Hunter's Moon Read online

  CHUCK

  LOGAN

  HUNTER’S

  MOON

  For Sylvia Siegrist Logan

  Contents

  1 The friends of Harry Griffin never fell off…

  1

  2 Harry allowed himself a quiet hour to…

  4

  3 Harry called it…

  7

  4 The radio announcer crooned his signature…

  11

  5 “C’mon,” said Bud, grinning for the first…

  21

  6 Six apartments the size of Harry’s would fit…

  23

  7 Jesse plus one hour and counting: the raw…

  33

  8 Back inside the lodge, Bud put on the…

  42

  9 Harry woke up with a bad case of nerves…

  51

  10 The clean slice of skits cut through the…

  58

  11 There was time.

  64

  12 Panic played its clumsy slow-motion joke…

  71

  13 Eight A.M. in Maston County. The low…

  73

  14 Laconic after-the-fact police traffic droned…

  82

  15 Maston County was governed from a one…

  93

  16 Bud wasn’t fine.

  105

  17 Jerry, apparently under orders not to discuss…

  108

  18 Flurries blew across Holman Field in St.

  Paul…

  113

  19 Harry insisted that Randall drive him home. 118

  20 Mistake, all the lawyers in town, Bud call… 127

  21 The Jack-in-the-box had slanted eyes and… 131

  22 So how serious are you, man—St. Paul…… 134

  23 Six pillows propped Bud up in the hospital…

  137

  24 “Circle the wagons, the bitch is on a rampage…

  141

  25 Harry left his Honda Civic parked illegally…

  148

  26 The storm dumped on St. Paul and it was… 154

  27 With Bud under wraps, he was free.

  158

  28 Harry wheeled into the lodge drive and Jay…

  161

  167

  29 On Tuesday morning fog lay thick on…

  30 They’d come after him now. Good. Get it… 177

  31 The next morning it was like a basement… 185

  32 Gunshots woke Harry at dawn. He rolled… 191

  33 Outside, some comedian had pasted a…

  201

  34 Once Harry got past the blood bruise on… 207

  35 Harry, in Bud’s baggy terrycloth robe…

  212

  36 Fifteen minutes, later, a blue Ford Escort—muffler…

  218

  37 He arrived early and walked along the…

  222

  38 Take a chance.

  226

  230

  39 Harry dressed in the predawn dark, made…

  40 Stanley High School was near the hospital… 239

  41 Karson’s station wagon was parked in the… 248

  42 Working on One Day Sober Twice. The… 257

  43 Mitch Hakala steered his scrupulously…

  266

  44 The bewitching hour, when the last light… 271

  45 Harry cleaned the shotgun in front of the… 276

  46 The heat vent was shut off and the cold… 280

  47 Harry grabbed his hunting knife, found a… 286

  48 Broke his fucking nose!

  296

  49 The blue Escort was parked next to the… 304

  50 Must have nodded off when the phone…

  311

  51 Hakala bobsledded his Ford Bronco down…

  321

  52 Tethered goat implies lion.

  323

  53 Ten-fifteen. Bud was late. Harry lit another…

  327

  54 Harry watched Linda drive out of town and…

  333

  55 “Look out,” Harry admonished. “There…

  336

  56 “How about it? One drink to celebrate…

  346

  57 It smelled like a dog had been rolling in… 350

  58 Going south down 61 an adrenaline backfire…

  358

  59 Becky was drawn to Randall and they sat at…

  365

  60 Chato, Arizona, had two gas stations, one… 374

  61 It was last day of hunting season. A stream…

  384

  62 Harry made the drive in Linda’s car but… 397

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Chuck Logan

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The friends of Harry Griffin never fell off the wagon at a decent hour. The phone rang at 3 A.M. and Bud Maston’s 90-proof baritone poured out:

  “Harry? You there, man?”

  “You’re drinking again,” Harry answered, half asleep and fumbling the receiver, and Bud’s reply was drowned in a clatter of truck traffic.

