Hard Ground (9 page)

Funnest Man Ever

The scene was grisly, the man sprawled on the railroad track, cut in two. But there wasn't that much blood, all things considered. Conservation Officer Meglizabeth Vesco had gotten a call from the dispatcher and been first on the scene. The vic looked to be in his forties, sort of small, though it was impossible to judge with the two parts about three feet apart. Oddest of all, there was a smile on his face, not a smirk but a full shit-eating grin, a Joker-size smile.

Vesco had been a conservation officer for eleven years and seen death in all its forms: suicides, vehicular accidents (the snowmobiles tended to be the worst—many beheadings), death by violence (guns and knives, even fists, one with a broomstick carved and fire-hardened into a spear). Mostly the rictus of death left a shocked look on the faces of the dead, never a smile or a grin. Not like this.

The accident took place near Menominee, about a mile from any main intersection, and by the time Vesco got down the tracks in her patrol truck, she found a crowd of about thirty gawkers, all intent on seeing the body. She had no idea what sort of psychology attracted the living to the bodies of the dead, but the pull for some folks seemed undeniable.

Vesco checked the mangled corpse and began herding people away to make room for EMTs and the county medical examiner, an old gal named Gwendolyn Goldie Golt, whom everyone called Three G.

The conservation officer stood with the gawkers. The stiff had no identification in his clothing. “Anybody see what happened?” Vesco asked.

“Hitted by a train,” a man said. “Thud, then flump!”

“Thud, then flump,” several voices said in unison, and Vesco turned and looked at the gawker chorus. There was one group of perhaps seven or eight, and they all had small, distant eyes that sparkled.

“Thud, then flomp?” Vesco said.

“More
FLUMP!
than flomp,” a man corrected her.

The small group nodded in unison and shouted, “
FLUMP!
”

Vesco took an involuntary step back and turned to look at the body. The group scream sounded eerily like something of substantial solid mass was striking something of flesh and bone. Onomatopoeic, a voice in her head said, and then she began to have a hard time getting it to go away, an earworm.
Geez, what a pain.
“One of you folks see this . . . flamp?”

“
FLUMP
,” a man said with a hiss. “Not flamp, not flomp, not flimp!”

The group shrieked
FLUMP!
and caught the officer off guard again.

The man standing in front of her was a wide body, with gray hair combed over, thick glasses with black rims, an earring in his right ear (gay or not gay, Vesco couldn't remember), University of Michigan sweatshirt, Detroit Tigers baseball cap, and weird red lips, like pasted-on licorice strips. “What's your name, sir?”

“Not telling the man,” he said happily and waggled a forefinger like a metronome.

“I'm not the man, I'm Meg Vesco. You can tell me.”

“I don't
think
so,” the man said. “
FLUMP!
”

The chorus echoed the
FLUMP,
and Vesco looked at them and began to wonder exactly what the hell she was dealing with. “Anybody here know the man on the tracks?”

“
FLUMP!
” the group cackled in unison.

“The funnest man,” a woman said.

“Anything for a grinsky,” someone added.

“
FLUMP!
” the chorus said, and they all began to applaud enthusiastically, flippers over their heads like trained circus seals.

Clearly there was something off bubble with these folks, and when Vesco looked more closely, she decided they were all mentally deficient. Not a diagnosis, but a quick cop-take on reality. Droolers, she thought, and having had this thought she felt ashamed and turned away from the group to face the other onlookers. “Anybody here actually see what happened?” Vesco asked.

A woman with a ring in her lower lip and another in her left nostril pointed at the group. “They were all standing here when I got here, and I was first of all the rest of these dudes,” she said, indicating the other people around her.

“They were here?”

“Right where they are now.”

“Doing anything particular?”

“Like now, just standing there staring with their mouths hanging open.”

Vesco asked, “Do you
know
those people?”

“Don't know them, but by the look of them I'm guessing they come from the House of Joy, back across that field behind us. It's a group home for some kind of short-bus brigade,” she said matter-of-factly, pointing.

Vesco turned back to the group. “You folks from the House of Joy?”

“
FLUMP!
” they answered.

A single female voice said, “We stayed right here, Little Joe. Just the way you said.”

