Chasing a Blond Moon (6 page)

“Have a seat,” Blanck said.

Service sat, staring across the desk at the man he had nearly killed in his final collegiate hockey game.

“We had Walter on skates,” Blanck said. “Our doc cleared him. We're impressed as hell, eh? But his age is a concern. He's just sixteen. College players are older than juniors and there're academics to consider. This is a tough school and jocks don't get cut a lot of slack. We think it would be in Walter's best interests to redshirt him this year. He can skate with the team, but no games to preserve his eligibility and he won't be traveling with the club, so he can use that time to pound the books. We'll give him a full ride next year, so no money worries. This year we'll let him get settled in. He got his GED, and he scored out of sight on the ACT, but he hasn't been in a classroom for two years. We think it will be good for him to get that part of his college life well under control. Truth is, as soon as the scouts see him, he's gonna get drafted, and if he performs like we think he will, the offers and pressures will start coming. It's not like when we were playing, Banger. The NHL's expanded so much that they are desperately looking for talent and pushing hard to get players into the fold as early as possible. There's one other thing. Coach Forrester is going to retire at the end of this season and I've been offered his job. If Walter redshirts, we can start out together.”

Service was at a loss for words. The man he had nearly killed was now coaching the son he never knew he had.

Service looked at his son. “How do you feel about this?”

Blanck spoke for the boy. “Walter said you're his dad and it's your decision.”

“It's Walter's game and he's the student. It's
his
decision.”

Walter said nothing and Service got the impression that he was being set up, but he couldn't imagine how or why. “Does he need to make a decision today?”

“Not till the players officially report later this month.”

Service stood and reached across the desk to shake Toby Blanck's hand. “I'm glad you're here,” he said, meaning alive, not necessarily as a coach.

“Me, too, and we'll be really glad to have your son here.”

On the way out of the arena with his son beside him, someone shouted. Service turned to find Dr. Kermit “Rocky” Lemich, a former hockey player and now a professor at the university. Last fall Lemich had helped him solve a difficult case.

“Hey, Banger. Your kid's enrolled, eh?”

Service nodded. “Thinking about it.”

“Listen, you bugger, you promised you'd get involved with kids and do some coaching, but you haven't, so I took the liberty of talking to Walter and Coach Blanck. He's gonna help me coach a bantam team when he's not practicing with the Huskies. It'll do him good, and one way or the other I'll be getting your family back into the game.” Lemich laughed, pivoted, and walked away whistling.

“He's crazy,” Walter said. “In a good way.”

“Goaler,” Service said, drawing a chuckle from his son. “Why do you want me to make the decision?”

“You're supposed to be my father. Aren't you up to it?”

“That's not the point.”

“Isn't it? You invited me into your life, so I figure if you're my dad, you should do your job.”

“How do you feel about redshirting?”

“I don't like it, but it makes sense and I like Blanck. Did you really beat him up?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“He said you were a great player.”

“I've got to get moving,” Service told his son.

“You'll pick me up tonight?”

“We'll be here.”

Nantz was sitting in the truck. Service got into the driver's seat and Walter stood by Nantz's window. “See you tonight,” he said.

“We're late,” Service said, putting the truck into gear and pulling away.

“That was abrupt,” Nantz said.

“I told Bearclaw ninety minutes.”

“Family comes first,” Nantz said. “The job will always be there.”

Her tone was so soft that he wasn't sure he had just been chastised. “You ever feel like you're in the Twilight Zone?” he asked her.

“Every day—with you, Service.”

2

You look like you swallowed a bucket of lemon drops,” Nantz said as Service raced south on the two-lane M-26.

“I don't understand him,” he said.

“You mean your son. His name is Walter,” she said.

“He told me the assistant coach wanted to see me, so I walked in to find a guy I nearly killed back in college. He's going to take the head coaching job next season and he wants to redshirt the boy so he can get his academics in order. The boy hasn't been in class for two years.”

“Walter, not ‘the boy.' What's your objection?”

“They want me to make the decision.”

“So make it.”

“It's the boy's decision.”

“You make decisions for others all the time.”

“I won't make this one for him.”

“You're not being rational, Service.”

“First the kid tells me I'm not his father and now he tells me to act like his father. What the hell does he want?”

“Jesus, Grady. He's sixteen. He lost his mom last year. He's got a stepfather who doesn't give a shit about him. He wants what we all want. He wants stability and he wants to be wanted. This isn't rocket science.”

“So he dumps the decision on me to test me?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Exactly.”

“You think this is all right?”

“Jesus, Grady. Stop whining. Walter can't come right out and ask you to be his dad because he's afraid of being rejected, so he gives you a little test to see how you handle it. Didn't you test your own father?”

