The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Tom Berdine Spring Rite

From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

“Which is even weirder yet,” Gowen said. “But that ain’t the best part.”

At approximately which point, Kramer didn’t want to hear any more. It had been a mistake to let Gowen get started. He went outside into the mild March evening to take a leak and get away from Gowen for a little while before hitting the sack.

“Seriously, I got the skinny on ’em,” Gowen said, unzipping and joining him at the edge of the porch.

“Tell it to someone who gives a good goddamn,” Kramer said.

The elder of the brothers and known his entire adult life simply by his last name, Kramer felled trees for a living, had a nagging pain in his right shoulder, had to get up before dawn, and felt certain the sources of Gowen’s information would turn out to be his stoner drinking buddies down at the Trail’s End Tavern. People from the Community Church used to get on Kramer about Gowen: do this for him, do that for him, this or that about or to him. Orphaned at age three, with only Kramer left, Gowen had been permitted the discovery of leisure, then self-indulgence, inevitably rebellion, and on down the line to a number of vices including drug use and actual dope peddling.

Kramer accepted that he had done a poor job with Gowen, who now as an adult in his mid-thirties still brought the law around on occasion and still had that tendency to get mixed up in things that were none of his business. Mr. Town Gossip was one of Kramer’s nicknames for him. Arguably a clearer infraction of the social code than even dope peddling in a neighborhood of millions of trees and few people, most of whom, even the straight ones, did something a little illegal from time to time, poached a deer or an elk, a few salmon, a load of firewood out of the state forest, gossip had from homesteader times actually gotten people killed. Gowen, never one to back off an argument, purported to have read a magazine article somewhere that said that scientific research showed gossip was seventy-five percent accurate.

“Amazing stuff happens right under your nose, Kramer.”

“Gowen...” Kramer used the parental voice on him, and they were quiet for a time. A lone housedog harooed somewhere in the distance.

“There’s Wes Greenly’s dog. Figures. Word is that Wes is going in with them.”

This was standard Gowen. Kramer was supposed to ask, going in with who on what? At minimum, experience in this country should have led to a circumspect attitude as to who was doing what and with whom, and even more generally what was coming from where. Sense of direction itself was confounded here. Rescuing hunters who got themselves lost in the twists and turns of river and ridge was a local industry. A compass was useless because of the iron in the hills, and with the unpredictable airs that ran upstream and down over the surface of the Neslolo River, the suddenly uprising mists, downrolling fogs, and various other phenomena of distinctly odd and possibly magical nature depending upon your point of view and maybe level of intelligence, the local acoustics fooled even the natives. It was Gowen, for that matter, who was always yacking it up, by way of proving any number of different points, about how Mount St. Helens had blown her stack right on the eastern horizon and nobody there had heard a pop. It had been Gowen, just the previous spring, who had found Jake Armbrister in the river dead of hypothermia, pinned in the current by the limbs of a snag but with his head above water so that obviously he had screamed his lungs out in the hour or so before all his heat was gone, screamed and screamed but was unheard by his wife at home fifty yards away and for that matter by the Kramer brothers upriver a quarter of a mile, who on any number of occasions had been able to hear the Armbrister family in normal conversation in their yard, sometimes been able to pick out several words.

The residents of the Neslolo Valley, in neighborhoods strung on the meandering river like beads on a snarled string, were alternately clustered together on benches of usable land and distanced from one another by passages of rapids and rifles. The fifty-three acres that were left of the original Kramer homestead were alone on the north bank of Kramer’s Bend, a stretch of deep water that lazed westerly in a nearly hundred and eighty degree arc from the riffle beneath the Hinsvaark Bridge to a twisting, north-northwesterly slide of whitewater, along which no one could live until the now-deserted Armbrister place. Neither could anyone live in the patchwork of Crown Corporation forest and clearcut directly across from the Kramers on the north side of Long Andrew Ridge.

There were two homesteads on the flat bench of the upriver shoulder of Kramer’s Bend: Jensen’s, currently being rented by a gang of Mexican treeplanters, and Old Frick’s. The raucous music the Mexicans played during their Saturday all-day parties sometimes sounded like it was right outside the Kramers’ kitchen window, while at other times it either seemed to be coming from the Armbrister place, in completely the wrong direction, or else was not heard at all unless the Kramers came out their front door and walked up to the Hinsvaark Bridge, where it was like the Spanish-language MTV they could get on the satellite dish but turned all the way up to ten. The Frick place was actually closer than Jensen’s, but seldom was anything at all heard from that quarter. When Kramer as a kid had cut hay for Young Frick, his mother had been able to call him home to supper with a just-barely-raised voice as she stood on their back porch, yet he could shout and shout his return to her and not be heard.

Old Frick’s, as they still called it, was located in a natural cul-de-sac which Old Frick and then Young Frick had knocked themselves out farming or ranching or whatever they could do to make a buck, and which a succession of renters had also failed to turn into anything. The last renters at Old Frick’s had installed professional-looking chain-link kennels for raising Afghan hounds. Now these new people kept wolves.

It was the new renters at Old Frick’s, in fact, who were the object of Gowen’s current preoccupation. Watching the wolves pace back and forth in the Afghan hound kennel and listening to them being harassed by the neighborhood coyotes night after night, the Kramer brothers had at first found themselves in an unusual state of agreement. Neither of them would have admitted to any romantic notions about the forest that surrounded them or the creatures therein, which as a matter of fact had not included any freeranging wolves for at least a generation, but the penning up of such creatures was, in Gowen’s word, “weird.” The brothers had assumed that the new neighbors were the source of the flyers taped to the Vildefeld store window advertising WOLF AND WOLF-X PUPPIES FOR SALE, but then Gowen, Mr. Town Gossip, learned that the wolf-puppy seller was someone else entirely. The new neighbors weren’t selling, just keeping, which was even weirder.

Beyond which Kramer was unwilling to listen. He had been down this road with Gowen too many times. He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose.

“You don’t know whose dog that is, Gowen. The only way we know for certain where those goddamn wolves are is we can see ’em in the binocs. Jesus Christ.”