  He focused and asked: “Where are you?”

  “Where the hell do you think? Up north in a phone booth. On the highway.”

  “Ten years…” Harry said to the dark, very calm now, because he could taste Jack Daniel’s ooze in Bud’s voice and smell it in the nightcrawlers of sweat that wormed through his own chest.

  Bud giggled. “Fuck Minnesota Harry. I wanna talk to Detroit Harry.”

  “Wonderful, you blew ten years of sobriety,” said Harry.

  “Don’t pull that crap. I love you, man…”

  Out there, in the drunken night, the phone slammed down and the line went dead. Harry exhaled, hung up the receiver, and rubbed his eyes; then he dropped his feet to the floor and pushed off the bed. He wandered over to the window and stared out into the dark.

  His high-rise studio faced east from downtown St. Paul and he could see the new moon and a solitary pair of headlights traveling the cold ribbon of Interstate 94. It was a Thursday morning, the first week in November, and he and Bud hadn’t spoken in a year.

  Since Bud had his breakdown.

  And finally Harry was wide awake in the middle of the 2 / CHUCK LOGAN

  night with a parched knot in his throat; angry at Bud’s reminder that the edge was always right there, just a drink away. So he tried to be reasonable and told himself, Well, shit, there were rules. And even though he hadn’t been to a meeting in a long time, the old AA reflexes kicked in; because this was your basic scream for help.

  He punched on the bedside light, got his phone directory, and paged to the number that he had never called, which was an area code 218 up in the North Woods on the North Shore with the bears and the moose and the timber wolves— Goddamnit, Bud, it’s three in the fucking morning and we’re way too old for this shit!—He stabbed the buttons and waited. A busy signal droned in the Maston family lodge in Stanley, Minnesota. The last he’d heard, Bud lived with a woman up there.

  He hung up the phone and thought, Just as well: drunks were like terrorists. You didn’t negotiate with them when they were using.

  You were supposed to let it go…

  He reached for the pack of cigarettes next to the lamp, debated, put them down, killed the light, and climbed back in bed. But he was pissed now and he tossed in the covers until he curled up on a shallow ledge of sleep.

  When the phone rang the next time, he had to pick it up because that was what happened in the dream.

  “Harry, buy a suit,” said his mother. He couldn’t see her in the dream but he could feel her all around him and she sent mixed messages; she’d wanted him to be an ar
tist but she’d sent him to military school and she’d even read The Iliad to him while he paddled in her warm amniotic sea. Now, as then, her voice arched with nervous hope, softly protective and fragile as a wishbone.

  “Try on this jacket,” she said. The jacket was black, double-breasted, and when he slipped it on, it fit him perfectly. A carnation was curled in the lapel, suggesting a wedding or a funeral.

  Damn it.

  Heart thumping, he swam from the tangle of sweaty sheets and his hand jerked automatically for the cigarettes. He lit an HUNTER’S MOON / 3

  American Spirit and the smoke came at his eyes. Mom had been dead for more than thirty years, so why in the hell did he have to buy a suit?

  Gradually, the familiar bite of tobacco laced up his discipline.

  With a grim smile, he shooed the nightcrawlers from his bed and stubbed out the cigarette and wiped the sweat off his face. Nights like this were the reason he lived alone.

  He had stolen an undisturbed hour of sleep when the phone rang again, for real. He reached for it, resigned: shit comes in threes.

  “I got married three weeks ago,” said Bud in a glum voice.

  “Say again?” Harry sat up.

  “I need something from you,” said Bud.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I’m having a stand-up ceremony in town next month. The works.”

  His voice was exhausted but steadier now. “I need you to hold the ring. You know, best man—”

  “Jesus, Bud…”

  “The present I want from you is…you gotta go hunting with me and my wife’s kid this weekend.”

  “You don’t talk to me for a year and you call shitfaced in the middle of the night—”

  “You gotta,” Bud insisted.

  “Bullshit, I don’t gotta do anything.”

