Bad Axe County

by John Galligan

  This is when she crashes. This when a tiny voice inside her, a useless voice that Pepper hates, cries out, Help me . . .

  She stumbles toward his reception desk, his telephone. Clumsy, blind, trying to remember Marie’s number, she drops the receiver on the floor, it clatters, she fumbles for it, kicks it.

  “OK, you betcha, then how about no way?”

  This is what the troll tells her as he rushes out of his studio. He comes at her with that roll of silver tape from Walmart and Pepper tries to run for the outside door but only sinks onto her knees because she is so stupid and weak that she can’t even run properly and just like before with Felton Henry she is so bad at escaping.

  “You can’t hurt me!” she tries to scream through the tape across her face.

  32

  Sheriff Kick—interim, suspended, in jeans and a sweatshirt, with the .38 Cobra in the pocket of her barn coat—sped the family minivan over Cliff Swallow Branch. The tiny spring creek, normally as clear as gin, was muddily opaque and swollen nearly to the deck of its iron bridge, about to spill beyond its boundaries. That was exactly how she felt, and OK with it. The hospital had told her that Tianna Ek had taken Brock Pabst home. Zombieland, here I come.

  The community of Blackhawk Locks, where Pabst shacked up with his lady friend, was truly on the Mississippi, a lifestyle choice literally drowning in bad ideas. When she found the residence, it was a small, flat box, about as well built as a birdhouse, balanced on rickety stilts twenty feet high. At flood stage, in other words, the fourth-largest river on the planet was supposed to flow harmlessly beneath. What could go wrong?

  She eased the van as far as she dared upon the slushy-muddy yard. At the extension of deep ruts beneath the house was Tianna Ek’s silver Subaru. The twenty or so steps leading to the front door were swaybacked and buckled. She wasn’t going up there. Pabst was coming down. She blew her horn. Nothing happened. She left the Kickmobile—gold Dodge Caravan, smudgy windows, sour-milk smell—and approached the steps while gripping the Cobra, glad she had hung on to it.

  She kicked a metal stair tread. The whole house vibrated. Tianna Ek appeared. Dressed in a blue bathrobe, her hair wet, that boy-child on her hip, she stood on the tiny tilted porch and glowered down for a good long time. “Of course,” she said at last. “It’s you without your costume. I’ll send the loser out.”

  She went inside, closed the door. The walls were thin. “Guess who’s here, dumbfuck!”

  In about thirty seconds Brock Pabst limped onto the porch, shirtless and barefoot, in pajama bottoms, an unlit cigarette between his fingers. “I didn’t do nothing.” The whole house jiggled as his wide-spaced heels thumped down the steps. “Hey, a guy can party, right? No law against that. How are you doing? I guess this is all gonna melt now. Is the river coming up? Shit, forgot my lighter. You don’t have a lighter, do you? Hey, I was here with Tianna all night.”

  Take your time, she advised herself. “No, Tianna was ‘here and there,’ she told me. It was her night out. You were home with the baby. Is that what you meant?”

  He turned to look up at Tianna. She stared dirty knives at him. Their child was out cold, his big head lolling over her elbow.

  “Uh. Shit. Yeah, I meant I was here with the baby all night.”

  “Except you went to a party at Emerald Faulkner’s barn.”

  “You what?” Tianna jerked the kid around to get a better grip. “I knew it. You left Garthy here alone. Where’s your stupid car at, Brock?”

  “My car?”

  “C-A-R. You can’t hear me or something?” For such a young woman her voice had the scorch of old rage, of too many trips down this same stupid road. “What happened to your fucking car? And who’d you go to the party with?”

  He found a lighter in the pocket of his pajama pants. He lit up. “What party?”

  “The one she just said. How’d you get your nuts burned? What’s her name?”

  Pabst was looking ever more twitchy, agitated. “Her name?”

  “Yeah. What people call other people. The chick you went with. Dumbfuck.”

  “You guys are not communicating.” The sheriff touched the pistol in her pocket. “Let’s try again. You went to a party last night at Faulkner’s barn. Booze, strippers, high times. Good so far? Later somebody beat up Walt Beavers.” She stopped herself there. “I think you might know who did that and why.”

