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.