  Bud mumbled, “Look, I shouldn’t have to beg…”

  So the big debt was being called in. So it was duty. “Christ, I haven’t been hunting in—”

  “Since before the army, I know,” said Bud.

  “I have to work. I don’t have a rifle,” said Harry.

  “It’s all taken care of. All you need is a deer license for zone one.

  I already called Randall. He’s getting a rifle ready for you…”

  “You didn’t bug Randall at three in the morning?” Randall was as close as Harry came to having a family.

  “Look, I called Randall, okay? I already bought you stuff to wear.

  And I called Tommy over at the paper. You have the time off—”

  4 / CHUCK LOGAN

  “Don’t go pulling strings, goddammit,” Harry muttered. Tommy was Thomas Riker, a distant presence seen on elevators who was the publisher of the paper where Harry worked as an artist. Bud rubbed elbows with Riker at the Athletic Club before he took his belly flop off the top of the social ladder.

  “Let’s just do it. I’m driving down tonight. I’ll pick you up, ten o’clock, Friday morning,” said Bud. The phone clicked—and that was that.

  Harry lit another cigarette and watched flurries dot an ice-water dawn.

  Presumably, Bud’s “Detroit Harry” crack was supposed to evoke Harry’s gloriously stupid youth in less tranquil places than St. Paul and provide a dash of northwoods brio to prod him for the hunt.

  But that wasn’t it. Bud had coined the Detroit Harry line originally to convey a certain audacious style of stepping in.

  Harry spread his fingers and drew them in a gentle snare around the moment and weighed it in his palm. The subtle gesture disappeared in lines of force as he made a fist.

  He knew a lot of people and as they grew older and paired off and had kids and hunkered deeper into their lives, they didn’t invite him to dinner or to their parties.

  They only called him when they were in trouble.

  2

  Harry allowed himself a quiet hour to make coffee and shower before he called Tim Randall. “So Bud Maston’s back,”

  Randall observed in a bemused voice.

  “He said he called you,” said Harry.

  “Last night. He’s in a manic phase. Married. Full of plans. Plans to open a fishing lodge in the spring. Said he was curious about the current state of your gun phobia. Whether you could handle knocking down a big deer.”

  “He sounded to me like an experiment where all the mice got out,”

  said Harry.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 5

  “You guys,” said Dorothy Houston, coming on an extension.

  “Maybe he fell in love. There’s this thing called romance.”

  “Check it out,” said Harry dubiously. “Right in Webster’s. One definition of romance is ‘doomed to failure.’”

  “We all feel bad about what happened last year, Harry. Maybe he’s trying to turn that around,” said Dorothy.

  Harry pictured them, two lean redheads, sitting in the kitchen of the big house on River Road that overlooked the Mississippi. “We’ll see,” he said.

  “So you’re going?” asked Randall.

  “Have to. He’s calling in his chits,” said Harry.

  “I have some errands and Tim’s got a big old rifle ready for you.

  We’ll drop by,” said Dorothy.

  Dorothy smiled when Harry opened the door. Randall stood behind her with a cased rifle under his arm.

  She was four years older than Harry, which put her closer to fifty than to forty. Her prettiness had faded, but not her alert green eyes, or her slender, upright figure, or her long, fiery hair. A wrenching scar ripped the left corner of her smile and puckered up her cheek to her eye.

  Colonel Randall remained gaunt and powerful at sixty-three and the spooky shadow of a smile that flickered through chinks in his dignified bearing was the afterburn of a life spent attracting lightning bolts. He wrote history in his retirement from government service.

  Harry kissed Dorothy’s savaged cheek. He loved these people unconditionally.

  “First time he called he was looped. He called again before dawn.

  That time he was playing whirlwind, organizing the hell out of everything,” said Harry.

  “Full of plans,” said Randall. He leaned the rifle against the wall.

  Harry popped his Zippo and lit a cigarette.

  Dorothy, a fierce former Pall Mall addict, shook her head. “You stay in shape and still smoke.”

