Hunter's Moon Read online

  “Exactly what did you say?”

  “‘I heard you like to beat up on old men. If you don’t get your skinny ass out of here, you can try your luck with this old man, you scum-licking little shitbird.’ I was pretty pissed off, taking lip from a scumbag. I should’ve known better. It doesn’t take much to set him off. Maybe if I’d…”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Bromfield said. “I wouldn’t think about it.”

  “I’ll try not to,” Will said.

  * * *

  Will was wheeled to a private room, as if he’d been crippled, and hooked up to a machine that monitored his blood pressure and heart and pulse rates. It seemed that a lot of fuss was being made over a patient with superficial injuries. The doctor was probably erring on the side of caution; the hospital in Newberry, Michigan, population two thousand give or take, didn’t admit many shooting victims.

  The anesthetic had worn off, and Will felt as if a tormentor, hidden from sight, were poking thorns into his forehead, cheeks, and jaw. The nurse administered a shot of morphine. In minutes, it duplicated a sensation he’d had nearly forty years ago, on a hospital ship off the coast of Quang Nam Province: a liberation of mind from body. His conscious self floated into midair and looked down on his physical self with the detachment of someone observing an injured insect.

  He had no awareness of time passing, so he didn’t know how long he’d been hovering there, between the ceiling and the bed, before Lewis spoke to him—not as a voice remembered but as if he’d entered the room, a kind of unseen visitor. Forget it, Will. Don’t give him what he wants. Lewis had uttered those same words this morning, right after Will had called Kidman “a little shitbird” and right before Kidman grabbed the rifle. But what did he want? An excuse to commit cold-blooded murder? Doubtful. Kidman’s violence wasn’t the sort that needed excuses.

  Speaking spirit to spirit, Will asked Lewis, Well, what did he want, or what do you think he wanted?

  He was a soldier, Lewis began, and so were you, so you ought to know that soldiers are dreamers.…

  Suddenly, the room phone’s ring yanked Will back into his body, and contact with Lewis was lost. He lifted the receiver. It was Madeline. She and Alan were going to stay the night with the Magnusons. How are you feeling, darling? Soldiers are dreamers. Those words, vaguely familiar, teased his brain. Will, are you there? How do you feel? Like I’ve been shot in the face with a dozen pieces of safety glass, he answered, his voice thick and slow from the drug. Did you tell Alan that I’m okay and that I’ll be home tomorrow? Yes. If you’ve got a TV in your room, it’s going to be on the six o’clock news tonight. No, thanks. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what happened. The police are going to call off the search till tomorrow. It’ll be pitch black in the woods pretty soon. Everybody in town is locking their doors. Soldiers are dreamers. Where had he heard or seen that line before?

  * * *

  Sitting against a tree, rifle in his lap, Lonnie looked through the trees. He’d been waiting here, in the woods at the edge of a roadside rest stop, since before dawn. The sky was paling now, and he could clearly see the parking lot, a picnic table, two outhouses, and the highway beyond, Michigan Route 28. This part of it, called the Seney Stretch, thirty-odd miles of two-lane shooting straight as a railroad track through spruce bog and tamarack swamp, bore little traffic even at midday. At this hour, it was almost deserted. So far, only two cars had passed by.

  Lonnie shivered in the late October chill. Besides cold, he was hungry and wet, having slogged through a marsh yesterday to throw the dogs off his scent. Tired, too. He’d slept maybe two hours, after breaking into an empty deer camp last night.

  Another car went by, then a semi-trailer. Ten minutes passed, fifteen. Daylight washed over the woods and the rest stop and the highway. He knew he could not wait much longer before he would have to plunge back into the wilderness and dodge the search parties and the dogs. Ten more minutes. At last, a car turned in, a white Jeep Cherokee. He watched a man climb out and walk into one of the outhouses. Lonnie rose and moved quickly to the rear of the outhouse, then around to the front. He didn’t have a high opinion of Jeeps. Not as fast or as rugged as his V8 Ford or a Dodge Ram. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, could they? Not that he intended to beg.

