Bad Axe County

by John Galligan

  As she wades in, her plane of vision changes and she can no longer see the house, the vehicles, just the mass of junk that climbs the opposite side of the valley. But out there. Across that. She needs to aim at something. Beneath the road, amid a beard of last year’s dead weeds, a corroded pipe spews a jet of orange-brown water. That. She needs to aim there, where that jet of water arcs in the sunshine before it crashes onto the flood. Go.

  Now filthy names for her come screeching off the bluff. She looks back but the angle is too steep. Then she remembers Bennie. Flow, he said. Don’t fight it.

  She retreats to swampy ground and moves upstream. Through suck-mud, over wobbly tussocks of dead marsh grass, she less walks than wallows, can’t ever get her balance. But the current will take her, and the farther up she goes, the more room she has to flow with it and end up where she needs to be.

  She hears him screaming again as she reenters the flood two hundred yards above. She pushes through a thicket of underwater briars. Thorns tear her legs, sharp streaks of pain that the current whisks away. When she looks back she can see him now, stumbling out the bottom of the bluff. She penetrates deeper. Just as the flow takes her, she flexes her knees, squeezes her eyes shut, claps her palms above her head, and pushes off the bottom. She kicks and wheels her arms until the fast water flips her over. She tumbles once. Then she gets her head up. Her eyes open. Her legs drop. She spreads her arms and tries to steer against the spinning.

  She spins anyway. On one circuit she glimpses him. He has waded in up to his chest, holding his pistol high and dry. On the next spin she can’t find him. Next time around she fixes on the spewing pipe, and she sees that she is moving too fast, she is too far on the wrong side of the current. On the next spin, the blunt black lunge of an old sawed log aims to crack her in the face but she ducks it. She feels it glide along her back like the heavy tongue of some great beast. She feels the slap of catching it. She throws a leg, grips. Up she bobs, riding it. He is taking aim at her with his pistol clapped in two hands.

  But he can’t hurt her. Not from there. She slides behind the far side of the log, raises her middle finger for a target as he fires. No way.

  But she will flow too far. She twists to find the pipe again. Nearly past it, she is stunned by what she sees. That same heavy old man comes slinging out the pipe mouth. His body tumbles sideways as the jet of water spreads and flattens. One boot flings off. As he rotates, flailing his arms, she sees flashes in the sun—keys on his belt, holster in his armpit—then he belly flops. She can’t tell if he’s still moving. His soggy mass decelerates and eddies back toward the pipe, sinking. Pepper lets go and swims.

  66

  In the end, his dad never got to see how perfectly his pit trap had worked.

  Angus had whistled to direct Boog Lund. Sure enough, Gibbs’s old chief deputy had come wearing street clothes and driving his own red Silverado, like when he had come with Clausen and Gibbs to make the first deal. Angus had whistled and Lund had hauled his old bulk up the scrap yard running his mouth instead of drawing his weapon.

  “Well, if it ain’t Hotshot and Potshot—”

  His dad had set up a chair exactly uphill of where he wanted Lund to walk. He had jabbered excitedly for a good long time while he waited. An hour had passed. The next hour had begun. Brandy had gone inside the Quonset shed to sprawl sullenly on an old truck seat, and then she had fallen asleep. Angus had gone back down to the house and looked at the wax man Brandy had called “me and Brock’s friend.” He had never seen a man shot. He had shot animals, but never with a pistol in the head. Blood and brain had leaked from the wound into the gasoline spilled around his body. The woodstove still cranked out too much heat. Angus had wondered if the house would blow up, burn down. He had wondered if that might be a good thing. If he had come back to start things over, maybe that should happen.

  He had gone back up to his dad, who had become exhausted and fallen silent. Then finally Lund had arrived. Angus had whistled to direct him. Lund had walked right up the line of the pipe, all that floodwater coursing six feet below his boots.

  “Well, well, well,” he had continued, every step bringing him closer, “if it ain’t the happy Beavers family, just sitting up here in the junk where they belong. Lyman, you ain’t got any pants on. Hell, is that a diaper?”