“And we laughed. This was the funnest,” another person said, this from a man of thirty, though the more Vesco looked, the less certain she felt about guesstimating ages.

“You saw the train hit your friend, and it was the funnest?”

No group yell this time. The group nodded solemnly as one.

Unbelievable. “But he's dead.”

“Dead as dirt,” somebody said.

“Always had a split personality, now his body matches,” a woman called out.

“He said he wanted to go play train,” a man said, and Vesco homed in on him.

“Your friend wanted to go play train, he
said
that?”

“Joe-Joe said.”

“Okay, Joe-Joe wanted to go play train, is that it?”

“No, we all played.
TEAM
.”

“
FLUMP!
” the group roared.

“What do you mean, you all played?” she asked, not sure to whom to direct the question. Vesco selected a man at random and pointed at him. “You all played. What's that mean?”

“Joe-Joe got his. We told him.”

“Told him,
FLUMP!
” the group called out.

“I don't understand. Joe-Joe was the funnest man?”

“And meanest,” a woman said meekly.

“Not nice, not nice,” a man said, and began rocking from heel to toe on both feet, staring up at the sky. “He's gone, he's gone, the funnest man is gone.”

“
FLUMP!
” the group shouted and began to whoop and whistle and clap their hands.

Vesco said, “You're glad he's dead, is that what you're telling me?”

They all smiled.

Vesco felt queasy. “Was this Joe-Joe's idea, to come over here and do this?”

“Yah,” a woman whispered. “Was
his
idea.”

“But you came to watch?”

“No law against watch,” the woman said with a hint of defiance in her voice.

Vesco tried to sort out the gibberish. “So Joe-Joe was mean and fun?”

“Two Joe-Joe's then, two Joe-Joes now,” a voice called out.

The group shouted “
FLUMP!
”

“Joe-Joe's idea to come over here?”

Silence from the group.

“But you knew he was coming, and what he planned to do?”

Still silence.

“Did you know he was going to jump in front of a train?”

“Stand, not jump,” one of the group said, and the rest of them turned to glare at the man who said it, and together they said “
FLUMP”
in a throaty, low, growly tone. The man put his head down and began to sob.

“United we stand, divided we hang,” a female voice said from the edge of the group. It was getting dark, and Vesco was having trouble seeing who was saying what.

“Who said that?”

No answer.

“There's no capital punishment in Michigan,” she said.

“Lansing is the capital of Michigan,” a voice said.

Vesco rubbed her eyes and wondered when the damn medical personnel would arrive.

“Okay, just between us. You all came over here and watched Joe-Joe step in front of a moving train, and now he's dead and you're laughing . . . why?”

“It was funnest to see,” a young woman said.

“Somebody dying is fun?”

“If it's Joe-Joe,” she said.

The group thundered, “
FLUMP!
” and began to jump up and down.

A local deputy finally arrived. “Sorry it took so long to get here. Had a damn domestic call other side of the county, and I'm the only one on.” The man looked at the body, made a face. “Yuck, fricking gork, what the fuck is that all about?”

“The group behind me may be from the House of Joy, and I get the feeling they watched the poor bastard commit suicide.”

The dep looked over at the group. “
That
bunch?”

“Not just that, but I get a real bad feeling that somehow they may have forced the vic to do it.”

The deputy looked at them again. “Are you
kidding
? Rubber room rangers? That lot can't plan where to take their next dump, much less engineer homicide.”

“Nevertheless,” Vesco said.

“These ain't homicidal maniacs,” the deputy said. “They're just a little slow on the uptake.”

A new man showed up, tall, young, freshly shaven. “Dr. David Peterson. I run the House of Joy.”

“Is the victim over there one of yours?”

Peterson exhaled slowly. “Alas.”

“I've been talking to your people.”

“You can't trust what they say. They don't lie, they just don't have full contact with reality. They're somewhat slower than the rest of us.”

Vesco said, “Listen, Doc, I think they watched the whole thing, you know, came over here to watch their pal step in front of a train.”

The doctor sighed. “That was Joe-Joe, anything for a laugh.”

“I get the feeling this was more than a joke.”

“You don't understand,” the doctor said.

