Strike Dog (3 page)

Treebone was winded from the run through the woods to the site of the gunfire. “What the hell are you
doing,
man?”

“Getting ready,” Grady Service said.

“There it is,” Treebone said quietly.

Service was certain that all of them understood exactly what he meant.

5

SLIPPERY CREEK, MICHIGAN
MAY 3, 2004

Grady Service and Tree sat on the porch of his cabin. Newf and Cat stayed close. The sky was the color of sun-baked slate. He had found the cat years ago in a cloth bag with seven kittens someone had dumped in the creek. Why the one had survived was beyond him, but she had lived and turned into a feline misanthrope that he never got around to naming. Newf's color was brindle, an unappealing mix of brown, gray, and ocher, all slopped together like cheap cake mix in a bowl. She had intelligent brown eyes and a wide black snout.

The crowds of well-wishers had dwindled. There were just the two of them, alone finally.

His watch said 2:40 p.m., but time had lost all meaning. The only numbers registering now: Five reduced to three, death in a flash, sudden, unexpected, too familiar, too permanent, the way he knew it best, had experienced it too many times before.

Intellectually he understood they were dead, but he was still trying to process the reality. Somebody had tried to drown Cat and she had survived. Nantz and Walter wanted only to live, but had died. It made no sense. Was God a jokester, or just an asshole?

Sadness had changed to anger. What the hell had Nantz been doing on M-35 south of Palmer, and why the hell was Walter with her when he was supposed to be at school? Something inside him kept telling him that if she had not gone down that road they would still be alive, but he knew the truth. Death came in its own time and in its own way. Nantz had wanted to be a conservation officer and had already adopted a game warden's habits. Like him, she never came home the same way. His fault! She had tried to copy a lot of his behaviors. Jesus.

For three years he had lived with Maridly Nantz as friends, lovers; they were a couple. In three years with Nantz he had almost become civilized—and even soft—but he had also been deeply and undeniably in love. Now she was gone and not coming back, and he had returned to sleeping on a thin mattress on military footlockers set end to end.

The autopsy results were still pending, and there had been no funeral service and no memorial. He refused to hear of it. When it was time, he would have them both cremated.

“You remember Erbelli?” Tree asked, and answered his own question.“One day in country, base camp, sniper round to the head. Wouldn't know him if he walked up on the porch right now. How many we lose from the company?”

“Fourteen dead.”

“There it is,” Treebone said. “We are born to die.”

“God's will, that junk?” Service asked, feeling uncomfortable. Of all his friends, Tree was closest. They had been through the most together, including Vietnam, and Tree would be the one to try to reach out to him, toss him a net if he thought he needed it.

“A while back Kalina tries to get me down to the AMC, the Reverend ­Thelonious Jones, proprietor—Thelonious Jones of Howard, Harvard, and Jackson. He did fifteen for a plethora of transgressions, now reformed, his life an open book, all sins pronounced and denounced, can I hear an amen,
brother?
”

“You went to church?” This was a revelation. Neither he nor Tree put much stock in organized religion, but Kalina was undisputed queen of Treebone's kingdom.

“Ain't no quit in the sister. The reverend and me circled and sniffed each other and we both saw the truth of the other: two pit bulls with a philosophical fence between us, him wanting to redeem lost souls in order to redeem his own, and me wanting to go up the side of bad-ass motherfucking heads—his included.”

“This story have a point?”

“Are who we are, is what it is,” Tree said.

“Meaning?”

“We choose to walk through the Valley of Death, Grady. We don't have to like it, but we got to keep on keepin' on.”

“Trucking until we retire.”

“After all the shit we've been through, a retirement ain't something to throw away, man.”

“You telling me to rein it in?”

“No, man. There's got to be payback. All I'm sayin' is that payback can be in degrees—hear what I'm sayin'?”

“I hear.” Grady Service had enough years of service, between the marines, state police, and DNR law enforcement to pack it in now, but he had begun to conceive of retirement in the context of Nantz and his son—not alone. Now they were gone.

“I never married her,” Service said, his voice cracking.

6

SLIPPERY CREEK, MICHIGAN
MAY 4, 2004

Service came back from a run and found Tree tying flies on the porch of the cabin. He was sitting next to a small man with a ruddy complexion and white hair in a buzz cut, smoking a cigar and rubbing Newf's ears.

“This is Father O'Brien,” Tree announced.

“I'm not a mackerel snapper,” Service greeted the man caustically.

“Call me OB,” the man said. “Technically we don't have the Friday fish rule anymore, and in any event, I'm not here as a Catholic. I'm here as an informal grief counselor. Your captain suggested we talk.”

Newf came over to Service and poked at his hand with her drooly snout. “So talk.”

“As you reenter the melee, you're apt to carry a bit of anger, and maybe your judgment will be frayed. It helps to talk things through with somebody neutral, bounce feelings off.”

