Harder Ground Read online

  “I’m on it, One, One Fifty. Be careful. Station Twenty clear.”

  If Homeland Security could be headed off, Lt. Barry Sample would be the one to make it happen. Verlaag unloaded her four-wheeler, and verified she had a full fuel tank. She always kept it full, but always checked it and had looked at it in Crystal Falls and now looked again, just to be certain. She did not want to run out of gas up here. It looked like six miles to the coordinates Vipsania had given her. Thank God she had the low-slung Polaris RAZR 1000. With this she could snake over, around and through virtually any obstacle. And she could also run like a rocket if she needed to.

  •••

  “Stop or I shoot!” a voice commanded. Verlaag had stopped to stare at an endless carpet of shiny silver fabric stretching up into a rare grove of first-growth white pines. This area apparently had been too remote even for old-timey loggers who pretty much used winter to go where they liked. Usually the crews swarmed like ants and disappeared leaving a hole in the forest. Harvesting, loggers called it, but it was the same thing. Pay a low contract to the state, chop a bunch of trees, and sell high. In most places the strategy left nothing behind but greater nothing.

  “It’s me, Vipsania.”

  “I can see that for myself, but there are black helicopters in the area. I seen ’em!”

  Homeland Security, officious bastards. Assholes. “They are here to help,” Verlaag said, not buying her own line and sorry she’d said anything.

  “They’re the enemy. Here to help? Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “Of course not.” Certifiably left field, maybe, but not stupid. Switch directions. “Where are your prisoners?”

  “They are secure.”

  “Are they all right?”

  “They are secure.”

  “Where?”

  “Exactly where I secured them. I can feel the choppers in my bones.”

  “There’s no One World Government, Vipsania, no New World Order.”

  “I have captured Nazis as proof.”

  “They’re balloon racers, not soldiers.”

  Long silence. “Explicate.”

  “An all-woman balloon race around the world. This team is one from Germany.”

  “War everywhere and people are racing balloons?” Apfel asked, her voice cracking with nerves. She sounded irritated, befuddled.

  “Better than making war, eh?”

  “Yes, of course,” Apfel said.

  “Are your detainees healthy enough to travel?”

  “Yes, of course. But they are vapid, empty creatures. There is no threat to America if this is the kind of soldier the One World Government sends.”

  “They are civilian balloon racers, not soldiers. Can we talk face to face, woman to woman?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Verlaag was startled. Apfel popped up not six feet from her, her camouflage making her blend perfectly with her background. “Geez, you are good,” Verlaag exclaimed.

  “I will starve if I am just average.”

  “Good point. Where are the women? Can I talk to them?”

  “You are not alone, but I told you to come alone. You have violated our agreement.”

  “I am alone.”

  “There are helicopters.”

  “Where?”

  Apfel looked upward.

  “Gone right now.”

  “I made them pull back.”

  “So you admit to be with them. You just lied to me.” The woman’s rifle barrel came up.

  “I didn’t lie. You know how higher levels of command involve themselves in stuff that’s none of their business. A balloon went missing along the border and Homeland Security leaped in to save the day. Don’t point that weapon at me. Homeland Security is part of your country, our country, not the New World Order. They are us and we are them and so forth. They are trying to help. You have six people detained. I can’t put them all in my RAZR. Do you expect me to walk them out of here? These people are not like you and me. They are balloonists, pilots. They fly in the air, not walk on the ground.”

  “You may have them,” Apfel said. “They eat excessively,” she muttered.

  With this said, Vipsania disappeared. There, then gone, leaving Verlaag blinking. Fruitcake!

  Verlaag left the RAZR and walked ahead to the tree line against a hill, saw a rectangular trapper’s cabin built into a hillside and pushed the door in. She found six women in black and red jumpsuits, silver spacesuits piled in the corner with helmets and oxygen masks. All the women had short blonde hair, blue eyes, high Aryan jawbones, lantern jaws. “Good morning ladies.”

  “Gut morgen, We are crew of Germany Reunited, Deutschland Wiedervereinigt. I am Kapitan Asta Bormann.”

