Harder Ground Read online

  She had to think what to do. You could legally keep big cats if you filed and met guidelines and qualifications, as she had done with Susie, who was tame when she arrived. But this animal, though action was tame and lovey at the moment, was neither tame, nor domestic in nature, and ten minutes from now, might turn to killing. Big cats were unpredictable and used swagger to intimidate. Worse, what will happen the next time an intruder comes over the red fence? Goddammit goddammit all. Or Susie got preggers? I can sort of manage one cat, but two? Don’t even know if a cougar and a lion can make kittens. I never should have listened to Butch and taken the lion. Knew then it was poor judgment, my damn ego overriding common sense. I’m both betrayer and betrayed, like Thomas Kyd and Kit Marlowe. If I report this, the visiting animal is probably as good as dead. As too is Susie. If my cat was a magnet for this one big cat, there would be another one eventually. Not could, would. Even if the next one doesn’t vault the fence it might wander the perimeter and drive Susie to distraction. Or get after area pets or kids. How could I have been so damn stupid and thoughtless?

  Choice brings consequences. Always has, even when your choice is forced by torture. I tell people about their choices every day. Now this? She couldn’t even look at Miss Susie as she got more meat and the shotgun, took it outside for the cats who immediately came to her.

  “I am so sorry,” she whispered, raising the barrel.

  Mile-High Humble Pie

  This is how the assignment came down to CO Alice Daynight: DeMint James, Western U.P. manager for Montrose-Foret Timber Company, called the Marquette District office and growled at the El-Tee. “We’ve got squatters on property along the Net River in Iron County. I went out there to tell them to move on and they pulled weapons on me. Now you goddamn DNR people can earn your goddamn pay.”

  El-Tee immediately called the sarge, who said, “Send her.” Her being Alice, fourteen years a conservation officer, fourteen hard nose-to-nose years with violators and her own command.

  The El-Tee loathed her, once declaring at a district meeting in front of all of her colleagues, “You are outrageous and unprofessional.”

  She had shot back, “Which of those two assertions bothers you most?”

  Of course she knew: For fourteen years she had fought, never surrendering, never pausing, never taking even one step back, and carping like a banshee at other officers she felt couldn’t meet her standards, males or females, of any rank.

  Her old man had been a marine in Vietnam, two tours, taught her to suck it up and press on, charge or die, which gave rise to his nickname, “One Word,” that word being “Charge.” Daddy One Word had set the bar high and she had been forced to stretch almost every day to reach it, the El-Tee not making it any easier with his snark-and-bark attitude.

  Dissing her with a personal objective pronoun: her? Like a woman was so much dog shit on a man’s boot? It disgusted her, it angered her, it hurt her, and the worst of all: She agreed with him. Women did make lousy cops, too damn needy. Not her, but other women. She was the exception that proved the rule because she did not need help from a goddamned living soul, at her job or for anything else.

  El-Tee was a sneaky creepy, trying to wear her down over time with his subtle but pointed put-downs. He was old-school, boys were put here by God to do this and women were here to do that, end of discussion, no crossovers. In his mind, women lacked resolve, commitment, and worst of all there was that biological clock thing ticking like a time bomb in every uniformed uterus, and once a baby was in the picture the woman became mom first and cop second, jeopardizing her own safety, the safety of others, and above all the mission. El-Tee didn’t lecture or proselytize, but she knew what he was thinking, because it was the same thing she thought. Women folded under stress, needed extra support. She was the exception, could handle anything and everything. Had done it all these years. Alone, goddammit, the way One Word wanted, the way he demanded.

  Which led her out to the Montrose-Foret Timber Company property one late October night with early season wet snow falling, five inches down and more coming and forecast to last another twenty-four hours, up to a foot of snow. It would cripple the area for a couple of days. But Daynight didn’t mind the snow. Snow helped her see better at night, gave her an edge.

  She’d called DeMint James to get directions to the squatters and asked him why he hadn’t called her directly instead of calling Marquette. “We top dogs like to sniff the butts of other top dogs,” he told her with a dismissive laugh. Such a gaping asshole.

  Once into the area, she hid her truck three miles away and hiked onto the property on foot, preferring to face whatever it was head-on, not to scare them into running from her truck. The plan was to confront these jaybirds and get the problem solved now, not to drag out the damn situation, which was how it often went with squatters and off-the-grid types.