“If it ain’t Wes’s dog, then whose dog is it?”

“Oh ja,” Kramer said, imitating the great-grandfather he had known but Gowen had not. He zipped up and turned away.

Suddenly from the bottom of the yard their own dog, Bucket, started up. They both shushed him immediately. This was how it started every evening now. First one dog, then another, then the coyotes, and then the goddamn wolves.

“I’m going to bed now, Gow.”

“I got the information on ’em,” Gowen said again.

A single coyote sent a long wail out from some hillside — they could not have said which — and was answered from somewhere lower down, closer, possibly on their side of the river. Quickly more coyotes chimed in, followed by Bucket, unable finally to restrain himself. They let him go. Soon Bucket and the other dog dropped out, so that it was only pure coyote singing. The song rose to fill the entire bowl of the valley, transforming itself, as they listened, to a kind of wild laughter. Kramer was just opening the back door when the wolves joined in. Half in, half out of the doorway, he paused for that interval, now familiar, of uncertain duration but predictable conclusion, in which at some undetectable-to-human-ears cue the coyotes stopped suddenly, all together on a single beat, leaving the wolves to continue solo, forlorn, and ridiculous in their cages.

“Same coyote practical joke, night after night,” Kramer said. “Why do you think they do that?”

“I know for a fact the wolf guy’s running a meth lab up there, right up there by Old Frick’s Spring, right there by that big maple, remember? Remember that big maple? Thirty-five-foot trailer. Can’t see it, but it’s there. Fishburn or Fishback or Fishman, some goddamn thing like that, something with fish in it. Keeps a few cows so he can pretend he’s doing something over there, and the wolves so people’ll think he’s real bad. Lives with some kind of child prostitute or sex abuse victim or something.”

It was Kramer, not Gowen the ladies’ man, who saw the Fisher woman first. He wouldn’t have said she was a woman really but a girl, and with her short hair Kramer thought at first she was a boy, fourteen or so, soaked to the skin and white with chill, drying off in front of Wes Greenly’s stove. But then she had looked back at him and arched her spine to the heat.

It automatically put Kramer one up, and the first half-thought that went through his head was, wait till I tell Gowen.

Lately, with the national forests closing up because of the spotted owl and all the environmental laws, and sawmills shutting down all over the country, the valley was full of women and children who had been deserted by their men. The Kramer family had the opposite problem: three generations of women had run off. Kramer alone, having never actually had a woman, had avoided this rite of passage. Gowen had been married, if only briefly, ten years before and had subsequently had a string of girlfriends, but since the wife he hadn’t brought any of his women home and Kramer didn’t know any of them, although he might know their fathers or their brothers or their estranged spouses.

Kramer didn’t really know any single women, at least none that he thought of as such. He had missed out on the few schoolgirls of his youth, eight total in the sophomore class he had dropped out of at age sixteen to go to work in the woods, and as the years had gone by, there had been only a few widows or castoffs with children who had caught his eye. But he’d had enough of child-rearing with raising Gowen from age three, himself barely more than a child at the time.

Kramer’s temperament was anyway a more or less direct shot from the great-grandparents, sawed-off Germans who’d migrated from Schleswig-Holstein in the 1870s, tough squareheads who had ruined their oxen dragging cuckoo clocks and carved bedsteads over the shoulder of Nicolai Mountain to that bench of sandy loam created and perennially reclaimed by an obscure, crazy river the Indians avoided and called Neslolo. Whereas Gowen apparently could not have cared less about all that had been accomplished by that and two subsequent generations, Kramer had paid the taxes, repaired the fences, preserved Great-grandmother Grace’s diary in German — only a few words of which he could translate — and her German Bible, and all manner of yellowed licenses, bills of lading, deeds, newspaper articles especially from the bootleg day’s, receipts for Roebuck shoes, seed corn, kegs of nails, lumber for barns and outbuildings long since washed down the Neslolo, and women’s clothing in surprising quantity — they had all left in a hurry — some of which over the years had been transformed into unlikely school shirts, trousers, pajamas, work coats, and grease rags, while others, the very feminine items, rested in obscure crannies and boxes and on mute hangers pressed to the backs of closets.

Kramer had been nine and was still called Albert and Gowen was only just about to be born when Great-grandpa Jan, Old Kramer, more than one hundred years old and bent over like a horsecollar from osteoporosis yet still trundling baby-loads of firewood around the yard in his little wheelbarrow, had finally toppled over headfirst directly into the wheelbarrow and died curled up like a tire standing on its tread. Within the family Old Kramer’s demented belief that his wife would imminently be returning from Astoria — where she had gone fifty or so years before with money to pay their back taxes and instead had hopped a steamer for San Francisco — had become the butt of dark humor the point of which had not revealed itself to child Albert until that moment of looking down into the pale blue, dead eyes still open to the sky between the old man’s legs. Aha!: you don’t live forever. Albert in turn had been discovered standing over the dead old man by Grandma Elise. When he said to her, showing off his new insight, “He’s still waiting for Grandma Grace to come back!” she had slapped him full across the ear and yarded him all the way back to the house by his hair.

This bellringing Kramer had retained as one of very few memories of the paternal grandmother, who a year later, subsequent to Grandpa Walter’s stroke and drowning in the river along with his D-1 °Cat, had departed for California just as her mother-in-law had done. Of Grace, however, there were many almost-memories, vivid swatches of reminiscence from Old Kramer, who could and did read her diary out loud, of rounding the Horn in steerage, fending off the rats with her good silver soup ladle and the terrible thirst by drinking her baby’s urine, of the panther crouching in the soft mud of the new road as she rode her white pony to Vildefeld. As to reasons Grace may have had for deserting husband and child there was nothing — since she was perpetually, hah! coming right back — just as there was not a word, not of protest or even of surprise, when Grandma Elise left. Similarly, when Kramer and Gowen’s mother, Jenny Bergersen Kramer, hit the road with a truckdriver in Kramer’s thirteenth year and Gowen’s third, there was no explanation offered and, with Frank Kramer into the bottle big-time then, none sought. When, all in that same year, Frank died right in front of the house in the path of a log truck, Uncle Curley was killed in the woods, and Aunty Gert had gotten “the hell out of here, boys!” the same day the insurance check arrived, that was it, the men were dead and the women had split.

