Hunter's Moon Page 14

  Trey is fully recovered. “Give her a hand with all that,” I tell him.

  Back to his old self—not necessarily a good thing—he snaps at me: “Yo! She’s a hard-ass, and I’ve got my own shit to carry.”

  “Goddammit…”

  “Oh, no worries, Paul,” she sings out, with a kind of caustic weariness. “I’m not used to gallantry anyway.”

  She strides off, Trey right behind her.

  “Son of a bitch,” I mutter to myself.

  Rick grasps me by the biceps.

  “What is it?”

  He displays his yellow teeth. “Thought it would be like the movies, right?”

  “Movies? What movies?”

  “That he’d be different. Faced death and all that and all of a sudden he’s changed, grown up.”

  “I suppose, yeah.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. He’ll be all right. Give it time.”

  “Well, listen to the parenting advice from a guy who’s never had kids.”

  It’s a cruel, stupid thing to say, which I regret immediately.

  “No, I haven’t,” he replies serenely. “But I’ve been around the block more than once—more times, I’ll bet, than the college prof.”

  We four sit in the alders at the lakeshore for a long time, speaking very little. My thoughts wander back to the wolves killing the bull caribou and what Elise said then, and to Trey’s rescue and the eagles soundlessly whirling while I held him, terrified that he might die in my arms. A wind has come up, as it usually does by midmorning. Keen-eared, we listen for the drone of an approaching plane, but all I hear is the wind and the voices it seems to carry, those strange murmurings from the unpeopled mountains. I understand them now. I feel I can be their translator.

  LOST

  1.

  In the early spring of 2014, tired of the bar-and-restaurant business after more than thirty years, Will Treadwell sold the Great Lakes Brew Pub. He had just turned sixty-four; it was time. Considering its location in a small town on the south shore of Lake Superior, he’d expected it to languish on the market for no less than a year; instead, it sold within weeks.

  The buyers were Patrick and Vicky Scully, a couple from Traverse City, old enough to have acquired some capital and a decent credit rating, young enough to take a chance. They’d owned a tavern in Traverse but felt that the city had grown too upscale for their tastes—“Too hoity-toity,” in Vicky’s words.

  Will was not prepared for the quickness of the sale. More than expecting the brew pub to linger, he’d wanted it to. A part of him did, anyway. He needed time to get used to the idea of retirement and to plan what to do with himself. Moving to a warmer climate or traveling was not to be considered. Madeline, eight years younger, had no desire to leave her counseling job at the clinic in Newberry.

  When the time came, Will read a little, watched television a little, tended to house repairs that had gone neglected, exchanged occasional emails with his son, Alan, now a junior at Ferris State. Once or twice, he stopped in at his old place for lunch and to offer his advice to the new owners if they asked for it, which they didn’t. Otherwise, he occupied himself by hiking along the lakeshore or in the woods with his new dog, a lively young English setter named Samantha. Still, he was left with the retiree’s dilemma: too much free time and no idea how to spend it.

  * * *

  Idleness, seldom good for anyone, was particularly unhealthy for Willard Treadwell. It unlocked a certain door in his mind, making it easier for Dark Ones to enter. They’d intruded on his days and disturbed his sleep for a long time after he’d returned from Vietnam, until, for no identifiable reason, their irruptions ceased. But when a semi-trailer T-boned Janine’s SUV at an intersection, killing her instantly, Will relapsed. Nightmares. Spells of frigid gloom relieved by outbursts of anger. He was living in Marquette at the time, working for a firm that built log homes from a kit, supplementing his income as a hunting guide on fall weekends, a part-time bartender in the off-season. All the while, he was struggling to raise Dakota, his and Janine’s only child. His shaky psychological state, along with money problems, made him less than a model single father.

