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.