Hunter's Moon, Chuck Logan [i am reading a book TXT] 📗

the moon. With her beauty barely in control, she walked up to him and she was innately man-wary and man-daring and she had a bold lower lip and raven eyes and black hair twisted up in a tangle of braids. She wore skintight Levi’s and a crisp blue-and-white-checked blouse that crackled under a loose wool cardigan.

He bisected her face, covering up one half, then the other. Beware, warned her cool, untouchable right eye. Come a little bit closer, suggested the left.

The rangy boy stood behind her and, like his mother and his sister, he was a little too good looking, the way Cox was a little too much of a fright.

Chris had raccoon circles under his tense brown eyes and had harlequined his appearance with long hair, tailed in back and shaved to his scalp over the ears. A death’s head emblem decorated his black T-shirt; under the grinning skull, the crooked lightning insignia of the Waffen SS pimped some heavy metal band.

He favored his left leg with a slight limp.

Bud put his arm around Jesse. “Harry, meet Jesse,” he said with a goofy grin. She held out a cool left hand. A barbaric diamond glittered on the third finger.

“Hi.”

Their hands met. Left-handed shake. She smelled as dangerously fresh as ozone coming after lightning and their eyes and their fingers lingered together a fraction of a second too long as the ghost of Harry’s sex drive sat up and took a ragged breath.

Everybody grinned. Cox’s gray eyes wobbled and he looked like he’d chugalugged a gallon of flu virus. Harry grinned, too. They weren’t grinning with Bud. They were grinning at him and to each other.

“Chris,” said Bud. “C’mon over here and meet my friend Harry.”

Chris’s eyes flashed.

HUNTER’S MOON / 23

“No way to be,” Cox quietly admonished. Dutifully Chris came forward and shook Harry’s hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

Chris’s lean hand crawled in Harry’s grip.

“So you’re the guy who knows where the big deer are,” said Harry, making a stab at conversation.

Chris avoided Harry’s eyes.

“We’ll get that deer, tomorrow morning,” said Bud, putting his hand on Chris’s shoulder.

“We’ll see what we get,” said Chris. He shook off Bud’s hand and went into the lodge.

Bud turned to Harry with a hurt expression. Standing behind Bud, Jesse wrung her hands together and her knuckles bleached white.

She fired one probing glance at Cox. Cox just stared, spooked.

“Let’s go inside,” Jesse said. “It’s cold out here.”

Bud, myopic with hangover, missed the eyes working all around him. And Harry knew that, this time, Bud wasn’t mired in the neurotic, indulgent morass of city slicker love. Bud had really stepped into it out here in the sticks.

Jesse and Cox carefully did not look at each other as Cox made his farewell, went out, and got back in his big truck. He sat for a moment, gripping the steering wheel with his hands. Then he started the truck and drove away.

Harry shook out his senses and cast them in a wide net. He’d been around these kind of folks before.

They were outlaws.

6

Six apartments the size of Harry’s would fit in the lodge’s main room and a man could sleep in the field-stone fireplace.

The woodwork was hand hewn and inlaid with Ojibway design.

An antique bowsprit, carved in the shape of a bare-breasted Indian maiden with streamlined hair, jutted out from the apex 24 / CHUCK LOGAN

of beams over the fireplace. “Looks like a goddamn meadhall. What was your granddad’s real name? Beowulf?” Harry’s eyes wandered up to the cathedral ceiling and wagon wheel chandeliers.

“Grendel,” said Bud, winking.

“His name was Stanley, like the town,” said Jesse. Becky darted past them in a youthful flap of arms, legs, and bouncing breasts and disappeared down a hallway at the other end of the building.

In contrast to the Mission Oak furniture and Navajo rugs on the oak plank floor, the walls were decorated with grim, framed prints from Goya’s Disasters of War. The prints were interspersed with tribal masks: Indian, African, South Sea Islander; collections of spears, bows and arrows, and war clubs clustered around the masks.

Harry inspected a large bearskin, complete with head and claws, stretched on the wall. The plaque under it had been carved by a child: GLACIER LAKE ROGUE BLACK BEAR. SHOT BY SHERIFF

LAWRENCE EMERY.

Bud explained, “The stuff on the walls is left over from when public TV was up here.”

“You know,” Jesse dead-panned, “all these treehuggers from the Cities came up here to play Indian. Beat on drums. Get naked and,”

with elegant barroom vulgarity, she looked Harry in the eye, “pretend it don’t matter who’s got the biggest pee pee in the teepee.”

Harry felt like he’d known her all his life. Strength and mystery were at her fingertips, but she kept part of her brains squeezed down in her pants and she liked to see men fight.

“Tad Clark’s men’s group, that show they did?” said Bud with a pained smile.

Harry nodded vaguely. Then his eyes fastened on a sheet of stationery that lay on the writing desk next to the fireplace. A fancy printing job, the paper had a beige birchbark ripple. He scanned the business letterhead:

HUNTER’S MOON / 25

Snowshoe Lodge, Stanley, Minnesota

In friendly Maston County

Jesse Deucette, Manager

When he looked up, she was watching him. He pointed to the letterhead. “So you didn’t change your name?” he asked.

“Neither did Bud,” she parried. He continued his inspection. No wedding pictures. No cat. No dog. No houseplants. With all these windows, if this was a home, something should be growing.

Bud stooped and fiddled with the fire. Jesse showed Harry around.

“You caught us kind of in between, we plan to get this place up and running for the fishing opener in the spring,” she said, pointing up a broad stairway. Thick plastic sheeting walled off the balcony and second story. Harry smelled paint and plaster spackling compound; several paint cans and a 10-gallon bucket of spackle sat next to French doors that opened to a long porch where new wood shone in the