Praise for William Hazelgrove’s Novels

  “American Fiction is not dead…Hazelgrove has skillfully revived it. Highly recommended.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Hazelgrove writes with warmth and feeling, his characters richly drawn, moving and evocative of it’s time.”

  —BOOKLIST

  “Its a steam roller of a story, starting small and getting bigger and bigger…”

  —STARRED REVIEW AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

  “Hazelgrove has a natural grace as a storyteller that is matched by his compassion for his characters.”

  —CHICAGO SUN TIMES

  “Hazelgroves writing has the natural arc of a baseball game.”

  —JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD

  “Proof that despite the fleeting nature of trends, good writing survives.”

  —TIME OUT CHICAGO

  “Hazelgrove is skilled at creating fully fleshed out characters and the dialogue carries the story along beautifully.”

  —SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

  Jack Pine

  by William Hazelgrove

  © Copyright 2015 by William Hazelgrove

  ISBN 978-1-94019-268-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic,

  mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed

  reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The names, incidents, dialogue, and opinions expressed are products of the

  author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  212-574-7939

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  Cover design by Dalitopia Media

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  For Kitty, Clay, Callie and Careen

  Who all lived the dream of the Northwoods

  It was a beautiful dream…

  the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.

  There is no center any longer,

  and the sacred tree is dead.

  —Black Elk

  Jack pine, n.

  A pine tree of northern North America

  that has a narrow trunk, short needles

  arranged in pairs, and curving cones. It has soft

  wood that is used especially for paper pulp.

  Northern Minnesota just below the Canadian-American Border Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

  Table of Contents

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  1

  DEPUTY SHERIFF REUGER London squinted at the smoke over the trees. He twisted the motorcycle throttle with wind tugging a Colt .44 and sun flashing the badge pinned to his vest. The sand road zigzagged among smaller red and white pines then disappeared into a scraggly wall of trees. He rode through the speckled pines into a valley of spruce and balsam firs, stumps, and cut logs. The fresh sawdust smelled like turpentine on a warm day.

  He downshifted on the sharpest S-turns and flew through grass past white and gray boulders of granite and greenstone then up a hill to wide blue sky and saw the smoke roiling over the far pines like a swollen thunderhead. Reuger passed back into the trees and smelled charcoal then rubber melting then burned wood. He winged another curve and locked the back wheel. He pulled the rifle from the scabbard and the radio from his cowboy belt.

  “10-6 here.”

  “Ya, Reuger, copy that.”

  “I have a burned-out slasher in the Boundary Waters.”

  “10-4 on that.”

  He levered the .30-30 Winchester, pulling out brass cartridges from his vest pocket like cigarettes and walked slowly into the clearing of logged trees, keeping the short-barreled rifle toward the sky. Charred wood crackled under his boots as fire smoldered from logs like an abandoned village of Indian fires. A hulk of blackened metal smoldered indiscriminately. Smoke steamed from the hood of the Ford truck with the blackened hydraulic claw crushed down on the cab. It was a cherry picker used for grappling logs and stacking or feeding them into a six-foot hydraulic saw on wheels. It was the standard setup for the independent logger, and the saw and the cherry picker were known as a “slasher.”

  He brushed back his blond hair and glanced into the truck cab and saw vinyl icicles hanging from the dashboard. The side mirror showed a man just over thirty-five with sunburnt skin, a bleached mustache, and red-rimmed blue eyes. He saw the stick shift had become a melted candle. Scorched springs poked through the bench seat. He walked past steel bands on tandem hubs past blackened melted cables leading to the control cab and the birds flying off the roof.

  Reuger hunched down and peered under the truck, but it had sunk to the ground. He crossed to the hydraulic saw on a trailer resting in sawdust turned to red oatmeal from an earlier rain. The saw and the hydraulic cables were untouched by the fire.

  He turned and stared into the limp trees. Jack pine. Foster Jones had been logging jack pine before the fire. The scraggly trees had taken over the land of the Northwoods after the big Norwegian red and white pines were logged out in 1890. Foster would sell his logs to the paper mills and the processing plants that churned out particleboard. It was like the sharecroppers who farmed the worn out soil in the South and tried to produce cotton. The modern logger was left with jack pine as the only legacy of the big trees.

  “Foster!”

  His voice was small in the breathless forest. Reuger didn’t like the feel of the scene. The fire was too neat and too intense, and Foster Jones had been logging too long to let an accident like this occur. Usually the new loggers had the mishaps that put them out of business in the first year. The old loggers, the shaders, knew the fine margin between disaster and limping through to another year. Foster most of all.

