Strike Dog Page 3

  “I’m sorry for our loss, Grady. Hear that? Ours, not just yours.”

  Nantz was to have entered the DNR academy this fall.

  “I talked to the captain,” McKower said. “He told me what you found at the auto-body shop.”

  Service nodded.

  “The evidence doesn’t prove anything,” she said. “Are you prepared to deal with it if it’s ruled an accident?”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” he said.

  She sighed. “You always see the world in black and white, Grady. Remember, the Chinese say black has five colors and the Ojibwa have fourteen words for snow, including several colors other than white.”

  He didn’t respond. She was one of those people who was pathologically rational, a woman who overrode intuition with pure intellectual power and had risen because of it. But she had also been a smokejumper and had considerable fire inside. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, she understood the call to vengeance.

  “I know you, Grady; you only think you know me,” she said. “You classify me according to what’s convenient for you. If this is not an accident, that does not mean it is automatically a homicide. There are shades, Grady, and there is a system and a process, and we are sworn to uphold both. We both know that the system and the process are no more than social algorithms, not final arbiters of right and wrong; they are only methods we use to determine guilty or not guilty, which has nothing to do with morality. Vengeance is not part of the system or the process,” she concluded, looking directly into his eyes. “I know you will do the right thing,” she said. “The captain says we are to assume this is an accident until the Troops issue a formal report to the contrary.”

  “Nice speech. It won’t be me talking about it,” he said.

  “Not you talking, period,” she said.

  “Never been much good at it,” he said.

  “Nantz made you better,” McKower said. “We don’t want any backsliding.”

  “Is that the departmental ‘we’?”

  “That’s the personal we, you big hardhead—me, and all your friends.”

  It seemed like half of Michigan Tech’s hockey team trooped in the second morning, led by Walter’s girlfriend, Karylanne Pengelly. Her eyes and nose were red and swollen, but she walked with her head up in a gesture of pride and resolve that caught Service’s attention and choked him up for a moment.

  His son had been in his first year at Michigan Tech and was working out and practicing with the team. Next year he would have been on scholarship. Not now. The Tech players mumbled as they shook his hand, and he understood. Elite young hockey players were like all young jocks. They hated ­dealing with injuries and death. Athletics was about feeling invincible, and when one of their own went down, it caused most of them to pull away so that they didn’t have to face the reality or their own potential vulnerability. He ­couldn’t blame them. He had been there once, had been a player who could have signed a pro contract if he’d wanted, but he had chosen the marines and gone to Vietnam instead of the NHL. It was a decision he’d never regretted, though it had been a hard, often nasty road from then to now.

  He held Karylanne and felt her sob, but he had no words to soothe himself, much less her. All he could do was prepare to act. Why couldn’t they all understand this?

  That morning he had gotten a visit from the past.

  The silver-haired man who walked into his cabin was tall and straight-backed with a weather-beaten face, accompanied by a small, gray-haired woman who was stunningly beautiful. “Grady, Bowie Rhodes,” the man said.

  Service said, “We’re all getting gray.”

  Rhodes smiled. Service had met him when Rhodes was a UPI reporter in Vietnam. He and Tree had watched him trying to fish in a rice paddy that was actually a minefield, and they had helped get him safely out. They had known each other for decades, though they seldom got to see each other. Rhodes had a job that was the envy of fishermen: He wrote a column for an outdoor magazine and traveled around the country doing nothing but fishing.

  Tree came over and embraced Rhodes. “What it is, bro.” They dapped in the elaborate Vietnam style and laughed, like the kids they had once been.

  Service went outside with Rhodes. “I’m not much for giving advice,” the old reporter said, “but I’ve been through this one.”

  “Ingrid,” Service said. Ingrid Cashdollar had been Bowie’s first wife. She had been a deputy in Luce County and Service had known her. She had been beautiful, funny, and an effective cop, and when she died it had affected a whole county, not just her husband. Since then Bowie had remarried and seemed happy with Janey.