  Angus had tried not to look at the trap because Lund was heading right for it. Once it was under the full light of day it hadn’t look very good. Under the weight of the sawdust spread over it, the canvas had sagged slightly into the hole beneath. Earlier, waiting, Angus had revised his dad’s original approach, replacing the four tires that anchored the corners with four random pieces of heavy junk, each one different. But a bear, a deer, any animal you were trying to pit trap, would have sensed it by now and changed paths. But his dad had been right about Boog Lund, a man so full of himself, so eager to intimidate Beavers, that he had never even noticed.

  “You folks are gonna want to reconsider all this trouble you’ve been causing.” He had looked at Angus. “Hotshot, you didn’t listen to me, did you?”

  His next step had been the one. The sawdust puffed. The canvas buckled. The anchors at the corners slid. Lund’s arms had wheeled desperately as he tilted in. Then the high current in the pipe caught his leading foot and flipped him headfirst. He was gone in an instant. There was no sound then except the water in the pipe, washing him down beneath the scrap yard, a hundred yards, two hundred yards. Ten seconds later, there he went, spinning out the pipe into the meadow. But Angus, hearing no celebration, had looked over and seen his dad had missed it. He had touched the leathery side of his dad’s neck. He had lifted the stranded bones of his dad’s wrist. He was gone.

  Now Angus stood stunned as the wet black head of a girl popped from the flood. Who was that? Where had she come from? He watched her swim into the eddy under the pipe. Then she was snatching out Boog Lund’s huge wilted mass, beaching him on a spit of high ground below the road. She rolled him over on his back. No doubt what Angus saw next: she robbed him. She took his keys. She took his wallet. She took his gun.

  Then more. Far across the flooded meadow a man fired a pistol at the girl, then stumbled into the flood and began swimming like a house cat. The girl ignored him. She climbed to the road. She had Lund’s pistol and his wallet on its chain. She aimed her hand. Lund’s Silverado flashed and chirped. She was going to steal it. Then she saw something upstream and she began to run toward the car. An officer in a brown Bad Axe uniform sloshed through slow water at the upstream end of the meadow. The wet uniform clung to a woman’s shape following the fence line toward the road.

  Brandy had appeared beside Angus. She was looking at their dad. No strength left, Angus put his arm across his sister’s quaking shoulders.

  67

  The sheriff had crossed the flooded meadow to the junkyard side. But still there was nothing she could do about what was happening too far in front of her. She could be glad that the girl was alive. She could pray that Pepper Greengrass would be safe and not get far before someone found her and helped her. That was it.

  The girl had Boog Lund’s keys, for sure. His Silverado flashed and beeped as she loped toward it. The gun in her hand had to be Lund’s too. That was his wallet hanging from the chain looped around her elbow. With the sheriff running but still too far away, the girl hopped in. The engine roared. She plowed Lund’s truck through the stream coming down the west end of Lost Hollow Road and was gone.

  Now she assessed as she limped along. Lund was somewhere. And that was the old Rhinegold Dairy truck that plowed snow at Pinky Clausen’s yesterday, so Jerrold Mickelson was here somewhere too.

  So was Angus Beavers. She still wasn’t sure if he was with or against her.

  And she could see Baron Ripp. He was thrashing in the flood, trying to get across.

  She drew her weapon. She did not expect Mickelson to be in his truck. He was not. The door of Beavers’s house was open. She headed that way behind the Ruger.

/>   Inside, the house smelled of spilled gas. That woodstove glowed and snapped. With her boot, she shut its iron mouth. This place was going to go up. Now here was Mickelson in the hallway, an additional hole through his forehead. She left him there, checked the bedrooms, no one else.

  She returned to Mickelson. She stared . . . and blinked . . . and stared. It looked like her zombie fantasies, blowing brains out in her imagination, but no, this was real. His brains were blown backward, a mass of gray-pink gelatin dissolving in a puddle of gas. She stared for a moment into his weirdly pale eyes, like old ice.

  She backed out. She came off the porch scanning the scrap yard above and saw Lyman Beavers still sitting mostly naked in a lawn chair and his two kids, Angus and Brandy, sitting in the mud beside him, Angus with his arm around the girl. Ahead of them was a gaping hole in the ground. She was heading toward them when she heard Ripp scream for help.