“Everyone keeps telling me that, and still I keep trying.”

“These are not the criminally insane; in fact, these gentle folk are not insane at all.”

“Well, something smells here,” Vesco said.

“I think you have an overactive imagination,” the doctor said. “These are sweet, peace-loving, harmless folks.”

Vesco felt like a heel. The doctor was probably right.

The EMS and medical examiner arrived, along with a state trooper, and Vesco explained what she knew and suspected and stood by the group. They all whispered “
Flump
” in an almost inaudible single voice, and someone added, “The tortoise brains won
this
race.” The group said “
FLUMP
” again, and Vesco looked at them and knew that they had somehow engineered the death of Joe-Joe and that this would never be pursued, much less proven.

“Must be tough to lose your funnest man,” Vesco suggested to the group and shone her SureFire on them. There were all smiling, a united front, undefeatable.

As she took a step toward the truck, a woman from the group said, “We're sooo slow,” and giggled out loud.

The Third Partner

A Lute Bapcat Story

Twenty inches of snow fell last night, concluding its business around dawn, the latest storm in a long winter of muscular wallops. On Bumbletown Hill above Allouez, where the Keweenaw Peninsula's two deputy fish, game, and forestry wardens lived, snow had piled up to the roof line on the north and west faces of their log structure.

Over the winter the deputies had dug three tunnels through the frozen drifts, one from the porch of the house to the shed, where they parked the state-owned Ford; another from the shed out to Bumbletown Hill Road; and a third directly from the porch out to the road.

“Starting to look like catacombs here,” Pinkhus Sergeyevich Zakov had remarked as they were clearing new snow.

Lute Bapcat had no idea what a catacomb was and had been too busy shoveling to ask at the time. The Russian-born Zakov, a former colonel in the czar's army, was brimming with vocabulary and trivia, some of which were interesting and occasionally useful, but many of which were downright odd and seemed insignificant to Bapcat.

They were inside now, Zakov brewing tea, and Lute Bapcat, former cowboy, hunting guide, miner, trapper, and Rough Rider, was navigating the labyrinthine forests of a law text called
Tiffany's
, the law bible for game wardens and other lawmen across the state. Bapcat liked to learn but found reading difficult and tedious. Written law for him was often like a cedar swamp where no light touched ground.

“I hear something on the porch,” Zakov announced. The former Russian soldier had keen ears, though it seemed to Bapcat that the man was most keen to hear his own voice. Come May, the two would have been partners for almost a year, and over the months, Bapcat had learned how to tune out his colleague, a difficult feat.

“Are you not listening to me?” the Russian pressed.

“I am reading,” Bapcat countered. “Only you seem able to talk and listen at the same time.”

“There is no need for that tone of voice,
gospodin.
I am merely sharing an observation.”

“Open the door if you think someone's there.”

“My ears suggest some
thing
, not someone.”

“By the time you get around to the door, it will be long gone, this thing you think you hear.”

“You are so quick to belittle my hearing acumen?”

“Talk is no strain on you, only for the rest of us forced to listen.”

“It would serve you well professionally to learn to talk more. Partners should share their thinking, their dreams, ideas, fears, everything.”

Bapcat sighed. He too now heard the heavy sound outside the door, put the book aside, walked to the door, opened it, and found himself face-to-face with a long-necked red mule of gargantuan proportions, breath blasting from its fire-red face and spurting small clouds in the icy air. Bapcat touched the animal's soft muzzle. “Why, what're you doin' here, Joe?”

The mule, which stood almost eighteen hands at its withers, towered above its Swedish owners, the Skojoldebrand brothers, fishermen out of Eagle Harbor, who were nowhere to be seen. In winter, Goran and Palle Skojoldebrand rented an old mining house a mile north of the deputies across the Houghton County line and inside Keweenaw County.

Bapcat and Zakov sometimes visited the Swedes. Goran was morose and seldom spoke. Palle was gregarious by Swedish standards but spoke English in a nearly unintelligible accent. The brothers made their own vodka and flavored it with various spices and fruits. The giant mule lived in the fishermen's house in winter and invariably greeted Bapcat like a long-lost friend.

“Joe's here,” Bapcat said over his shoulder to Zakov.