  “What you have to do is keep your mouth shut and let people do and say whatever they need to get out their feelings. The funny thing is that when a wife dies, everyone is concerned about everything except the husband.”

  “We weren’t married.”

  Rhodes smiled. “Yeah, like paper matters.” He fished in his pocket and held out a key. “When all the company clears away, you need to go off somewhere and be totally alone for a while. That key opens the door to a camp I have in west Chippewa County. You have to come in through Fiborn and drive ten miles up a two-track. There’s a coded lock on the gate. What was your last day in Vietnam?”

  “December 19,” Service said. “1969.”

  “Okay, the lock will be coded 1219, and you have the key to the camp. There’s no well or running water, and no electricity. There’s heat from propane and kerosene lamps—very old-style, unheated outhouse included. The camp sits at the end of a finger in a huge swamp. Go when you want, stay as long as you need, and take in your own water. You remember Ironhead Beaudoin?”

  Beaudoin had been a contemporary of his father’s, also a conservation offi­cer. “Out of Trout Lake, right?”

  Rhodes nodded. “He was a pistol. He tracked a poacher named ­Carvo­lino for years. The camp is built where the old poacher’s stand sat. Carvolino used Indian pulpies to haul in timber and built a cabin on state land in the swamp. Beaudoin didn’t find it until after Carvolino died, and when it got logged and came up for sale, he bought it. After Ironhead passed, I bought it from his daughter.”

  The name Carvolino seemed familiar. “He the one—”

  Rhodes interrupted him by nodding, opening his mouth and pointing a finger inside. “Carvolino used to sell buck racks to downstate sports in bars in Moran and Brevort and Trout Lake and Ozark and St. Ignace. He was a major lush, but he knew his way in the woods. Ran traplines. Come deer season he’d park his car somewhere for two weeks, walk into his hunting ground in a roundabout way, and stay until the season was over. He’d ship out the meat and racks using a sidecar that the Indians used to go back and forth to town. Beaudoin never could catch him. Just after deer season, Beaudoin’s last before he retired, Carvolino and his wife had separated and he was drinking like a fish. He called her at the phone company in Iggy one morning and begged her to come back and give him another chance, but she was fed up and refused, and he said, ‘Okay, then listen to this.’ He put the shotgun in his mouth and squeezed it off. I think it broke Beaudoin’s heart that he never pinched the guy.”

  Rhodes told a good yarn, and had a conservation officer’s appreciation for stories.

  “I’m serious, Grady—use the camp. And trust me: Over time, the pain will be replaced by scar tissue, which will thicken. It will never completely cover the wound, but it will make life tolerable.”

  That night there were twenty or thirty officers and friends in the cabin, but Grady Service was alone in the dark, several hundred yards away on a ridge, and when he began firing his pistol at a paper target he had tacked to a tree, several woods cops appeared, their 40-caliber SIG Sauers in hand, ready to rock and roll.

  Treebone was winded from the run through the woods to the site of the gunfire. “What the hell are you doing, man?”

  “Getting ready,” Grad
y Service said.

  “There it is,” Treebone said quietly.

  Service was certain that all of them understood exactly what he meant.

  5

  SLIPPERY CREEK, MICHIGAN

  MAY 3, 2004

  Grady Service and Tree sat on the porch of his cabin. Newf and Cat stayed close. The sky was the color of sun-baked slate. He had found the cat years ago in a cloth bag with seven kittens someone had dumped in the creek. Why the one had survived was beyond him, but she had lived and turned into a feline misanthrope that he never got around to naming. Newf’s color was brindle, an unappealing mix of brown, gray, and ocher, all slopped together like cheap cake mix in a bowl. She had intelligent brown eyes and a wide black snout.

  The crowds of well-wishers had dwindled. There were just the two of them, alone finally.