  Another blonde piped up. “You shall not usurp our collective authority. We are all kapitans: Asta, Krista, Dagmar, and I am Elke. Take us to your leader.”

  Verlaag had to fight laughing. Take us to your leader? Good grief!

  The first speaker said, “Osten verloren in ihrer vergangen hut. This means East—she is lost in her past.” The woman rolled her eyes.

  “Are all of you all right?” Verlaag asked.

  “Ja Wohl,” Kapitan Elke said, “but of course we luuse zis race becuzzzz one of us makes za wronk kal-ka-leyshunulation of zawinz. Dumbkoff.”

  The six women all began shouting and pushing each other and Verlaag backed outside and activated her radio. “Twenty, One, One Fifty. I have our missing fliers. They are all well and accounted for. Homeland has a chopper somewhere near here. Tell them to look for green smoke and I’ll talk them in. Put them on DNR One.”

  “Doing it now,” the dispatcher in Lansing said. “One One Fifty, did they back off?”

  “Just in time, thanks.”

  “We’ll send them back in.”

  “Tell them no weapons, all is calm and copacetic here. One, One Fifty clear.”

  The girls put on their spacesuits and carried their helmets. They lined up behind Verlaag and she led them to a clearing near her four-wheeler and popped smoke, shaking the can to get the plumey coils rising upward.

  “Our kondola iss on za hill behind za shack,” Kapitan Asta said.

  “It will be sent to you,” Verlaag said, hoping she was right.

  She felt the chopper before it flew into view and hovered over them. It landed in the clearing, whipping debris everywhere and the chopper’s crew came out in black uniforms, brandishing weapons.

  “All clear, all clear!” she yelled, waving her arms to get them to sling their weapons.

  One of the crewmen came forward. “These the aliens?”

  “They are a German balloon crew.”

  “We will take custody from here,” the sergeant said.

  Verlaag shook hands with each woman and watched them file into the belly of the helicopter, which lifted off with its turbines screaming as it flew away over the trees. Wait until conspiracy nuts get hold of this deal, Verlaag thought.

  “You have honor,” Vipsania Apfel said, popping out of nowhere again.

  “Don’t do that. Please!”

  “Our business is concluded,” the hermit said and fired her rifle in the air, making Verlaag drop to the ground. When she got up, the woman was gone. Good God.

  •••

  “So, Mommy-O, space aliens?” her daughter greeted her.

  “Balloonists,” Cash said.

  “Like the creepy guys that make scary animals at kiddie parties?”

  “No, all women, Germans, racing around the world.”

  “How stupid,” her daughter said dismissively.

  •••

  In bed that night with Nazrat. “Rub my back, hon. Between that truck and the RAZR I’ll be lucky if I can still walk when I retire. Ooh, those hands.”

  “Kreegah?
Bundolo?”

  “Do my back first, okay hon?”

  Fishing for Glory

  The conservation officer casted and retrieved with metronomic regularity, working the water, every inch, expecting every cast to be the one, yet hoping it would not.

  The lake was small, not ten acres, surrounded by maples denuded of leaves, a rim of sphagnum around the circumference. It had been a nasty job to get the aluminum pram through the tag alders and loon shit into real water, but if you wanted a big fish, there had to be a struggle. Granpa had preached that. You want big fish, you gotta work for ’em. God don’t give no big fish to nobody don’t deserve it. The struggle was minor, really, not more than a quarter-mile boat drag and once she was on the water and in the envelope of peace the lake created, the struggle was immediately forgotten, reality reduced to cast and retrieve, thinking through her wrist, varying speed, waiting for that tap to tell her to set the hook.

  Granpa Dusinberre had taken her out to Harsen’s Island nearly every day all summer and they filled coolers with walleyes. Granpa even kept carp he called nigger food. They always dropped the carp with an old man with rheumy yellow eyes. Granpa called him Willie Fish, but she never knew the man’s real name. Granpa liked Willie, that was clear to her, but he was always the nigger. On days she couldn’t fish, Granpa took Willie along. Later in life she recognized it as racism, but racism tempered by something else she couldn’t identify.