  The plan worked perfectly until she got ambushed by a half dozen bearded men who lit her up with flashlights, swarmed her, and began to beat on her before she could react. Very quickly and unhappily she found herself face down in the snow, but kept struggling and somehow got to her pepper spray and swished the air, but caught herself a nasty dose, which blinded her as the attackers continued to kick and punch her and began pulling off her clothes. Sometime during this, they got her boots off and she had gotten one arm free and jammed the heel of her hand upward until it hit something that audibly cracked, which immediately reduced the pressure on her. Next thing she knew she had rolled free of the tangle and was on her feet and running and it struck her as she ran with flashlights dancing behind her that she was headed toward the river, just like a gut-shot deer, a situation that rarely ended well.

  She ran for minutes or hours, had no idea how long or how far, only that the pursuit fell back. It didn’t relent exactly, it just gradually fell back, a fact she attributed to her own adrenaline overwhelming her attackers. She’d lost her watch in the wrestling, and her duty belt with flashlight, baton, and Sig Sauer 40. The pursuers had fallen back but continued to buck forward in silence, not screaming, just following relentlessly, and she made her way along the river, her feet hurting, and next thing she knew, she felt nothing below the knees, and realized she could go no farther. At least she still had socks, but they weren’t going to be enough.

  No choice, she stopped, found a piece of dead wood with some serious heft for a club, and burrowed wildly into a pile of brush and timber debris to let them get close so that she could launch a counterattack ambush before they could react. Once into the woodpile, she tried to think logically and calmly, took off her top layer, wrapped her feet in the sweater, dug through the snow into leaves and pushed her feet into the leaves, hoping for some insulation, curled her legs, and soon felt sleep nipping at her like a feisty dog. Life, like the night, went black, like she had tumbled into a chasm. She wondered how long it would take to hit bottom, or if she would fall to eternity and that this was the portal to death and whatever came next.

  •••

  Alice Daynight awoke to see dim light outside. She couldn’t feel her feet or tell if it was still snowing. No radio, no weapon, no boots. You are fucked, she told herself and began trying to get up, only there were no more leaves and her feet were sockless and no longer wrapped. She was under some kind of a blanket or tarp, and when she tried to sit up, hands roughly shoved her back down. “Stay down Mister her-him, her-him’s feets is all frozed up. This lil piggy gone him’s market, freeze foot counter, I speck.”

  The hands that held Alice Daynight were strong and she smelled cloying breath redolent of whiskey and cigarettes.

  “Let me up,” she pleaded weakly.

  “Lachu up, her-him gone fall kersmack! on her-him’s ass-bomb and all dere is to’at.” The voice made a sound like a sandbag dropped on cement.

  “I can’t feel my feet,” Daynight said.

  “Her-him’s tellin us her-hims don’t feel them’s feets, I gue
ss when we seen ’em skins gone go eeky inky black, her-him’s little pigglies ugly as polly woggles swimming dem springtime puddle.” A piercing cackle shattered the silence. But Daynight was too exhausted to react, lay back docilely and whispered a weak and derisive, “Baah.” Aimed at herself, her inability to keep going. You are a weak sheep, a loser. Her-him is an odd construction, intended to identify me as a her playing him, a him with her qualities, or some kind of queer blend?

  From her back she saw a specter close to her face, a high wide flat forehead, a Neanderthalic ridge above the eyes, heavy cheekbones with knots the size of mature walnuts, eyelids thick and puffy, a narrow nose set too high, thin at the top and red and bulbous at the bottom, a mouth stretching all the way across the face with no east-west terminus, a pointed cleft chin under thin lips at the apex of acutely slanted jaws, a cluster of cream-colored warts to one side of the chin, greasy black mop hair strands hanging down like a rasta gone wild with the consistency of worn-out whiskbroom bristles, and that smell!

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “Seen worse is truth I t’ink. Come down his way from Newfieland with my Mum-mama was way back in thet then and when. Up there was livin’ in him village with Mum-mama’s man, whiskey face got lots them dogs, all bark-bark, shittin’, oh them dogs do shit-shit-shit for sure, him-them’s up there call him Happy Valley.”

