Harder Ground Read online

  It seemed to Daynight that by now, certainly by now, the search would be on for her and her truck and with the Automatic Vehicle Locator on board, finding the truck should be a piece of cake. It was only a matter of time and as time went on, she found herself repeating this little earwig.

  “My truck?” she asked Maggie one day.

  “Uh-huh, her-him’s truck done went take swim-swim, sploonk.” Here she used a sound that reminded Maggie of a massive weight dropped into a deep pond.

  “You know where it is, this swim-swim?”

  “I know, I know,” she said.

  Sizzy seemed a pleasant enough girl and was equally considerate of cats, evidence of fine breeding in some circles, and religious fervor in pharaonic Egypt before the greatest sandstorm in history buried everything, god-cats included. Maggie’s shack cats prowled the premises keeping the place free of mice, screwing and fighting with equal enthusiasm, especially at night, their cries and shrieks echoing inside and bringing odd smiles to Sizzy’s rotund face. The girl told Daynight she was twenty or two-times-ten, and she’d gone to school too, finishing grade two-times-three. Sizzy had fawn-colored cheeks, acne scars, and licorice stick lips.

  Her hair was black and tied in a tight-hair yarmulke. She favored a natural-colored deer hide dress that hung well above her thick, hairless legs. There were approximately one hundred rubber bands around her left ankle, mostly in natural neutral colors, with a few red and green ones and two huge blue ones. The conservation officer noticed that when Sizzy got nervous, she plucked at the rubber bands with her thumb, snapping them against her flesh like out-of-tune banjo strings.

  Every day Sizzy toured a trapline but the girl, unlike mom, professed no vocation. Daynight assumed she was Mama’s dogsbody.

  One morning the two women came in arguing, jabbering sharply, and set several net bags on the floor, filled with hubcaps. “I seen ’em dere,” Maggie thundered at Sizzy. “I’m say okay T’underburr, okay. Cat-ill-acks, okay. Lin-cones, okay-okay, but what her Sizzy gets?”

  “Two-times-two,” Sizzy said weakly. “Two-times-two.” She tried to hold up two fingers on each hand but her fingers lacked flexibility and she signed three.

  Four Dodge hubcaps were on the floor in two sets of two.

  “Shit her two-times-two,” Maggie said with a snarl and turned to Daynight for moral support. “I say him pay first, pay first, then fuck, okay? Sizzy get him plates, T’underburr, okay, Cat-ill-ack, okay. Lin-cones, okay, but not no damn Dodge. Dodge is shit!”

  Here, thought Daynight, was Chrysler’s corporate image problem in a nutshell.

  “No diff!” Sizzy said, louder and more forcefully than normal. “All same, Sizzy like Dodge, all damn same, two-times two, her pig ’em up, pig ’em up.’ ”

  “Not same,” Maggie hissed. “Dodge, him shit.”

  Maggie looked at the CO again. “T’underburr, Cat-ill-lack, Lin-cone, Dodge, Her-him say now.”

  Damn, this was forcing her off the fence she had so carefully tried to maintain between the women, both of whom she was grateful to. We had here two women, mother and daughter, four Dodge hubcaps, and a raging cumulonimbus of emotional rage. Daynight opted only to shrug.

  “Her-him, her side,” Maggie roared angrily. “No fuck for Dodge. I fuck, Sizzy get plates, no damn Dodge!”

  “Look,” the conservation officer said, “before we write off one side against the other, let’s decide exactly what it is that each side is for.” In the mediation business, backing up was the best tactical approach.

  “Not for,” Maggie squawked at Sizzy. “Nor for, right?”

  Sizzy nodded assent. “Not for, only two-times-two.”

  Maggie amplified. “We have. Hims had. Now we have. All there is. Not for, to have what is, lui faire comprendre?”

  The hubcaps in the tarpaper shack, Alice Daynight concluded, were decorative items, treasured gewgaws, semiliquible assets, perhaps even some sort of cargo cult specie.