  “Coach Beavers? Somebody beat up Coach Beavers?”

  “We have your plate number from the party, Mr. Pabst. It was on a gray GTO. We have a photograph. You were there.”

  “Shit. OK, OK, you got me. Yeah. OK.” He began to pace on his bare feet in the slush. “OK, yeah, me and a friend went out for a while. Hey, shit, Tianna, go inside.”

  “Oh, no. You don’t talk to me like that. You were at the stag party? With a friend? What’s her name? That little Beavers chick again? Somehow you got your nuts scorched?”

  “Can you just go inside?”

  “That bitch will do anything for you, huh, Brock? What happened, she was so high she helped you turkey baste with a cigarette in her mouth? You’re never touching me again.”

  “Go inside.”

  She did. She slammed the door, barely missing the boy’s head. The stilt house rocked. Brock Pabst pulled on his smoke, squinting at the massive slab of brown water slipping past, a pair of sandhill cranes bleating along, paddling the air with their necks out and legs trailing.

  “Thanks,” he muttered just audibly, watching the cranes. “Thanks a lot. The fuck you think you are, ruining my life when I didn’t even do nothing?” He glanced up at the house. Tianna watched from a window, the kid crying and wrestling with her. She seemed to aim her phone.

  “Come with me,” the sheriff told Brock Pabst. “Let’s get ourselves a little space, talk privately.”

  She herded him ahead of her toward the riverbank. She kept her hand in her barn coat, touching the Cobra, urging him across swampy melting snow and mud onto what looked like a muskrat or a beaver track that twisted through the brush and riprap lining the river. She stopped him on a flat spot where a deep eddy swirled below, a littered spot where fishermen drank beer and smoked cigarettes down to the filter and chucked stink bait for catfish.

  “I’m going to give you a choice right now. You assaulted a law enforcement officer when you hit me with that bat. That gets you five to ten. Later, when you knocked me into the river, you were attempting to kill a law enforcement officer. That guarantees you life. Your whole shitty life, such as it is.”

  He added his cigarette to the mess at his bare feet. “You got no proof,” he ventured.

  “It won’t be hard. Coach Beavers is going to recover. You left the bat behind. My car has your car’s lipstick on it. The thing is, I haven’t told anyone what all happened yet. My reasons. And so here is your choice. You tell me who sent you to hurt Coach Beavers and why, and I’ll have no idea which of our many local meth heads committed such horrible crimes last night. Are you with me so far?”

  He nodded, shivering.

  “If you choose not to tell me,” she said, “or you lie to me, that gets you somewhere between five years and life, not counting time for what you did to Coach Beavers.”

  This whole time the two cranes had been bleating and circling—waiting for a third and a fourth crane to join them. Now they coasted down to settle onto a midriver island. They aimed their long black beaks and stalked through melting snow like dinosaurs.

  “Yeah, OK. I went to the party. I picked up a friend. Later she drove and dropped me off to wait for Coach Beavers. I was just told to bust him up a little. You showed up—I just freaked. I didn’t mean none of that.”

  “Uh-huh. Told by who to bust him up?”

  “Aw, man . . .”

  “Your choice, five to life.”

  “Told by Pinky Clausen.”

  “I see.” She reminded herself: there had been that weird break-in later at Clausen Meats. “Why did Coach Clausen want you to hurt Coach Beav
ers?”

  “Pinky said Coach needs a good thumping now and then, keep him in line.”

  “Why does Coach Beavers need to be kept in line?”

  Pabst shrugged. His scrawny torso was goose-bumped, his pale skin turning dull purple.

  “Because he’s a drunk and a moron? I don’t know.”

  He was inching back, getting behind her right shoulder a little. She opened her stance to keep her face to him. She kept her fist around the gun inside her coat pocket. “You said when you were offering to fuck me with your baseball bat that since you beat him up, Coach Beavers wouldn’t tell me anything. What was he not supposed to tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  “Were you paid?”

  “Nah, shit no.”

  “Then why would you do it?”