The last female in the family hadn’t even been properly in the family. Gowen had brought a bride home from the university where he had gone for a year on his G. I. benefits. She was an artist, the real thing, a painter in oils and watercolors who said the Neslolo was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. She had arrived in spring. Then winter and rain and darkness. Kramer had listened to her slow, cigarette-smoking footsteps go room to room, window to window in the wornout homestead house that rocked on its poles when the wind came up and had never quite come up with anything in particular to say to her. Yet he had understood the problem long before the groom. Women hated rain. They needed sun. They were something like tomatoes, which refused to ripen in that country because the nighttime temperatures were so seldom above fifty-five degrees. They craved the company of other women, which otherwise was a good thing, for where there was one there might come others.

Kramer, notorious tightwad that he was, had sprung for a new TV and satellite dish. But around Christmas she had split anyway, leaving half her stuff behind. Kramer hadn’t understood why Gowen hadn’t gone after her. He briefly considered it himself, but then what would he have said to her when he caught up with her? Kramer sensed without being able to put words to it that he had come to count on the status that went with having a beautiful young woman in the house. And by inertia of some obscure illogic he had come to believe that he too would soon find a wife. And now he had lived like a maiden aunt with his brother for an additional decade and the same logic dictated that the bride’s name never be spoken.

It was a Saturday in April. Spring had turned around to play with winter, dumping pea-sized hail and cold rain here and there while up the road a warm sun was shining. It was raining where Kramer turned off the highway onto the rocky mainline that led through a second-growth fir plantation to Wes Greenly’s driveway. There was an easterly wind, so it would be colder up high where Barber Logging Company’s timber show was. Kramer pictured himself working Monday in wet snow. Maybe Barber would call a day off. How would he spend a day off? Wiping Gowen’s butt, he thought. That’s how I spend my time.

A week earlier Gowen had come back from steelhead fishing in a state of rage. The new neighbor with the wolves had run him off the north bank of the river with a shotgun. Kramer could see Gowen’s argument — they had fished there their whole lives — but at some point Gowen just had to cool down. After all, the wolf guy was paying rent over there. Plus, without any doubt whatsoever, Gowen had been guilty of snooping around.

Kramer had followed Gowen as he went kicking and thrashing his way through the house and had nearly come to blows with him getting his pistol away from him. Kramer had locked up all the guns then, and Gowen, in the grand finale of his tantrum, had packed up and trekked over to the framed lent he kept on Long Andrew Ridge for lending his pot plantation. Kramer had spotted him up there in his binoculars the night before, his shadow sitting still on the surface of the tent for as long as Kramer watched. Old Frick’s house was on the same ridge as the tent, about three-quarters of a mile away overland, and Old Frick’s Spring was even closer, east and downhill, half a mile at most. Kramer had caught himself hoping the law would somehow get wind of what was going on, whatever it was that was going on. Kramer himself could never call the cops, but maybe somebody would.

Countering the steep slant of Wes Greenly’s driveway, Kramer shoved his rear end into the back of the pickup’s seat and feathered the brakes over the deeply potted track. The rain slacked off, and momentarily a sun break swept across the clearcut around him. It was not often he went to Wes and Jeanellen’s these days, although he and Wes went back a ways and they still worked for the same gyppo outfit. More or less worked, since lately Wes hadn’t even shown up on the landing half the time, and usually when he did at least one guy on the crew wanted to kick his ass for something stupid he had done or said.

About two years ago Wes had gotten into the dope-growing business just like Gowen, although they didn’t seem to have much to do with each other. Barber had begun hassling Kramer because it was Kramer who had vouched for Wes way back when. “Go down and find out does he want the goddamn job or not!” It had already occurred to Kramer that Wes was the one to talk to anyway. Now he had a good excuse. Who else to ask about a doper but another doper? At least Wes was a doper he knew. He needed to talk to somebody. He sure as hell couldn’t talk to Gowen.

Kramer went under big timber and descended through the cavernous space beneath the heads of the giant white fir and hemlock rooted on the riverbank below. The truck complained as it took the big bounce at the bottom of Wes’s driveway and waded into an expanse of tan water that had been left behind by the receding river. Kramer kept his speed up, having negotiated this track many times in high water, until he made the rise that led into the Greenly yard. Jeanellen’s milk goats followed him with their slit eyes as he went past and stopped at the laundry shack, where the lights were on.

The sky changed quickly again and dumped a hard shower on him as he got out. He skipped through the mud in front of the laundry shack and banged on the door briefly before letting himself in. Jeanellen was in there with Lydia, her fourteen-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Jeanellen was feeding dungarees through her old ringer, which grunted away in the midst of the humming new automatic washer and dryer Wes had bought her with some of his dope money. Lydia was folding.

“Want to borrow my boat?” Kramer said. This was a reliable opener. Careless Wes had lost a succession of boats and canoes to the river, two or three of which had wound up in the Kramer pasture. So the boat joke was always good.

Lydia cut her eyes at her mother. Jeanellen did not look up, merely gave Kramer a brief wave of a plump hand that was not particularly hello any more than a gesture toward the rain on the metal roof. As he moved into the warm spot by the trash burner, Kramer thought he detected tears hanging in the corners of Jeanellen’s eyes. He made sure not to stare. Women crying was anyway impossible to deal with. If Gowen had been there, Kramer would have done all right playing second fiddle. Gowen would have got her to talk or laugh.

“Your old man down at the house?”

Jeanellen waved again, taking in a larger portion of rain and roof.

“He’s there,” Lydia spoke up, something in her voice. Kramer went back out into the rain and down the planked path to the porch built onto the front of the trailer. How Wes got away with it he would never understand, keeping a wife and pretty daughter down in this wet hole with hardly any sunlight, unreliable electricity, crappy TV reception, no company. As Kramer went up the steps onto the porch, a shadow passed across the drawn front window-shade. He knocked.

