Hunter's Moon Page 3

  The Jeep churned through a foot of snow, deeper drifts. Visibility cut down to five yards. Then three. Harry couldn’t 18 / CHUCK LOGAN

  see the side of the road. He shifted into low gear and steered inside a set of fading tire tracks. They passed the blur of a general store with a solitary gas pump. “Where’s the turnoff?” Harry asked.

  “Half a mile. There’s a big sign on the right side of the road.”

  “Where the fuck is the side of the road?”

  “Maybe we should put on the tire chains.”

  “We got wheels. We need eyes.”

  “According to the speedometer we still have four-tenths of a mile.

  I clocked it from when we turned off the main highway,” said Bud.

  “If we get stuck, no heroics, we stay with the car,” said Harry, mindful that it had been a long time since he’d been out in this kind of weather. The last ten years he’d mostly watched it gnash its fangs against city windows.

  The Jeep labored at the tight end of a funnel and the tires started to wallow and sideslip. The tracks in the road were blotting out.

  “Shit.” The right wheels churned sideways and they were off the road; the shoulder was snow pudding. The wheels spun, dug a trench, forward motion ceased, and the Jeep stalled.

  Bud pursed his lips. “It’s only a tenth of a mile. We could try to walk in.”

  “No way. We dig it out.”

  Outside took on a whole new meaning: instant disorientation.

  Harry’s breath went small in his chest as the wind wrapped his fancy mountain parka around his spine. They were buried in a snow bank almost up to the passenger door window. Harry dug furiously with his hands to free the exhaust pipe. The cold put needle teeth in the snow. Chastised, he yanked on his gloves. The red flash of the hazard lights revealed how swiftly the snow was filling in their tracks. Take ten steps in any direction and you’d lose sight of the car. Bud carried two shovels. One was a big snow scoop, the other was a surplus army entrenching tool. Harry took the

  HUNTER’S MOON / 19

  bigger shovel and began dragging snow away from the packed wheels. Bud worked next to him with the smaller one. In minutes, Bud was gasping for breath.

  Bud got behind the wheel. Harry tried pushing. The Jeep threw gravel but did not move except to settle deeper.

  “Shit,” yelled Bud. “We almost made it. I’ll bet you we could walk it. We got the gear. We could put on the snowmobile suits. The snowshoes. Jesse’ll say we’re weather wimps.”

  “Uh-uh. Keep digging. Put something under the wheels.”

  “Warm up first,” said Bud. Back inside, they turned on the heater and smoked a cigarette in silence. Harry switched the lights on.

  “Wait,” said Bud. “Turn ’em off again.”

  Harry turned them off. A flicker of light up ahead. A pattern.

  Harry flashed the lights three times. The flicker came back. Three times.

  “The cavalry to the rescue,” said Bud, more animated the closer he got to home.

  The blue monster truck that trundled from the wall of snow had jacked-up suspension, monolith tires, roll bars, decks of running lights, a broad snow blade, and a winch for tusks. Two people sat up high in the brightly lit interior.

  The truck stopped ten feet away and the two people got out. The driver resembled a ponytailed Abe Lincoln come back as a middle-aged Hell’s Angel.

  “That’s Jay Cox,” said Bud. “He’s not as rough as he looks.”

  Harry took in the leather-patched denim and the jut of the scar-lumped face and wasn’t so sure. Cox hailed from the white backwoods tribe that burned leaded gasoline and carried their young full term in a grease pit and delivered them by chain-hoist and suckled them on a sharp stick.

  The girl danced into the headlight like a wild spark from the storm, agile and lanky, and mocking the cold in tight jeans, tennis shoes, and an old army field jacket that wasn’t zipped. Her high youthful breasts swelled against the flimsy protection of a T-shirt and, defiantly hatless, her long black hair whipped around her face like a cap of tarantulas.

  20 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Harry cranked down his window. Cox gave a lupine grin and shouted, “You’re crazy to be driving in this, Mr. Maston. But Jes said you’d make a try, so I ran some tracks down to the main highway a couple of times to give you something to go on.” His eyes were silver-gray and as fixed and shiny as two over-tightened bolts.

  “Thanks, Jay,” said Bud. “Meet Harry Griffin. Jay Cox.”