  He met Madeline Croft in the early summer of 1980, when she was just twenty-two. She and some friends were celebrating their graduation from Northern Michigan in a Front Street pub where Will tended bar on Saturday nights and sometimes downed a beer or two after a week of fitting prefab logs together. That’s what he was doing on that Friday evening. A tall woman with the blackest hair he’d ever seen drew his glance, though she wasn’t trying to attract his attention. Will did not stare directly at her but at her reflection in the back-bar mirror. Of the five women in her group, she was by no means the prettiest—her face with its coppery complexion was too full, too round, a pie plate of a face, and her blunt nose had a slight skew, as if it had been broken once. The long, pitchy hair, spilling down to the middle of her back, and her gray-blue eyes were what arrested him, the eyes especially. They flashed a strange mixture of defiance and sadness, suggesting that she’d taken some hard knocks but wasn’t about to let them keep her down. There was a certain boldness in her manner, apparent in the way she stood at the bar, one foot mannishly on the rail, while her friends sat.

  It became more apparent a little later. A trio of young men, college boys from Northern, one of whom was wearing a green sweatshirt with gold letters spelling “NMU Wildcats,” came in and started to chat up the women. The pub was crowded and noisy, loud music on the jukebox, so Will couldn’t follow what brought on an argument between the black-haired girl and the guy in the sweatshirt. He could sense a familiarity in it, like an exchange of words between ex-lovers. He, “Sweatshirt,” called her “Pocahontas,” to which she gave a sharp reply that Will didn’t quite hear. The next thing, they propped their elbows on the bar and clasped hands. They were going to arm-wrestle. Sweatshirt was small, five-six or so, two or three inches shorter than his opponent, but his wide shoulders and muscular arms hinted that he was stronger than he appeared at first glance. One of his friends, grinning at the prospect of an arm-wrestling match between the sexes, laid a palm flat on the contestants’ joined hands, then raised it and said, “Go!” In two seconds, Sweatshirt had her arm nearly flattened, when she did something with her wrist. Will, watching in the mirror, couldn’t see what—some quick, twisty move that bent her opponent’s fingers backward. He yanked his hand from hers, as though he’d touched a hot plate, and yelped in pain.

  “Who taught you that, you sneaky bitch?” he cried out, rubbing the injured hand. “That black-belt gook?”

  She nodded. “And I’ll be getting mine pretty soon.”

  “Bitch, you broke my fucking fingers!”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said in a level voice. “But I will if you call me Pocahontas or bitch one more time.”

  Will walked over and bought her a drink.

  Their first year of marriage was one of unpleasant discoveries that came close to breaking it up. They rented a house near Northern’s campus, where Maddie was studying for a master’s in psychology. She found herself, only twenty-three years old, with a troublesome stepdaughter and a husband subject to mood swings as baffling as they were frightening, while he found himself wed to a woman with what they genteelly referred to as a “drinking problem,” which his ups and downs aggravated. She knew they had something to do with the war, something to do with his upbringing in a rough Detroit neighborhood. On his part, Will thought his new wife was the recipient of double genetic bad luck, inheriting from her Ojibwa mother and Irish father her feisty temperament and fondness for booze.

  But they, Will and Maddie, were reluctant—no, they refused—to admit they’d made a mistake. That’s what saved the marriage; that, and a trip to Vieux Desert one weekend in the summer of 1982. A run-down bar, one of only two in town, was for sale. The Anchor Inn. Will made inquiries, contacted the VA to find out if he qualified for a small-business loan (he did), and the couple decided to move from the “big
city” to a town with no stoplights and eight hundred people. Maddie quit drinking. The irony that a recovering alcoholic was married to a saloonkeeper was not lost on her. She’d joined Vieux Desert’s evangelical church and credited her renunciation of the bottle to her acceptance of Jesus as her savior. At first, in the fresh zeal of her conversion, she attempted to evangelize Will. If he took Christ into his bosom, those black holes he fell into would close up. Her preachiness got on his nerves. Vietnam, he told her, had robbed him of faith in God but deepened his belief in the devil. She retorted that he could not possibly believe in the father of all evil without believing in the source of all good. “Oh, yeah, I can,” he answered, “and you would, too, if you’d been there.”