  “I kind of owe Pinky.”

  “For what?”

  As he searched for an answer to this, a door opened at the stilt house. A tiny back porch was just visible over the riverbank brush. Tianna appeared with the toddler dangling under her arm in a new grip that gave her mobility. Miscellaneous possessions began raining over the porch rail: a toothbrush, a can coozy, a wad of dirty clothes, a fishing rod, a white foam cup that exploded in midair with sawdust and mealworms. She went back inside to reload.

  “I guess you’re moving out.”

  He shifted again. She shifted to stay square. He could push her into the current, she realized. She might not survive the great river twice.

  “So why do you owe Coach Clausen?”

  “It’s this weird thing.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “When we won state in 2010, Pinky had kicked me off the team for coming stoned to a game. But then he, like, totally forgave me. I got to dress for the tournament. I got to stay in the hotel. I got the per diem and everything.” His voice cracked. “I got to be in the picture with the trophy. Ever since then, I just feel . . .”

  Now tears. He wanted sympathy from her, someone he had assaulted and threatened to rape with a bat. Abruptly her heart was beating too fast. He was too close to her. Fucking zombie.

  “I think of Coach Clausen as . . . as kind of like . . . a father to me.”

  “I see. That’s very touching. New topic. Did you have any contact at all with a girl with long black hair who was at the party last night?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know the girl I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Clausen have any contact with her?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How about Walt Beavers?”

  “He just gets drunk and tries to dance along with the dancers.”

  “Did you see who the black-haired girl left with?”

  “No.”

  “When you beat up Walt Beavers, who drove the car for you?”

  Pabst glanced back at the house. Tianna had come out once more. This time instead of the baby she carried a large yellow snake. She flung the snake off the porch into a tree. It dripped down a few branches and then hung, writhing slowly.

  “Damn, Tianna . . .”

  “Who drove the car?”

  “Brandy Beavers.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “His niece.”

  “She helped you beat up her own uncle?”

  Pabst shrugged to answer. “She didn’t know.”

  “How old is Brandy Beavers?”

  He shrugged again. “Eighteen, for sure.” Meaning, for sure she wasn’t.

  “Where is your car now?” One more shrug. Her voice felt thick. Her fist felt hot and slick on the pistol. “You don’t know where your car is? Why not?”

  “I think it got stolen.”

  “You think you’d like to spend your life in prison?”

  “OK, OK. I told her take it home and crush it. Because, you know, I crashed into you. Beavers’s junkyard. They have a machine.”

  She looped back on him. Walt Beavers had tried to hide something in the library.

  “Let me quote you. ‘Stupid old stumble-fuck,’ or maybe it was coonfucker, ‘won’t tell you nothing now.’ Let’s try again. Tell me what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I told you.”

  “Last chance.”

  “I’m telling you I don’t know!” he whined. “Shit!”

  She stepped back until her jacket scraped the crowding buckthorn behind her. “Stand right there,” she told Brock Pabst, indicating where she had just stepped from, closer to the edge above the eddy.

  “Turn around so I don’t have to look at you.”

  He shakily followed her orders and she made him stand there for about fifteen seconds while the river flowed mightily past. Then she removed the .38 from her pocket and touched it to his skull. The black-haired girl, she was understanding, had been swept up in a swirl of secret events through the Bad Axe, a mass of bad actions bigger and older than one party last night, flowing forward and back. Ladonna Weeks, Walt Beavers, and now, if Pabst wasn’t lying, also Rattlers ex-coach Pinky Clausen had something to hide from her. Was it all the same thing? As for Chief Deputy Lund, was he messing with her just to make sure he was the next sheriff? Or was he helping Ladonna? Or Clausen? Or both?

  “Four years ago, the Rattlers lost a playoff game, nineteen to three. Did something happen during that game? Before it? After it? Anything that Walt Beavers was nervous about and Coach Clausen didn’t want coming back to the surface? Something that happened after that game?”

  He felt the gun and trembled. She trembled too. It would feel so good.

  “I don’t know. I was off the Rattlers by then. I mighta been in jail.”