Service started to object, but he held back, understood O'Brien's presence was the captain's way of gauging and monitoring his readiness. He had no choice but to go along with it. He could hear Nantz whispering, “Back off, you lummox.”

“Whatever floats your boat, OB,” Service said, going into the cabin.
If everyone would just leave him alone he would be fine
, he thought. Like Tree had said, no choice but to keep on keepin' on.

“Okay then,” the priest said, following him. “I guess that's a good introduction. I'll leave my card with you. Feel free to call me every couple of days.”

“One time better than another for you?”

“It's your choice. I'm mostly retired and my time is open.”

Service turned around to face the man. “What sort of work did you do?”

“I taught psychology at Marquette University for thirty years. Also I was in the Marine Reserve as a chaplain, and served in the first Gulf War.”

“Retirement a tough adjustment?”

“
All
of life's adjustments are difficult, son. Semper Fi.”

“You're not gonna call him,” Tree said after the man was gone.

“Back off,” Grady Service said. “I don't need help.”

“You mean you don't
want
help, man. We all
need
it.”

“I called the funeral home today. I have to stop and sign papers tomorrow. They'll be cremated tomorrow or the next day.”

“And the memorial?”

“Not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means not yet.”

Two days later the two of them drove to the funeral home in Gladstone and picked up the ashes. They were in sturdy cardboard containers made to look like marble. They brought the ashes back to Slippery Creek and Service set them on the counter in his kitchen and broke open a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Tree would be heading back to Detroit in the morning.

Treebone held out his glass and touched Service's. “She was a fine woman, your Nantz, and Walter was a fine kid. It don't mean nothing.”

This was what they had said in Vietnam every time something bad or inexplicable occurred. A drunk marine second lieutenant named Ploegstra once explained, “Think of a huge honker of a log floating down the Colorado River, and on that log there's billions of pissants and each one of the little assholes thinks he's steering. It don't mean nothing.”

But it did, Grady Service knew. It meant he was alone and would never again feel the soft touch of Maridly Nantz or smell her hair after she got out of the tub. And he would never again hear his son shout in triumph as he hooked a big brook trout with a fly. What it meant was that he had lost not just a lot, but everything, and that meant something. It meant that he would not rest until he figured out what the hell had happened and settled accounts. He looked over at his friend and Tree nodded. He understood.

7

MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN
MAY 19, 2004

Service sat in his captain's office.

“But she was a pilot,” Grady Service insisted. “Don't you
people
get it?”

Captain Ware Grant looked across the table at him. “You
people?
Grady, pilots are not invincible,” his captain said gently. “Have you got something to say to me?”

“I've been on the shelf three weeks,” Service said.

“Take as long as you need,” the captain said. “There's no hurry to come back.”

“If I don't get back to the field, I'll go out of my mind,” Service said. “You have to let me come back to work.”

“You don't seem ready.”

“I can't sit around. I need focus. I need my boots in the dirt, dealing with what I know best.”

“We can't afford to have a loose cannon out there,” his supervising officer said.

“You know me. You know that's not what I am.”

“Sudden loss can induce a form of PTSD,” the captain said. “Mourning can bring a severe form of the disorder.”

“I lost my father suddenly. I've lost men in combat suddenly. I've lost friends suddenly—this is not something new. And, dammit, it wasn't me in the accident!” It was difficult to keep his voice at a reasonable level.

The captain studied him.

“We each mourn in our own way and in our own time. The aftermath of some situations is nearly as traumatic as the situation itself.”

“Please, Cap'n.” This was as close to pleading as Grady Service could bring himself.

The Upper Peninsula's DNR law boss took a long time to reply. “Okay, you can come back, but if you need downtime, take it. Just let me know. I won't ask questions.”

“You won't be sorry,” Service said.

“The night this happened, you said, ‘But she's a pilot.' And you said it again today.”

“She wasn't
just
a pilot, Cap'n. She was a damn good pilot, experienced. She was born to vehicles, didn't panic, kept emotional control when all hell was breaking loose. How does somebody like that lose control of a truck and hit a tree on a dry road? I haven't seen the report.”

Grant reached into a neat pile of folders, extracted a stapled document, and slid it across the table. “Straight off the road, down the embankment and into the tree. The cab roof absorbed the main impact, buckled flat. The case is closed—official ruling is that it was an accident.”

Grady Service had expected as much. He took the folder out to his Tahoe and drove from the pagoda-like Marquette Regional DNR building called “The Roof,” over to an abandoned gravel pit on the Carp River behind Marquette Mountain. He parked in the shade and spent an hour smoking and reading and thinking, and when he was done, he decided he needed to see photographs—but not now. He didn't want to wallow in their deaths. He wanted to move on and find out
why
they were dead, and he knew that if he went back to the captain, Grant would be suspicious of his focus. Right now he was glad to have the green light to work.

One thing was for sure: He was no longer a family man. Now he had only the clan of conservation officers in gray shirts and green pants, a gigantic dog, and a bad-tempered cat. He had been left with less previously. He would make do with what remained.