“
Nobody
tested my old man—not if they wanted to still have their head attached.”

She smiled. “Well, I don't think Walter is looking to get the shit kicked out of him as a sign of affection, though with you men it's often hard to tell,” she said.

“What's that mean?”

“It means that men get bent out of shape over the oddest things.”

Service began to grind his teeth and stopped talking.

“What exactly does Betty want?” she asked after a suitable pause to let him calm down.

“She found an old guy last night. He's more than a hundred miles from home.”

“So are we,” she said, grinning.

“It's not a joke. He's blind and got one leg. Everybody calls him Trapper Jet, but his name is Ollie Toogood. He was a pilot in Korea, shot down, a prisoner for two years. He came back to the U.P. after the VA cut him loose and he's been here ever since. My old man used to take me to visit him. He makes his living off a small pension and trapping. Been up on Mitigwaki Creek since the late 1950s.”

“Violet?” Nantz asked.

“He feeds bears year-round and rumor is that he lets people come in and pop the bigger ones for a fee.”

“You've investigated?”

“It's only rumor about the fee, but it's a fact that he feeds bears. I've seen as many as a dozen around his shack at one time. I think every bear biologist in the state has been to see him at one time or another. Great chance to study the animals, and in the shape Jet's in, it doesn't hurt to have people out there from time to time. He's never applied for a bear permit.”

“So we're rushing to his rescue.”

“His and Betty's. The two of them are likely to tangle before too long. If Blanck hadn't been in such a yank to talk, we'd almost be there.”

“Relax. An extra hour won't make a difference.”

“I know, but since Joe died last year, I've been feeling like there's more I could have done to look after him.” Joe Flap was a longtime DNR pilot who had lost his FAA license but continued to fly. During his career he had been in so many accidents that his nickname was Pranger. Last fall his luck had run out and so had his gas, and he had died in a crash near Escanaba. Service had found him and called for help, but his old friend hadn't made it. He had felt remorse ever since.

“We all die,” Nantz said. “You can't save everybody, Grady.”

“I can try,” Service said.

“Not everybody wants to be saved.”

“Horseshit,” he said.

Nantz laughed. “Whenever you get into a discussion you don't want to have, you always say ‘horseshit.'”

“Horseshit,” he repeated. She rubbed his arm, leaned over, and kissed him on the shoulder.

“When you get old and frail, I'll save you,” she said.

“Horseshit,” he said.

“Really,” she said, “it only seems like there's suddenly so many things to think about, but Jesus, Grady, you live in perpetual chaos. What's different about this—that it's not job-related? That you have a son to think about and now maybe you are thinking about this old guy, too?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I guess that makes me part of the trinity of burden.”

“You're not a burden.”

“No, but we have responsibility for each other, so that puts me over on that side of the scale.”

“Goddammit, don't twist everything around,” he snapped.

“I don't have to twist anything. I just let you spit them out and spin until they choke you.”

Another period of silence ensued.

“You want to save the old man,” she said, “and I wouldn't want to interfere with noble ambitions.”

“Because they're so rare?”

“I'll take the fifth on that,” she said with a coquettish smile. “Seriously, what would he be doing so far north?”

He looked over at her. Even after their fourteen months together, he still found himself watching her. Her long neck had a bit of a curve, which she didn't like, and her lips, according to her, were too thin. Sometimes she was merciless in self-appraisals, withholding credit where it was obviously due. Like her blue eyes that had a range of intensity equal to an industrial laser (too big, they bulge like a bug). She constantly fretted about her hair (too fine and did it seem to him that it might be thinning? It had happened to her mother), her legs (all thigh, calves too damned thin), her fingernails (why couldn't she stop chewing them?), her feet (like a damn duck's). The list was endless and he had learned to simply listen, understanding that she was venting feelings, not looking for his ham-handed attempts at making her feel better.

Sometimes he tried to look at her objectively, but such efforts invariably failed and he always reached the same conclusion: The sum of her was bigger than the parts and she was the most beautiful and interesting woman he had ever known. What he loved most was that she was alive, engaged in life, willing to stick her nose wherever curiosity led and to hell with consequences.

“With Jet, you can't tell,” Service said. His father had always said that there was some deep secret in the trapper's life and that it had been this that sent him into the backcountry to live alone. “When I took over my old man's territory, I inherited Ollie Toogood.” Service's father had been a ­conservation officer before him, and by chance Service had ended up standing guard over the same area that his father had taken care of for so long.

“He's nowhere near your territory,” she said. “And?”

“His story checked out. He had a nasty war. Air Force jock. He got the Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, a passel of Air Medals, and a Purple Heart. The Silver Star was awarded for his behavior as a prisoner of war. He was an example to others and frustrated the hell out of the North Koreans.”

