Hunter's Moon Read online

  “I’m falling down laughing,” Will said.

  “He was prob’ly just blowin’ off steam. He got fired yesttidy. From Jerry’s place in Germfask. Guess he beat up on a customer. Some old fart pissed him off.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me? That boy of yours has got the ugliest temper I’ve ever seen.”

  “Ain’t no boy. He’s twunny-five. What d’you expect me to do? Whip his ass?”

  “From what I’ve heard, you did enough of that when he was younger. I’ll be out there tomorrow, so what I expect you to do is tell him I’d appreciate it if he watched his driving.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that. Now I expect you to get off my porch and the hell off my property.”

  “Pleasure talking with you, Angus.”

  * * *

  Despite Angus, when Will pulled into his driveway, the sight of his house, its lighted windows cheerful and welcoming against the backdrop of black woods, immediately cast him into a better frame of mind. It stood on twenty acres he’d bought for a small fraction of what they would have cost in the resort lands on the Lower Peninsula. Across the drive was a pole barn and a log hut with a paneled sauna inside. He’d built much of this place with his own hands—he’d worked construction for three years after his discharge from the Marines—and looking at it always gave him a feeling of satisfaction: the barn and the sauna, the house with its steep roof that shed the snows of northern winters, its screened-in porch where he and Madeline sat in the long summer evenings.

  His pair of springer spaniels, Chesty and Roy, slobbered him as he went into the mudroom behind the kitchen. His hunting clothes threw off hints of the bear baits’ stink, and Maddie told him he would have to shower and change if he wanted dinner. Upstairs, he peeked in on Alan and ordered him to put down his phone and open a book. The command lacked sternness; he felt too good to play the role of strict father.

  Will was sixty years old and in fine health, if somewhat overweight. He had a good woman’s love. Dakota, his daughter by his first marriage, was teaching handicapped children downstate, and the son he and Maddie had together was doing well enough in high school, a star on the hockey team. Will was happy, and he clung to his earned joy now. For there’d been a long period in his life when he could take pleasure in nothing, when the memories of Vietnam, jabbing his brain, told him that he wasn’t entitled to happiness or even simple contentment. He dwelled in a dark place that grew darker after Janine was killed in a car accident and he found himself a widower raising a child alone. His devils hadn’t been exorcised so much as tamed. Maybe all he’d done was to keep putting one foot in front of the other, like the grunt he’d been.

  “Much better,” Maddie said when he came down scrubbed and in fresh clothes, his sparse reddish hair combed.

  She rewarded him with a kiss and a bowl of venison stew. He poured a glass of wine and sat down to eat. She sat across from him with a cup of tea. Madeline had been a heavy drinker once—the Indian curse, though she was only part Indian, an Ojibwa on her mother’s side—but had quit a couple of years after she and Will married. She’d been dry ever since and was a counselor at a drug-and-alcohol rehab clinic in Newberry, a calling to which her personal experience proved more useful than her degree in psychology. They’d joked about the ways they made a living—he served booze, she was paid to get people to stop drinking, and if ever she succeeded they’d have to turn to crime to pay the bills.

  “What kept you?” she asked. “Did you have to track down another wounded bruin?”

  He caught the note of disapproval in her voice. In her recovery, she’d become a born-again Christian, but she retained vestiges of her mother’s traditional beliefs: the bear was a sacred animal, its powerful manitou held the secrets to healing sickness, it was not to be killed for frivolous reasons.

  “I went to see a guy in Seney,” Will said.

  “Who and what for?”

  He gave her the story.

  “Lonnie Kidman? Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “That jerk who washed dishes for me a while back,” he reminded her. “He was looking for a job after his discharge, and I got sentimental about hiring a vet. Y’know, Thank you for your service, here’s a job. I had to can him.”

  She glanced off to the side, crinkling her forehead. “Oh, yeah. I remember now. Something about him blocking a customer’s car.”

  “The guy asked him to move his truck, Lonnie said when he felt like it, the guy asked him again, not so polite the second time, and Lonnie jumped on him like a pissed-off wildcat. I guess he got fired again for doing the same kind of thing. Beat up some old man.”

