1. Time to Get the Hell Out of Black Earth TIME TO GET THE HELL OUT OF BLACK EARTH All credit and blame are due to Harvey Digman, my tax guy, my cheerleader, and my liberator. But that''s a long and probably schmaltzy story. So let''s start with my ugly attitude. Okay, I was telling myself. Enough with the good citizen charade. Time to get the hell out of Black Earth. I had already explained how and where I''d found the dead fisherman, and the moment the village police chief handed back my driver''s license, I planned to break down my fly rod, cross the creek, throw up in some nearby stinging nettles, and hightail it on shaky legs to the road.
"Okay, Mister. uh. Og-log-livery?" The distance between what the chief said and the name on my license suggested a fairly severe reading disability. My name is Oglivie. Ned Oglivie. Dog for short--a self-inflicted nickname, and in those days it fit. "I''ll just run this through the computer," said the chief, "and you''ll be on your way." Damn right, I muttered.
The Dog charted his course. The county highway was just across the cow pasture, and my Cruise Master RV was parked a mile downstream in a sorry excuse for a campground called Lake Bud Park. My vision was to hit the Cruise Master at a gallop, drop the awning, hurl the wheel blocks inside, strap down the cabinet doors, and make the three hundred miles north to Big Two-Hearted River by sunup. "So you hang on a minute," said the chief. He was a young guy, about thirty, a shallow breather with a trainee beer gut in a tight uniform shirt, amber sunglasses up on his shaved head, toed-in cowboy boots, and a worried look. About an hour earlier, he and the ambulance had screamed by on the county highway and disappeared around an upstream corner. A long minute passed, the sounds of help growing fainter. But then the patrol car had reappeared on my side of the creek, dusty up to its gold-on-cream stripe, jouncing along a tractor path ahead of the ambulance.
The chief had left his lights going, as if the dozen or so Holsteins lazing under a burr oak in the pasture were going to get up and block an intersection. He read me into his radio and waited. His junior officer squished heavily about the stream bank, bending and snapping Polaroids of the dead man. The officer was even younger than the chief. His uniform shirt had come untucked, and the pink top of his ass showed as he bent over the body. I looked away. A silver milk truck had pulled off the highway to watch. A blue van was slowing.
Down the tractor lane bounced a red Chevy Suburban. "Correct," the chief said into his radio. "Individual who found the body." Then, "Duncan! Widen out and get a shot of that deep hole behind him." A keg-bellied man in shirtsleeves heaved out of the red Suburban. He hitched on across the mud, tugging at his jeans and puffing. "I knew it," he said. "It''s Jacobs.
" The chief slung out of his patrol car. "You don''t have to tell me it''s Jacobs." "O''Malley got him finally." "We don''t know who or what got him yet," said the chief. "Now stand back and keep your footprints out of there." The keg-bellied man stiff-armed the window frame of the patrol car and propped himself against it. "Jake was out here fishing the sally," he puffed. "He was fishing nothing," replied the chief.
"He had no fly on his line." "You better call Halverson." "I called Halverson." "Then where the hell is Halverson?" "Halverson is the hell on his way." Keg-belly slid a glance at me. I was sitting astride a box elder snag, elbows on knees, head lolling. The Dog was not doing well. A dead body.
a drowned body. all the chatter. misanthropy and grief had collided inside me, mingled with the scent of rotting wood, and suddenly I was sick. The whole point of my fishing was to escape human noise, which was always so horribly amplified by the event of death. So I groped for my ugly attitude and aimed it at Keg-belly. Hell, I thought, where I came from, people were either fat or skinny--not both. The guy couldn''t stand up on his own. He used his arm like a tripod against the patrol car.
A pack of Camels, tucked in the pocket of a patterned yellow sport shirt, rose and fell with his ragged breathing. "Me, I''d flip him," offered Keg-belly. "Take a look at the back side." The chief opened his trunk. "Don''t you touch him." "I know what I''m looking for. I''d flip him." "You would, huh?" said the chief.
He lifted out a measuring tape and a roll of crime scene banner. "Well, I''d wait for Halverson. I''d let the coroner flip him." Keg-belly lobbed me a rubbery grin. "We sent him to school, see. Now Sherlock here knows everything." Fine, I said to myself. Good luck then.