Fifteen seconds passed and he knocked again. Another half minute and he knocked and gave Wes a shout. When Wes answered the door finally, he had a revolver in his hand, halfway hiding it down behind his leg. Wes grinned quickly but didn’t step aside to let Kramer in.

“What’s up?” Wes asked, giving Kramer the raised eyebrows and shoulders.

“Talk to you.”

“About what?”

“What what? You not talking to me now?”

Wes glanced over his shoulder into the trailer’s living room and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door behind him.

“Didn’t know who it was.”

“Who the hell’d you think it was?”

Wes didn’t answer, just looked out into the rain in the yard.

“Okay, look, first of all, Barber says if you want your job you better be at work tomorrow and on time. He asked me to come by personally and tell you.”

“How come he didn’t come himself? You his waterboy now?”

“I also want to talk to you about our new neighbor.”

The rain in the yard increased suddenly so that Kramer only heard part of what Wes, turning away from him, said next, only: “... mine!...”

“You heard about Gowen and our new neighbor?” Kramer persisted. “Fishback or Fishburn or something like that?”

“Yeah. Fisher. Keep your voice down, okay? Yeah, I heard about it.”

“Why am I keeping my voice down?”

Wes kept moving away from him and had almost reached the door when Jeanellen came charging down the walkway through the rain bearing a basket of clean laundry. She arrived with a clump on the top porch step, and Wes had to hold the door open for her to avoid getting run over. She went past him and then stuck her head back out and said, “You going to let Kramer stand out in the rain? Come on in, Kramer. Meet your new neighbor.”

Wes went in, and Kramer followed. What he took for a young boy in a wet, white shirt arched his back to the heat of the parlor stove and looked back at him, and before Kramer could look away, there was the dark stain of erect nipple beneath the wet cloth and Kramer thought, wait till I tell Gowen.

Wes jerked his head for Kramer to follow and went ahead of him into the kitchen. Jeanellen, puffing over her clothesbasket in the narrow hallway, went away toward the rear bedroom. A coffeepot was perking on the stove, and Wes busied himself.

“Cup, Kramer?”

“No.”

Wes went past him back into the living room bearing a steaming mug in two hands. Kramer watched through the doorway as the girl received the mug, her hands on top of Wes’s so that the both of them together delivered the first hot sip to her lips. Wes crossed to a shelf and returned with a bottle of whisky, offering to pour a slug of it into her cup. She took the bottle from him and raised it to her lips, her head thrown back and the wet cloth shaping to her arms.

“How’d you get so wet?” Kramer asked from the kitchen, immediately regretting the clumsy sound of his own voice. But neither the girl nor Wes responded.

“Easy, easy!” Wes murmured, pulling the bottle from her mouth so that it made a loud pop.

Kramer came out of the kitchen and went to the front door and said, “Wes?” He waited until Wes started coming along after him, then went onto the porch to the far end where firewood was stacked.

“That right, what Jeanellen said? That the wolf guy’s woman?”

Wes’s mouth screwed up. “They’re not married or anything.”

“What’s the story on the guy?”

“Fisher is somebody you ought to avoid, Kramer. Something you definitely need to keep your nose out of. Yours and your wacko brother’s.”

“Weird,” Kramer found himself saying, one of Gowen’s words that he himself never used. Wes looked at Kramer intently for several seconds and then smiled.

“What’s she doing here?” Kramer asked.

“Visiting. Likes a little female company.”

“She walk here?”

Jeanellen’s voice inside and then Jeanellen at the door, her arms akimbo holding up her big breasts. “Kramer, you give this girl a ride home? She lives down there by you.”

Wes turned quickly on his heel. A moment passed between husband and wife.

“Come on out, girl, what’d you say your name was, come on out here. This man’s going to take you home. Whyn’t you change into those things I give you?” Jeanellen went inside briefly and reemerged with the girl, ushering her with pushy bustle onto the porch.

The Fisher woman made no move to don the flannel work-shirt Jeanellen draped across her shoulders. Instead she descended without a word into the rain and started up the slope of the yard on the plank walkway. Wes leaned after her. Jeanellen took a single step forward and said, “Kramer?”

The Fisher woman was waiting for him, staring out the truck’s side window into the rain. She didn’t turn to him as he got in and started the engine. Lydia was watching from the laundry shack door, arms akimbo like her mother’s. Kramer backed and turned the truck around in the narrow driveway. They had started forward and Kramer had put it quickly into second gear for the descent into the standing water when a sudden, dull impact just behind his ear startled him. A mud clot stuck momentarily to the truck’s rear window and slid downward, its juice spreading across the expanse of glass. He opened the door and looked back to see Lydia fleeing through the yard. He had thought Lydia liked him. He closed up again and went on.

Momentum was required to make it back up Wes’s driveway in the muddy conditions, and Kramer kept his eyes ahead all the way up to the mainline. The percussive racket of the truck’s progress over the freshly laid pit-run on the mainline filled the silence in the cab as they wound toward the highway. At the stop sign where the mainline intersected the highway he had an excuse to look over. Her face beneath the cap of black hair was very pale. She looked like no one in particular, no one else he knew, like neither boy nor girl and certainly not like a woman except for the fullness of the lower lip and the steadiness of the smallish black eyes that turned then and studied him in return.

Pretending he had merely been watching for oncoming traffic, Kramer started again and accelerated. They coasted down the long, curving ribbon of asphalt toward the bottom. He kept his eyes on the road as she moved in the seat beside him, drawing the wet shirt over her head, her small yam-shaped breasts jiggling into the light before he could catch himself. She regarded him steadily as she put one arm into the sleeve of Wes Greenly’s shirt, drew the body of fresh flannel around behind her bare torso, captured the other sleeve, and, not hurrying the dark tips under cover until he had looked and looked away again, slowly buttoned.