  Every now and then more hubcaps appeared, but no more fights ensued and as Daynight grew stronger and her feet healed her hosts gave her muckluks to keep out the cold.

  “Those men who chased me, I want to find them,” she told them. “And I need to let my people know I’m all right.”

  “Hims no more look-look,” Maggie said in a flat voice.

  “Which hims? Bad hims or good hims?”

  “Any them hims, him-radio tellum her-him gone, tsk-tsk, no more leads.”

  “Shit,” Daynight thought, They think I’m dead. “Where is my truck?” she asked them for the umpteenth time, “and don’t give me that swim-swim singsong shit.”

  “Fish water. Truck, him go down fish water,” Sizzy said.

  “Can you show me where?”

  “Her-him no go outside, hims will get her, do bad t’ings.”

  “I’m better. I need to let people know I’m safe and I need to get those people who attacked me. You can either help me, or get out of my way.”

  “Her-him no go out,” Maggie said. “Bad him not far, not far.”

  “Show me just how not far,” Alice tried.

  Both women crossed their arms, set their jaws, and shook their heads.

  Here then was an object lesson in self-reliance. Once you accepted help, you were a hostage to that and the values that came with it and your freedom of choice was gone. “Sorry, ladies. Confronting badass is what I do. Now, I need clothes.” They had kept her unclad all the while they were nursing her back to health.

  Sizzy fetched buckskin pants and a tunic, both dyed white, various old sweaters smelling of mothballs, but warm. Wool socks.

  “I need a gun,” Daynight said.

  Blank looks. Silence in the room.

  “You can’t live out here full time the way you do without a gun,” she told the women. “Don’t worry, I’ll return it. I just want to borrow a gun.” Then it struck her, something was amiss with the law.

  “I don’t care where you get your weapons or if you carry concealed without permits,” she said. “Not my business. I just want to borrow one to help me do what I have to do.”

  “Them hims make her-him worm food,” Maggie said. “How you bring back bang-bang when you worm-food?”

  “How far away are these bad guys?” Daynight asked.

  Maggie made a dramatic sniffing sound. “Smell hims, uh huh.”

  “From here?”

  The two women nodded.

  “How far?”

  “Mebbe mile bird-fly,” Maggie said, pointing.

  •••

  Fully dressed for the first time since that night, Daynight stepped outside, found that the shack was located in a tight grove of scrub oak and jackpine, on the side of a knob of boulders, and sitting so that prevailing winds sweeping down from the Canadian prairies would have the least effect. The sky was dark and gnarly, like something was brewing. Daynight’s feet still hurt, but they were at least warm and working.

  “Go night better,” Maggie offered as they stood outside. “Bad-hims gets drunks, slips. Then her-him be safer.”

  Daynight studied her savior. “Gun?”

  Sizzy pulled a Colt .45 from her coat and pushed the handle at the CO, along with two clips.

  The weapon was old, but well cared for. Daynight checked the action and inserted a clip. She smelled the weapon, not recently fired and not a virgin, which almost made her laugh, the description pretty well describing her love life. Why do you think of such a thing at a time like this? The human mind was a very odd thing.

  The snow from the storm that night was gone. Leaves were off the hardwoods leaving a yellow and russet carpet in the forest. The sky was ominous, but sun was peeking through swirling clouds. “I go tonight,” she told them.

  “No,” Maggie said. “We go. Her-him, Sizzy, Maggie, three hers better than one her.”

&nbs
p; Sizzy went inside the shelter and came back with two AR-15 rifles, handing one to Maggie.

  “No I have to do this alone,” Daynight insisted.

  “Her-him do alone last time, how that work?” Sizzy asked.

  “That was then, this is now.”

  “Same bad hims, same same last time, uh huh,” Maggie said. “We go, all for one.”

  All for one, one for all, what was that from? She looked off into the distance. These women are a problem. I cannot take them into a situation that could go bad, not armed. Not at all. But their point is well taken. The last time had been a disaster and the women seemed to know the quarry. No surprises this time. “Okay, we three, but only me with a weapon,” she told mother and daughter.

