Harder Ground Read online

  “No damn wonder, up there in a dorm, sneaking bed to bed all night long, you got plenty of strength for all those guys, but not your own spouse.”

  She sat up. “Are you stupid? It’s a police academy. Even if anybody had the wants, nobody has the get-go or the opportunity.”

  “Ah, so you admit there’re attractions.”

  “We’ve been over this ground before,” she said. “Every damn weekend they let me come home.”

  Ronald sat up. “How would you like it if our situations were reversed and I was up there in a dorm sleeping with twenty women?”

  She sighed. How many times did they have to have this argument? Ronald Colt Bridges, she said in her mind. I want a divorce. I’ve had enough and I’m filing. It sounded so solid in her head but the words refused to transfer to her mouth. She’d married a tripartite name, three assholes rolled into one, more to hate. The thought made her giggle.

  “Something is funny to you?” Ronald said with a gotcha in his voice. “Tell me his name.”

  “There is no him.”

  “Oh God,” her husband said, slapping his forehead. “It’s a damn woman, isn’t it?”

  She squinted and reached for her robe. “Yah, you got me Ronnie, we go all night long, four women and me, that’s it and now you know my secret so let me sleep. I’m exhausted.”

  “Long as it ain’t men,” Ronald said. “Want to tell me about it?”

  “They’ll kill me,” she said, spearing her slippers in the dark.

  “I can keep a secret,” he said. “It turns me on. Where are you going?”

  “To the couch, Ronald. I need sleep.”

  “Work the problem!” their instructors bellowed every day, all day, every exercise, every simulation and drill. They had just come off three days of chilled ice tank drills, no exposure suits, swimsuits only, bare skin turning blue, the whole ordeal in total darkness. She had never imagined, much less experienced anything like it. Cold was a monster that didn’t need teeth to take you apart. Never wanted to do it again, but knew if she was out on the job and saw someone in trouble she’d be out on the ice trying to help, the urge more in the heart than in the mind.

  Just awful. Total fear, anger, frustration, disorientation and you had to stay focused, control everything, be in charge of the problem that you found, no matter what it was. Work the problem, work the problem, stay in the game, work the problem, focus, focus. Twice she’d thought she was drowning, had been right on the edge, felt it grinning, but fought her way back. Now this bullshit?

  Yesterday, all day long, fifteen pairs of cadets running around with canoes on their shoulders, five hundred pounds of dead weight inside the aluminum craft. Back and forth across a grass field slipping in cold rain. Torture, but she knew the instructors wanted to push them past their endurance, give them a look at their breaking points. So far she had remained plastic, pushing out the breaking point, but this, at home, every weekend they got off, in her sanctuary? No way.

  She’d known before leaving for the DNR academy that this was going to be a problem. Ronald Colt Bridges was a cling-on, Mr. Milquetoast Macho. If she left him, would that mean he had broken her when the academy couldn’t? Corporal Holloway, in her last tank experience, had outweighed her by a hundred pounds, hauled her to the bottom like an anchor, and held her there.

  She had wiggled and squirmed and finally gotten an elbow free and blasted him in the nose as hard as she could. She was sure she had heard cartilage crack but he had let loose immediately and she had hauled him to the surface and multiple hands helped both of them out of the tank. Holloway sat there with a stupid, dazed look, blood streaming from his nose, grinning for God’s sake. Grinning. Out cold on his butt, and grinning. Good God!

  That night after chow he’d pulled her aside. “Never hesitate to do what you have to do when you’re immersed in a goat rodeo. Great job, Cadet Lungcharsky. You worked the problem.”

  Goat rodeo? What was this if not that?

  “Ronald,” she said. “You go sleep on the couch. Pack your bags in the morning and get out. I’m calling a lawyer.”

  “Maybe you need a lesson in who’s the boss here.”

  “Ronald, if you so much as try to touch me, you’ll be sleeping on a steel gurney in the ER tonight. Get the hell out of my bedroom.”

  Her husband lingered at the doorway and finally turned away. She closed the door behind him.

