eight blocks away.

  The ambulance crew was waiting.

  “Welcome to the party, folks,” she began. “As far as I know, Mr. Snustead was struck once with a fist in the face, then fell and hit his head on the corner of that table over there. It seems like he’s stable.” She looked at the librarian. The EMTs hadn’t touched him yet. Bob Check was masking and gloving. His crew just stood there. “Or not. It looks like he just passed out.”

  “Uff-da,” said Lana Kussmaul. “Too much Goodnight Moon.”

  “Has anybody called the sheriff?” asked Kent Taint
er. Lana Kussmaul hooted. Tainter cuffed the sheriff on her stiffened shoulder. “We’re just kidding!”

  “You two get your heinies in gear.” A scowling Bob Check waded in to assume the sheriff’s pressure positions against Harold Snustead’s injuries. “Any idea who hit him?”

  She repeated what Gabby had said. Two strangers, a bet about a baseball game, then the loser, the man, had roundhoused their elderly librarian, who had helped the winner, the girl, by looking up the game in a book of old newspapers. They could have been almost anyone, she reasoned out loud. Storm permitting, she would be tracking down Coach Beavers to find out what he saw. Coach Beavers—now she was thinking to herself—who had rushed to shut the book of bound newspapers. What was he worried about when he fled the scene?

  She looked across the library at the big red volume closed on the table, Harold Snustead’s blood spattered around it.

  * * *

  After the EMTs had stretchered Harold Snustead away, she went to the table in the center of the library. The book was a cheaply bound tome, thick and wide, nearly three feet tall, made from all the issues of the weekly Bad Axe Broadcaster in the year 2012.

  A spatter of blood arced across the table and stopped exactly where the opened book would have been. She reopened the volume, its front cover fitting perfectly into the clean spot on the table. So where was the blood? She began to flip randomly forward and back within the year 2012, looking for spatters on open pages. But she was dealing with what had to be five hundred pages of newsprint. She was due at the karaoke fund-raiser twenty minutes ago. She scribbled a note and left it on Harold Snustead’s desk: Taking 2012 Broadcasters. Will return.

  With the heavy book held awkwardly under one arm, she once more headed for the doors. She had put one foot down into two inches of snow before she stopped again. Shouldn’t she at least know what dirty old Coach Beavers was doing on the internet?

  10

  Looking past all the big-league-style upgrades inside the Rattlers’ clubhouse—the Gatorade cooler, the plush red towels, the five-pound tub of Dubble Bubble, the washer and dryer—Angus Beavers turned his attention to the tubs at the back of the equipment room, packed with air-sealed bags of old jerseys.