“Alone or with the Swedling mutes?”

“Appears it's just him.”

“Perhaps he is fleeing Goran. In his position, I would no doubt do the same, only I would have done so many years ago.”

“There's too much snow to take him home,” Bapcat said, opening the door wide and encouraging the animal to enter. Joe ducked his massive head as he confidently stepped inside.

Zakov observed, “We had many
muls
in the czar's army, but nothing of our Joe's proportions. Even medieval Russian battle horses would be dwarfed by this creature. I must duly commend my partner's hospitality but also must point out we now have an outsize four-legged creature
inside
our cozy abode. Am I to assume our dear friend Joe will take his meals at the table with us, and do you think you could you share the next step in this developing plan? Or will the next step be as much a surprise as dear Joe's arrival?”

The mule bared its teeth and issued a horselike whinny and soft bray. The two men laughed.

“It would seem,” Zakov said, “that our friend also wallows in suspense over what comes next.”

Bapcat began to dress in winter clothes.

“Where are we going?” Zakov asked.

“Feels like something's really wrong,” Bapcat said.

The Russian pushed aside his tea makings and also began to dress. “The vehicle is out of question after this snowfall.”

“We have snowshoes.”

Zakov grunted displeasure. “I welcome the time when such dreadful devices will be relegated to a museum of wilderness oddities instead of everyday winter conveyances.”

“No need for both of us to make the trip.”

“Are you so arrogant as to think you are the only one with the power to sense trouble?”

Bapcat ignored the comment. “I think we should backtrack Joe as far as we can.”

“There seems a lull in the wind at the moment, and I concur.”

“If we lose the tracks, we'll head directly from that point to the Skojoldebrand brothers' house.”

“Shall we alert Sheriff Hepting?”

“Too soon. This may amount to a simple matter of Joe wandering off. Maybe he got lost in the storm and couldn't find home.”

“It appears you know little of mules, my friend.
Mul
, as we call this animal in Russian, like a horse, does
not
lose its bearings, but unlike horses, they seldom panic. The
mul
is a practical animal with immensely more common sense than its human masters.”

Bapcat knew mules from his time in the Dakotas. He had ridden a steady animal named Reggie when he guided Teddy Roosevelt on several hunting trips. And he knew horses from his cowboying and Rough Rider days, though the troop in Cuba had been unhorsed and reduced to foot cavalry when they assaulted the San Juan Heights and became famous in the process.

“What about our friend Joe?” Zakov asked.

“He can stay here.”

“A decision obviously begging disaster,” the Russian argued.

“I'm not leaving him alone outside, and I don't want to try to lead him home with the two of us on snowshoes.”

“Zakov grudgingly accepts this logic.”

“That sure makes my day complete,” Bapcat said sarcastically.

“This peninsula is Siberia exaggerated,” Zakov said when they got under way. “Same cold, same winds, but far more snow.”

The deputy wardens followed the giant mule's tracks back to its owners' small house. The animal lived in a stable built along the wall of the house, but there was an opening that allowed it free entry to the house, which the brothers had bought on credit from a mining company. Bapcat had no idea where the mule had come from. It seemed the brothers had always had Joe.

No smoke was coming from the chimney. Bapcat shucked off one of his beaver choppers and tried the door: unlocked. He stepped inside, found a lantern, and struck a match to give them light. No sign of Goran Skojoldebrand, but Palle was in a chair next to the wood stove, which was cold. The man's face was waxy and blue.

“Get wood,” Bapcat told his partner. “We need heat fast.”

“The woodbin is empty,” Zakov reported.

“Break something and burn it. Palle is barely breathing.” Bapcat went into a bedroom to gather quilts and blankets and saw blood and tissue all over one wall and the bare wood floor.

He wrapped the barely conscious Palle like a mummy.

A fire was soon going and throwing off heat. The two men pushed the Swede close to the stove and rubbed him, trying to increase circulation. “Palle, we're here. Where's Goran?” Bapcat asked, getting no response.

Zakov repeated the question; same result.

The heat increased. The man began to move under the blankets, his eyes flickering.

“Palle?” Bapcat said. “It's me, Lute.”