  Harry hadn’t met a Jay Cox in a while. Guys like him didn’t work at newspapers. The patch on his long-billed black cap was of Snoopy in his aviator hat, hand upraised, middle finger flipping the bird under the stitched caption: FUCK JANE FONDA.

  “Howdy,” said Cox, squinting, unable to make out Harry’s features buried in the parka hood. Harry shook a leather hand that was tempered in gasoline and callus and there was definition in the finger muscles. “This is Becky,” said Cox. She poked her head in the window.

  “Hi,” she said. Her eyes were dark beneath an inquisitive frown.

  Cox yelled over the wind, “I’ll turn my rig around and hook up a tow strap. I got the road into the lodge plowed out.” He tipped his hand to his cap and jogged back to his truck. The girl leaped into the truck bed. Cox manhandled the giant truck in a turn, following the girl’s hand signals. He popped out of the truck, took the thick strap from the girl, disappeared under the grill for a second, fiddled for a moment at his rear hitch, then was back at the window.

  “You want me to gun it a little to bust free?” yelled Harry.

  “Nah. Just put in the clutch and enjoy the ride.”

  After a wild lurch, they careened through the snow drifts. Harry steered off the road, passed a big hand-lettered plywood sign—SITE

  OF SNOWSHOE LODGE—and was on a freshly plowed roadbed.

  “That the daughter?” asked Harry.

  “That’s the daughter.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Sweet sixteen.”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 21

  “She doesn’t look sixteen. She looks like a fucking Indian.”

  “Got some Metis in her. Jesse’s dad was French and Cree. And maybe a little Gypsy. Mom was Serbian.”

  “Who’s the guy?” asked Harry.

  “Jack of all trades. Good carpenter. He’s building this new stuff.”

  Thick spruce cut the wind and they passed under a poled archway with a pair of snowshoes for a crest. A peaked roof thrust up among the trees, slabbed with cedar shakes, and rugged as a fort. An addition and garage appeared quaint, diluted with gabled gingerbread, next to the massive original timbers. Blond ribcages of new lumber winked in the snow. Cabins under construction. A satellite dish sat in a clearing like a stranded space traveler. Beyond the buildings, Harry sensed the lake.

  They ran up the steps into shelter. Cox retrieved his tow strap and joined them and Bud handed him a folded bill. He pocketed it quickly with a shrug. A surreptitious smirk zigzagged between Becky and Cox as the money changed hands.

  “Stay for coffee,” said Bud.

  They were on a large, snug mud porch, peeling off gloves, opening their coats, and stamping snow off their boots. Harry shook off the parka hood and Cox got a good look at his face. The tight eyes unscrewed, the hard grin clotted, and the blood drained from Cox’s pitted cheeks.

  Jay Cox looked like someone who had lost his place.

  5

  “C’mon,” said Bud, grinning for the first time, “cup a coffee will warm us up.”

  Cox’s prominent Adam’s apple bobbed as he tried to bring up spit. “Naw. Gotta plow out other folks,” he rasped and closed his hands to hide the chewed patches of red meat that 22 / CHUCK LOGAN

  rimmed his cuticles. Becky edged over and touched his arm. Cox nervously moved her aside.

  “Don’t be bothering Jay, Becky.”

  The husky voice brought Harry around: Jesse was a chance you take by firelight or the dark o
f the moon. With her beauty barely in control, she walked up to him and she was innately man-wary and man-daring and she had a bold lower lip and raven eyes and black hair twisted up in a tangle of braids. She wore skintight Levi’s and a crisp blue-and-white-checked blouse that crackled under a loose wool cardigan.

  He bisected her face, covering up one half, then the other. Beware, warned her cool, untouchable right eye. Come a little bit closer, suggested the left.

  The rangy boy stood behind her and, like his mother and his sister, he was a little too good looking, the way Cox was a little too much of a fright.

  Chris had raccoon circles under his tense brown eyes and had harlequined his appearance with long hair, tailed in back and shaved to his scalp over the ears. A death’s head emblem decorated his black T-shirt; under the grinning skull, the crooked lightning insignia of the Waffen SS pimped some heavy metal band.

  He favored his left leg with a slight limp.

  Bud put his arm around Jesse. “Harry, meet Jesse,” he said with a goofy grin. She held out a cool left hand. A barbaric diamond glittered on the third finger.