  Call a man a nigger, like he wouldn’t mind, and take fish to him and his place was not even close to convenient or on their way, it was in fact way out of the way. Her grandfather had been a hard man to figure and she never did solve him, but he was kind and attentive and full of information and advice, which turned out to be equal parts bullshit and real. She knew he always cared about her and rooted for her. His death, while she was in training, had hit hard, forced her to suck it up and reach deeper inside herself.

  How many fish had they killed over the years? Certainly enough to populate this small lake, but the old man refused to bow to any rules. “What the hell do them bone-ass desk jockeys in Lansing know that I don’t know for myself?”

  She interrupted memories to reposition the boat, anchoring deep over the loon shit.

  No hits yet, work the shoreline carefully. There was an unexpected drop-off there, a black hole in a black hole under a sky the color of dirty motor oil and spitting ice-pellet snow, the contrast making the snow look like cornflakes. Her hands were cold, but steady casts kept her warm enough. So nice to not be in the truck.

  How would I explain a chore like this to the clueless, those folks locked in factories and office mazes? Well, maybe not factories, not like when you were a girl and the entire neighborhood was populated by shop rats and motor-heads. God, how they railed and squawked when I went off to college, and it got louder and nasty, especially when I declared criminal justice as a major. That decision had very nearly sent neighbors in their saltbox houses off the deep end. “It’s not a proper job for a woman. No odds in it. Too damn dangerous. You’ll never be as good as a man, never get married, never have kids, never satisfy God’s plan for all women.” They wigged out when I told them how I felt.

  That switched the focus and pressure from her to mom and dad. “You don’t want grandchildren?” they had asked her parents. It’s that old man’s fault, neighbors said, raising that girl-child like she was a boy. Just not proper for a young lady. Now look at her”.

  Cast, retrieve. Cast to the target, let the line sink until there was slack, retrieve.

  How did my one family, same as all the rest when you really got down to it, how did my family command so damn much neighborhood attention? It was like all noses were pointed at 59122 Dover Avenue. Until the day you came home with a sixty-six-inch muskie. No talk after that, only praise and jealousy. She be a female Ted Williams, neighbors proclaimed to mom and dad. Fools, idiots. Sixty-six inches brought nothing but praise, and soon I’m that weird kid who doesn’t know her damn place in the scheme of things.

  You have to learn that if you listened too closely to people, they’d put you off balance and keep you there. They spit up whatever they think-feel but without real thought, just on impulse. Like the time you had two tequila shooters on top of three beers and Sean Hospital had touched you and caught you on fire and the next thing you knew you were buck-naked on top of him in the back seat of his father’s yellow Olds 98, screaming like you’re a banshee. Afterwards you felt really mellow and asked him about camping and fishing and hunting, and he had made a gagging sound.

  “That stuff is so pleb,” he had said.

  Pleb? She had no idea what the hell it even meant, but guessed by tone it had been a put-down. Too bad. That night still stood out in her mind in terms of pure electricity, while most others were barely remembered. His loss, not mine.

  This isn’t a job, it’s a way of life, one envied by a lot of folks and understood by few. Cast left, retrieve slowly, slower, slowest, pause, yes, like that, yaaah. People think game wardens hunt and fished twenty-four seven, which is true if you understand people are your quarry, not fish and game. People are so clueless and a day like today is a gift if you care to see it so. I love this!

  She repositioned the boat again, picked up the thermos, and filled her cup with coffee.

  A pile of mergansers flooded down onto the lake north of her. A raft of thirty. They were such odd creatures and fish-killers extraordinaire. “Go away,” she told them. “I don’t want competition today.”

  Fisheries class, her first one, a professor by the name of Ann Frank had begun class, “No, not that Ann-with-an e Frank, but yes I’m a Jew like her. My family owns an aquaculture venture off the coast of Scotland. Fishing in my blood, you might say, and I would not object. Hook and line too.” The professor proclaimed, “I love the surprises that fishing brings, the explosion of action, your heart racing.”