  A laugh shattered the air.

  “You Ass Flyneboys had himselfs up there, flyne dem Uncle Sam jets down like Canada goose-goose, landin’ I seen ’em plenty times, watch ’em close, watch ’em close.” The voice made a whistling sound so real Daynight thought a jet was trying to land on top of them and she flinched, her head jerking around, looking for the source of the sound.

  “Was dere night-nights, calls him’s Max Hermenal, them Uncle Sam You-Ass flyneboys hims buyin’ hamboogers, okay ketchumup, okay pickle-dillies, okay mayo, okay onions raw, hold moose turd, Chief,” the voice said softly with the detached tone of a gospel reader at a Catholic mass. The voice moved closer and lowered, “Him moose-turd yella-yella like him puppy shits,” she confided, and whined like a new-baby pup thirsting for an open pap. “Cheese I sometimes eatem all, eatem all, goddammit! Maggie slow down b’fore you th’oat-choke, frites too, with ketchumpup You-Ass style, not no vinnygar like from him Angleterre, where that Queem him’s at, they say. Him majesty Queem galavant Kanada-Country they say but never her-him come no Happy Valley, Newfieland. Never saw him queem up dere I don’t t’ink, but mebbe so, mebbe so, long time ago, and never know.”

  The woman hummed a few bars of “God Save the Queem.” “Mama told me her name Margaret, but you-Ass flyneboys up blue yonder call him-me Maggie, Ski-Mow Maggie, bought him hamboogers and I aten ’em, aten ’em oh yes, hold the mooseturds, Chief.” The woman put her lips to Daynight’s ear and whispered, “You know Ski-mow pipples?”

  This voice named Maggie was asking for a response, but Daynight was having a hard time following any of her rambling.

  “Down here in You-Ass just fucking Indin, hey? Same like Ski-mo, same same.”

  The woman leaned even closer. “You heard him all her-him. Now you, Sisser.”

  Did she say Sister? Is she insane? Or is she even real? “My feet,” the conservation officer said.

  “Frozed up I tole her-hims can’t hear, Sisshater. Her-him we seen gallomphing through them snow barefeets and bareleckted all bluebiddyblue-blue-blue like him springs ices. Me and Sizzy pull her-him out dem woods pile into truck, fetch her, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! alla time her-him making crazy chatter-chat how them-hims jumps her bones mean have him’s way, hump-hump squirt squirt, but her-him get loose and run like big-eye deer.”

  This cannot be real. I am Alice in the rabbit hole, Dorothy flung like a Frisbee in a shithouse across Kansas.

  The woman paused to take a deep breath. “Damright, her-him’s frozed foots can kill Sister. Got to get her-him warmbled up. Gone take some days, some things don’t fix up fast as break?”

  Daynight thought by the tone of the woman’s voice and her soft touch that she meant no harm, but what she intended was far from clear, as was her sanity and connection to reality.

  “Her-him slurp some soups, warm her-him up inside first first. Her-him stay right dere, still as fawn in grass move, Okay. Her-him got piss we put Sister over pot and let her-him psssssh.” The sound was a perfect mimic of a stream of urine slashing the cold air. “Like dat, her-him hear? Don’t Sisshater her-him worry none ’bout them-hims, non-non-non-non. Nous avons le dos de notre sœur, oui-oui-oui-oui-oui. We don’t tell hims nothing.”

  “People are asking about me?”

  The woman grinned her snaggletooth grin. “No You-Ass flyneboy. Just him wit’ dem black trucks.” She mimicked a quiet truck motor. “Hair cut real short like You-Ass Flyneboys, but Maggie know what she see, Sister.”

  She pushed her face against Daynight’s. “Hims shows pitchers, I say ain’t seem her-him. I say make him good deal two hambooger, hold the mooseturd.”

  “Him say, no good, ‘You see her-him, call talk-him number.’ Give me pepper, see?”

  She pushed it so close to Daynight’s face that she couldn’t read it.

  “I can’t read it,” the conservation officer said. “Me no reader neither,” Maggie admitted.

  “Get Sizzy bynbye, she read mebbe turd grade, mebbe four? Her’s words is good.”

