These Heroic, Happy Dead

by Luke Mogelson

  “So now I have to hear it from Richie too?” he said.

  —

  I don’t drive to Collinsville. I sit in Sal’s truck on the wharf until the sun goes down, and then I sneak back to the harbor. Nothing moves in the cabin of the Barbara; no doubt Sal is dozing. I get aboard as quietly as possible, and, as quietly as possible, I open the hatch and ease into the hole.

  I have to crouch there, in two inches of bloody water, for nearly an hour before the engine rumbles on. When we pass the seawall, Sal turns west, toward the Golden Gate. Soon the hull lifts and slaps in the rough confluence where the breakers meet the bay. The engine dies, and I climb onto the deck.

  The bridge is not very far behind us, its towers red in the upturned lamps. Still, almost right away, I can feel it: how hard the ebb is ripping—the profound tow of all those rivers, deltas, estuaries forcing through the narrow gap between the headlands and Fort Point.

  The bridge recedes. Within minutes we are carried past Bonita Cove, the lighthouse, into the Pacific. I go inside to tell Sal to head back toward the mouth. The carpet is rolled up, the floor hatch to the engine room propped open. Sal squats down there with a penlight in his teeth, already wearing his orange survival suit. I catch him just as he is fitting an Allen wrench into the drainage plug’s hexagonal groove.

  “Sal,” I say.

  He looks up, shining the light in my face. I am about to tell him to hold on, wait a second, when he torques the wrench and a jet of water blasts the plug out of the floor.

  —

  It takes a while for the engine room to flood. Sal won’t talk to me. (All he says is, “Aren’t you supposed to be in Collinsville?”) When the sea bubbles like a spring into the cabin, he radios the Coast Guard. By then, the bridge is just a pulsing tendril about to snap somewhere between San Francisco and Marin. The lighthouse blinks, but we are well beyond the reach of its beam. I follow Sal to the deck. Eventually, like that, the cabin lurches under, pulling the bow down behind it. Then we are floating.

  “Stay close,” Sal says.

  The suits keep us buoyant and dry and not quite freezing. The tide, though, is irresistible, and soon I lose sight of Sal. I look around. A faint bonfire smolders on Baker Beach. I yell Sal’s name, but he doesn’t answer. I yell louder. There is only the static of the surf on the rocks.

  At some point a flare drags a bright tail into the night. It describes a steep arc and at its zenith bursts into a rain of electric color. For a few moments, it lights everything.

  They were dogging bear again. It was the third night in as many weeks he’d been woken by the bawling hounds. Tom Mayeaux listened, wishing them to turn. When they didn’t—when, instead, there came the unmistakable din of the pack baying their quarry down the ridge, straight onto Tucker land—he got up, pulled on his boots, and lumbered from the bed-and-toilet end of his Airstream to the dinette-and-stove end. The .30-.30 leaned beside the door. Mayeaux slung it on his shoulder and stepped into the rain.

  He’d left the flatbed window down. The seat’s non-upholstered foam, absorbent as a sponge, emptied when he sat on it. By the time he reached the wetlands, it looked like he had pissed himself. Mayeaux turned off the engine and could hear, away up on the dark ridge, the four-wheelers revving on the fire road, the dogs that they pursued lining out for Gypsum Creek. He walked into the trees.

  For a while, the canopy did not admit the rain. But soon that tightly knitted weft thinned to open sky. The ground began to squish. Back when Nate Tucker first hired Mayeaux to help out with the hogs, this clearing had been a meadow, all deer brush and pussy tow. Now it was marsh. If the beavers kept it up, they’d soon have themselves a lake. Used to be, Nate and Tom would wade out in the cattails, snipe those bastards all day long. That—beaver culling—was another thing Hannah put an end to.

  The hounds had splashed through the mud and sedge to an elevated hummock, where they surrounded a skinny pine, snapping teeth and yowling. Up in the tree, the spooked black bear hugged trunk. Mayeaux found some cover downwind in the grass. He eased into the prone and drew a bead on what seemed to him the lead dog: a slobbering Plott in a thick steel choke collar. He waited, getting rained on.

  When at last the poachers caught up, the weather had moved; a break in the clouds allowed some starlight on the scene. Sure enough, it was Dave Campbell and Leo DeMint.