  6 / CHUCK LOGAN

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Harry.

  Randall snuck a drag from Harry’s cigarette and said, “So Bud took a wife on the sly.”

  Harry nodded. “Big stagy wedding next month for the cameras.

  Christ, I’ll have to buy a suit.”

  Dorothy ruffled Harry’s longish brown hair. “Good idea, you’re the only guy we know who doesn’t own a real suit.” She cocked her head. “Be happy for him. Don’t blow it all out of shape.”

  Skepticism lined Randall’s face. He didn’t share Dorothy’s enthusiasm. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t help him when he came apart. Maybe I can do something this time. I owe the guy. The AA thing. He went the extra mile for me back when,” said Harry.

  “That was years ago. And you quit going to AA,” said Randall.

  “I’m still sober. Bud isn’t.” Then Harry laughed. “Gun phobia, huh? He said that?”

  The faint smile wetted Randall’s lips. “I figured you’d want iron sights.”

  Harry nodded. “Never liked scopes.”

  “It’s an old, long-barreled Remington ought-six. It shoots dead flat at two hundred yards. You still remember how they work?”

  Harry smiled. “Like riding a bike. It’ll come back.”

  They did not undo their coats; just dropping off the rifle. Randall paused. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  Harry shrugged, “Good. Never better.”

  “You feel strong?”

  “Hey, I feel all right, Randall.”

  “Don’t take this wrong, but you and Bud never did fit as close friends.”


  “He lacks discipline,” said Harry, nodding in agreement. “Like his pockets. No bottom. He never learned to set limits.”

  “One question. If you started drinking again and developed a wild hair to go hunting, do you think anybody’d go with you?”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 7

  Harry tried to stare down Randall’s ice-blue eyes. He dropped his gaze first. Randall squeezed his shoulder and said, “Watch yourself, son.”

  3

  Harry called it Das Wortfarben— the word factory.

  Ten years ago, the paper had been a real factory with brawny printers and clattering Linotype machines raising an industrial racket below the newsroom. Now it was mainly phony smiles, the plastic patter of computers, and death by memo.

  Harry’s boss, Arnie Cummings, ran art and photo and was real enough. A fatback Atlanta boy by way of L.A., Arnie looked strangled by his tie as he came across the newsroom and thumped a big knuckle at Harry’s sternum. Hug and push was his style. Harry shoved the hand away.

  “Must be nice to know people,” Arnie drawled. “We’re short-staffed as it is.”

  “Sorry, Arnie, it came up sort of sudden.”

  Arnie glowered and shoved his thumb toward the ceiling in the direction of publisher country. “You got today and tomorrow off.

  And Monday. Next time come to me first, Harry.” He slapped a pay envelope against Harry’s chest. “Walked it through payroll myself.

  Be here on time Tuesday. Whitetail, huh?” He smiled reluctantly.

  “Go on, get outta here.”

  Franky Murphy, a general assignment reporter, fell in step with Harry as he passed the bulletin board.

  “Cummings fucking with you?” asked Murphy. He was a wiry, acne-scarred man with a ’50s flattop and laser-blue eyes behind wire-rim glasses. Not a friend.

  “Nah.” Harry kept moving toward the elevators in the lobby.

  Murphy followed him. Harry pushed the elevator button.

  “So you’re going hunting with Bud Maston, huh?” asked Murphy.

  8 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Harry squinted at him. “How—”

  Murphy shrugged. “He was in town yesterday. Saw him at lunch at McDermit’s. He was asking about you.”

  “Asking you? About me?”

  “Yeah, you know, how you’re doing. Hey, I didn’t know you were in the service with Tim Randall, the writer. That’s kinda interesting.”

  Harry narrowed his eyes. “What the hell was Bud doing in town yesterday?”

  “Wouldn’t say,” Murphy purred, then he cocked an eyebrow, “but he left with Bill Tully. Maybe he’s thinking of dipping his toe back in the political sewer. Hear anything, let me know,” said Murphy.