  On a weekend fish with Ann and her husband Bolton, Ann said, “Fish are like men. They want to be on top or bottom, never between.” They all laughed at the not so-subtle double entendre and Ann then announced in her professorial voice, “You will always find the most pleasure in a small hole in a small water body.”

  Dusinberre pondered that, put down her rod, rubbed her hands, and looked at her hydro-chart. She saw that the deepest hole was quite close to the shore, not out along the ledge drop-off.

  She rowed over to the hole, anchoring with two anchors to keep the craft positioned in one place, stationary. She took out her little Bugs Bunny lunch pail and got out a peanut butter and grape jelly on raisin bread sammy. Granpa had told her, “Even God eats PB&J.” He was so full of shit, and so MUCH fun.

  She felt a chill of anticipation, a ferret zipping up the inside of her spinal column. “One hit,” she said out loud. She had never in her life lost a fish she hooked, not once, not ever, a gift from Granpa Dusinberre.

  First cast and retrieve across the bottom of the hole she thought she felt a tentative bump, no more than a brief, soft shudder. She cast back into the same spot and let it sink a while longer. Down, wait, wait, wait. Okay, long enough. Now creep it, creep it, s-l-o-w-l-y, feel the bottom, feel it tap. Pause. Lift the pole tip slightly. Tap. Resistance? Yep that’s a tap. Set! She jerked the rod tip up with all her strength, felt the hook bury deep and set as the rod bent into a U, and she kept the line taut and began the long haul and fight, pulse and crank, pulse and crank, pulse and crank until it came grudgingly to the side of the boat and she got a hand on it and held tight as she put down the rod and touched her radio transmitter on her coat. “Central, One One Eighteen. I have Glory.”

  Glory Livermore, thirty-six, fell out of a canoe last night, probably intoxicated. A downstate woman with four little kids up in deer camp with three of her pals, drunk and dead, one road leading to the other.

  “One, One Eighteen, great job,” her partner chirped over the radio. He was in his own boat at the other end of
the lake. “You never lose ’em!”

  Good to be known for something useful, she told herself, and to get a whole day on the water and not in the faces of idiot deer hunters.

  Gulf of Goths

  They had named their daughter Eudora after the writer and until she was fourteen she was a studious girl, polite, thoughtful, sensitive to others, outgoing, happy tomboy, jockey, never still.

  And overnight beloved Eudora became another person, wanting only to wear black and colorless clothes and compressed her vocabulary to no more than a few words and phrases. If you say so. Whatever. I have no interest, whatsoever.

  Golden Child turned Miss Morose almost in a twenty-four-hour cycle of the clock and CO Alexandra Gamerov and husband Melville King were at a loss. School counselors shrugged, kid shrinks shrugged, the family doctor and her nurse shrugged, their priest shrugged, as did her teachers and her friends.

  Only Grandmother Baba Gamerov didn’t shrug. “Miss All American Girl becomes Miss All-Black listening to that stuff, Rivethead, Nine-Inch Nails and she wants me to call her Doomcake? I refuse. I will not accept this. She needs a good kick in the pants. Doomcake, for God’s sake. It’s an abomination!”

  “This is God’s punishment,” Baba insisted. “She turned me prematurely white and made my breasts sag like due otri piatte! All that hunting and fishing and camping in the woods and sleeping on the cold, damp ground, eating all that junk food, I’m telling you it’s all unnatural and now look what it makes! Civilization has taken the last five hundred years to decide a woman’s proper role and it is not in the bois. The child is lost forever, for eternity, and you have only yourselves to blame.”

  Classic mother-speak. Alex pushed the heel of her hand hard into her eye socket. Her mother was consistent, if not humane, considerate, supportive, empathetic, or interested in anything in life, save one: Herself. So it went.

  Baba would be no help, and Mel wanted terribly to help but he was a nurse for a cardiac surgeon and could barely handle the workload and demands of his job, much less the vacillations of a teenage daughter. He tried, but this was a time when employers were strict constructionists in easing burdens on employees’ work lives. There were too many people in line for any opening, and willing to take huge cuts from their previous incomes. You had to toe the line. It was my-way-or-the-highway time and a lot of states were gnawing away at unions, putting even more pressure on people.