  Foster!

  He shouldered the Winchester then stumbled over a red extinguisher and checked the gauge. The needle was in the red area of the gauge. That meant he had used it to try to extinguish the fire before it hit the gas tank. Foster would have fought the fire with everything he had because his equipment was his livelihood. Reuger set the extinguisher down and walked through weeds to a metal gas can with the sliding cap open. He smelled the jerrican then set it on the ground. He turned slowly as a crow arched the sky and landed. The crow cawed loudly, and two others landed on an old cedar spared by loggers.

  Reuger watched another crow descend farther off in the fireweed. The crow hopped from log to log then pecked down, and a flash of blue cloth jumped. He swung the Winchester down and walked slowly through the fireweed and felt his heart in his chest. Something was mashing down the weeds. He saw a white beard ruffling in the wind.

  Reuger kneeled beside Foster Jones. His mouth was open in the approximation of death where it seemed the life force had rushed out violently with the body contorted to the sky like so many Civil War photos. Blood had stained Foster’s matted white hair and flecked his beard. His eyes had rolled back and were the color of a pale blue sky.

  Reuger noted the suspenders stretched over his flannel shirt and the blue jeans worn at the knees and cuffed over double- tied construction boots. His gnarled hands were stained with black oil from a chainsaw. Reuger breathed deeply. He had seen death many times, but he never got used to it. Foster Jones was simply no longer. This hunk of meat was left in the woods like any other animal that had died.

  Reuger leaned close to the clotted hole drilled jaggedly just behind the right ear with the blood trailing down. He examined the pockmark blowing out the o ther side of the skull. The blood had spattered on the weeds for fifteen feet and the explosive force of the bullet sprayed brain matter like compressed air and had dried into a sticky paste on Foster’s neck.

  He unclipped his radio.

  “Hector!”

  “Ya, go ahead.”

  “I have a 10-72 here.”

  Roger that. Need any assistance?”

  “I’ll let you know, it’s Foster Jones.”

  “Foster, huh? Jeez…10-4.”

  He hooked the radio and walked with his head down through the fireweed. He paced off from the body twenty feet one way then twenty feet the next. He looked at the position of the head and went off to the right twenty more feet. He walked back to the corpse and stopped, then picked up a black-handled .45 Colt automatic hidden in a bed of wildflowers. It was less than five feet from the body. He swung the radio up.

  “Hector, need a registration check.”

  The radio hissed.

  “Go ahead.”

  He gave him the serial number then got down on his hands and knees and brushed the weeds, watching spiders and ants and jack pine beetles escape. Reuger dogged around with his Colt, grabbing briars for twenty minutes. He dropped his hat then wore it far back on his head like a rodeo cowboy. He watched the ground closely then got up on his knees. He saw something glinting sun. Reuger stood and walked to the brass cartridge lying on some weeds. He wrung out a plastic baggy then scooped the shell.

  “Reuger, have that registration.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Registration belongs to a Foster Jones, repeat, Foster Jones.”

  “10-4. Thanks Hector.”

  Reuger clipped the radio and dropped in the warm weeds and dogged around again for twenty minutes. He covered the ground going thirty feet out from Foster on all sides, but found nothing. Reuger stood and swiped his hands together. He smoothed his mustache and stared at the old man he had been out to see the day before.

  “How she go, Foster?” He called, swinging off his motorcycle.

  Foster lowered the saw and shook his head. He was a wiry man with the build of a wrestler and just as strong. Reuger guessed he was well into his sixties, and his fierce blue eyes burned out from beneath bushy white brows. He slept in the cab of his truck sometimes, and other times he slept out in the open. Foster was the last of the old lumberjacks.

  “If the bank don’t take my slasher here, then she’ll go all right,” he said spatting a glob of tobacco juice into the cut of the tree.

  “Tough times,” Reuger nodded.

  Foster spat into the sawdust again with one eye shut.

  “Them tree huggers are winning the war, and I say it’s every man for himself now.” They stood in the quiet forest, then Foster shook his head slowly. “Man has to do what he has to do, and I’m too fucking old to do anything else.”

  Reuger hunched down to the body again and saw a flick in the left side of his eye. He raised his head and saw the branches waving up and down. He stood slowly then pulled the Winchester to his cheek.