I kept my sick eye on my driver''s license. The moment it was back in my hand, the Dog was done with Black Earth. The Big Two-Hearted River was seven hours north. I could be there by sunrise. "Jacobs had to be fishing the sally," said Keg-belly to the chief. "Had to be. The sally hatch, last night, about eight o''clock. Betcha fifty.
" "Let me do my job." "I''ve let you do a lot of jobs," said Keg-belly. "And not one of them got done right." The chief turned red in the face and stalked off toward the corpse. Keg-belly gave me the rubbery grin again. He swiveled stiffly--surveying pasture, cornfield, empty tractor in the hay crop, the steep wooded sides of the Black Earth coulee--but I guess he didn''t see what he was looking for. "Hell," he fumed at last, getting himself a Camel. "I''ll go fetch Halverson myself.
" I held on to my box elder log. I tried to push a breath down past my third rib. Pasture to highway, I reviewed, highway to campground, drop awning, chuck wheel blocks, strap cabinet doors, gas-up on the highway, bust the three hundred miles to the Big Two-Hearted by sunup. That''s where I was, imaginary miles from Black Earth already, when Farmer Jane hit me with a dirt clod. But let me set the scene. Wisconsin, as it turns out, was not quite what the Dog had in mind. Sure, across the flat ground and the ridge tops ranged the sinuous, deep-green cornfields, broken every mile or so by a well-kept dairy operation--house and yard and cottonwood windbreak, red barn and blue silo, ceramic deer and reflecting ball in the yard--dull as hell--a neat Lutheran church in a hem of spruce trees on every third hilltop, and every ten miles a place to get gasoline, Slurpees, and beef sticks. The dopey, feel-good heartland, right? A land yearning for subdivision.
Home of the very best in good people. But take a left or a right onto a county road and you find yourself plunging and twisting down into coulees where deer spook and badgers scramble, where the clock of human progress stopped sometime in the early seventies, the last time things were passably good down on the farm. In the narrow bottom lands, the terrain is rugged and the farms are small and collapsing. Life has a funky, still-born, Appalachian look--projects half-started, fences half-mended, people half-finished, and everywhere the relentless drive of plant and animal to reclaim the land around cold spring creeks that still hold trout. A back alley of America. Decent turf, as it turned out, for the Dog to lie low and lick some wounds. And so the shock hit me double when I came upon the body. There was no company more demanding, I''d found, than a dead body.
Hell, I''d driven over ten thousand miles in the Cruise Master just to keep death behind me, and here it was anyway, rolling up like a ghost from an eddy in Nowhere, Wisconsin. I shook myself. Jesus, Dog. He''s nobody you know. Do something. Do something intelligent. Like. leave.
But the dead man held me somehow. He looked like the Dog in the good old days--well-fed, well-dressed, comfy, dead. He floated faceup amidst the duckweed and flotsam of a big pool. Flies crowded his bulging eyes. There was something odd about his mouth--it was stuffed with something fibrous and black, as though in drifting dead he had gouged the bottom, bitten out a weedy chunk of stream bed. Or like his corpse had already been claimed by the creature world, and a muskrat or a mouse had burrowed into his mouth. The sight was strange and awful. I gagged emptily once more.
Then I guess the Dog had a few civic instincts left. I beat trail for help. All day to that point, I had listened to the sounds of a farmer cutting hay on the hillside above the creek, clanking and rumbling back and forth, a radio going. All along, I had assumed the farmer was a man. I assumed as much, in fact, until I got real close, and for a moment or so afterward, too. But the hay rake''s pilot turned out to be a woman about thirty, thickly built and medium-tall, sunburned and sweaty and regarding me--as I staggered uphill--with a certain kind of what-the-hell-will-they-do-next expression in the set of her lips. I could tell she had observed more than a few fly fishermen from the seat of her tractor. We wore funny clothes and big hats and played in the water all day while other people worked.
I could see it. Farmer Jane, she doubted the Dog. But my story changed all that in one rotation of the tractor''s big treads. "Aw, son of a buck knife!" she cursed, shutting down the engine. "You mean Jake Jacobs?" Her eyes, wildly green, jumped at mine. Then she vaulted off the tractor and before I could catch up she was waist-deep in the stream, doing what I should have done to begin with. She towed the man she called.