"That's Feet, he stinks," said Paul, and laughed vacantly. "He took my matches away and he won't give 'em back."
"Yeah?" The two boys came toward Gene. "Listen, why don't you give him back his matches?"
"I haven't got them."
The two looked at each other. "Grab him!" said one, and they wrestled him to the floor. While they held him, Paul went through his pockets, pulling out a few coins, a wad of string, some baseball cards and a wadded handkerchief. "Guess I'll keep these for my matches," he said, and laughed again.
"Lemme see them cards," said the tall one, and they let Gene up. Paul was backing away, but they tripped him, sat on him, took the cards and money out of his fist. While Gene was putting out their dropped cigarettes, Paul got up and rushed at him. He took Gene off balance and fell with him half out of the window. "You took my matches! You took my matches!" he blubbered. Gene was pinned by his weight across the window frame, one arm under him, his head down.
"Get his pants," somebody said. Hands were fumbling with Gene's belt buckle. He kicked and struggled, but all he accomplished was to force his body farther out the window. He was crying. Blindly he reached and turned, felt Paul's weight slip away from him. He heard a shriek, then a thump below that echoed against the house like a pistol shot.
He grasped the window frame and pulled himself in. Below, Paul lay with his head on a blood-spattered two-by-four.
The other two were gray-faced. "You killed him!" the tall one said. "I'm going to tell my dad!"
Their footsteps rattled down the stairs. Gene followed. They were running down the street toward town; he went the other way. He ran until a pain in his side forced him to stop; then he went on, weeping and groaning, up the hill into the trees. It was about three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon; be was nine years old, and he knew he couldn't go home.
Chapter Two
Dog River, Oregon, named after the stream discovered by Lewis and Clark in 1805, is situated at the confluence of the Dog and the Columbia. The river was originally named Labeasche, after Francis Labiche, one of the expedition's French watermen. (Neither Lewis nor Clark was strong on spelling.) "Labiche" was taken by many to mean "the bitch," but this fact apparently has nothing to do with the name finally selected for the river and the town: it comes, rather, from the experience of some early travelers who were reduced by starvation to eating dogs.
Dog River lies in a fertile valley largely devoted to apples, pears, and strawberries. Most of the valley is flat as a table, but the town itself is hilly; up from the river, the streets rise so steeply that at some intersections there are concrete steps with pipe railings. Behind the County Library, the hill is so abrupt that there is no street at all, only a switchback wooden staircase that rises to the suburban district sixty feet above.
The business section, which is entirely modern, is four blocks long; here will be found the First National Bank, the Odeon Theatre, the courthouse, the Bon Ton department store, the newspaper office, the two drug stores, the Medical Building, Stein's Meat Market, and the Book and Art Shoppe.
The town is not hostile to immigrants, of whom there are many: Mayor Hilbert, for example, was born in Germany, and Desmond Pike, the editor and publisher of the "Dog River Gazette," is English; but it congratulates itself that its young people are almost uniformly fair-skinned and pleasing in appearance.
Morris Stein and his family are the only Jews known to live in town. There is one black family, headed by a man who works as a janitor at the Dog River Hotel near the railroad depot. Out in the valley, much of the most productive orchard land was formerly owned by Japanese immigrants and their descendants, all of whom, however, were taken away to internment camps during the Second World War. The town is staunchly Republican. The state anthem, "Oregon, My Oregon," is sung with fervor in the schools. The high-school football team, known as the Beavers, has a traditional rivalry with the team of Dalles City, twenty miles to the east.
Many of the residents of Dog River came to Oregon during the first quarter of the century from Iowa, Nebraska, and other midwestern states. Among these were Donald R. Anderson, from North Dakota, and Mildred Sonderlund, from Ohio. They met in Springfield, where Anderson was working in a sawmill and Mildred was teaching elementary school. After their marriage in 1939, they moved to Dog River, where Anderson set himself up as a carpenter and builder. Their only child, Gene, was born there in 1944.
Tom Cooley, the son of a Portland bootlegger, was nineteen when he married Ellen McIntyre, the daughter of a Dog River orchardist. Their first child, Paul, was born in 1941; he was an infant when the war broke out. Cooley served in the Marine Corps, reaching the rank of sergeant. After his discharge, he worked for a while as a beer distributor and had a part interest in the Idle Hour Billiard Parlor, along with his cousin Jerry, who had been in the Marines with him. In 1944 he and Jerry sold out their shares in the billiard parlor and bought an apple orchard which had come on the market cheap. (The former owner, a Mr. Takamatsu, was in a relocation camp in Colorado.) Cooley was a silent partner in the orchard operation; he wanted something to keep him busy. In 1947 he became Dog River's chief of police.
Chief Cooley cruised the back roads around Dog River for three days and nights, ranging as far east as Dalles City and as far west as Portland. He drove slowly in his eight-cylinder Buick, watching both sides of the road and peering into every car he passed. Once on Monday morning and twice on Tuesday he saw a man on foot ducking into the underbrush. Cooley leaped out each time with his gun drawn, pursued the man and caught him, but all three times it turned out to be some tramp or migrant laborer with a guilty conscience. At night Cooley sometimes drove with his lights and motor off, coasting down a long hill, looking and listening. Toward dawn he parked the car and slept for a few hours. He stopped five times for gas and food, once for a bottle of blended rye. By Wednesday morning he had put nearly two thousand miles on the Buick.
Cooley was a short, sturdy, red-faced man who carried a .45 in a belt holster and wore a cowboy hat. He was the entire police department of Dog River. Under ordinary circumstances, the job did not call for anything more demanding than hustling an occasional drunk or vagrant into the county jail.
He came down out of the hills into town, red-eyed and unshaven; he slewed into the driveway, scattering chickens, and yanked on the emergency brake. Tess Williams, his wife's sister, met him inside the door. His voice was thick. "How's Ellen?"
"Where have you been, you sawed-off son of a bitch? She's half out of her mind, is how she is."
Cooley started up the stairs. "And Mayor Hilbert's been on the phone seven times!" she called after him.
"Tell'm go shit in his hat," said Cooley, and staggered into the bedroom.
Gus Hilbert came around at four that afternoon, when Cooley was up and dressed. Hilbert was a big man, popeyed and balding; he ran the town's one movie theater, in which, until her retirement a few years ago, his wife Ethel had played the Golden Wurlitzer organ.
He found Cooley at the kitchen table eating bacon and eggs. The chief had shaved, and looked a little better, but he still looked like a man who had been on a three-day drunk.
Hilbert dropped his hat on the table and sat down. "Tom, you through making a fool of yourself now?"
Cooley looked at him and said nothing.
"You know by now that kid's gone. Hitched a ride somewhere, he's out of the state."