  The women shook their heads. “Three hers, three guns,” Maggie said. “Now we eat and rest,” and she went back inside, followed by Sizzy. Daynight took a deep breath, exhaled, and followed them. Sometimes choices in life boiled down to no choices at all.

  •••

  Past midnight, the air spitting snow, they were not a hundred yards from the camp, one small log building built into the side of a hill and almost invisible until you were almost on top of them. Smoke came from chimneys, but no human activity since eleven, the three women had sat the whole time quietly, each wrapped in a blanket, patient. They had counted five men, which might or might not have been the number of assailants who jumped her that night.

  It had taken some convincing but she wanted the women to wait outside as backup, and stay outside until she called them. They had brought her to the place, but now she wanted them to lay back and not get involved. Safer for everyone that way. “All right,” Daynight said. “The time has come.”

  •••

  The stench inside was almost beyond belief, but Daynight eased open the door and slid inside into the darkness, broken only by a small light somewhere beyond her, and all around her the worst snoring imaginable. Were there lights in here? No way to know, and now that she was inside she had a flash. There was too much dark. If she initiated anything in this, she could come under fire and never see it coming. This realization chilling her, she slid back outside, eased the door closed.

  “Too dark. We need to wait for daylight,” she told her companions.

  “Burn it,” Sizzy said.

  Daynight knew that was an invite to disaster, would prompt panic and shooting. “No, we wait for first light, take them as they come out, one at a time or in a group.”

  It was a great plan until the first contact came from a man who jogged in from the woods, not from out of the cabin and he shouted and raised his rifle and Sizzy shot him in the leg, dropping him, and ran over and jumped on him and bashed his head like a melon until he was still.

  By then people were stumbling out of the cabin, half-asleep, some with weapons, some not, and Daynight got the drop on them and guided them to one side to Maggie as she waited for the last one to come out, which he did meekly, demanding, “What’s the meaning of this?”

  Absolutely nothing, which was the sick part of the whole deal, from the initial group assault to this.

  •••

  County jail in Iron County, all the perps logged in and out of her hands and her sarge showed up. “Jesus, Alice, we thought you were dead.”

  She thought of Mark Twain’s words. “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  Sarge stared at her like she was a ghost. “Who shot that one?”

  “I did.”

  “With what?”

  “Colt .45.”

  Sarge sneered. “That don’t quite fit what I heard from the EET guys.”

  “Well, it is what it is, Sergeant.”

  “There are reports,” he said.

  “What day is this?”

  He told her. It had been ten days since that night.

  “I know there will be reports. Can I at least get some sleep?”

  “First tell me the story and then you can go and we’ll start back at it tomorrow at the Crystal Office. The El-Tee wants to be there.”

  She told him a very abbreviated story and told him she had been forced to flee from her savior-captors. Pure luck that she stumbled on the bad guys and even found a gun to use.

  Daynight knew he wasn’t buying it, and decided to lay it out in detail, which she did.

  “So you did not shoot one of them?”

  “No, but I will say I did. I owe those people. They were just trying to protect me.”

  “This ain’t like you,” her sergeant said.

  •••

  The next day, almost all of it spent in the Crystal Falls DNR office in a vacant cubicle they had gone over it and over it, the El-Tee staring and not saying much, letting Sarge do most of the talking and work.

  There would be a shooting investigation, and she was on temporary suspension until that was done. “Take the time and recover,” Sarge told her.

  El-Tee walked her out to her personal truck. The work truck was being recovered from the river, but was likely totaled. She had gotten her other stuff back from the cabin that night.

  The lieutenant looked at six cool bags in the bed of the truck. “Been shopping?”

  “Yah.”

  “Not for you, is it?”

  She shook her head.