  And slept peacefully and deeply, dreamlessly, the way dead souls slept in eternity.

  Come morning, Ronald was sitting at the kitchen table with sunken eyes. “You look like shit,” she told him.

  “Because of you, I cried all night.”

  “Tears can be good for the soul,” she said. “A cleanser.”

  “This cop thing makes me crazy,” he said. “You know that.”

  “I do know that, but it’s going to happen, Ronald. This is what I want. I’ll graduate, put on my badge, and hit the field and be out all hours with partners, mostly men. That’s reality.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” he said, softening his tone. “I make enough to take care of us. Stay home, start our family.” Ronald was district supervisor for a successful hardware wholesaler.

  “There isn’t going to be an our family,” she said.

  “But this was our dream.”

  “Your dream, never mine. I may want kids and I may not. I don’t know yet.”

  “What are those people doing to your head?”

  She had to think about that. “Making me whole, Ronald.”

  “That’s crazy. You are whole.”

  “Not as long as you’re in my picture. Pack your stuff and get out. I’m done talking.”

  “We haven’t talked,” Ronald said. “Not really.”

  The phrase goat rodeo formed in her mind. “Shower, pack, leave,” she said. “One hour.”

  “Or?”

  She stared at him until he broke off the eye-lock. He said, “You’re unbalanced, crazy.”

  “I am me,” she said. “Call it whatever you like.”

  “I get the house,” he said. “And the boat. House and boat are mine.”

  “Take it all,” she said. “Life isn’t about stuff.”

  “You used to think it was.”

  “I used to not think at all,” she said. “And now I do.”

  “Because you’re gonna be a doughnut dolly in a green suit? That’s rich,” he said and laughed malignantly.

  “Fifty-five minutes,” she announced.

  “This isn’t right,” he whined.

  “Someday you’ll think differently,” she told him.

  “I don’t want this,” Ronald said through clenched teeth. “What’ll my parents say?”

  “Fifty-four minutes.”

  “Dyke-lesbo-butch-cunt,” he said with a hiss and left the kitchen.

  She later watched him back his Lexus out of the driveway. He had gone through the garage putting sticky notes on tools and other things he was claiming. The notes said “MINE, not HERS.” He even took phone photos.

  Three years: You were married to that jerk three years? It had been an awful decision, and an even worse experience.

  Sunday night back at the academy in East Lansing, her roomie Shelly Conner said, “You look peaceful.”

  Astute observation. “I got some quality sleep.”

  “With a husband in your bed?”

  “Ronald wasn’t a bother.”

  “Lucky you. Bengt was all over me like a second shadow. The man is relentless.”

  “Goat rodeo,” Cadet Sidonie Lungcharsky said. “Keep that image centered in your mind and work the problem.”

  “You sound like an instructor.”

  Lungcharsky grinned.

  The Roadrunner Should Make You Laugh

  “I don’t know who you are, I ain�
��t your pop, and get out of my house!” Sigmund Bergson ordered in a stentorian voice. His daughter thought his brain might be melting but his voice remained fine, still loud, and, incredibly getting louder.

  “I’m your daughter Calliope and this isn’t your house, it’s mine, Pop.”

  He bellowed, “Tirzah, Tirzah!”

  “Your wife is not here. She left Pop, and the way you treated her, I can’t blame her.”

  “A wife don’t got no choice,” the elder Bergson said.

  “Only in the long ago days when Mom was alive. Things’re different now.”

  “I don’t like you,” her old man said.

  “Whatever floats your boat, Pop.”

  “I have a boat. She’s called Calliope.”

  “You had a fishing boat with no name. I’m Calliope, your daughter. You sold the pram when I was twelve. You said it was a piece of sorry shit.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t remember. You wouldn’t tell anyone, including Mom.”

  “Boat is the man’s business. Nobody else.”

  “Want to take off your coat?” she asked.

  The old man looked at a sleeve. “This is not my coat. My coat’s a horse blanket.”

