Hunter's Moon by Chuck Logan (the false prince series txt) 📗

news: the worst of the storm had passed to the southwest, warmer air was moving in.

The store looked deserted but the lights were on. There was a large maple tree next to a swayback garage with a ladder placed against the thick trunk. Ropes dangled from the branches.

Going in, Harry jerked his head at the tree and quipped, “They going to have a lynching?” His serious voice did not carry the joke.

Bud winced. “For deer.”

Inside were big round oak tables and mismatched chairs, dry goods, and cooler to the side, kitchen in the back. A sturdy woman in jeans and a blaze-orange shirt was counting receipts at the cash register. “Not a good night to be out, Mr. Maston. The heat off at home?” she crooned with a sly smile.

Bud crumpled into a chair. Harry went to the counter and selected a pack of Camel straights from a slotted shelf and ordered two cups of coffee. He brought the coffee back, sat down, and slit the cellophane on the cigarettes with his thumbnail.

“Time to go to the Camels, Bud.”

“Fuuck.” Bud drew it out. Going to the Camels was an AA ritual they used to have that preceded straight talk.

Harry placed his Zippo on the table with a firm click. Bud reached out reluctantly, fumbled with the pack, and raised the lighter. His hands shook.

“You quit going to meetings, didn’t you?” Bud asked.

“I think I figured it out. Don’t put it in your mouth,” said Harry.

“That’s Detroit Harry talking, doing it on guts,” said Bud. His smile turned down at the corners and he looked away.

An elaborate silence separated them. Harry was more visceral and direct. Prone to act, to use his hands rather than words. Bud was always the more verbal, traveling circles in his head. Reluctant to offend.

Bud had dubbed him Detroit Harry after Harry had taken what is known in AA as a Fifth Step: Admitted to God, to 36 / CHUCK LOGAN

himself, and to another human being the exact nature of his wrongs.

Under the seal of AA, Harry had confided to Bud why he’d left Detroit in a hurry. That was ten years ago, in a glibber time, when Minnesota was the first M in the MMPI. In the reborn zeal of sobriety, Harry had signed on for the whole extended-warranty Minnesota therapy jive package; treatment, AA, stress groups through the VA.

Now Bud owed him that kind of honesty in return.

“What the fuck is going on up here? How long you been drinking?” Harry asked.

“Shit, ever since I…left town.”

“Dammit. Why’d you isolate yourself and wait a year to call?”

“You knew where I was, you could have called,” Bud shot back.

Harry unburdened himself of a long-standing resentment. “Right, when you were playing bigshot you started treating me like the hired help.”

Bud’s voice dropped to a whisper. “You think this is easy. Letting people who knew me see me like this. I finally just panicked, I guess.”

“You just got married. People get nervous, but panic?”

Bud drew in a sharp breath and gritted his teeth; his eyes glistened and his distended body arched in his chair.

Harry said it for him. “You were drunk when you got married, am I right or wrong?” Bud dropped his eyes. “Now you’re thinking of getting out but she’s a wolverine and you don’t know how to drop the bomb.”

A tear crept down the rust of freckles on Bud’s cheek. He shook his head from side to side and his eyes drifted, became dreamy, the way they used to get when he looked out from behind a podium and microphone, into the lights across an auditorium. He shook his head. “I came up here thinking Buddha was right, man. You don’t solve human suffering through direct action. Politics was an ego trip…” Bud grimaced and his voice was a whisper. “But I miss the action. I miss it real bad.”

HUNTER’S MOON / 37

“Cut the bullshit. What’s coming at you right now?” Harry was a little shaken by Bud’s tears. Maybe this was beyond his compet-ence. Maybe it really was depression. Harry didn’t want to believe that, because if he did, he had to worry about covering all the bases and he hated the sound of the word suicide.

Bud’s face quivered. Christ. Like looking at Orson Welles with triple chins in a wine commercial. Harry suppressed an urge to knock the needy expression off Bud’s face. God—what happened to the guy? The day they’d met at an antiwar rally at the University of Minnesota, they’d sniffed each other out like two skinny dogs who had lived out in the rain. Bud had stood straight on his crutch, his freckles were scorched pennies, and he’d worn this amazed Huck Finn grin from a year gone fishing in Hell—just back from Nam and Woodstock in the same week.

For a few heartbeats, the predator in Harry was off the leash and padding in step with his conscience. Bud, the consummate player, had emerged from the crisis of his life as a mark. The perception bothered Harry, who believed you were innately one or the other.

“You want out of this scene up here.” Harry stated it as fact, not a question. Bud pursed his dry lips and stared at the plastic tablecloth.

Harry exhaled. “Okay. Bud. Look, you just need a little help getting off the meat hook…”

Crying muscles bunched around Bud’s eyes and his mouth. “Easy for you to say.”

“Bud. Buddy. It’s the good no-fault life in Minnesota. No one has to be right or wrong. You just have to have irreconcilable differences.” Harry tried for some levity. “Hell, when I got divorced back in Michigan I was guilty of acts of extreme cruelty.”

Bud didn’t laugh. He growled and swung his head around, at bay. He clamped his arms to his chest to stop a spasm of shaking.

“Fuck this.” He mumbled and reached inside his vest pocket, pulled out the pint of Jack Daniel’s, unscrewed the top, and poured two inches