“Here,” she said at the juncture of Long Andrew Road. She got out and was turning back toward him as she closed the truck door, a moment in which a person ordinarily would have thanked another person for a ride. But she didn’t say it, and so he did: “Thanks.”

The crookedness of her teeth surprised him. “For what?” she asked, and laughed. “Letting you look at my tits?” And laughed again, her eyes looking straight into his, and then turned away up Long Andrew, her small haunches alternating. He sat in his truck as she went under the white trunks of the alders growing along the road, following the curve of the river out of sight.

Sunday night the jetstream shrugged, and before dawn a spring snowstorm descended upon the Neslolo Valley. Barber called at five and canceled work. The smell of the snow was overpowering as Kramer lugged firewood from the stack beside the house. About nine A.M. the electricity went out. He called the power company and got a recorded message. Kramer fed the dog, who gyrated and leaped in ecstasy over the snow.

“Yeah, Bucket! You like this stuff, don’t you?” His voice sounded louder than normal in the dense air of the near whiteout. It occurred to him that it was possible — no, probable — that the Fisher woman could hear him from across the river. This notion held him in place as if it were novel. Bucket stared eagerly into his eyes as snowflakes accumulated in his hair and on his face. But then, what could he say that would be of interest to her?

He went inside and paced the noisy floor and looked out the window into the cascading white curtain. He built up the stove in the front room and took off his shoes. He prepared an elaborate lunch of instant soup fortified with ground elk. When he realized he had set the table for two, a sudden depression overtook him.

There were places in the cellar where Gowen sometimes hid whisky. Kramer was able to locate only an empty Jim Beam bottle nestled against a plastic zip-lock baggie of pot. This he automatically seized and carried upstairs to be consigned to the woodstove.

He crouched before the cast-iron door of the stove and squeezed the pillow of dried leaves in his fist, inexplicably raising it to his nostrils before throwing it into the fire. He took the extra bowl and spoon from the table to the sink as if they needed washing. He ate his solitary soup and sat over the empty bowl looking out the back window at the snow. The light flattened, and the stove burned down. At dusk the snow ceased. He took down the binoculars from their peg beside the kitchen door and examined one by one the opaque, lit window’s of Old Frick’s house. The wolves rose occasionally and shook snow from their fur. Gowen’s tent was a just barely visible oddity among the stumps and white-draped brush halfway up on the ridge. Darkness fell, and the tent’s canvas sides remained unlit. He let the house become dark. When the moon shone briefly through the traveling clouds, his breath became visible. It startled him slightly to see his breath inside the house, and he laughed out loud. He built the stove fire back up and warmed the leftover soup and started the generator so he could watch TV. He was channel surfing when the muffled racket of a pickup truck plowing into the drift at the head of the driveway announced Gowen’s return.

Kramer turned the front porch light on and went out. A few snowflakes filtered out of the black sky. Gowen whooped as he came down the yard kicking glittering spray ahead of him.

“You smell like a gin mill.”

“Nobody says that anymore, Kramer. People used to say that when there used to be gin mills. There are no gin mills anymore, Kramer. Say something else.”

“You get tired of spying on Mr. Fisher?”

“Ah, the lofty Kramer descends... very good, bro. What’s new? What’s going on in the world, such as you know it?”

“You talk first, then I’ll decide what I want to say to you.”

Kramer followed Gowen inside and watched him disrobe in the heat of the stove. He regarded his brother’s bare limbs, remembering when he had been able to pick Gowen up into his arms effortlessly.

“So talk. What’s Mr. Wolf-man doing up there? I know you been sneaking around peekin’ in his window.”

“He’s making meth. Just like I told you. A sad tale but true.”

“What is that, meth?”

“Methamphetamine. Yes indeed. You take it, fifteen minutes later you want more. Ask your buddy Wes, he knows all about it.”

“I just saw Wes yesterday.”

“You talked to Wes? My, my, you do get around. And he told you what?”

“Nothing really. He seemed to think your Mr. Fisher was a dangerous individual.”

“I worry about you, man. Stuff happens right under your nose. You talk to Jeanellen? What’d she have to say for herself?”

“Nothing. Seemed a little out of sorts.”

“Yeah, I’ll say. She and Wes are splitting.”

“Bull! That’s bull!”

“Not according to my source of information.”

“One of your little dope customers gossiping with some other little degenerate, one little degenerate to another.”

“That’s right. One of my little dope customers is real tight with sweet young Lydia, and he says that she says that mommy and daddy are splittin’ the sheets. That was this afternoon, so it’s as we speak, if you know what I mean.”

“Gossip!”

“Eighty-five percent, Krame. Local gossip, it’s even higher.”

“I was just up there yesterday, and Jeanellen and Lydia were doing laundry.”

“Doing laundry, oh... well...”

“Bull!”

“It was Lydia caught him.”

“Him who? Caught what?”

“Caught Wes, in delecto el flagrantee, as they say, doing the nacky with Mr. Wolf-man Fisher’s little meth whore. Ah, the neighborhood is going to the dogs, er, wolves, ’scuse me.”

“Bull! That’s bull!”

“Crazy bitch walks around in the woods in the rain. Looney Tunes. Brain’s cooked. You see her while you were up there? Must have just missed her. Too bad. You could have given her a lift. I hear she trades sex for transportation.”

Kramer had made no decision not to tell. He had merely hesitated, and hesitation had shaped itself into a small lie of omission, and by the end of The Late Shaw he was schooling himself to think about the Fisher woman only out of Gowen’s presence lest his brother pluck the secret from his mind.

In bed for his go-to-sleep dream Kramer constructed his next meeting with the Fisher woman. He came across her in the rain in the woods. He came across her walking down the road in the snow. She was walking down the road in the snow having just come out of the woods. He said... and then she said, I require methamphetamine, I require it every fifteen minutes.

He awoke at his usual time in the predawn and built up the fire. Barber telephoned. A warm rain had started, pushed by a Chinook wind. He and Gowen watched television all day. The brown surface of the river became visible as it filled its ravine. He almost told Gowen about the Fisher woman at supper, but then simply did not. Barber called again during the evening news and said they would try to get something done the next day. “Call your friend, will you?”

