All right, Emery—you and me!
47
Harry grabbed his hunting knife, found a white sheet in the hall closet and slashed a hole for his head. At the fireplace he scrawled a quick winter-camo pattern with a chunk of charcoal, threw it over his parka, and pulled on his boots.
Not the only one who can play snoop and poop in the woods, Emery.
Pack? No time. Going out the door, he barely remembered his hat and gloves. He hefted the heavy lever-action rifle and sprinted into the woods on sheer adrenaline.
You been hunting that kid, you fucker. Why don’t you try hunting me?
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He picked up Emery’s tracks and slowly started up the ridge. Walk three steps, stop, listen, scan 360 degrees. Boonie Walk, an Austral-ian conceit of fieldcraft he’d learned.
He wiggled on his belly through a stand of dwarf pines and saw Larry Emery’s red square back dip over a hill 200 yards away.
Emery took a trail that skirted the ridge and twisted through the ravines. Harry came to a sign disfigured by a rusted stipple of buckshot. Snowmobile logo in a circle behind a diagonal slash.
Hiking trail.
Emery traveled at a smooth trot, working a pattern through the trail network. Harry kept the 200-yard interval, his lungs banging against his ribs. Snake breath. Formaldehyde sweat gushed in his eyes. Keep going. The old tie breaker. He can do it. You can do it.
Emery left the trails and climbed the ridge and the silent chase ate up the morning. No watch. No compass. Hour and direction lost in the swirl of exhaustion. Emery skirted the ridgeline and went down the other side. Oatmeal for sky. No sun. No shadows. Just follow.
Back on the trails, the red target stopped. Harry squatted, caught his breath, and relaced his boots. Within a minute, Emery moved again. He’d paused at a county road. An unfiltered cigarette butt smashed the snow. Across the road, an empty pint of Old GrandDad lay in his tracks with amber beads of liquor still wet on the bottleneck.
A couple hundred yards down the road Harry saw a country mailbox, set on an overhang to let the snowplow through.
More switchback hills. Swampy, thick second growth. Jack pine.
Off Bud’s land. Emery removed his Mackinaw and tucked it under a bough. His slate-gray shirt blended into the snow and Harry closed the distance, afraid he would lose him in the hills. Once he thought Emery might have heard him. He fell back. The track of a plow blade wound through the trees. Road? No, a driveway. Power line running in. Emery went back for high ground. The tang of wood smoke stained the air.
The big trailer had a screened-in porch on one side and an 288 / CHUCK LOGAN
addition on the other with a stovepipe off the addition putting out the smoke. Jay Cox’s truck. Jesse’s Escort. A Quonset garage had been converted to a workshop and looked full of power tools, lumber.
Emery lay motionless, scouting the trailer.
An hour passed. The sun made a platinum smudge in the clouds and disappeared. The wind came up. When the plume of smoke came directly at Emery and Harry, Harry took advantage of being downwind to calm himself with a cigarette.
The trailer door opened, the sound out of sync with the distance, and Jay Cox stepped out, clad in blaze orange. He shouldered his rifle and walked to his shed where he pushed out a fat-tired three-wheel scooter. He mounted it and putted down the driveway.
Harry kept his eyes on Emery. What would he do? Go after Cox?
Go down to see if Jesse was in there alone? A meeting?
Emery moved almost immediately, scrambling to where he’d left his coat. He put it on and began to walk in the direction Cox had taken.
Harry waited another thirty minutes to see if Emery would double back. His eyes snapped back on the trailer.
She was in there alone.
He circled, staying in the cover of the trees, and came at the trailer from the end where there was only one window, the curtain drawn.
He hoped that Cox didn’t keep a dog. A dog inside the trailer would be barking already. No dog, decided Harry. From the edge of the trailer he could see through the framed eight-foot-high thermal windows, twelve of them, four to a side, that formed the addition.
A nude copper shadow rippled through the tinted glass as Jesse moved into the addition drying her hair with the end of a towel.
Harry pulled back behind the end of the trailer and gripped the rifle with both hands and willed his heartbeat to slow down. Then he rounded the trailer and gained the screened HUNTER’S MOON / 289
porch in long strides. Through the porch. The door opened to his grasp. He was in.
“Hello,” she called out over the whine of the hair dryer. “Jay?”
A couch and chair. TV. Coffee table. Shelves held more books than Harry was prepared to think that Cox was inclined to read.
Flat cardboard boxes adorned with the script of a Duluth women’s apparel shop were strewn on the couch amid tatters of beige wrapping tissue that gave off a new expensive scent. The table was littered with brightly colored travel brochures, scattered among plastic pill containers. “Mexico” in warm terra-cotta type. Harry picked up one the bottles. Elavil. From the Twin Ports VA Clinic in Superior, Wisconsin. Cox’s name typed along with a lengthy description of doses and contra-indications.
Travelers checks. Thick booklets of hundreds. Two airline tickets.
Northwest. Dulu th to Ixtapa, Mexico. Somebody was headed to the beach to beat the winter blues.
The electric whine shut off. “Oh my,” said Jesse.
She merely stepped into the doorway, but she danced in his vision, his own backroads Shiva, with her hair down and her bare shoulders more rounded than he pictured them and her skin as pale as blooming peonies