  “That coat is long gone, Pop. You’re not a game warden any more. You retired a long time ago. The coat you’re wearing is yours. I know this for a fact.”

  He said, “You were with me when I picked this out. Tell me your name again.”

  “Your daughter Calliope.”

  “Calliope’s my boat. I have a daughter?”

  “Four daughters, Pop. California, Carole Ann, Camille, and me, Calliope.”

  The old man snorted. “What kind of fool names a kid for a state full of screwballs and queers?”

  “Cal has wondered that her whole life. It was your idea, not Mom’s. As eldest she thought she should have been named after Mom.”

  “I have a daughter named Mom?”

  “Your wife, mother of your four daughters, Betty?”

  “No, I don’t remember no Betty.”

  “She got pregnant just before you shipped to Korea. You married her, and got on a train and headed west to the coast.”

  “Fairytales can come true,” he said, apropos of nothing.

  At least he’s calm. That’s good. She helped him out of his coat.

  Now hunched over with scoliosis, slumped over like he wanted to spend his life looking at the ground, he looked old and used. But he had once been a driven physical beast, dripping self-confidence and with enough skills to do damn near anything he decided he wanted to do. Being wounded three times in Korea had not changed him, Mom said. He was always happy and in charge, bulletproof, impervious to life’s vicissitudes and ill winds. Now this shell sitting at her table, empty yet still hardnosed without knowing why. He had been a fighter throughout his life, with a mind and without, as if there was a second mind in his brain, unaffected by the old timer’s disorder, a second mind modern medicine had yet to identify, much less unmask.

  Maybe it was his soul in control, his youngest daughter thought. Poor Tirzah, his second wife, the arm-candy spouse, loaded from hauls from four previous hubbies, all of whom she’d outlived. Not Tirzah’s fault. She had been good for and with Pop until one day he awoke with his second mind fighting to take over.

  “Want some lunch, Pop?”

  “I hate baby food,” the man said.

  “I have soup,” Calliope said. “Big-boy soup. Pop-soup.”

  “Pop-soup? Okay, I’ll take that one, but no goddamn baby food, hear me?”

  “I hear you, Pop.” He had been in a nursing home, but she had found him strapped to a bed, soaked in urine. The facility’s explanation was that he refused to stay in bed and out of other patients’ rooms. She pulled him out of the place and brought him home. Still not sure of the logistics. Like him, she was a conservation officer and could flex her schedule and work split shifts some of the time, but during certain seasons she would have to be on the job for twelve hours, sometimes sixteen.

  Pop had alienated Tirzah, bullied all of her sisters as well. His off-the-wallness rarely bothered her because she saw it all the time in her job and dealt with it matter-of-factly. But she knew she was going to need help when that second control center took complete control of Pop. It would make him more than a handful for anyone.

  “They collected our shit, ground it up, salt and peppered it, rolled it in cracker crumbs, and gave it to us as food,” her father said.

  “That’s disgusting,” she said.

  “It’s true. You can’t make that shit up.”

  She swallowed a laugh.

  Calliope put a bowl of warm soup in front of him and sat beside him.

  He slurped and drooled soup down his chin into his scraggly beard and his hand shook. Her father glared at her. “They usta feed me in that place. Told ’em I could do it myself.”

  “You’re not in that place anymore, Pop.”

  “Hah,” he said, resuming his slurping. “I usta kill people,” he said.

  “A long time ago.”

  He nodded vigorously. “Terrible business, killin’ all them racist chinks.”

  “Tigers play tonight.”

  He made a puffing sound. “Candy asses, paid millions, they couldn’t carry Al Kaline’s jockstrap. Go on the disabled list with a damn pimple these youngsters. Can’t pull that kind of shit in a war or when you’re a game warden. They find out, they shoot your ass for cowardice.” His voice went soft again. “Course we were all tempted to shirk and run, but you can’t do that. Not never, hear me?”

  “Loud and clear, Pop.”

  “Game warden’s a cop nowadays, right?”

  “Yes, Pop.”

  “You can’t run neither, Cal. Coppers and soldiers got to stand the line, fight the fight.”