“Call him yourself. I ain’t your waterboy.”

Wes was not there on the landing in the morning. Kramer lost himself in the work of felling second-growth fir into the pulpy snow on Greasy Spoon Ridge.

“I thought he was a friend of yours!” Barber veiled at him over the noise of their saws. Kramer took himself away from the others during lunch break. On the way home he tried and failed to imagine the Fisher woman in the cab of his truck, trading sex for transportation. What was a meth whore? He looked for her along the road and in the trees going past. He pictured Wes holding the steaming mug to her lips.

He came close to telling Gowen about her that night as they orbited around one another in the house before dinner. It was Gowen’s turn to cook, and he was ransacking the cupboard for something that did not require complicated preparation.

“You’re making a goddamn mess!” Kramer shouted at him.

“The hell’s the matter with you?”

Another windstorm came up in the early evening, and again the dogs and coyotes and wolves were quiet all night. Again Wes was not at work. Barber was in a state. Kramer yelled back at him, “He don’t belong to me! Go see him yourself!”

Barber let him alone until quitting time. As they were getting into the crummy for the ride down to the landing, Barber asked him to bring two cases of dynamite up with him the next morning. Kramer, of them all the fundamentally sound man and reliable worker, had been Barber’s keeper of explosives for years.

“Might as well build road until we can find us a new choker man,” Barber said pointedly. “We ain’t gonna get any timber moved, seein’ as your great friend is so completely goddamn irresponsible. I thought you talked to him. Didn’t you say nothing to him?”

“Someone else can set choke,” Kramer said back.

“Yeah? Who? You?”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, I ain’t paying you faller’s wages for setting choke!”

Everyone was quiet on the way down but wished Kramer goodnight at the landing where their rigs were parked, to show they weren’t choosing sides.

Kramer drove fast down the Crown mainline. She was in the cab of the truck with him. She said she wanted to trade sex for transportation, but he said he was willing to give her a ride for nothing.

It was still light when he got to the house. Gowen’s truck was not there. He went past the driveway and down the lane that led behind the barn to the old icehouse that had been used for years to store dynamite for Barber Logging. He backed the truck up to the ramp and fished the key to the icehouse from its niche under the steps. Inside he methodically pulled the light chain and took down the clipboard that held a sheaf of papers containing his federal license to handle explosives and the federally mandated log of entries and withdrawals. Automatically he eyeballed the stacks of crates, checking against the balance on his record. He penciled in his intended withdrawal of two crates with the date and his signature and hung the clipboard back on its nail. As he eased the top corner case into his arms, he felt a sharp bite where the heavy box pressed against his belly.

He grunted and put the crate back on top of the stack. He fingered his belly through the front of his shirt, thinking he had pinched a spider and it had bitten him back. A nailhead winked at him in the light. He bent and examined the lid of the crate. All the nails had been started and pushed back into place. The force of his fingertips under the edge of the lid was sufficient to pry up an end: then he yanked the lid the rest of the way off and threw it against the wall, cursing and knowing already what had happened but looking, counting anyway. Four sticks were missing.

“Goddamn you, Gowen!” he shouted.

He retrieved the lid of the crate and hammered it back into place with his fist, cracking the wood and cutting the heel of his hand. He set the box aside — it had been invalidated, and he could no longer be responsible for it — and loaded two others into the back of his pickup. He took the key to the icehouse away with him in his pocket. He and Gowen had already had this discussion. If Gowen wanted to blow stumps in his pot patch, a goddamn dumb idea anyway, he could get his own goddamn dynamite.

He gunned the truck back up the lane and into the driveway. He banged the front door open against the bottle-and-can garbage in the corner and yelled for Gowen. He already knew Gowen was not home, and the foolishness of shouting for him increased his rage. He stomped up the stairs and kicked open the doors to the bathroom and Gowen’s bedroom, neither of which he bothered to enter.

As he descended thunderously, he shouted, “Gowen! Gowen!” at the top of his voice. A dull, flat explosion thudded against the south side of the house. Another, louder, followed. Kramer tripped and stumbled heavily as he ran toward the back door, bowling it off its hinges as he went through.

Beyond the back porch railing a great yellow flower was lofting its head against the dark ridge above Old Frick’s Spring. The position of the methamphetamine factory was explicitly revealed as a third and very different concussion sent the separated roof and sides of a house trailer skyward like newspapers in a wind. The gleaming tongue of an aluminum storm door wagged back and forth as the front section of the trailer fell noiselessly back into the roiling blob of orange and blue flame. Just as Gowen had said, the location of the meth lab was one that the Kramer brothers knew well, a spot beside Old Frick’s Spring where grew a huge big-leaf maple tree that they had played in as children and which now flared in the rebounding blast like a great skeleton holding a hundred candelabra in its arms.

Kramer ran back through the house and the front yard to his pickup and raced to the concrete bridge at Long Andrew Road. He swerved wildly onto the gravel track and ran beneath alder trees standing in the margin of the brown river. Hammering over the cattle guard that marked the entrance to Old Frick’s pasture, he looked up at the house on its knoll. The windows were lit with the reflection of the fire on the hill, and the door was standing wide open. The gray forms of the wolves twisted and turned in their cages. Cows were stampeding in wide circles in the pasture. The bull, standing its ground suddenly, charged the oncoming pickup. Kramer swerved off the road as the bull slammed into his fender. The engine screamed as he gunned over wet turf, on across the pasture to the second cattle guard at the edge of the timber.

He could smell the fire now, not the smell of a forest fire but a chemical odor like cat urine or perfume, department store perfume, and then, as he rounded the first switchback, he could hear the crackling and the deep bass hum of the fire above him on the ridge. Flaming brands rained down on the truck’s hood. The narrow cut of the roadway was incandescent, and in its center stood a figure. Kramer jammed the brakes as the first muzzle crack sent a slug smashing through the windshield. Another followed, and Kramer tore open his door, his momentum spilling him into the deep ditch beside the road. Pain shot through his leg as he struggled to rise. Above him in the wavering light the muzzle of a gun pointed at his face.