  Mayeaux watched them slosh up to the dogs. DeMint produced a Magnum from his belt and held it on the bruin while Campbell dragged the hounds one at a time to the far slope of the hummock. When he returned from tying up the last of the pack, the two men stood together, considering their game. It was not much of a trophy, still just a yearling—ears laid back in terror, hackles sunk like nails in the rough bark of the pine. Nonetheless, DeMint steadied the Mag and put a bullet through its skull. The bruin tumbled down, snapping brittle branches, landing with a thud. Leo rolled it over and Dave brought out from his ruck the block and tackle.

  —

  The next morning he woke to an angry fist hammering the Airstream. It was Saturday. If Hannah wanted to forgo the courtesy of waiting until the afternoon to upbraid him, Mayeaux would forgo the courtesy of putting on his pants. He was about to open the door, the remnants of an a.m. chubby still nudging at his skivvies, when he recalled his teeth, lunged back to the bed-and-toilet end, plucked them dripping from the mason jar, and jammed them in his mouth.

  Hannah Tucker stood beside the flatbed.

  “Barn on fire?” asked Mayeaux.

  “Are you going to stand there and tell me you didn’t hear it?” Hannah said.

  She was old enough to be his mother. All the same: that figure. Today it was concealed under an oversize sweater. When she gathered up her graying hair to snap a rubber band from her wrist onto a ponytail, she had first to raise her hand and let the baggy sleeve slink down. Mayeaux’s near nakedness hadn’t fazed her in the least.

  “Heard what?” he said.

  Hannah put her foot on the bumper of the flatbed. The way she did it seemed intended to remind him whose it was.

  “Hounds? A gunshot? But let me guess: you slept through that too.”

  Mayeaux sat down in the doorway, looking at his dirty socks. His mouth felt full. He jiggled the top dentures with his thumb. Suddenly, he missed his pants.

  “Negligent discharge, probably,” he said. “You know these bear guys. They’re just out to grabass, exercise the pups, more than really hunt.”

  “They can grabass all they want. Grabass, circle jerk, hump the pups. They can hump each other—on someone else’s land.” Hannah shook her head. “It’s no hunter needs to tree his game.”

  “Not much sport in it,” Tom agreed.

  “That shot was near the wetlands. If they got one, maybe they field dressed it. Why don’t you go have a look? See if you can find some guts.”

  “Sure, Hannah.”

  “Before the critters get to it.”

  “I’ll go today.”

  Hannah nodded and turned to head back toward the house.

  “First, though,” Mayeaux called after her, “I thought we could discuss the hogs.” He knew it was bad timing. But with Hannah, there was no good time when it came to talking hogs.

  She kept walking. “Just see if you can find some guts.”

  —

  The Tucker house stood at the top of a wide grassy slope. At the bottom of the slope, shaded by a line of aspen, stood the disused barn and sty. The sty consisted of a cement-floored pig hutch, with steel pipe partitions, and an outdoor pen. There, an old boar and two sows still liked to root and wallow. Mayeaux shoveled the bear organs from a wheelbarrow to the slop trough. He watched them come and get it. The windpipe and gullet, the genitals, anus, heart, and lungs—them hogs snarfed up the whole fly-swarmed anatomy like it was theirs, they needed it back.

  God, Tom loved them. Year after year, with a couple others, they’d farrowed two healthy litters each. That was sixty-something shoats to fatten, butcher, and string up in the smokehouse
with hickory and beech. A profitable operation—until Nate died and Hannah decided it felt “wrong” to keep it going. A week after the funeral, she’d told Mayeaux to slaughter all their breeding stock: she was finished raising hogs. Appalled, Mayeaux had waited until Hannah came down to the sty, then staved in the first sow’s head with the blunt end of a poleax. Just brained her.

  “Jesus!” Hannah had cried, and before she could exclaim again Mayeaux’d killed in identical fashion the next one in line.

  That did. She let him keep the others.

  After inhaling the bruin innards, the boar shit all over. Mayeaux took the shovel. It was a pity, wasting such high-grade manure on the grass.

  “Good as it stinks,” Nate Tucker used to say.

  They had sold it by the truckload to half the farms in Plumas.

  —

  He was on the tractor, turning up the slope from the barn, when Hannah got back from town. She idled the Suburban, rolled down her window, and yelled. Mayeaux pulled alongside her, pointing at his ear.