  She saw him downstream of a disgorging culvert, about a hundred feet out, clinging to the tire of an upside-down hay wagon that bobbed ponderously downstream. He had an armpit hooked over the tire. The tire kept spinning out beneath him. He screamed and waved with a big silver handgun.

  She made hand signs: throw the gun in the water.

  He didn’t.

  She yelled, “Throw it! If you want help, throw it away!”

  That wagon tire kept rotating beneath his armpit. It kept dunking him. He held on to the gun. Then the tire peeled off the wheel. Ripp gargled a shriek of panic. He went under.

  Shit. She stripped her duty belt as she skidded down off the road. She shucked her boots and socks on a lump of high ground beneath the spewing culvert. She tore out of her heavy sopping shirt. Like the old Mighty Heidi White at a bonfire on the Kickapoo, she sprinted at a downstream angle until the water cut her stride. Then she dived.

  She had no idea where Ripp was until she was swept over the blur of him on the bottom. Through the churning murk she saw his white skin and the filigree on his cartwheeling boots. She caught one boot. It came off in her grip. But the tug bobbed him up. She caught him around the neck, let the flow lift them, and began to scissor-kick out of the current.

  As they caught the eddy, things slowed down, and she wasn’t surprised when he tried to thrash a shooting angle on her head. She got one foot on the bottom. She grabbed an ear and shoved his head under. She held it under. She felt him go boneless. She lifted her foot and collected him by the neck again and stroked through a deep slow eddy back toward the patch of high ground under where the culvert spilled out. Again one foot touched bottom. Then the other. She wrenched the big silver automatic from his hand. She threw it up where her belt and boots were. She dragged Baron Ripp ashore. She sank to her knees, shaking and breathless.

  “What a hero you are,” said Boog Lund behind her.

  68

  He loomed unsteadily, straddling her discarded gear. He looked soggy and feeble and out of his mind, huffing and spitting, snot trailing from his nose. He staggered two steps back and tipped forward over his huge gut. He snagged her duty belt, unsnapped her Ruger. He leveled it at her. Then he staggered three steps to his right and picked up Ripp’s gun. He popped the magazine and looked at it. He replaced it and fired once into the air. The explosion echoed through the hollow.

  “So, here’s what happened,” he slurred.

  He looked at the two weapons as if to keep them straight.

  “You shot Rippy.”

  He tilted his big raw head, confirmed it was the sheriff’s service pistol in his right hand. He was going to shoot Ripp with that one. Ripp lay gasping, barely conscious.

  “The problem being, of course, that Rippy shot you too.”

  He squinted down his shaking left arm at Ripp’s showboat silver gun. She would get her bullet from that. He aimed it at her. But he was unsteady on the saturated ground where he stood. His bootless heel sunk beneath his weight. Feebly, very carefully, he began to change his footing. While he tried to get satisfied, the sheriff searched for the energy to charge him. Five or six steps across the mud seemed like so far away. She had to look down to see if she was standing up or not. She was not.

  She had just gotten off both knees onto one knee, had one bare foot planted, was understanding she wouldn’t make it but was forcing herself to try, when behind Lund out of that vomiting pipe shot a tangle of black sticks and then Angus Beavers on his back. He flew smoothly for one second. Then he corkscrewed with the shattering water. His hands pinned something narrow and rust red against his chest.

  The splash distracted Lund. He turned. But Angus Beavers was well beneath the surface. Black sticks floated where he had gone under. There was nothing for Lund to see, so he went back to work on his footing. He didn’t quite have his balance yet. Now hearing distant sirens, he took his time to gloat a little.

  “I could have stopped the whole thing, if only I had gotten here earlier. It’s a shame. Hell, look at me. I had to fish you out half dead but anyway you shot him while he lay there helpless on his ugly face. Like folks are starting to say, you seem to have your issues. But anyway, I did my best.”

  “You covered up a murder.”

  “Says who? If it’s a Beavers telling the story, that worm won’t fish.”

  He raised Ripp’s gun to shoot her first.