“Mine, Kramer!”

And then nothing but the howling of the fire. Kramer crawled into the cab of the truck and drove one-legged in reverse down the switchback into Old Frick’s pasture. As he struggled to turn the truck around in the slippery pasture, he looked up toward the house and saw her small, still figure watching from a corner of the chain-link kennels in which the wolves were furiously leaping and spinning.

Wes Greenly had suckered Gowen, come to the door with a story that Barber had sent him after dynamite, Kramer busy falling and it was just a couple of sticks they needed, but right away, so they had the choker-setter run down the mountain and back real quick. Sounded plausible. What the hell, how was he supposed to know Wes wasn’t even working for Barber anymore? It wasn’t like Kramer ever communicated anything. Plus, it didn’t look like Kramer understood what the hell was going on even though he had gotten his nose right up in the crack of the whole deal. Goddamn Kramer! Explosives plus any kind of crime equaled federal jurisdiction, and here he was, he had already had one brush with the Feds, it wasn’t like on TV, he had a record, was looking like an accessory to a capital crime, and Kramer was stuck on the idea this was some kind of adolescent screw-up where he was going to have to be taught a lesson. Maybe Kramer was in shock. Before he’d even cleaned himself up after the fire and Wes shooting at him — his clothes still smoking for Christ’s sake, never mind the broken foot — he’d sat himself down at the kitchen table with a ballpoint pen and the appropriate government form to make out a report on the four missing sticks of dynamite. Gowen had come behind him and seen what he was doing and said to him, “How about driving around in a forest fire with two cases of dynamite in the back of your pickup truck, you gonna report that, too?”

“Fine!” Kramer had exploded. He balled up the paper and slammed it in the stove, and that was when he started with the silent treatment. When Gowen had said to him, “You want to do something back to him? I’ll help you if you want,” Kramer had just looked at him with his eyes bugging out, and about then Gowen figured two things: one, shut up, he’s ready to whack you, and two, get your own story together, because you don’t know what the hell he’s going to do.

Gowen spent Friday, the day after the blast, away from the house, not wanting to be there when the law knocked on the door. He had gone from the store to the Vildefeld Lunch and then to the tavern, managing to kill the whole day. At first he tried to avoid people, but then, after a few beers, it was business as usual. He kept waiting for it, but no one said to him. Hey, what happened up your way? What was the big noise? It crossed his mind, all that jazz about the local acoustics, Kramer’s Bend acoustics in particular that Kramer made such a big deal out of, like the big boom — three of them really, a big one and then boom! boom! two more right after — had been held in place, or maybe deflected somewhere, bounced up into the sky or into some other neighborhood, or maybe somehow actually sucked back into that cul-de-sac where the big big-leaf maple stood beside Old Frick’s Spring. No one said anything about the fire either, but then a heavy rain had started up just as Kramer was getting out of there. Like the landscape itself didn’t want the news broadcast. He didn’t believe this, just liked to play with the idea of it in his mind as he got into a good buzz from the beer and, later out behind the tavern with the guys, the reefer.

Kramer had gone to work that day with his broken foot. When Gowen came home, he was looking out the back window through the binoculars. He still wasn’t talking.

“Anybody say anything to you?” Gowen asked him. No answer.

“The Mexicans are gone. Cleared out completely, looks like.” Still nothing.

“Jeanellen and Lydia too. Left the goats behind. Can’t believe that.”

Kramer sighed loudly through his nose.

“I don’t get it. Where are the cops?”

Kramer rose and advanced upon him so suddenly he started back. As Kramer rocked past him on the busied foot, he punched the binoculars into Gowen’s chest. It was almost friendly, some communication at least. Gowen focused the binoculars on Old Frick’s. Wes Greenly was over there, feeding the wolves.

Over the space of the next two weeks Gowen weighed one cover story after another as he waited for the authorities to show up. Between him and Kramer the binoculars were kept on Old Frick’s and on the flank of Long Andrew Ridge a good percentage of the daylight hours and into the night. They watched Wes coming and going. No timber cruiser appeared overhead in a helicopter or drove a truck up Long Andrew Road through the blackened patch of timber. They didn’t see any firewood poachers, although it was a bad time of year for that anyway with the mud and the snow up high. Hunting season was over, fishing had yet to commence. It could well be that Fisher’s meth customers figured he had had to make a quick move, or had been taken by the law. Doubtful Fisher had a dear old mom who called Sundays to see how he was doing, or an ex-wife waiting for a support check.

No one, no deputy sheriff, no state trooper came to the Kramers’ door to ask: What happened? What do you know? What did you see? Hear?

Lurking in the back of Gowen’s mind when he was sober and let out for a gleeful prance when he was loaded, the wacky idea that had first visited him in the Trail’s End Tavern the first day after the blast began to assert itself as belonging to the realm of daylight and reality. Kramer hadn’t called the cops, the Mexicans with no green cards wanted none of it, Wes Greenly obviously wasn’t about to, nor was Fisher’s — now Wes’s — little meth whore. That left Jeanellen and Lydia to tell the world. Maybe they hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Figured someone else would surely have called it in and they were best out of it. Wes the recipient of a backhanded female absolution: washed that man right out of their hair right away. Or they had told but without picking up a phone to the authorities, their interlocutors maybe disbelieving them, or believing them and wagging their heads still without anybody picking up a telephone.

It was May already. Could it be, was it possible, that such a large event had gone unnoticed by the world? Indeed, it looked as if the only physical testimonials to the murder by dynamite of Mr. Wolf-man Fisher and the spectacular wipeout of his enterprise were to be the clunky wad of plaster and cloth applied to Kramer’s foot by the alcoholic homeopath in PeeDee, who asked no questions, and, against the deepening pea soup of spring growth on the flank of Long Andrew Ridge the still visible — though at fifty miles per hour only if you happened to look at exactly the right moment between the corner of the Kramer house and the tall stand of trees by the Hinsvaark Bridge — great blackened skeleton of the big-leaf maple.