  Eventually, resigning herself, she climbed down from the pulpit. But Will did undergo another spontaneous remission that really wasn’t all that spontaneous. Learning to run a bar and restaurant, managing employees and accounts, fixing up the place and the upstairs apartment where his family lived, absorbed all his mental energies. Physical energies, too—he did most of the repair and renovation work himself. He hired a new cook, expanded the menu from burgers and hot dogs to whitefish and pizza and ribs and steaks. He learned craft brewing, built an addition in which he installed stainless-steel tanks and copper kettles, and changed the establishment’s name to the Great Lakes Brew Pub. In 1993, before her biological clock ran down, Maddie got pregnant. Alan was born the following year. Will bought twenty acres outside of Vieux Desert and built a house. He did some guiding in hunting season, as much to get outdoors as for the extra income to help pay off his VA loan. Every year, he packed a freezer with venison and game birds and tapped his sugar maples in the winter to make syrup; Maddie planted an herb and vegetable garden and taught herself how to can and put up preserves.

  Dakota flew through her adolescence as a plane through the sound barrier—a lot of turbulence (sulks, tantrums, fights with Maddie), a lot of shaking and shimmying (bad grades in high school, driver’s license suspended in her senior year after three speeding tickets)—but the wings stayed on, she got into a community college, did well, and was admitted to Michigan State, graduating with an education degree as the century and the millennium turned.

  * * *

  Will was a happy man, which amazed him.

  Then, four years before he retired, something bad happened—a crime that should have given the Dark Ones a chance to deal him another severe setback. But he didn’t let that happen. He had suffered no lasting aftereffects, which encouraged him to believe that they’d been banished from his life for good and all.

  * * *

  The weather warms, the trees leaf out. With the arrival of summer vacationers and trout fishermen, Vieux Desert’s three motels display NO VACANCY signs; RVs and trailers crowd the campground outside town.

  On the Friday of Fourth of July weekend, antsy to do something productive with the remaining hours of daylight, Will drives out to Bruce Skrydlowski’s cabin to help him cut firewood. He’s in an edgy, irritable mood, though he can’t quite say why.

  Skryd, as everyone calls him, lives off a logging road six miles east of town, on acreage he’d bought from a paper company. He’s a high-strung man in his late fifties with big ears, a small nose, and graying black hair that resembles a pile of steel wool. His two-room cabin faces a small lake. It’s no ramshackle hovel, like the deer camps scattered throughout the northwoods, but is pretty enough in its setting to go on the cover of Field & Stream. He’d cut, skidded, notched, and fitted the logs; installed the windows; dug a septic pit; put in plumbing; roofed the place; and wired it to a diesel generator; all on his own except for the roof. Will had lent a hand with that.

  Skryd is a refugee from the Great Recession, swept from Flint northward to the Upper Peninsula by a tsunami of hard luck. He’d lost his job at a spark-plug factory—it emigrated to Mexico—then his house to foreclosure. Figuring that at fifty-plus, with nobody hiring anywhere, he had a better chance of winning Powerball than of landing another job, Skryd made no serious attempt to find one. He did just enough job-hunting to qualify for unemployment compensation. Fed up, his wife filed for divorce. “Good thing our kids was all grown up and gone, or I’da lost them, too,” he once told Will.

  He took half his savings (Mrs. Skrydlowski got the other half), packed his tools in a 1985 Dodge pickup, and drove to Vieux Desert to build his hermit cabin. He’d concluded, with considerable justification, that his life until then had been “built on the idea that if you gave a man eight hours’ work for eight hours’ pay and didn’t piss it away, you’d be all right, which turned out to be total bullshit.”

  He’s since become a cherished local character. The Marquette Mining Journal had discovered him; the reporter cast him as a self-sufficient Jeffersonian rustic who grew his own vegetables, ate whatever he could shoot or catch, and earned pocket money making driftwood carvings that were sold on consignment in U.P. tourist shops.

  The carvings are of birds, mammals, fish, and are quite beautiful, but for all his varied talents, there is something a little off about Skryd. Maybe more than a little. He suffered from fugue states—fleeting bouts of amnesia (for which he’d been medically discharged from the Air Force back in the eighties).