Zakov went around looking into cabinets and drawers. “Nothing here,” he reported, “no wood, no food, nothing, like Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The larder is in name only.”

“Heat water on the stove,” Bapcat said, and the Russian set to work immediately.

The deputies always carried packs with tea, sugar, extra provisions, and clothing, never knowing what circumstances might conspire to threaten them. Or where. Up here on the Keweenaw, weather was an unpredictable and ever-present predator that found ways to kill humans year-round. Bapcat tapped cayenne pepper into the hot water, an old remedy that beat brandy for cold and chills.

Palle Skojoldebrand fluttered on the edge of life. “Joe found you, did he, Lute?”

“Tea,” Bapcat told Zakov, and they held a cup close to the Swede's lips and helped him sip.

“Joe came to our place.”

“Good, he'll be happy dere witchus. I put Goran oot beck for dose wuffs. Dey gott eat same we do, eh.”

Bapcat and Zakov exchanged glances. Zakov raised an eyebrow and moved away.

“Out back, Palle? You put Goran out back?”

“Yeh, we lose dat fish bees'nees, dis place, ev't'ing she gone, no food neither. Goran cry two day, take gun to mout'. I tole him we got hard time before plenty, donchuknow, we start with nothings once, do again, donchuknow. Goran said give Joe youse, and I done it.”

“If you need money, you can sell Joe,” Bapcat offered.

Palle Skojoldebrand made a pained face. “Joe's famblee. Can't sell famblee, Lute. Gott wunt want us sell famblee.”

Bapcat didn't know what to say.

“Joe, he yore mule now. Gone die, Lute. Ticker bad. Wanted go like Goran, go togedder, like we live are whole dem lifes, but I got no guts, me. Joe, he yours. Goran said he always like you best.”

Zakov came in from outside, sweeping snow off his clothes, made a pistol shape with his hand, put his forefinger in his mouth, and shook his head.

“Palle, we'll call the doc. We know a good one. He's a pal.”

“Iss no damn good, Lute. What he gone do, make me new heart?” The Swede grinned crookedly.

“I'm no doctor,” Bapcat said, “but I hear they can do all kinds of things nowadays.”

“Not stuff I need; damn sawboneses iss like dose damn benkers, eh. Money, money, money,” Palle mumbled. “Take lots money, dose guys. We buy beesnees, what benk call dat moralgauge, twent year, pay so much end every fish year. This year not so much fish, donchuknow. Benk says, ‘Sorry, boys, our house, our boat, our bisnisst, not yours no more, you not pay, we take back, too bad not enough fish dis year.' Den dey call company stores, tell dem no more credit for dose Swede fitcher boy, and dat's end of us, donchuknow. Like I tell, Goran cry two day. Was good brudder, him. Lute, you take good care Joe. He good brudder, too.”

Palle Skojoldebrand died with his eyes open, gawking into an unseen void.

The deputy wardens felt helpless and did not speak until Zakov declared, “Laissez-faire capitalism: You have here its fruit, men as means, with less value than machines, the identical callousness we observed during the strike. The two brothers were killed by capitalism.”

The violent miners' strike lasted July of last year into early this year, with lots of victims falling along the way. The copper mine operators, fueled by East Coast money, were kings in the Keweenaw, and when the miners walked out, the operators had gone all out to break the back of the union and everyone who supported it.

“The French,” Zakov proclaimed, “were fond of snatching savages and barbarians from the New World back to France, under the mistaken assumption that they could inculcate in such beings a veneer of civilization.”

The Russian's changes in subject and direction could be dizzying. First he's talking about the copper strike, then French and savages? It was often impossible for Bapcat to keep up with the man's thoughts and words. “And?”

Zakov looked at his partner. “I have had the pleasure of reading on one occasion a tome by the French intellectual Montaigne, who reported Brazilian Indians captured by the French and brought to France as captives. They were paraded around the country and finally to the king's court and afterward asked what they thought about what they had seen. They said they had seen white men eating and drinking and gorging themselves and mating and outside those places thousands of poor and starving men, and having seen this, the Indians could not understand how the downtrodden should accept this and not kill their rich tormentors, take the possessions they needed, and burn the rest.”