  His watch said 2:40 p.m., but time had lost all meaning. The only numbers registering now: Five reduced to three, death in a flash, sudden, unexpected, too familiar, too permanent, the way he knew it best, had experienced it too many times before.

  Intellectually he understood they were dead, but he was still trying to process the reality. Somebody had tried to drown Cat and she had survived. Nantz and Walter wanted only to live, but had died. It made no sense. Was God a jokester, or just an asshole?

  Sadness had changed to anger. What the hell had Nantz been doing on M-35 south of Palmer, and why the hell was Walter with her when he was supposed to be at school? Something inside him kept telling him that if she had not gone down that road they would still be alive, but he knew the truth. Death came in its own time and in its own way. Nantz had wanted to be a conservation officer and had already adopted a game warden’s habits. Like him, she never came home the same way. His fault! She had tried to copy a lot of his behaviors. Jesus.

  For three years he had lived with Maridly Nantz as friends, lovers; they were a couple. In three years with Nantz he had almost become civilized—and even soft—but he had also been deeply and undeniably in love. Now she was gone and not coming back, and he had returned to sleeping on a thin mattress on military footlockers set end to end.

  The autopsy results were still pending, and there had been no funeral service and no memorial. He refused to hear of it. When it was time, he would have them both cremated.

  “You remember Erbelli?” Tree asked, and answered his own question.“One day in country, base camp, sniper round to the head. Wouldn’t know him if he walked up on the porch right now. How many we lose from the company?”

  “Fourteen dead.”

  “There it is,” Treebone said. “We are born to die.”

  “God’s will, that junk?” Service asked, feeling uncomfortable. Of all his friends, Tree was closest. They had been through the most together, including Vietnam, and Tree would be the one to try to reach out to him, toss him a net if he thought he needed it.

  “A while back Kalina tries to get me down to the AMC, the Reverend ­Thelonious Jones, proprietor—Thelonious Jones of Howard, Harvard, and Jackson. He did fifteen for a plethora of transgressions, now reformed, his life an open book, all sins pronounced and denounced, can I hear an amen, brother?”

  “You went to church?” This was a revelation. Neither he nor Tree put much stock in organized religion, but Kalina was undisputed queen of Treebone’s kingdom.

  “Ain’t no quit in the sister. The reverend and me circled and sniffed each other and we both saw the truth of the other: two pit bulls with a philosophical fence between us, him wanting to redeem lost souls in order to redeem his own, and me wanting to go up the side of bad-ass motherfucking heads—his included.”

  “This story have a point?”

  “Are who we are, is what it is,” Tree said.

  “Meaning?”

  “We choose to walk through the Valley of Death, Grady. We don’t have to like it, but we got to keep on keepin’ on.”

  “Trucking until we retire.”

  “After all the shit we’ve been through, a retirement ain’t something to throw away, man.”

  “You telling me to rein it in?”

  “No, man. There’s got to be payback. All I’m sayin’ is that payback can be in degrees—hear what I’m sayin’?”

  “I hear.” Grady Service had enough years of service, between the marines, state police, and DNR law enforcement to pack it in now, but he had begun to conceive of retirement in the context of Nantz and his son—not alone. Now they were gone.

  “I never married her,” Service said, his voice cracking.

  6

  SLIPPERY CREEK, MICHIGAN

  MAY 4, 2004

  Service came back from a run and found Tree tying flies on the porch of the cabin. He was sitting next to a small man with a ruddy complexion and white hair in a buzz cut, smoking a cigar and rubbing Newf’s ears.

  “This is Father O’Brien,” Tree announced.

  “I’m not a mackerel snapper,” Service greeted the man caustically.

  “Call me OB,” the man said. “Technically we don’t have the Friday fish rule anymore, and in any event, I’m not here as a Catholic. I’m here as an informal grief counselor. Your captain suggested we talk.”

  Newf came over to Service and poked at his hand with her drooly snout. “So talk.”