  * * *

  Madeline drove Will home in the late morning. They listened to the NPR station out of Marquette, waiting for the news to air. A classical-music program was playing, violins and cellos making a bizarre soundtrack when they were stopped at an intersection by a state-police roadblock: two patrol cars, flashing lights strangely festive; four cops carrying shotguns. One of them gave their license plate a quick look, peered into the window for a moment, and let them through with a brusque wave.

  Will called Bromfield on Maddie’s cell. His was in his truck, and his truck, impounded as evidence, had been towed to the sheriff’s department in Manistique.

  “Hey, it’s Treadwell,” he said after Bromfield answered. “What’s going on? The state cops have a roadblock at 28 and 77.”

  “Yeah. Roadblocks all over the U.P. A closing-the-barn-door-after-the-horses-are-out kind of thing.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You don’t know? Kidman hijacked a car.”

  “Holy shit!” He turned the phone to speaker so Maddie could hear. “Where? When?”

  “The rest stop on the Seney Stretch, a few hours ago. Nobody was there. A guy pulled in to take a leak, a liquor salesman. Kidman cornered him in the men’s room at gunpoint, took his car keys and wallet, and then whacked him over the head with a rifle butt and drove away. Kidman didn’t take his cell, so when the guy came to, he called nine-one-one.”

  “Pretty good head start,” Will said. “He’s got to be—”

  “Out of state by now. Figure three hundred miles.”

  “You said yesterday that you’d have him today. Doesn’t look promising, does it?”

  “Uh-uh,” Bromfield said, as if this were of no great concern. “But there’s a lot of today left, and he’s got police departments from here to North Dakota looking for a white Jeep Cherokee with Minnesota plates GIN2408. You know his reputation. This isn’t some ice-cold professional we’re dealing with. A dumb hothead. He’ll fuck up. He’s desperate.”

  “He seems to be doing just fine so far,” Will said, annoyed by Bromfield’s casual confidence.

  “Listen to this. The liquor salesman is five-nine, thin, got dark hair, twenty-nine years old.”

  “Kidman will try to pass himself off?” Will said. “He’ll use the guy’s credit card to buy gas, and that’s when he gets nailed?”

  There was a rushing sound on the phone—Bromfield sighing, like a teacher exasperated with a slow student.

  “You’re almost there. The rest stop was deserted, remember? If Kidman were Mr. Frosty killer thinking ahead, he would have shot the guy, then dragged the body into the woods. He’s got his wallet and ID and car. How long before anybody finds the dead liquor salesman? How long before he’s identified? How long before his murder is tied to Kidman? By that time, Kidman could be on the goddamn North Pole.”

  Will thanked him for the insight into the criminal mind and closed the phone. Madeline said, “Jesus God, it’s like we’re in a movie.”

  “I wish.”

  “All right. But now he’s three hundred miles away,” she said. “Can Alan and I sleep in our own beds tonight? Can we go back to normal? I want out of the movie. I want to feel normal again.”

  He gazed at the woods flashing by, the yellow aspen leaves flickering in a breeze, the red blooms of mountain ash. “All right. And you don’t have to take the rest of the day off and nurse me. I’ll be fine. Go to work, go grocery shopping, and I’ll pick Alan up from hockey practice, like always.”

  “Nope. You’re on painkillers. You shouldn’t drive. I’ll get him.”

  * * *

  Will should have known he’d been too quick to congratulate himself; he’d been calm and com
posed merely because he was in shock. As soon as he came out of it, the reaction was bound to set in, and it did after Madeline dropped him off and he was alone in the house, with no one to talk to except Chesty and Roy.

  Lying in bed, he played the shooting over and over in his head, on an endless loop. The thin, tattooed arms in the headlights, the black rifle. He was helpless to stop it and sick with fear, much as he had been decades ago, unable to sleep at night because night was the time of maximum danger, his mind refighting battles there in the room where he silently recited the bedtime prayers of his childhood: There are four corners to my bed, And four angels overhead; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Bless this bed that I lay on.