  “What are you doing?” Hannah repeated.

  “Mowing.”

  “Did you have a look?”

  Mayeaux nodded.

  “And?”

  “All I seen was beavers.”

  Unamused, Hannah told him, “I went to the sheriff’s. I talked to Henry Parson.”

  “Did, did you?”

  “He said he’d ask around.”

  Mayeaux leaned over on the tractor seat and spat. “Surprised he didn’t want to dust the woods for prints.”

  Henry was no friend of his. The day of the accident, then–Deputy Parson had driven out to the property and asked Mayeaux to show him exactly where he’d been when Nate got tangled up. He’d crossed the muddy pen himself and stood inside the hutch, squinting through the door.

  “Say you couldn’t see him?” he’d asked, pointing at the bloodied mower. When Mayeaux explained that the door had not been open, Henry actually grabbed the loop of bailing wire that functioned as its latch and pulled it shut. There’d ensued some awkward seconds, then, as the door creaked back on its own. Henry, as if he’d just sleuthed out the smoking gun, made a show of studying the unplumb hinges until Tom said, “You have to hook this one, Deputy,” and closed it again, this time catching the wire on a bent nail that protruded from the jamb.

  Henry Parson nodded. “You were in the service, is that what I heard?”

  “Yes.”

  “What branch?”

  “Army.”

  “I was in the service,” Henry said. “Air force. It was peacetime. I was in logistics.”

  To this, Mayeaux could not think of anything to say.

  Henry shrugged. “Anyway. You used to run around with Dave Campbell?”

  “I ain’t seen Dave for a while.”

  “Ain’t you?” Henry said, and Mayeaux was unsure whether he was consciously mocking his accent or unconsciously echoing it. “Where you from?” Henry asked. “Originally, I mean.”

  Mayeaux told him. The deputy nodded as if it confirmed some niggling suspicion of his. He unlatched the door and gazed out at the tractor again.

  “Goddamn tragedy,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” said Mayeaux.

  —

  Dave Campbell called what he lived in a mobile home. If you wanted to ruffle Dave’s feathers, you called it a trailer. Mayeaux and Campbell had disagreed on this point many, many times. Usually, Campbell’s argument hewed to specs. His rig measured nearly seventy feet—twice the length of Mayeaux’s Airstream. Plus it had no wheels. Plus double-pane windows on all four sides.

  Mayeaux’s response: Didn’t one side have a hitch?

  He parked down the road and snuck around the back. A garden hose snaked past chain-link kennels and tarp-covered quads. Mayeaux followed it. The hose led to a steel tub covered with a sheet of plywood. Inside the tub, fascia scraped to silky hide, the young bear’s pelt in a bath of saltwater and alum.

  A light flashed on. Behind him, someone told Mayeaux to put them up.

  Mayeaux let down the plywood and raised his arms. He turned around. Dave Campbell had the Magnum trained on him.

  Squinting at Mayeaux, Dave lowered the gun.

  “Tommy?” he said.

  —

  In the den, Leo DeMint sat on the sofa and a big girl Mayeaux didn’t recognize sat beside him, one fishnetted hock draped on his knee, little flesh diamonds pushing through the webbing like a string-tied ham. A second girl, in dirty white jeans and a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt, sat sideways in the La-Z-Boy. When Campbell rapped her feet, she groaned, got up, and let him take her spot. Then she fell onto his lap.

  Dave Campbell wore a camouflage hat with a duct-taped buckle and a worn-out bill. His four blueticks lay on the carpet, staring up at Tom and panting. Campbell and DeMint, the girls—they all had the skin, the teeth, the nails, the eyes.

  “Who is he?” asked the girl in the Minnie Mouse sweatshirt, Campbell’s girl.

  Campbell ignored her. “So, what, you’re here to party?” he asked Mayeaux.

  “If he is, I’m leaving,” DeMint said. “You know how Tommy gets.”

  “How does he get?” asked Campbell’s girl.

  “Tell her, Tommy,” said DeMint.

  Mayeaux shook his head. “You need a new place to hunt,” he said to Dave.

  “I don’t believe it,” DeMint said. “She sent him here to set us straight.”

  “You already got one,” Mayeaux said.

  “That’s Leo’s,” Campbell said.

  “Yeah,” said the girl on the couch, the big girl, Leo’s girl. “That’s Leo’s.”

