Hunter's Moon Page 6

  “We’re hitting the sack,” she said. “You know where everything is?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It’ll be crazy in the morning. Bud wants to get up at four.” She paused, almost shy. Jesus. She had more forward gears than a Mack truck. “Well, goodnight,” she said. Just being polite, seeing to a guest.

  Alone in front of the fire, Harry snapped the Remington 271 to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel, getting its feel. He set the rifle aside, lit a cigarette, and savored Jesse Deucette, the manager.

  For a married woman, she sure had a bold way of showing her ass.

  The kind of female who trips a man up in his balls. Same principle that had the red-eyed bucks rampaging out there in the dark, lips curled back, noses tilted to the estrus in the wind as they thrashed their horns against the trees in the grip of the rut and were led around by their dicks right under the hunters’ guns.

  Too much woman. Like…he shut his eyes…being inside Grace Slick’s voice with the volume turned all the way up.

  Eyes again. Chris stood in front of the TV, looking down into the main room, watching him. A hulking brown shape HUNTER’S MOON / 47

  moved past the kitchen. Bud in his bathrobe, going down the hall.

  Harry flipped his smoke into the fireplace.

  “Guess I’ll turn in,” Harry said as he walked into the den. He stopped in front of the racket of some rock group video on the TV

  and tapped down the volume key. “That’d wake the dead,” he said.

  “That’s the idea,” Chris shrugged.

  “’Night,” said Harry, moving toward the hall.

  “Hey,” said Chris. Harry turned. Chris pointed his finger and cocked his thumb. “One, two, three.” The boy’s grin was too bright.

  His eyes too hot. He was high.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Chris said in an even voice.

  Harry smiled grimly and turned his back on Chris. The minute he closed the bedroom door behind him, the TV jolted back up to high volume. He heard Bud go down the hall and have a long con-voluted conversation with Chris, trying to convince him to turn it down. Bud’s voice was a reasonable drone. Harry debated walking in there and shaking the kid. Turn it down. Do it. He flopped down on the bed. It was a house without rules.

  Bud entered the room and Harry smelled marijuana.

  “That kid smoking dope out there?” Harry asked.

  “Jesse. She smokes a little grass before she goes to bed.”

  Harry lit a cigarette with jerky motions and blew smoke to blot out the cannabis perfume. “You talk to her?”

  “Jesus Christ, man, I took a year to get into this…give me a few days.”

  Harry scowled.

  “What’s going on with you? You’re getting all pointy.” Bud said.

  “I don’t like people smoking dope where I sleep,” said Harry.

  “Take it easy. There’s other people in the world besides you.”

  Harry thought about it. One of his basic rules was, if you get uncomfortable, leave. Before something happened. Now here he was waiting for Jesse to happen.

  48 / CHUCK LOGAN

  And now Bud’s ruddy face looked pleasantly bedraggled. The ends of his beard were damp and stuck to his meaty chest and his robe fell open at the waist and showed the hairy sag of his belly. A chunk of his left calf muscle the size of a fist was missing, the skin twisted over the concave whorl of scar tissue. The wound gave his leg, below the knee, the slick appearance of a scalded drumstick.

  “I’d feel more comfortable tonight in one of those log cabins,”

  said Harry.

  “The roofs aren’t on those cabins. Hey, hey,” Bud said in a soothing voice as he put his hands gently on Harry’s shoulders. “It’s been a long day. We’re both burned from the drive. And we’ve talked down some heavy shit. Maybe you’re just a little nervous about…tomorrow.”

  “Nervous?”

  Bud cuffed him warmly on the neck, his fingers lingered, kneading the taut muscle. “I don’t know. Guns. Moving targets.”

  Endless bullshit, thought Harry. And the woman, right next door, smoking dope in a silk robe.

  Bud paused at the door and glanced self-consciously down the darkened hallway. “This won’t be easy. She really turns me on,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  Harry looked away and tried to put sternness in his voice. “That kid, Chris, needs a kick in the pants.”

  “He’ll be all right once we get in the woods—”

  “Shit,” Harry laughed, pointing to the Goya over the bed. “Lookit this room. There’s probably an altar around here someplace with the bones of little children on it.”