“Maybe he got tired of serving as a good example,” Nantz said.

“Who knows? He's a strange old bird, but he knows bears and trapping better than any man I ever met. Maybe he signed off to get a break from people, got set in his ways, and couldn't find his way back.”

“Like you?” she said.

Service shot her a look. “We're not talking about me.”

“It will be a pleasure to meet your friend,” she said with her customary optimism.

“It will be something,” Service said, “but I doubt pleasure is the right word.”

Betty Very owned a small farm south of Rockland, on the precipitous banks of the Ontonagon River. Pure copper had been discovered in the craggy hills around 1840, and fifty years later the population was a thousand souls, complete with Michigan's first and then only telephone system. A fire before the turn of the twentieth century had been a major setback, but the decision by copper mining companies to abandon the area and push west was even bigger, and brought the town's death knell. Now there were fewer than two hundred people in the village and land was so cheap that one local bought an entire city block just to grow flowers.

Service considered many of the residents to be of the artsy-fartsy persuasion, most of whom spent summers on the Rock and fled at the first burp of winter. Service thought of them as aging hippies who were time-trapped in the sixties. With only two bars in town, the only persistent problem for local law officers were bush dope farms, and even these seemed to be on the decline.

Bearclaw dealt with more problem bears than any other CO in the state and had the scars to prove it. She was forty and lived alone on the old farm with a menagerie of goats, sheep, llamas, dogs, and cats. When she retired she planned to open an animal rehab sanctuary.

There was a small brick house in disrepair and a new pole barn gleaming beside an older wooden one that leaned precariously toward forty-five degrees. One of these winters it would finish falling.

Very came out to greet Service and Nantz. She was in civvies and did not look happy.

“The sooner you get that sonuvabitch out of here, the more likely he is to keep living,” she said loudly enough for it to be heard a hundred yards away. She gestured toward the old barn, making a chopping motion of her hand.

“What's the deal?” Service asked.

“I was scouting and I ran across him. He was sitting on a blow-down not far from the river.”

“Did he seem disoriented?”

“Nope, just irritated. I could see he was blind and there was nobody around and we were a mile from the road, so I told him I'd help him out, but he didn't want to come. I wasn't about to leave him. He wouldn't say why he was there alone or how he got there, so I dragged him out and he demanded to talk to you.”

“I'll take care of it,” Service said.

“You know him?”

Service nodded. “He lives in north Iron County. My old man used to take me to see him and now and then I stop by to see how he's getting on.”

“What's he do?”

“Used to trap. Mostly he just doesn't like human company.”

“Is he the one who baits in bears for biologists to study?”

“He baits them in because it pleases him. Doing something for others isn't part of his modus operandi. Jet is for Jet, period.”

“The smell of him's enough to make a vulture trombone,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

Which explained why she had him in the old barn. Betty Very was one of the most polite and considerate officers he had ever met, able to accept people for who and what they were, but she was also a believer in cleanliness and the old man would never meet her standards along those lines.

“I smelt youse comin',” Trapper Jet rasped when Service stepped past a door hanging from a rusty hinge. The old man was wearing faded, tattered brown Carharts. The stench radiating from him almost made Service retch.

“You got coose with you,” the old man warbled before Service could speak.

Maridly stepped in beside Service. “I'm Nantz,” she said.

“How do,” the trapper said. “Got the curse, have ya? Smelt blood soon as youse gotten outten da truck.”

Nantz stared at him. “You like to shock people, do you?”

“I'm thinkin' youse ain't of a kind to shock,” the old man said with a mischievous chuckle.

“You wanted to see me, Jet?” Service asked.

“You, not the coose.”

Nantz stuck out her jaw. “I have a coose, but I am not
the
coose. Nor am I
his
coose.”

“Got a mouth on her,” Trapper Jet said.

Nantz parried, “I can't figure how'd you'd trap anything smarter than a spruce grouse.” A spruce grouse was generally considered the dumbest animal in the forest, a fact attested to by how few remained.

Trapper Jet stared up at her through darkened eyes and grinned. “Coose with fire,” he said, shaking with silent mirth. “I didn't think it possible.”

“You'd have to double your smarts just to be stupid—” Nantz started.

“Stop!” Service said, raising his hands. “Jet, what the hell are you doing here and what do you want?”

“You could start with givin' me a lift back to my place.”

“That's not exactly on our way.”

“You think my being up here is on my way?”

“Why
are
you here?”

“Got no idea.”

“Why'd you call me?”

“Who else I'm gonna call, eh?”

The trapper obviously wasn't ready to talk. They loaded him in the truck, rolled the windows down, got a smile of relief from Betty Very, and headed out.