  “So he’s one of these post-traumatic stress cases?”

  “Is there such a thing as pre-traumatic stress?” Will said. “Because he never went to Iraq or Afghanistan. He was all hot to go, couldn’t wait to shoot some Arabs, but Fort Benning, Georgia, was as close to the war as he ever got. He’s never gotten over that.”

  “Schizo? Bipolar? There’s got to be a reason for somebody behaving like that.”

  “Maybe. He’s a mean little bastard with a vicious temper.”

  “How did we get on this?”

  “You wanted to know what held me up. Let’s talk about your day.”

  “Can’t say much. The usual.”

  As she looked at him, the brightness of her gray-blue eyes startling in her coppery face, Will thought she was beautiful, better-looking at fifty-two than when she was younger and best friends with a gin bottle.

  “Then let’s not talk at all,” he said, with a huskiness in his voice that made the suggestion plain enough.

  She pointed at the ceiling to indicate that Alan was very much awake.

  “At my age, moments of lust have to be taken advantage of right away,” he said.

  “Save it for later. So tell me a little about your clients. The Chicago cops. A black bowhunter—pretty unusual, isn’t it?”

  “A first for me. They’re funny guys.”

  “Do you mean weird funny or funny funny?”

  “Funny funny,” he answered, then related the tale of Lewis’s encounter with the gangbanger, the remark he’d made to the investigator.

  She frowned and passed a hand through her hair with an abrupt movement and said, “Guess you had to have been there. What’s so funny about taking a human life?”

  “Look, it’s like when I was in Vietnam. We made jokes about stuff that would curl most people’s hair. It’s a way of dealing with things. Otherwise, you go crazy.”

  “There is a divine spark in all of us,” she said with evangelical fervor. “Even in the worst of us.”

  One of his old devils opened archival footage in Will’s memory: two Marines from his squad shoving blocks of C-4 under the piled bodies of North Vietnamese soldiers, lighting the fuses, heads and limbs blasting skyward, raining down, strips of flesh and entrails hanging from tree branches, like streamers at some bloody festival.

  “Sometimes it goes out,” he said. “Even in the best of us.”

  * * *

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Will was in the emergency room in the hospital in Newberry, sitting up in bed in a hospital gown, one arm connected to an antibiotic IV drip. He’d been given a local anesthetic before fragments of windshield glass had been plucked from his face. There was still some numbness, but he was beginning to feel a throbbing in the sutured cuts.

  The curtains were drawn, creating an illusion of privacy. Madeline stood at his bedside with the doctor and a nurse, the doctor showing Will CAT scans of his head while assuring him that his injuries were superficial; the fragments had not penetrated to the bone or damaged any nerves. The wonder was that his eyes had escaped the spray of glass entirely. Maddie squeezed his hand and exhaled with relief.

  “We’re going to keep you overnight for observation,” the doctor said. He was tall, slim, and freckled and looked too young to be a doctor. “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Treadwell. Any questions?”

  One question he had, the doc
tor could not answer. No one could. Why had he been so lucky while Lewis and Walsh had not? He’d heard an old saying once: luck is the residue of design. Meaning that you make your own luck. Vietnam had demolished whatever faith he’d had in that proposition. One hundred fifty-two men from his battalion had been killed during his tour. Why them and not him? The war had been a lottery, drawing its winners and losers blindfolded. He supposed that was true of life in general, the great difference being that in war it was immeasurably more obvious and that much less deniable.

  “What time is it?” he asked, his voice slurry, the way it sounded after a novocaine shot in the dentist’s office.

  “Two-thirty,” Maddie said. Her clinic was next to the hospital, and she’d run over to the ER as soon as she’d heard. It was she who’d told him that Lewis and Walsh, arriving in a separate ambulance, had been pronounced dead, a superfluous announcement. He knew they were dead. He’d seen them die.

  “There’s a police officer outside who wants to talk to you,” the nurse said. “Are you up to it?”