  Bud shrugged. “You’re not used to being around kids, Harry. I’ve been learning. You have to be flexible.”

  But not too flexible, thought Harry. Too hot, the absurdly loud music beyond the door. The marijuana seeping—permissive, unraveling—in the air.

  “Well, she’s in there, waiting,” said Bud in an amazed voice. “More than I can handle.”

  “When you met her, she approach you?” Harry asked.

  “Actually I met her a couple of years ago. She came down HUNTER’S MOON / 49

  to Saint Paul. Put the bite on me for a political campaign she was managing.”

  “Whose campaign?”

  “County sheriff. And after that, it was the new hospital—”

  “You check her out? Her background?”

  Bud shrugged. “She’s from here. Moved to Duluth, went to UMD.

  Got knocked up her freshman year. The guy split. Kids were born out of wedlock. She married another guy. He died, then she moved back here.”

  “Was there ever anything between Jesse and Cox?” Harry asked abruptly.

  “Cox? Be serious. She’s got more class than that,” Bud grimaced.

  “What about this Larry? The sheriff?”

  “They used to go out—”

  “Chris said they used to live together.”

  Bud swallowed. “She does stuff that…”

  Harry exhaled. Bail out, man. Beyond this point it gets real fucked up! Problem is, buddy, your wife turns me on. And it ain’t all in my overheated imagination. “This is dumb, me being here, Bud.”

  “I need you, Harry. To…talk to…”

  “Jesus Christ,” Harry muttered. “Get outta here.” He pushed Bud through the door.

  “Right. We got a big day tomorrow,” Bud forced a grin and closed the door. His departure caused a sudden quiet to fill the lodge. The TV, the stereo. Off. Absolute silence. The cold wrestled with the roof and the furnace came on.

  Listening. The whole hot lodge turned into an acoustic device.

  Harry shut off the light, stripped down, crawled into bed, and lay on his back, smoking. Faintly, he could hear Bud and Jesse on the other side of the wall. A low domestic conversation. Several times he thought he heard his name.

  They were discreet at first. The individual sounds were subdued.

  Harry stubbed out his smoke, rolled over, and lay facedown.

  50 / CHUCK LOGAN

  A thump? A giggle? Right against the wall next to his bed. Christ, the headboard of their bed was banging on the wall. Jesse tapping out Morse code with her hips right through the partition.

  Harry’s imagination amplified the muffled sounds as the springs squeaked. There was a throaty yelp of pain or pleasure. Slow then fast then slow again. Harry shut his eyes. Bud in there. His sticky flab slapping her like a tub of hamburger.

  Harry took a deep breath and tried his tricks. Part of sobering up had been learning transcendental meditation. Now he tried to find the ladder to climb to a calmer depth. All Harry is divided into three parts. He tried to separate his mind from his heartbeat from his breathing. Let it all float.

  Bang. Ram. Groan.

  No good. There were other relaxation techniques. Older, surer ones.

  Because One-Eyed Lazarus, the dead twig he peed through, was up and jolly red. Christ. An erection. Tho
ught he’d used them all up and would spend the rest of his life paying interest on a wanton deficit. To break the tension, he masturbated slowly, outdistancing the faint sounds next door. Tried to hang there, defying gravity, on the very top arc of sensation. The universal problem. How do you make anything last?

  There.

  But just as quickly gone. A spilled memory. Practical now. Hide the evidence. Bent over, he tiptoed to the door. Opened it. Quiet.

  Except for the kid snoring in the living room. He ducked across the hall into the bathroom, cupping his groin.

  Clearing up outside. Moonlight hit the snow cover and bounced through the bathroom window. He reached for the toilet paper.

  “Oops, sorry,” drawled the amused husky voice behind him. Besides her smile, Jesse wore nothing except a soft sparkle of sweat, shadows and scallops of moonshine. She watched him flush the soiled tissue.

  Boldly, she entered the room and he inhaled Bud’s raw HUNTER’S MOON / 51

  booze-marbled sweat and her clean salt and the damp business of her thighs—Bud’s jiz and her barn-musk—rioted among the porcelain and tile. Harry’s bare butt backed into the chilly sink and her hand glided out and touched him on the left hip.