  “As you reenter the melee, you’re apt to carry a bit of anger, and maybe your judgment will be frayed. It helps to talk things through with somebody neutral, bounce feelings off.”

  Service started to object, but he held back, understood O’Brien’s presence was the captain’s way of gauging and monitoring his readiness. He had no choice but to go along with it. He could hear Nantz whispering, “Back off, you lummox.”

  “Whatever floats your boat, OB,” Service said, going into the cabin. If everyone would just leave him alone he would be fine, he thought. Like Tree had said, no choice but to keep on keepin’ on.

  “Okay then,” the priest said, following him. “I guess that’s a good introduction. I’ll leave my card with you. Feel free to call me every couple of days.”

  “One time better than another for you?”

  “It’s your choice. I’m mostly retired and my time is open.”

  Service turned around to face the man. “What sort of work did you do?”

  “I taught psychology at Marquette University for thirty years. Also I was in the Marine Reserve as a chaplain, and served in the first Gulf War.”

  “Retirement a tough adjustment?”

  “All of life’s adjustments are difficult, son. Semper Fi.”

  “You’re not gonna call him,” Tree said after the man was gone.

  “Back off,” Grady Service said. “I don’t need help.”

  “You mean you don’t want help, man. We all need it.”

  “I called the funeral home today. I have to stop and sign papers tomorrow. They’ll be cremated tomorrow or the next day.”

  “And the memorial?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means not yet.”

  Two days later the two of them drove to the funeral home in Gladstone and picked up the ashes. They were in sturdy cardboard containers made to look like marble. They brought the ashes back to Slippery Creek and Service set them on the counter in his kitchen and broke open a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Tree would be heading back to Detroit in the morning.

  Treebone held out his glass and touched Service’s. “She was a fine woman, your Nantz, and Walter was a fine kid. It don’t mean nothing.”

  This was what they had said in Vietnam every time something bad or inexplicable occurred. A drunk marine second lieutenant named Ploegstra once explained, “Think of a huge honker of a log floating down the Colorado River, and on that log there’s billions of pissants and each one of the little assholes thinks he’s steering. It don’t mean nothing.”
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  But it did, Grady Service knew. It meant he was alone and would never again feel the soft touch of Maridly Nantz or smell her hair after she got out of the tub. And he would never again hear his son shout in triumph as he hooked a big brook trout with a fly. What it meant was that he had lost not just a lot, but everything, and that meant something. It meant that he would not rest until he figured out what the hell had happened and settled accounts. He looked over at his friend and Tree nodded. He understood.

  7

  MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN

  MAY 19, 2004

  Service sat in his captain’s office.

  “But she was a pilot,” Grady Service insisted. “Don’t you people get it?”

  Captain Ware Grant looked across the table at him. “You people? Grady, pilots are not invincible,” his captain said gently. “Have you got something to say to me?”

  “I’ve been on the shelf three weeks,” Service said.

  “Take as long as you need,” the captain said. “There’s no hurry to come back.”

  “If I don’t get back to the field, I’ll go out of my mind,” Service said. “You have to let me come back to work.”

  “You don’t seem ready.”

  “I can’t sit around. I need focus. I need my boots in the dirt, dealing with what I know best.”

  “We can’t afford to have a loose cannon out there,” his supervising officer said.

  “You know me. You know that’s not what I am.”

  “Sudden loss can induce a form of PTSD,” the captain said. “Mourning can bring a severe form of the disorder.”

  “I lost my father suddenly. I’ve lost men in combat suddenly. I’ve lost friends suddenly—this is not something new. And, dammit, it wasn’t me in the accident!” It was difficult to keep his voice at a reasonable level.

  The captain studied him.

  “We each mourn in our own way and in our own time. The aftermath of some situations is nearly as traumatic as the situation itself.”

  “Please, Cap’n.” This was as close to pleading as Grady Service could bring himself.