  “I’m not Cal,” she said.

  “Sure you are: You’re Calliope, Cal, my youngest daughter, the one most like me.”

  “You call California Cal.”

  “Who’s California?”

  “Not a problem, Pop. There’s a fella coming over this afternoon to meet you.”

  “I don’t want meet nobody,” the old man said.

  “His name is Al Buell. He served in Afghanistan and lost a leg, roadside bomb. He’s a good guy.”

  “He kill Chinks too?”

  “You can ask him yourself.”

  “Ask who?”

  “Al. Al Buell.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, and smiled. “Brain fart!”

  “I’ve asked Al to live with us.”

  “He some kind of a boyfriend, this Chink-killer?”

  “He is, Pop.”

  “He puttin’ the pork to you?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Usta put the old pork to Tirzah. Wowzer. I miss that. You think she misses that?”

  “No way to know, Pop. You could call her and ask her.”

  “Nah, she’s dead.”

  Calliope understood. “If you say so, Pop. Al will be here around three.”

  “For baseball?”

  “To meet you.”

  “Okay. Did I tell you what Tirzah used to do to me?”

  “Yes, Pop. A thousand times.”

  “Yah that’s about right, she done it a thousand times, maybe a million. Boy was she a pip and a half.”

  She helped him to an easy chair and turned on the TV.

  “Cartoons,” he said. “Not that I-Love-Lucy shit. God what a screamy bitch. I hate redheads.”

  Calliope flipped through channels. “Roadrunner good?”

  “It ain’t no Mickey Mouse. You think Mickey schtupped Minnie?”

  “Probably, Pop.”

  “How come Minnie Mouse is a girl and Minnie Minoso a
man? Did Flash Gordon have a girlfriend with big headlights?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I bet he played windshield wiper with her,” Pop said, demonstrating.

  Talking to him was exhausting and exasperating.

  He said, “It’s okay, you know.”

  “What, Pop?”

  “It’s okay. I like being here, with you. I know I need help. Give your Poppy a hug, Calliope.”

  She leaned down and hugged him, clinging.

  “How come them tears?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Roadrunners should make you laugh, not cry.”

  Which made her laugh. And he laughed with her and she knew they could make this work.

  Bambigumbo Yumyum

  It was late October. G-Lata Treat gripped the top grab iron of the boxcar, eased across the side, flattening herself as train speed and wind buffeted her. She drew one deep breath at the bottom, and swung across to the open boxcar door.

  A startled voice yipped. “The Lord done sent us a shine in green!”

  “Evenin’, boys. How many we got in here?”

  “We be six,” a familiar voice said.

  “Billboard, what you hawkin’ these days?” She had never known the man’s real name, only his road handle. Consensus said he was a king bo, a lifer, true royalty among the country’s transients. The man got up and stepped toward her. He wore a lime green hooded sweatshirt that proclaimed NIKE FUEL. His arm held a dozen or more electro-plastic bands in various hues of eclectic electric, throwbacks to dayglo days.

  “Knock-offs?” she asked.

  “You impugn my integrity and honor, Officer Treat. These all real, fell offen back of a Chinaman’s truck. Retail one fitty, for you whinny fie, two go foe-tee.”

  “You keep track of your steps and calories, Billboard?”

  “Yes-um, Damn-straight. Man got to watch his own health, even with Mr. Obama’s fine gift.”

  “You sign up yet?”

  The bo chuckled. “Wun’t know where to begin and we sign up, the man be watchin’s sayin’?”

  G-Lata Treat had been a conservation officer in Wayne County for ten years. She’d grown up in River Rouge north of West Jeff on Victoria, been a basketball star, all-state. Got a degree in police administration from Lake Superior State. Had forty basketball full ride offers out of school but had grown up fishing with her granny-ma’am on the St. Mary’s River in the Soo. They’d been up there every summer when she was a girl. Had always intended to transfer up there, but there was so much action here in Wayne she thought the U.P. would bore her and Granny-ma’am was still kicking in The Rouge.