  “I just wish to hell I could have saved such a fine young officer as yourself—”

  A new splash turned him. Angus Beavers brandished an iron fence post as he exploded from the water. His speed was almost invisible, three hard strides, his big hands loading a swing as he covered the twenty feet to Lund. A firearm in each hand, Lund tried to respond, but he could do nothing before the uppercutting fence post caught him in the ribs with a crackling thump. It was a sound of ruination, final. The guns fell to the mud. Lund collapsed. Angus Beavers flung the post toward the flood and it splashed into the shallows. He sank to his knees. He dropped his head between his heaving shoulders.

  Fighting for balance, the sheriff came to her feet. She collected the weapons. She stood over Lund, wondering what she needed to do. His face was in a soupy swirl of dead meadow grass, his lips releasing pink bubbles. She listened to the sirens getting closer. She turned to evaluate Baron Ripp and got one more shock.

  Ripp was on his feet. He held the fence post that Angus Beavers had flung in his direction. The seconds slowed into a gluey, dreamlike progression. The man who had cut his name into Sophie Ringensetter’s flesh and bought Pepper Greengrass like an animal was twenty feet away, armed with a fence post, stalking toward her. This made no sense, because when she looked down to check—yes, she had not one but two firearms trained on him. Baron Ripp was bringing a fence post to a gunfight. Between his chinstrap sideburns, his small gray teeth fit together in a lurid grin.

  “Go on, Dairy Queen. Kill me if you think you can.”

  She found herself flushed with eerie calm. For how long had she ached to shoot a bad man through his filthy brain? Time slowed even more. Baron Ripp was grinning, like he thought he would be the one to close the deal.

  “Even though I could tell you some shit,” he offered.

  He kept coming. A fence post against two firearms. “Some shit about your past, Dairy Queen, that if you killed me you might never know.” He thought he could get close enough. She leveled both weapons at his center mass. Ripp kept talking.

  “But go ahead and kill me if you can. I ain’t worth the pants I’m wearing. I know it. But be it known that I sure did get some fine young ass before I went.”

  He thought he could con her into distraction. He took another step. She took one step back. “Like you could tell me what?”

  “Whiz-Bangs.”

  That startled her. The rounds that went with her dad’s Colt revolver, Whiz-Bang brand .22 shells, had disappeared when the gun did. But Ripp knew Mertz and Mertz knew these details.

  “What about Whiz-Bangs?”

  “I know who stole your dad’s old Colt and tried to sell it, Whiz-Bangs and all.”

 
“Who?”

  He laughed. “Slips my mind at the moment.” He took another step toward her. She stepped back. “Now, I could remember some shit, though. Oh, Miss Dairy Queen, yes, I could.”

  “Like what—that you didn’t just hear from Mertz?”

  “Like every cow you folks had was named from that English faggot. Shakespeare.”

  This startled her again. It was true. “You never worked for us.”

  “I drove your cattle to Sunnyfield for rendering. Same fella who had that gun, working there at the time, he named every one of them bossies getting off the truck. He thought it was funny as hell.”

  “Who?”

  “The name just keeps slipping my mind.” He took another step, grinning. “But I can tell you another thing this fella had for sale that I’m gonna bet he had ripped off of your dad. Prove I know what I’m saying.”

  She wasn’t backing up anymore. Nothing had been stolen, nothing had been missing aside from the gun. She lowered Ripp’s weapon and steadied the Ruger. He was eight feet away, nearly close enough to reach her with the post.

  “You’re a liar. You don’t know anything.”

  “Then I guess you won’t know nothing neither.”

  He lunged and swung. As she ducked the lashing post, she guided her aim down his chest through his groin to his leading knee—pulled and grazed him—pulled again—and blew his leg apart.

  * * *

  Ripp screamed. Sirens wailed in close. She stepped away. She put her shirt back on, her radio and badge, she strapped her duty belt back on, holstered her gun. She knocked out Ripp’s clip and stuck that gun in the baggy side pocket of her wet pants. She unclipped her handcuffs. She circled behind Angus Beavers. He sat with his head hanging and shoulders heaving. She cuffed him.