  Now what frightened him most was the expression on Kidman’s face, or, rather, the absence of expression when he opened fire, eyes as blank as a rattlesnake’s. Will questioned how he could have observed such a detail with bullets drilling through the windshield. Was this a true memory or a thing imagined? Or a memory altered by his imagination? Whatever the case, he saw those eyes now. The deadness in them caused him to wonder if there were people in whom the divine spark had never been lit: a kind of birth defect.

  Four angels overhead. Yes, but what goblins lurked underneath, what bogeymen crouched in the corners, what dread figments cast their shadows on the walls? He got up and paced the room, trying to settle his nerves. Bless this bed that I lay on … G’night, Mom. Good night, honey. Sweet dreams. Then he remembered: Soldiers are dreamers was a line from a poem he’d read years ago. Odd. He didn’t read poetry. He didn’t read much at all, beyond newspapers and sporting magazines.

  He went downstairs and looked at the bookshelves in the living room, his gaze roaming over Maddie’s textbooks and professional tomes, a few paperback novels and histories. There was only one volume of poetry: The Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. He opened it and read the inscription from an old Marine Corps buddy, Tim Galloway, with whom he’d stayed in touch after they’d rotated back to the States: Christmas, 1977. Will—I was blown away by this book. The poems are about WWI, but they could be about our war, too. Merry Xmas and Semper Fi, Tim (aka Dado).

  Will smiled as he scanned the table of contents. Their squad leader, Sergeant Perkins, had given Tim the acronymic nickname Dado, for “Dumb-Ass Drop-Out,” because he’d quit college to join the corps.

  He found the poem “Dreamers” on page 76, read it through twice, and the last four lines of the first stanza—

  Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win

  Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.

  Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin

  They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and

  wives.

  —spoke to him directly, as if he and Siegfried Sassoon had shared a foxhole in the An Hoa Valley.

  He remembered that while half the guys his age would do anything to stay out of the war, he’d wanted to get into it, eager for an experience terrible and great. He’d pictured himself, that year he’d enlisted—it was 1968—dying in some valiant act, the solemn notes of “Taps” drifting into the echoes of the honor guard’s rifle salute, eulogies in praise of his bravery following him into a hero’s grave. Boot camp and advanced infantry training conjured darker longings. The point of those ordeals was to overcome certain inhibitions by instilling not only a willingness but a wish to kill. Two months later, he rode a helicopter into his first assault, a pack on his back, rifle in his hand, and in his head lurid visions of winning a medal not for dying but for making an enemy soldier die in a hand-to-hand fight.

  After he’d gotten a good taste of war, which had proved more terrible than great, after he had taken lives, albeit at a distance without certainty that his bullets had dropped the running figures two hundred yards away, the nature of his yearnings changed. On muddy monsoon nights lit by sputtering flares, a return to ordinary life, from whose dull rituals and routines he’d sought escape, became a beguiling fantasy seemingly beyond fulfillment, like imagining what he’d do if he won the lottery.

  He was startled out of these recollections by the dogs’ furious barking in the kitchen. He called, “Quiet down!” They kept on. He went in. They were up on their hind legs, forepaws on the windowsill, howling at an intruder: a spikehorn buck had wandered into the yard. It seemed to know the dogs weren’t a threat and tiptoed around Maddie’s vegetable garden, looking for a way over or through the deer fence. Finding none, it began to browse on the twig ends of a young red maple.

  The angle of late-afternoon sunlight threw a coppery tone on the buck’s gray coat, late afternoon at these latitudes being three o’clock. Alan would be done with hockey practice at four. Will went to the cordless phone to tell Madeline not to bother picking him up; he was feeling well enough. Not that he was; he simply needed to think about something other than what had happened to him.

  The phone was dead. He smacked the handset in his palm, put it to his ear. Still no dial tone. The handset must have failed to recharge. He placed it back in its cradle and was about to go to the bedroom phone when in a single instant he heard two quick gunshots and saw the spikehorn spring straight up into the air, then fall. In the next instant, he threw himself on the floor, his heart banging against the tiles. Chesty and Roy were yapping and running in circles; to them, gunfire meant a downed bird they were supposed to fetch.