  El-Tee chewed his bottom lip. “You remain, by all standards, an outrageous woman,” he said, “and a damn fine conservation officer. Those women who helped you? Right thing to help them and protect them. I’ll keep the spotlight off them. They are transient good Samaritans for public consumption. I’m glad you’re back safely, Alice. You are a unique piece of work,” he concluded. “You needed help and you accepted it. Good for you. Right decision. I’d have made the same one.”

  Piece of work. Is that good or is that bad, what’s he trying to say? Wait, slough off your defenses, Alice, he just called you by name and praised you. Said he’s glad you’re back.

  He’s going to help protect Maggie and Sizzy. Stop reading so damn much into everything. You can’t do everything by yourself. Your old man got that wrong.

  Facing Perfection

  “We never make time for us,” Monty whined. “See what I’m sayin’?”

  Bailey Cross grimaced. “Jesus, Monty, you can’t see what someone’s saying. You hear it, or you understand it. Lose your stupid clichés.”

  “So,” he said and she cut him off.

  “Is this starting a sentence with so some kind of damn virus? I hear every idiot under the age of thirty-five doing this all day every damn day.”

  “No sex in a month and all you can talk about is how I express myself? God, Bailey. The baby takes precedence over everything except your job.”

  “We’ve talked about this,” she said.

  “You’ve talked, I’ve listened, that’s how it is with you, issuing orders, expecting them to be followed, and never questioned. Life isn’t like that.”

  “It would be easier for everyone if it was. You get too emotional, overreact, pout like a child.”

  “I’m not pouting now,” Monty said. “I’m trying to get you to talk to me, not at me.”

  “I see no point,” she said in her aloof voice. “I like the status quo.” Which was a lie. She faced conflict all day, every day in her job as a conservation officer, and wished for, and prayed for perfection and calm when she was off duty. Why can’t Monty understand how important it is for us to work together for perfection? It’s a shield, a way to protect us, a way to put some predictability into our lives. She picked up her coat. “I am not going to engage in juvenilia.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?” her husband wanted to know.

  “Out.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “What about her? She’s fine, you know what to do.”

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sp; He glared at her, his eyes pressed tight. “Typical, you walking away, avoiding reality.”

  “Whatever,” she said, closing the door to their Spruce Street home. She got into her personal truck and motored up the county road toward Big Bay to her friend Jalani Dalani’s fishing camp on the Heaven River. Indian-born Jalani taught biology at Northern Michigan University, had been her friend since her first year in Marquette County, thirteen years back.

  Before marrying Monty her entire life out of her DNR uniform had involved trout fishing with flies. In those days she had fished every opportunity, however brief.

  Monty lacked such inspiration in anything, was not eager to connect to anything, even a child, his own. The latest brouhaha was just another round in the we’re-not-us-because-there’s-a-kid ongoing fight. She didn’t buy it. Monty worked eight to five at the bank, an eight-to-five job; How hard could that be? She flexed and split shifts to have time with the baby so that one of them was always there. Her job was hard, physical, scary at times. His was none of those things. The thought of eight hours in an office made her shudder.

  Their life worked fine, was almost perfection. Couldn’t he see that? “God.”

  The off-duty game warden stopped at Lefty’s gas near the campus and got a couple of sandwiches from the cooler, and some chips. Lefty knew who she was but was the kind of person who left her alone when she was in civvies. She liked that, appreciated not having to hear the refrain, “Got a question for you.” Said questioning almost always stupid, or a masked complaint about rules or another imperfect human.

  She had grown up in Grayling, fishing the Au Sable and Manistee, Big Creek, any water with a trout population. Her whole family fished, as did most everyone in town. Everyone fished for trout, and tourists added to the wader-clad horde, stomping around in hats proclaiming “Grayling: A Drinking Town with a Small Fishing Problem.”

  In those days her best friend was Bucky, who had incredible instincts for fish, ones she lacked and had to train into herself. They fished together every day, were always hanging out together, and even spent a couple of days rolling around naked on the riverbank in a clumsy experiment that brought more embarrassment than satisfaction, but she had been as equal and eager a participant as her pal.