Dark of the Moon

agreed.
     
    V IRGIL WORE native dress out on the prairie: faded jeans and scuffed cowboy boots and musical T-shirts, and because he was a cop, a sport coat. In the sun, in the summer, he wore a straw hat and sunglasses. He usually didn’t wear a gun, unless he was in St. Paul, where Davenport might see him. The law required him to go armed, but in Virgil’s opinion, handguns were just too goddamned heavy and uncomfortable, so he kept his under the seat of the car, or in his briefcase.
    After hanging his rain suit in the shower, he got a laptop out of his briefcase, went online. In his personal e-mail, he found the note from Black Horizon , a Canadian outdoor magazine, that he’d been expecting for a couple of days. They were working late in Thunder Bay: “Virg, I had to take a couple graphs out of the section on the portage—nothing I could do about it, it’s all about the space. I tried not to hack it up too bad. Anyway, it works for us if it works for you. Get back to us, and I’ll stick a check in the mail.”
    He was pleased. This was his third piece in BH . He was becoming a regular. He opened the attached Word document, looked through the edited section.
    Good enough . He closed the document and sent a note to the editor: “Thanks, Henry. It’s fine. I’ll look for the check. Virgil.”
    Whistling now, he went to the National Weather Service, typed in the zip code for Bluestem, got the week’s forecast: thunderstorms tonight—no shit—with fair skies and warm weather the next three or four days, thunderstorms possible in the afternoons. He checked Google News to make sure London hadn’t been nuked since he left Mankato; it hadn’t.
    He shut down the computer, got undressed, shook the little remaining water off his rain suit, got in the shower, cranked the heat until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then turned it up one more notch. He got out, scalded half to death, crawled into bed, and thought about Bill Judd roasting like a bratwurst in the embers of his own home, and a truck speeding away in the night. That would be an interesting murder.
     
    T HEN HE THOUGHT about God for a while, as he did most nights.
    The son of a Presbyterian minister and a professor of engineering, who saw in God the Great Engineer and believed as devoutly as her husband, Virgil had gotten down on his knees every night of his life, to pray before bed, until the first night he’d spent in the dorm at the University of Minnesota. That night, embarrassed, he hadn’t gotten down on his knees, and he’d shivered and shaken in fear that the world would end because he hadn’t said his prayers.
    By Christmas, like most freshmen, he was done with religion, and he mooched around campus with a copy of The Stranger under his arm, hoping to impress women with long dark hair and mysteries that needed to be solved.
    He’d never gotten back to religion, but he had gotten back some faith. It came all at once, in a bull session in an Army bachelor-officers’ quarters, when one of the guys professed to being an atheist. Another one, and one who wasn’t too bright, in Virgil’s estimation, had said, urgently, “Oh, but you’re wrong: look at all the wonders of the world. There are too many wonders.”
    Virgil, having grown up in the countryside, where there were wonders, and having studied ecology, where he found even more, had been stricken by the correctness of that statement from the not-too-bright believer: there were too many wonders. Atheists, he came to believe, generally worked in man-made cubes, with blackboards and computers and fast food. They didn’t believe in wonders because they never saw any.
    So faith came back, but a strange one, with a God his father wouldn’t have recognized. Virgil thought about Him almost every night, about his sense of humor, and the apparent fact that He’d made rules that even He couldn’t bend…
    Then at one o’clock in the morning, having thought of God, Virgil drifted off to sleep, and dreamt of men sitting in motel rooms, in the dark, secretly smoking Marlboros, watching their cats ghosting illegally around their rooms.

3
    Tuesday Morning
    T HE OLD TOWN of Bluestem, named for a prairie grass, lay almost a mile north of I-90. Over the years, the space between the old town had filled up with the standard franchise places—McDonald’s, Subway, Country Kitchen, Pizza Hut, Taco John’s; a Holiday Inn, a Comfort Inn, a Motel 6; four or five gas stations with convenience stores,