  Will had met him years ago, when they were both in their thirties. Skryd had come to the U.P. to go bird hunting, and someone had recommended Will to him as the man who could show him around. One day, as they were walking a logging road near Sawyer Air Force base, then a Cold War outpost, a huge unmarked cargo plane, black from nose to tail, flew low over the treetops with a startling roar. Skryd, who’d been an air-traffic controller in the Air Force, identified it as a C-141, “a CIA plane, that’s why no markings,” he said. “Delivers weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua.”

  Will thought about that, and after they’d tramped for another half hour, he asked, “Why would the CIA fly weapons from way the hell up here to way the hell down there? Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to fly ’em out of someplace closer, like Texas?”

  Skryd gave him a baffled look.

  “The plane,” Will said. “That big black plane.”

  “What plane? I didn’t see any plane.”

  * * *

  Now he parks his pickup alongside Skryd’s vegetable garden, surrounded by a seven-foot deer fence, climbs out, and grabs a chain saw strapped to the bed panels with bungee cords.

  “Hey! Glad to see you could make it!” Skryd exclaims, and throws an arm out toward a deck of beech and birch logs. “Take me two days to cut all this on my own. Let’s get ’er done.”

  The beech is to be cut into small pieces for wood burning stoves, the birch into fireplace logs. Selling firewood is another way Skryd earns pocket money. The work needs to be done now, in July, so the wood can cure before it’s sold. They spray themselves with insect repellent, clamp on earmuffs, and cut for an hour, tossing the pieces into piles, beech in one, birch in the other. Usually, Will enjoys hard, mindless physical labor, but he doesn’t today. It’s hot and muggy. His eyes burn from the mixed sweat and bug dope dripping into them, and as the repellent washes away, mosquitoes sing in his ears, drill his arms and forehead. When they have cut what should make a cord each, they stop to refuel the chain saws and give themselves a break. Skryd fetches two cold beers from his cabin.

  “Bud Light, the redneck drink of choice,” Will remarks, raising the can.

  “So did running a brew pub make you a finicky conneysewer of fine beer? You can pour it out if it ain’t to your taste.”

  “Take your pack off, Bruce. I was just making a joke. Didn’t mean anything personal.”

  “Sure sounded like it was. I’m no redneck anyways.”

  “Didn’t say you were.”

  “I’m an artist. A sculptor, like. But I work in wood, ’stead of marble or whatever.”

  “Okay, Mr. Arteest, let’s get back to it.”

  Skryd pauses and, running his tongue around the inside of his mouth, studies the uncut logs. �
�Y’know, this’ll go quicker if we cut the beech first,” he says.

  Will slaps two mosquitoes on his forearm, both gorged with blood. It feels good to smash them. He asks, “How will that speed things up?”

  “You’re cutting bolts and I’m cutting small pieces, so if we tackle mine first, it’ll all go faster.”

  Will considers this proposal for about one second. “Look, if it takes two more hours to cut the stove pieces and one more hour to cut the bolts, then we’ve got three hours’ work, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then what’s the difference which gets cut first?”

  “What’re you driving at?” Skryd asks, with a squint.

  “I’m not driving at anything,” answers Will, thinking, The great artist is a fucking idiot. “All I’m doing is pointing out the flaws in your thought process.”

  “My thought process is flawed? How’s it flawed?”

  An injured look clouds Skryd’s face. It’s almost a pout, and it excites in Will a malicious urge to smack some sense into him. Skryd is one of those people who unconsciously invite abuse; it’s as if they wear a sign: KICK ME. Which doesn’t mean that you are free to accept the invitation.

  “I can’t explain it any better than I already have,” Will says, forcing a calm, if not exactly amiable, tone of voice. “You want to cut the beech first, then we’ll do it your way, and when we’re done, you’ll see that it wasn’t any faster than the other way.”

  “How’s my thinking flawed, that’s what I want to hear.”

  Screw this, Will thinks, gripping the chain saw’s handle. “Know something? Doesn’t surprise me you got canned from your job and your wife took a hike. This is a good place for you, out here all by yourself in the middle of the woods. A good place for a fucking loser.”