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.”