  2

  THE SILHOUETTE DISAPPEARED into speckled leaves, and he heard footsteps crashing through the second growth. Reuger ran with his Winchester to his chest to the tree line then into the diaphanous forest light. He heaved past sap-oozing trunks and slabs of granite knifing the pine floor. Reuger dropped and centered the aiming pin on the elfin figure.

  “Freeze!”

  The man tripped and fell face first to the ground. Reuger stood with the rifle pinned on the center of the man’s back. Blood pulsed in his temples, and he kept his index finger tight on the trigger.

  “Hands on your head! Turn over slowly!”

  The man reached his hands to his head then rolled to his back. Reuger stared over the aiming pin with his finger curled in the trigger guard. He felt heat in his face, and sweat draped his body. Emotions he hadn’t felt for years nauseated him. Fifteen years later, and there he was. The eyes had the same almond shape and something else. He dropped the rifle and got hold of himself.

  “What in the hell are you doing up here?”

  The boy stared up with saucer eyes.

  “I’ve…I’ve been camping,” he stammered.

  Reuger clicked the safety on the rifle and held the barrel to the ground. He wiped perspiration from his forehead and the back of his legs felt weak. The boy looked about eleven, maybe twelve, with long shorts and new tennis shoes and the white skin of a city dweller.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “In a tent,” the boy shrugged, closing one eye against the sun. “I’ve been living off the land.”

  Reuger reached down and pulled him up by his hand. The boy brushed back his shiny black hair then crossed his arms.

  “Staying at Pine Lodge?”

  “No sir.” The boy shook his head. “I’m a woodsman,” he declared, hands on his head with a defiant gleam in his brown eyes.

  Reuger pulled his hands down and checked the safety on the Winchester. He had seen himself shooting the boy. It was his training. The use of deadly force required a trained procedure where normal emotions are circumvented and the training takes over. Once he went into those procedures, pulling back was hard. He had been close to shooting the boy, and he only now realized how close he had come. If he had spun around on the ground he didn’t know what might have happened. He had a man with a bullet hole in his head and then someone running away through the woods.

  “How old are you?”

  The boy shrugged again.

  “Eleven, but I’ll be twelve in another month.”

  “How’d you get up here?”

  He puffed out his chest.

  “I’ve been out here in the Northwoods, hiking and canoeing! I’ve been camping out in the wilderness on my own.”

  Reuger saw the shiny bucket with the Pine Lodge tag lying a few feet away. He wondered why he hadn’t seen it before.

  “That your blueberry bucket there?”

  The boy’s eyes rolled to the shiny bucket.

  “Oh, yeah, I guess it is,” he mumbled.

  “Have you been picking along the road?”

  “I told you, I’ve been camping.”

  “You’re staying at the lodge then?”

  He broke his stare, and the boy shrugged again.

  “Yeah, with my mother.” He hooked a finger behind him. “Our car’s back on the road,” he muttered.

  “Do you know how to get back there?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he nodded quickly. “Sure I do.” The boy kicked the ground with new tennis shoes. “I never had a gun pointed at me before….Are you a bounty hunter or something?”

  “No, I’m a deputy sheriff, but you shouldn’t run like that when someone tells you to stop.”

  He shrugged and brushed his muddy legs.

  “I thought you were some kind of mass murderer or something.”

  “Can you get back to your car then?”

  The boy tucked in his T-shirt, glancing around expansively.

  “Oh yeah, no problem.”

  “They’re no blueberries this far in. Along the road back there you ought to find some good brambles.”

  “Sure, thanks a lot,” he shrugged, starting off through the woods.

  “Road’s the other way there.”

  He stopped and glanced around. “Yeah, I know, I was just looking around,” he said, glancing to the sky as if to take a bearing. “Maybe, I’ll see you around somewhere.”

  “Kurt?”

  The boy stared at him, his face turning red.

  “Kurt, where are you?”

  “I think that’s your mother.”

  The boy blushed and shrugged. “Oh yeah, maybe it is.”

  “Kurt!”

  The boy turned nonchalantly and began walking.

  “I’m over here, Mom,” he shouted.

  Reuger turned and walked back through the woods. He emerged and saw the smoldering logs still wicking smoke into the morning sunlight. He smelled the corky scent of burned wood and turned his mind back to the bearded man in the grass. He kneeled and brushed the surrounding weeds.

  “Foster Jones is dead as a doornail there, as I see it.”

  Reuger jumped and wheeled with the rifle to a man in a Confederate cap and low-cut moccasins. The man reached for the sky with his mouth pinched beneath a scraggly mustache. John Mcfee yelled out something neither man heard.

 

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