“It occur to you,” he asked Kramer, “that it’s just you, me, Wes, and the Fisher woman gonna deal with this crime? Or not, as we choose?”

Kramer just smiled back at him and didn’t say anything.

May passed, and June. Kramer had gone back to work with the cast still on his foot, his face screwed up with pain, but that had not lasted long. Out of unthinkable carelessness he neglected to face-cut a small alder, and it barber-chaired, smacking him on the crown, luckily a glancing blow but enough to knock him cold. Summarily furloughed until he healed up, Kramer had uncharacteristically given in to his codeine prescription. He slept, and when awake seemed only preparing for more sleep.

Gowen had surreptitiously visited ground zero at Old Frick’s Spring not long after the blast. He had gone there again in late spring and several times in the full leaf of summer as irrepressible blackberry, salmon berry, burdock, horsetail, nettles, river grass, and the root suckers of the blasted maple itself progressively obscured and then swallowed completely the metal and glass detritus of Fisher the Wolf-man’s meth lab. In mid-July, Gowen spied Wes Greenly hard at work. He hid, watched. By August, daily smoke was rising from a stovepipe jutting from the window of a small pod-shaped trailer that Wes had hauled onto the site. The smell of cat urine came to Gowen on the airs moving up and down the Neslolo River.

Gowen kept his eye out for the Fisher woman. He could pretend to Kramer, who wasn’t curious about anything lately, that he had seen the Fisher woman when actually he had not. He climbed up Long Andrew and came down the other side to spy on the house from Old Frick’s high pasture. He considered that she might be gone, although the wolves were still there. Getting stoned and peering out from the shade of the timber into the blue-green valley under a high, clean sky — it was actually pretty amusing, in a way. The whole thing could have been made up. Or existed only in their imaginations. Or better, was a thing destined to become an old story, like the old family stories Kramer used to tell him when he was little, a story closed round and kept secret by vast forest.

For the present, the story had become untellable even between themselves. Whenever Gowen attempted to engage Kramer on the subject of the blast, his brother would turn away with that short chopping motion of his hand.

Kramer’s taciturnity was a deepening of a trait he already possessed, but other changes in him were more alarming. Even after his fool healed up, Kramer didn’t go back to work. He never said he wasn’t going back, he just didn’t. There wasn’t much Gowen could say about any of this, or about Kramer staying abed during the day and roaming around the place at night, packing a pistol everywhere he went. Or about talking aloud to himself out-of-doors. All summer, the most Gowen could get out of his brother was help cutting firewood. For short periods of time, as they worked together, Kramer would seem himself again. But these spells of energy and clarity were followed by even worse bouts of drinking. Most nights Kramer sat with a bottle at the kitchen table looking out the back door, and on nights when the coyotes got the wolves riled up he was apt to charge onto the porch and empty his gun into the sky.

Fall came and the rains and the good logging weather, and still Kramer did not go back to the woods. Gowen met Barber coming off their front porch one day in October and asked him, “He going back?” Barber had looked down and up and back down, as if he were about to make a major pronouncement, but then just said, “I don’t know what to tell ya.”

A few days before Christmas, Deputy Julius Maksymic pulled Gowen over for a loud muffler as he was cruising down Highway 26 on his way to Seaside. Jule only gave him a warning and didn’t even bother to ask him to step out of the truck. He said, “Hey, maybe you can do me a little favor, Gowen. You probably owe me a favor or two, don’t you?”

“Yeah, probably so.”

“We’re looking for a guy maybe you seen or heard about up your way. Meth cook named Lawrence Fisher. Goes by the name of Rex Fisher also. Got a little gal with him. No? Sure?”

“You know I ain’t into that, Jule.”

“Yeah, yeah. But you would also know, wouldn’t you, if he was in the neighborhood.”

“Hey, I mind my own business.”

“Please don’t b.s. me around, Gow.”

“No, seriously, listen, Jule, if the dude shows up or I even hear anything, I know who to call.”

“The feds got warrants out for both of them. The female is wanted in California and Idaho as a material witness to two murders. Seems she likes the bad boys, goes from one to the other.”

Gowen continued on to Seaside so Jule wouldn’t get suspicious but finished his shopping in a hurry and returned home. He couldn’t wait to tell Kramer. But when he got back to the house, Kramer was not there, and when Kramer finally did come in late that night, he lumbered drunkenly up the stairs and fell into his bed. In the morning when Kramer finally crawled out Gowen still hesitated, unwilling to squander his piece of news on Kramer’s morning funk.

“What’s the matter with you?” Kramer demanded at supper that night.

“Nothing.”

January passed. In February the Neslolo finally did roll up out of her channel and into the pasture. Across her flat, tan surge Gowen watched through the binoculars the wolves in their kennels and Wes Greenly coming and going.

“I don’t think she’s over there,” he said to Kramer.

“She’s there,” Kramer said.

“I got information on her,” he said.

“You shut your goddamn filthy lying mouth!”

One night in March Gowen challenged his brother, attempting to separate him from his bottle, and Kramer beat him brutally. The next day Kramer refused to apologize. Gowen packed and left, removing himself to his framed tent on Long Andrew. It was cold and wet, and he was being stupid not just clearing out and letting Kramer go completely crazy all by himself. But then, even if he couldn’t change anything, he had to stay to see how it would end.

Consequently he was in position to spot her in his binoculars, late in the afternoon of a changeable April day, as she crossed the river in an aluminum canoe, tied up at the Kramers’ floating dock, and made her way across the wet pasture to the back yard and up onto the back porch to be let in the back door.

He came down then. He circled around behind the barn and ran along the highway to the front of the house. He saw her shadow pass across the windowshade. He crept onto the porch and peered in the window between the edge of the shade and the sash. He saw Kramer holding a cup in front of her, extending it to her with both hands and her hands atop his so that it was together that they delivered the first hot sip to her lips. Then Gowen, who had never in his life knocked on that door, knocked.