  He was. While they waited, he said to Madeline, “Y’know, I felt really happy last night, really good, looking at our place. I should have known that something was going to happen.”

  “Sorry, I don’t get it.”

  “In Vietnam, when you were coming in off patrol, when you were out of the bad bush and thought you were in friendly territory, and you were hanging loose, smoking smokes, grab-assing around, happy as hell you made it through another one, that’s when you got ambushed.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t…” she began, then stopped herself, knowing that he knew what she was going to say: she wished he wouldn’t look at life through the distorting lens of the war. “What are you saying? That happiness is dangerous?”

  “I’m saying that you shouldn’t put any faith in it.”

  The cop came in—Bromfield, a deputy sheriff—looking for a statement from Will, as full and complete as he could make it. The one he’d given to the officers who’d responded to the 911 call had been pretty sketchy. Understandable, considering …

  “You’re our only witness, you’re it,” Bromfield said.

  “You’ve caught him?”

  They had not. Sheriff’s deputies had surrounded the Kidman cabin earlier, about the time that Will was being wheeled into the ER. Lonnie’s truck was there, but Lonnie wasn’t. Nor was his father. Angus had been miles away, delivering a load of logs to a mill, and when the police contacted him, all he said was that his son had left early in the morning to go hunting.

  “Yeah, that’s what he did, all right,” Will said.

  “It looks like he grabbed some warm clothes and survival gear from the cabin and ran off into the woods on foot,” Bromfield said. “We’ve got officers from three counties beating the bushes for him, and a team of tracker dogs from the state police. We don’t catch him today, we will tomorrow. He’s not going to last long in those woods.”

  Will turned to Madeline. “Pack some things, get Alan after practice, stay in town tonight.”

  “You don’t think he’ll—” she began.

  “We’re too isolated out there. It’ll make me feel better, okay?”

  “But he’s on foot, twenty miles away, cops and dogs chasing him.”

  “Please, Maddie. Please.”

  After she left, Bromfield dragged a folding chair into the enclosure, spoke into a small digital recorder—statement of Willard Treadwell, recorded on, et cetera—and placed it on the bed. Then he sat down, a notebook in his lap.

  “Okay, from the get-go, best as you can remember.”

  Will took a few moments, trying to assemble his fractured recollections.

  “We got to the junction a little before first light,” he said. “Where Forest Road 24 meets a jeep trail that leads to my stand. You can’t drive it—it’s blocked off by a berm. Right there in the headlights, we saw this black F-250 in the turnout where I usually park.”

  “Kidman’s vehicle,” Bromfield said.

  “Can’t miss it. Flames painted on the hood, jacked up, tires that look like they came off a road grader, spots on the roof. A badass redneck truck. Y’know, cruise around for trailer-trash chicks in tight jeans that don’t leave much to the imagination.”

  “Please stick to what happened,” Bromfield said. “Where was Kidman at this time?”

  “Standing outside the truck, looking at a GPS. In a camo T-shirt. How do you figure? Thirty degrees and he’s wearing a T-shirt.”

  Bromfield motioned his impatience with this irrelevant detail. “In your earlier statement, you said you asked him what he was doing there. Right?”

  “Right, and he said he was going bear hunting. And I said back, ‘Not here. It’s my stand.’ I knew right away what was going on.”

  “Which was…?”

  “You know about the talk I had with his old man last night?”

  Bromfield nodded.

  “Well, I made the mistake of telling him that I was going to be there this morning. That’s how Lonnie knew where to find me.”

  “You mean this wasn’t just an accidental run-in? He was looking for you?”

  “I can’t say for sure. But Angus keeps tabs on where guides have their stands. He’s a professional poacher. He’ll poach just about anything except an egg, and knowing where baits are out makes his life easier. You can get up to three grand for a bear’s gallbladder on the black market. His son is his understudy—”

  “Then why did you tell Angus where you were going to be?” asked Bromfield, in his best suspicious-cop tone.