  “Hi.”

  Their hands met. Left-handed shake. She smelled as dangerously fresh as ozone coming after lightning and their eyes and their fingers lingered together a fraction of a second too long as the ghost of Harry’s sex drive sat up and took a ragged breath.

  Everybody grinned. Cox’s gray eyes wobbled and he looked like he’d chugalugged a gallon of flu virus. Harry grinned, too. They weren’t grinning with Bud. They were grinning at him and to each other.

  “Chris,” said Bud. “C’mon over here and meet my friend Harry.”

  Chris’s eyes flashed.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 23

  “No way to be,” Cox quietly admonished. Dutifully Chris came forward and shook Harry’s hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

  Chris’s lean hand crawled in Harry’s grip.

  “So you’re the guy who knows where the big deer are,” said Harry, making a stab at conversation.

  Chris avoided Harry’s eyes.

  “We’ll get that deer, tomorrow morning,” said Bud, putting his hand on Chris’s shoulder.

  “We’ll see what we get,” said Chris. He shook off Bud’s hand and went into the lodge.

  Bud turned to Harry with a hurt expression. Standing behind Bud, Jesse wrung her hands together and her knuckles bleached white.

  She fired one probing glance at Cox. Cox just stared, spooked.

  “Let’s go inside,” Jesse said. “It’s cold out here.”

  Bud, myopic with hangover, missed the eyes working all around him. And Harry knew that, this time, Bud wasn’t mired in the neurotic, indulgent morass of city slicker love. Bud had really stepped into it out here in the sticks.

  Jesse and Cox carefully did not look at each other as Cox made his farewell, went out, and got back in his big truck. He sat for a moment, gripping the steering wheel with his hands. Then he started the truck and drove away.

  Harry shook out his senses and cast them in a wide net. He’d been around these kind of folks before.

  They were outlaws.

  6

  Six apartments the size of Harry’s would fit in the lodge’s main room and a man could sleep in the field-stone fireplace.

  The woodwork was hand hewn and inlaid with Ojibway design.

  An antique bowsprit, carved in the shape of a bare-breasted Indian maiden with streamlined hair, jutted out from the apex 24 / CHUCK LOGAN

  of beams over the fireplace. “Looks like a goddamn meadhall. What was your granddad’s real name? Beowulf?” Harry’s eyes wandered up to the cathedral ceiling and wagon wheel chandeliers.

  “Grendel,” said Bud, winking.

  “His name was Stanley, like the town,” said Jesse. Becky darted past them in a youthful flap of arms, legs, and bouncing breasts and disappeared down a hallway at the other end of the building.

  In contrast to the Mission Oak furniture and Navajo rugs on the oak plank floor, the walls were decorated with grim, framed prints from Goya’s Disasters of War. The prints were interspersed with tribal masks: Indian, African, South Sea Islander; collections of spears, bows and arrows, and war clubs clustered around the masks.

  Harry inspected a large bearskin, complete with head and claws, stretched on the wall. The plaque under it had been carved by a child: GLACIER LAKE ROGUE BLACK BEAR. SHOT BY SHERIFF

  LAWRENCE EMERY.

  Bud explained, “The stuff on the walls is left over from when public TV was up here.”

  “You know,” Jesse dead-panned, “all these treehuggers from the Cities came up here to play Indian. Beat on drums. Get naked and,”

  with elegant barroom vulgarity, she looked Harry in the eye, “pretend it don’t matter who’s got the biggest pee pee in the teepee.”

  Harry felt like he’d known her all his life. Strength and mystery were at her fingertips, but she kept part of her brains squeezed down in her pants and she liked to see men fight.

  “Tad Clark’s men’s group, that show they did?” said Bud with a pained smile.

  Harry nodded vaguely. Then his eyes fastened on a sheet of stationery that lay on the writing desk next to the fireplace. A fancy printing job, the paper had a beige birchbark ripple. He scanned the business letterhead:

  HUNTER’S MOON / 25

  Snowshoe Lodge, Stanley, Minnesota

  In friendly Maston County

  Jesse Deucette, Manager

  When he looked up, she was watching him. He pointed to the letterhead. “So you didn’t change your name?” he asked.