  “If anything you told me turns out to be a lie, stumble-fuck, I’m coming right back.”

  33

  “Yes, my queen?” Denise answered.

  “Coach Clausen was at the party last night. We have his plates.”

  “Correct.”

  “Send that jpeg to my cell, please.”

  “Heidi, you’re suspended. You’re supposed to be at home. I think I’m not even supposed to talk to you. And Pinky Clausen is, if I may speak in my native tongue, a real motherfucker.”

  They were both silent for a long stretch of road. The Kickmobile ascended and cleared the river bluffs. On the ridges, in every direction, unplowed spring fields pushed up dark earth through the sloughing snow and ice. Water flowed beneath the vast melting slabs, like streams from glaciers. The flood was beginning. And the sky was clouding up again.

  “So are you sending it now?”

  Denise sighed. “OK. I’m sending it. Anything else?”

  “Can Walt Beavers talk to us yet?”

  “I’ll call and check.”

  “Have we heard from the Dells yet? On the blue van?”

  “Negative so far. But I’ll make sure Rhino lets you know. And by the way, Olaf the Handsome volunteered to take your place to hear the Strong and Pritzle audit.”

  She went blank for a moment. Ahead of her, Coach Pinky Clausen’s sprawling estate had appeared on the south-facing slope. She was looking at a big new house with architectural design, a landscaped yard the size of several baseball fields, a two-story multicar garage, and at least a mile of white vinyl fencing to contain the Meat King’s thoroughbred horses.

  “Sheriff Gibbs’s Public Outreach budget,” Denise reminded her. “The audit. Today we find out what kinds of sleazy things he was doing with all that money. I’ll make sure Yttri reports out.”

  “Thank you.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “That booze in your car?”

  “Yes?”

  “That half pint of Mr. Boston butterscotch schnapps?”

  “If you say so.”

  “We’re withholding that detail. No one outside the department knows it. That bottle has an Iowa liquor control sticker on it. Rhino’s got a call in to every outlet in a fifty-mile radius of the Lansing Bridge.
He’s gonna find out who bought it.”

  * * *

  A battered red pickup with a snowplow blade cut swaths of black across Clausen’s snowed-in driveway. She pulled into a freshly plowed corner and put her window down. The snow removal guy watched her from the shadow of his cab. In ghosts of stripped-off letters, the door of the pickup still said Rhinegold Dairy, the place down in Crawford County, defunct now, where she had worked part time one winter during high school.

  “Where’s a good place for me to park this?”

  Cigarette smoke drifted from his window. She couldn’t see his face.

  “Hey? I don’t want to be in your way. Where do you want me to park?”

  He wasn’t going to tell her. She shut off the engine, collected her cell phone from the cup holder, and headed toward Clausen’s front door.

  “I’ll move it if you need me to.”

  But did she know him from Rhinegold? Her path brought her close enough to see beneath the cab shadow, and a glimpse of something only vaguely human took her breath away. She flinched, stopped, didn’t know what to do with herself, found herself looking at him directly. Severe burns had left him hairless and without ears—without a nose, two open pits in the center of his face. He stared out at her, his only movement a faint but steady spasm in his neck and chin.

  She tried to hold eye contact, be polite. “I’ll be talking to Coach Clausen. Let me know if you need me to move.”

  Now he stirred. He raised a cigarette pinched between the knuckles of a scar-webbed hand. He put the cigarette to a nose hole. As he inhaled through the fleshless nostril, she had the sickly sensation that, yes, she knew him.

  “I’m Heidi Kick. I used to be Heidi White. I used to work at Rhinegold. Have we met? What’s your name again?”

  Smoke gushed out his opposite nose hole. He nodded minutely, as if his skin were too tight for more. His voice was a hoarse monotone.

  “Three thousand psi sounds about right.”

  What? She saw a smirk flicker across his melted features. He clubbed his stick shift into REVERSE. He spun the truck backward, swung it around, dropped its blade. She hurried out of the way as he rammed another half ton of wet snow into Clausen’s yard. So here was another guy who worked for Clausen, she noted. Brock Pabst, now him.