  “I don’t like him,” Campbell’s girl said.

  Dave cupped her jaw with one hand and squeezed, making fish lips. “Shhh,” he said, and with his other hand pressed a finger to the lips.

  “She went to the sheriff,” Mayeaux said.

  Campbell and DeMint exchanged a look.

  “Henry?” Campbell said.

  “Sure it weren’t a social call?” DeMint said.

  “Social,” laughed Dave.

  “Who’s Henry?” asked the girl.

  Campbell glared at her, no longer laughing. He shoved her to the floor.

  “Fuck I do?” she said.

  “Just keep off her place,” said Mayeaux.

  “Or what?” said DeMint.

  “Yeah, or what?” said DeMint’s girl.

  Campbell yawned. “Everybody relax.”

  “We’re not the ones who need to relax,” the girl on the floor said. “Don’t tell us to relax.”

  Mayeaux made to leave. Before he got very far, DeMint called to him. “What’s it you do up there, anyway, now you don’t got no hogs to stick?”

  The big girl chortled.

  “Looks like you’re the hog sticker,” Mayeaux said on his way out.

  —

  One evening in November the sky turned green instead of gray. A charged current rocked the Airstream on its blocks. Through the window, Mayeaux saw bats flopping through the raving air, then realized they were shingles peeling off the outhouse roof. He hustled to the flatbed and headed for Hannah’s. An uprooted sapling lodged into the grille. It flipped onto the hood and continued down the drive—a rabid monster, many-legged and on the run.

  A patrol car was parked next to the Suburban. Mayeaux reached the front door just as Henry Parson opened it.

  He was not in uniform. He wore blue jeans and a flannel, wool socks, no shoes.

  “Where’s your slicker?” Henry said. He turned and hollered toward the kitchen: “Hannah! Tom’s here! Got a towel or something for him?”

  Mayeaux hadn’t been inside since Nate died. He’d forgotten how much house it was. The high, slanted ceiling with its exposed cedar beams; the two-story window that looked onto the ridge. Flames popped in a gaping fieldstone fireplace. Henry held the poker in his hand.

  Hannah came into the living room with two steaming mugs. She gave one to Henry, looked at Tom. “You’re drip
ping on the floor,” she said.

  “Got a towel or something?” Henry said.

  “I’m all right,” said Mayeaux.

  “Bull,” Henry said. “Hannah, for Christ’s sake, would you get the kid a towel?”

  Mayeaux watched in amazement as Hannah went down the hall. He’d never seen her bossed like that.

  Henry drifted to the fire. He lifted the tea bag from his mug and swung it by the string into the flames.

  Mayeaux listened to it hiss. Soon as he’d entered he’d felt a difference in the room—something other than the sheriff. Now he realized: Nate’s deer mounts were gone. He’d had half a dozen buck heads on the walls. Hannah had removed them.

  “Glad I was able to help, by the way,” Henry Parson said. “I want you to feel like you can always come to me for that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Them poachers,” Henry said.

  “You got them?”

  “Got them? No. I just sort of put the word out. It wasn’t gonna stand.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Mayeaux.

  Henry stabbed the logs. He set his mug on the mantel, leaned the poker on the stones, and arranged himself into a model of reproof. “What’s with the tone, son?” he said.

  Mayeaux shrugged. “No tone.”

  Lightning flashed and for a moment the huge black window came to life with a lurid ghost country that smoldered for a while on the liquid pane.

  Henry laughed. “What in the hell is that woman doing?”

  “I’m going,” said Mayeaux.

  “In this? At least dry out first.” Henry scowled and turned back toward the hall. “Hannah! Still waitin’ on that towel!”

  —

  The next morning Mayeaux hiked into the woods, climbing over jacksawed pines, following the roar of flooded Gypsum Creek. At the wetlands, he found the dams in disarray, their mud-mortared logs scattered in the marsh. He passed a blasted redwood scarred by strips of blown-out bark, pale cambium and heartwood spilling from its ruined trunk. Eventually, he reached the sheltered glade where he and Campbell used to grow. The black hoses still lay in the weeds, old beer cans and broken bottles, the lawn chair Dave used to sit and smoke in. Roughly twenty plants they’d had—a good sixty pounds a run. Mayeaux crossed the glade. From where he stood, through the brush, he could see the barn, the slope, the house, the sty.