  “Shut them fuckin’ dogs up, or I’ll kill ’em, too!”

  The shout came from somewhere behind the pole barn. Immediately, without thinking, Will, on all fours himself, grabbed the spaniels by their collars and, crouching low, tripped the latch to the cellar door with an elbow, pitched them down the stairs, and slammed the door behind them. They would be safe there. The next shot smashed a window and ripped a chunk out of the wall. It hurt him almost physically to see that, what with the pride he felt for this place, the sweat and money he’d put into it.

  “You know what I come here for, Will Treadwell! Let’s get it done!”

  In a panic, he lunged up the stairs to the bedroom. Yes, he did know now, which meant one more item could be added to his list of should-have-knowns. Should have known that he and Bromfield had misjudged Kidman as incapable of forethought or cunning. Collecting himself, Will grasped all at once what must have happened: Kidman had calculated that the carjacking, after it became known, would draw the search parties out of the woods onto the highways in pursuit of a white Jeep Cherokee. That was why he hadn’t killed the liquor salesman. He’d taken the car into the backcountry maze of logging roads, forest-service roads, and two-tracks, which he knew from accompanying his father on poaching expeditions. Then he must have looked for a spot to hide the vehicle, remote enough not to be noticed by some wandering hunter or off-roader but near enough to Will’s house to make his way there on foot. He’d arrived a short while ago and set the dogs to barking when he’d snipped the phone wires at the connection outside.

  Another gunshot, this one from a direction opposite the last. It shattered a window in the living room, where the Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon lay on a lamp table. And another, from the back of the house. Kidman was circling the place, a raiding party of one.

  Does he know I don’t have my cell? Did he see it in my truck? Will thought, ducking into the closet. His home-defense weapon was propped in a corner: a semi-automatic police shotgun loaded with eight rounds of double-aught buckshot. He grabbed it. Was there any other choice? Even if he had his cell, he could not possibly summon the police to get here in time. He could flee, as he had yesterday, take his chances and run out the door and hope that Kidman would miss him again, but he sensed that in the act of seizing the shotgun, he’d committed himself to a single course of action that could have only one of two possible outcomes. He sensed as well that the random firing, the challenge to “get it done,” were supposed to lure him outside, where Kidman, hiding in the woods surrounding the yard, would have a clear field of fire. Or maybe he’d lead Will into the woods, and the two of them would stalk each other.
In his own mind, Kidman was at war. Will knew it, perhaps better than Kidman did himself. The experience had been denied him, so he’d started his own war.

  He fired again, a burst this time, the rounds whacking into the clapboard siding. The noise heartened Will. The plotting he’d had to do to come to this point had exhausted Kidman’s capacity for calculation; his natural, impulsive violence was regaining the upper hand. Sooner rather than later, frustrated by the lack of response from inside, he would be unable to bear the tension; sooner rather than later, he would be compelled to enter the house and bring things to their flaming, fatal climax. Whatever he’d wanted a day ago, that was what he wanted now.

  Will hurried to the downstairs hallway and wedged himself into a corner. An evil, once it presents itself, is not half so terrifying as when it’s imagined. He wasn’t as afraid as he’d been less than an hour ago, lying on his bed. He wasn’t afraid at all, and the release from fear exhilarated him. In a state of acute awareness, he could hear Oscar and Buster whining in the cellar below and the sound of footfalls on the back-porch steps.

  A thud as the mudroom door was kicked open. He pictured Kidman, lost in a fantasy, putting his boot to the door, rifle leveled, as he must have seen done a hundred times in news clips from Fallujah or some other nightmare place. And that image brought Will into a strange communion with the man who intended to kill him; he had a sense of the inevitability that arises when desire unites with necessity. What was about to happen had to happen because that was what he wanted, as much as his adversary did. Unconsciously, he’d wanted it since yesterday morning, running for his life, Lewis’s plea echoing in his mind.

  Kidman was in the kitchen now. In a moment, he would step through the entrance to the hall. Will eased the safety off and raised the shotgun to his shoulder.

  THE NATURE OF LOVE ON THE LAST FRONTIER