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.
Bentley Dadmun
Annie’s Dream
From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
The Farm is seven miles of bad roads from anywhere and has occupied sixty-three acres of scrub pine and rock-laden pasture since Teddy Roosevelt was thrashing around the White House. Now, at the other end of the century, it is home to eighty or ninety senior citizens, several aging cows, a few semiferal chickens, and a handicapped cat.
The majority of the senior citizens ended up at The Farm because they were living their lives on the two-hundred-year plan and handled their money accordingly. The animals, like most domesticated critters, had little choice in the matter.
The animals make do with a large shed, and the barn houses most of the humans. Those who don’t live in the barn reside in a motley collection of trailers and RVs that squat like disgruntled sows in the pastures surrounding the barn.
Except for me and the cat. We live in a thirty-six foot mahogany sloop cradled in the middle of a windblown grove of hardwoods in the north pasture.
Annie Kokar, closet misanthrope, Renaissance woman, and retired veterinarian, is the owner of The Farm and keeper of the purse. It is by her efforts that The Farm stays solvent and the residents warm, fed, and relatively free of despair and errant behavior.
I am very attached to the boat. We suit each other, for we are both old drifters, sharing a propensity for solitary wanderings and a desire to keep our distance from others and walk our own path.