  “Neither did Bud,” she parried. He continued his inspection. No wedding pictures. No cat. No dog. No houseplants. With all these windows, if this was a home, something should be growing.

  Bud stooped and fiddled with the fire. Jesse showed Harry around.

  “You caught us kind of in between, we plan to get this place up and running for the fishing opener in the spring,” she said, pointing up a broad stairway. Thick plastic sheeting walled off the balcony and second story. Harry smelled paint and plaster spackling compound; several paint cans and a 10-gallon bucket of spackle sat next to French doors that opened to a long porch where new wood shone in the shadows. A long carpenter’s level was propped up against a wall of bare Sheetrock.

  The level had a coat of dust and looked like it hadn’t been touched in weeks. Just sitting there.

  “Jay’s redoing the porch so we can turn it into a dining room,”

  explained Jesse. They stepped onto the unlit, chilly porch, which gave off a cold wood scent. More dust crunched under Harry’s boots.

  The ceiling beams were pegged in tongue-and-groove joinery and gabled with a flourish that went beyond mere craft.

  “Jay does nice work,” said Harry.

  “He’s good with his hands.” She pointed out the roughed-in addition next to the porch where opaque sheets of plastic were stapled over the framing and masked several large packing crates. Plumbing equipment was strewn around. “Whirlpool and sauna go in there,”

  she explained.

  She glided to the windows and Harry followed, drawn by the train of her energy, which was stronger in the dark. “Can’t 26 / CHUCK LOGAN

  see much now, but there’s a hell of a lake out there,” she said.

  Their wrists grazed and he felt the tension in the taut, twisted braids and imagined setting it free.

  “Two hundred feet deep. Muskie, Northerns, and Lake Trout,”

  said Bud, coming up behind them. “We even have some Indian caves at the other end with pictographs.” Again that goofy grin. “The good life in Minnesota,” he said.

  Harry watched her face as Bud spoke. She regarded her new husband with the poise of a high-wire artist glancing down on a clown.

  Bud clapped his hands together. “We’ll need the snow-shoes tomorrow. I’ll unload the Jeep.”

  “I’ll help.” said Harry.

  “Nah, you get comfortable,” said Bud, going ou
t the door.

  Harry followed Jesse off the porch, across plywood decking, through Sheetrocked partitions, to a restaurant-sized kitchen under construction. Wires dangled and bare fixtures jutted from holes in the drywall. A blueprint gathered dust on a piece of plywood supported by sawhorses. More dust shrouded a Skilsaw tilted on the blueprint and the circular blade was chalky orange with rust.

  They ducked through a double thickness of plastic sheeting and entered the remains of the old kitchen. Maple cabinets, a butcher block island, and more scuffed maple on the floor. A stained, cast-iron Wagner kettle bubbled on the tarred burner of an old gas stove.

  He smelled venison stew, coffee from a tall stoneware pot. The temporary kitchen opened onto a den.

  “This’ll all change,” said Jesse.

  The den had the unlived-in feel of a furniture showroom. There was a rich red Persian carpet and tall oak bookcases lined with books; the couch and chairs of deep, crushed coffee bean leather on Scandinavian oak frames looked like they’d never known human contact. The desk, an IBM PC, and a printer were brand new and the TV, stereo, CD player, and VCR were stacked in an oak console and exuded an electric whiff of welded circuits. A hallway opened past the kitchen and led, Harry supposed, to bedrooms.

  HUNTER’S MOON / 27

  Chris hunched over in a chair toying with a long, black hunting knife at a long trestle table that occupied the area between the old kitchen and the den.

  “Chris, put that away,” said Jesse.

  Chris smiled and tipped the knife mumblypeg fashion off his index finger. It flipped end over end, pierced the rug, and stuck in the floor with a loud thunk.

  “Oops,” said Chris. “Sorry.”

  “Put that away, right now,” she repeated. Chris pulled the knife from the floor. He did not put it away and Harry got the distinct impression the boy was pushing new limits. Jesse didn’t strike him as a woman who put up with defiance.

  “Why don’t you help Bud bring the stuff in?” Harry said in a friendly voice.

  “He said he’d do it,” said Chris, his dark eyes were quietly hostile.

  Jesse interceded. “C’mon, let’s get some coffee. You look like you could use some after being on the road.”