  “You missed some,” she said, with one eye cocked. Her profile, in a cascade of mussed hair, looked as cool as Liberty on a dime.

  “Get out of the way,” Harry said tersely.

  She moved left, a feint because as he stepped around her, she shifted back and her erect nipples grazed his chest and her sweaty hair teased along his bare shoulder.

  He pushed her away and crossed the hall to his room. Her voice chased him. “Bud fell asleep on me. But you don’t look like you’re going to sleep at all.”

  9

  Harry woke up with a bad case of nerves hammering dirty copper nails into the roof of his mouth and somebody was shaking him and shouting, “Daylight in the swamp.” He batted a hand away.

  Bud. With sidelight from the hall molding the grin on his fat cuckold’s face. As he turned and lumbered from the room, his grape-colored polypro long undies rode down his chubby hips and showed the hairy crack of his ass. On his way out, he yanked the light cord and the dangling Iron Cross swung back and forth.

  The glare of the naked bulb punched up the debris of Chris’s discarded cigarette packs, ashes, socks, and underpants. A Kmart boombox sat on the desk in a clutter of tapes and its overbuilt plastic case was redundant with ledges that were designed to collect dust.

  An executed schoolbook lay facedown on the floor.

  Jesse’s chanteuse voice lilted down the hall, singing in the kitchen.

  She was good, with a throaty Linda Ronstadt edge, but this morning it sounded like mockery.

  52 / CHUCK LOGAN

  You missed some. A wave of folly stood Harry up. He had to go out there and see the look on her face.

  Towel wrapped around his waist, shaving kit in hand, Harry went into the hall ready to see how Jesse would put the day in play. Instead he saw a drowsy Chris, leaning his long mop of hair against the wall next to the bathroom with his raccoon eyes grainy and red, glued half shut. He wore a T-shirt and droopy Jockey shorts and tried to hide his withered left leg behind his good one. Harry got in line for the bathroom and avoided looking at the leg.

  “Shake it up, you guys, if you want to eat before it gets light!”

  yelled Jesse as utensils tinkled over cast iron and the sound of frying bacon, eggs, sausage, hash browns, and onions crackled behind her voice.

  Becky came out of the bathroom wearing a shapeless nightie, with her hair all askew around a face pink and puffy as chewed bubble gum. She plodded by Harry with downcast eyes. Chris went in.

  “Set the table,” ordered Jesse in the kitchen.

  “Leave me alone!” The half whine, half snarl of the teenaged op-pressed.

  “Hurry it up. Hubba hubba.” Bud. Making a busy clatter in the main room, moving around rifles and snowshoes. “Fucking beautiful out, no wind, thirty degrees…” Dropped cartridges clinked on the oak planks.

  Harry’s turn in the bathroom. Where Jesse had stood last night like a pillar of fire was just chilly tile under his bare feet. Fast shower.

  Quick shave. A mouthful of Listerine to chase the corrupt taste. He returned to his room and pulled on long underwear under the mad gaze of Goya’s cannibal giant.

  He tossed aside the fancy Gore-Tex trousers—Bud’s gift—and put on his own heavy wool trousers. Resentment welled in his throat.

  “Get me up here in this.”

  Jesse waited in the kitchen with her Gypsy braids in black ranks, twisted tight to her skull. Proper as starch in an ironed blouse, she placed a cup of coffee in his hand. “You don’t HUNTER’S MOON / 53

  look so high and mighty this morning, Harry,” she said with lowered eyes.

  They both looked up at the same time and saw Bud, entering the den, caught in midstride, staring at them. “Eat. Eat,” ordered Bud, averting his eyes, flapping out his arms as a sleepy Becky loaded plates of food on the table.

  Harry needed a minute to get organized so he opened the French doors and took his coffee out on the frigid porch. Turning, he caught Jesse’s quick glance as she pushed off the kitchen counter with a restive thrust of her hips. He thought of a dirty book, the well-thumbed pages opening right to the good parts.