  Daynight flashed back to a summer in the forest service, fighting fires, smoke filling her eyes, unable to orient herself, like now. Back then in Hell’s Canyon, dropped onto rocky saddleback, the pilot a rookie in crown-fire thermals, the art of hovering not his forte, she had crawled down onto one of the skids and dropped the last eight feet to the slanted ground, rolling and feeling the wash of the Bell bubbletop as it took off to fetch two more bodies into the fight, first woman in her crew, she had earned her place, side by side with men, comrades in fire, now two women, comrades in cold?

  She had grabbed a shovel and assaulted the fire with flaming madness, her crew boss standing nearby grinning and saying, “Pace it, girl.” She had lasted five minutes, turned, vomited, and fell to the ground where she lay for a quarter hour or more as other fighters came in, this her first summer of adventure and derring-do. Smoke had stayed in her clothes and nostrils the rest of the summer, which turned to terror, as everything in her life seemed to, the two being the inner and outer skins of the still-forming creature she called herself. They built fire lines in the mornings, before the freakish noon winds acted like a bellows and sent the fire creature racing and crowning up draws and over razorbacks, sending them in pure flight ahead of the flames, cursing and praying and crying, all of them covered with soot and sweat and stinking like galley slaves, skid-marks in their drawers, eating T-bones and ice cream every night, all supplies dropped in by parachute, even stoves, small iron creatures that, when chutes didn’t open, as they sometimes were wont to do, burrowed into the earth like unexploded bombs. A crisp muffled sound, boomph, followed by a wisp of gray-brown dust.

  A smoke jumper impaled on a pine stub, legs apart, yellow football helmet still on, blood coagulating below on tawny pine duff, a half-dozen vultures overhead, a serendipitous pig-in-a-blanket gift for scavengers. The nametag stenciled over the breast of the white nylon jump suit said he was Van Donkert, a dead Dutchman, crucified by pine driven up his ass and through his heart. They left him hanging, called in the location by radio. Ought to have worn a helmet on his ass, she told herself, adventure and terror highly sensitive to details. Later, caught under a burning tree, someone pulling and tugging, beating on her. No, there was no tree, just the beating and then under a brush pile, and what? This is so confusing.

  “Root,” the voice called Maggie said. “Some eat good, some him not so good, this good, root soup, eatem up, Sister.” Maggie spat for emphasis and patted Daynight’s head with a damp cloth.

  Days spun on, she imagined,
or were they really? Impossible to tell, she was trapped on her litter, unable to move, her feet healing but burning, like they were being cooked back to health.

  Maggie’s dwelling was a shed-like affair longer than wide, with an exposed tarpaper and canvas interior and leafless slash piled against the outside, kraal-like to break the wind and snow and make the place blend into the landscape. It was situated in a grove of scrub oak and jack pine on the southeast edge of a rocky knob, away from the prevailing winds coming down from Alberta.

  There were two main rooms with dirt floors and several tattered hooked rugs scattered to serve as wafer-thin stepping stones across the cold surface. Heat came from a woodstove, a squat black antique with cast iron lion paws, made by the Kalamazoo Stove Company.

  The two women cooked on that stove, and the constant opening and closing of the belly’s door kept a pall of blue smoke hanging in the room.

  Maggie had no last name, this somehow having been obliterated over the course of several purported marriages. By profession, Maggie was a prostitute, untidy in her hygienic practices, a foul-talking slattern who bantered loudly and near-continuously, almost always in a gibberish that made it difficult to understand precisely what she meant, if anything. Gauging by her domestic situation, Alice guessed that Maggie was not among her profession’s elite, but the spartan surroundings also bore testament, Alice supposed, to a possible degree of integrity, that being she wouldn’t do anything for money. Just some things. Could apply to me too, Alice decided.

  Reeking of smoke and normally covered with a layer or two of old dirt, Maggie was far from physically attractive. Her head seemed at least two sizes too large for her neck to support and no doubt this might contribute to her perceived difficulties in the flesh trade. She was short-tempered and demanding, yet sensitive to the CO’s comfort and welfare, downright brutal with Sizzy and inexplicably gentle and solicitous with the many cats that wandered in and out of the place, even those that squatted along the tarpaper walls, and left the place stinking like an amphetamine cookery.