  “Like I said, a mistake. I screwed up. So my guess is, he told Lonnie that he was going to be busy today and to get out real early and shoot the bear before I got there.”

  “Stacks up with the evidence,” Bromfield said. “We found a spotlight and night-vision goggles in his truck. But what I’m asking is, do you have some reason, something Kidman said, for thinking that his real motive wasn’t to shoot a bear but to ambush you?”

  “You ask my opinion, yeah.”

  “I don’t want your opinions, just what you saw and heard,” Bromfield said sternly. “All right, you told Kidman that he was trespassing. Then what?”

  “I lowered my window and told him to clear out. Lonnie went into a routine, y’know, made like he was looking around for something, and he said, ‘I don’t see no sign says, RESERVED FOR WILL TREADWELL. We had words.”

  “What kind of words? What did he say? What did you say?”

  Will’s face felt stiff from the stitches, as though there were bits of cardboard sewn to his skin. But he was pleased with himself for the way he was handling things, for the calm, composed manner in which he was answering the deputy’s questions.

  “Lonnie goes, ‘I hear you don’t like the way I drive.’ I go, ‘I don’t like the way you park, either.’ Then he says, ‘And I hear you’re spreadin’ it around that I tried to run you over, you and the Uncle Remus you’ve got with you.’ So I told him for the second time to get in his truck and go somewhere else.”

  “And what did Kidman do then?”

  “Started shooting, that’s what. He pulled a rifle from out of his truck and—”

  “What kind of rifle, if you know.”

  “An AR-15.”

  “Walsh and Lewis were off duty but they were carrying their service pistols. Did they try to defend themselves?”

  “Never had a chance. They never got their guns out of the holsters. We were crammed in the front seat like sardines. Could hardly move.”

  “All right. So you told Kidman to leave and he opens fire, just like that?”

  “I left a part out. First off, he blows his stack, yells something at me—something like, You’re the one who’s going somewhere, motherfucker—and then he opens the passenger door on his truck, swings it open like he wanted to tear it off the hinges. That’s when Lewis and Walsh tried to get their guns out, like they knew he was going for a weapon. The next thing I saw was the rifle…”

 
; Bromfield scribbled with one hand while gesturing with the other for Will to go on. But his memories of the following seconds, however many there’d been—Five? Ten? Fifteen?—were as shattered as the windshield. The sounds of the rifle, of breaking glass, of bullets hitting metal and flesh, merged in his mind into one sound. He remembered Walsh’s body slumping against him but had no recollection of how he’d managed to open the door, roll out of the truck, dash across the road, and dive into a culvert. One moment he was in the cab, the next in the ditch, as if transported there by magic. Yet one memory was clear, and it pained him to summon it up. As he lay in the culvert, he heard Lewis cry out, “You shot me enough! Don’t shoot me anymore!” and then two or three more rifle cracks.

  “I stood up. I don’t know what I thought I could do,” Will continued, watching Bromfield’s ballpoint skip across the page. “I thought I saw Kidman trying to pull Walsh’s body out of the truck. I couldn’t see much because of the blood running into my eyes. Kidman spotted me, or heard me rustling the brush when I got to my feet, and he spun around and I guess I’d be with Lewis and Walsh now if he had a round left.”

  Because I ran out of bullets, Will thought as he spoke. “I took off running, and that crazy little bastard reloaded and ran after me, shooting into the woods, and yelling that he’d get me yet. I knew where I was. I knew that Johnny Bugg—he’s an Ojibwa I know from my bar, a pulp logger—has a place out that way, with a phone. And that’s where I went, and you know the rest.”

  Bromfield flipped through his notes, clicking his tongue. Then he stood, handed his card to Will, and said, “If you think of anything else, anything you might have missed, give me a call.”

  Will slipped the card into the plastic bag containing his wallet and clothes. He saw the bloodstains on his shirt. The flecks on his collar he assumed to have come from him, the large blot below from Walsh, after he’d slumped, without a sound, into his lap.

  “There’s one other thing,” Will said. “When I told you that I told Kidman to get out for the second time, that’s not exactly what I said.”