  He turned to the windows. The wind and snow had left behind a vast Tiaga stillness and a horned moon that wedged in a canyon of clouds and scattered silver dollars on Glacier Lake.

  Jesse moved beside him and their shoulders touched. “You have anything this pretty down in your Cities?” she asked.

  “What is it with you?” he said and their voices were clandestine, thick in their throats.

  “People can’t help when they meet,” said Jesse, matter-of-factly.

  “He’s my friend, Jesse.”

  “Your friend is the greatest show on earth,” she said and before he could respond, she walked back into the lodge.

  He stared into the darkness. Below a cape of clouds, the glittering points of Orion the Hunter hung low in the east and he picked out the icy diamond of Rigel and above it, the three studs in the constel-lation’s belt. A crack appeared above the crooked hump of Nanabozho Ridge and a sliver of purple and vermilion stretched solemn as a church window clear to Canada.

  At the table, Harry fed his bunched nerves sparingly with toast and a little scrambled eggs while Bud went over the plan of the hunt on the worn sheet of lodge stationery and Chris sat unusually attentive at his side and Jesse stood in the kitchen and puffed nervously on a cigarette.

  54 / CHUCK LOGAN

  Their eyes were loud and sticky and stumbled toward each other.

  Becky, face washed and wide awake now, came down the hall in a gray wind suit and cross-country ski boots. She pulled her hair back and knotted it into a practical ponytail.

  “What are you doing?” asked Bud.

  “I’m going to ski.”

  “You can’t ski today. The woods are full of hunters. There’s two feet of snow on the trail around the lake,” said Bud.

  “Some snowmobiles went through last night. The trail’s fine. It’s the first snow of the season,” said Becky, sitting down and tightening the laces on her boots.

  “She shouldn’t go out there,” Bud said to Jesse.

  Jesse nodded. “Maybe you should wait.”

  “Mom,” said Becky, drawing out the sound.

  “Hush,” said Jesse.

  Then Bud stuck his elbow into a puddle of syrup from the blueberry pancakes and Jesse scolded him lightly as she came to his aid with a damp dishcloth. As she tended to Bud’s spill, her eyes ambushed Harry through Bud’s thick cowlick.

  “We go along this ridge that skirts the shore,” Bud was saying.

  “Then we follow it east away from the lake till we come to where it peters out into these three fingers that go down to the swamp.”

  “Once the first shot goes off, all the deer head for the swa
mp, that’s what Larry says. The deer we want has thirteen points and the long tine on his left antler is way bigger than the other side. You can’t miss him,” said Chris in a touching attempt at mimicking a man’s deeper voice. He looked focused, purposeful, his hair combed straight back; a different person from the punk of last night.

  Bud nodded. “We’ll set up on the ridges. Harry on the first one, then me, then Chris.” Bud marked Xs on each of the three crooked fingers he’d drawn.

  Becky piped up. “Give up. Larry always shoots the biggest deer.

  Five years in a row.”

  HUNTER’S MOON / 55

  “Not this year,” said Bud.

  It was time to bundle up in blaze orange. Chris went to the bathroom. Bud fiddled with the snowshoes out on the porch.

  Harry carried his plate to the kitchen counter. Jesse stood a bare inch away and said in a low voice, “You don’t have to go out there.

  They’d probably have more fun, just the two of them.”

  For a moment there was only the sound of their breathing.

  “Look, I know why you’re here,” she said with tired candor. “He doesn’t have the guts to bail on his own.” The left side of her smile jerked. “When I met him he was too good to be true, we were going to put this town back on the map. He can get you to believe almost anything.”

  “So what happened?”

  The other side of her smile twitched. “What he was running from in the Cities caught up with him and he started changing on me, drank himself into that tub of guts out there. I gave up a lot for him.

  And not just to be his sport fuck. So yeah, I got him to make it legal.

  And when he splits I have no qualms about taking his money. Answer your question?”

  Becky approached with her leggy runner’s stride and thrust her body between them. “Oops, sorry,” she said, in a mocking imitation of her mother’s voice. She dropped a pile of dirty plates into the sink with a crash and gave them both a look of pure disgust as she moved away.