Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Kramer had been nine and was still called Albert and Gowen was only just about to be born when Great-grandpa Jan, Old Kramer, more than one hundred years old and bent over like a horsecollar from osteoporosis yet still trundling baby-loads of firewood around the yard in his little wheelbarrow, had finally toppled over headfirst directly into the wheelbarrow and died curled up like a tire standing on its tread. Within the family Old Kramer’s demented belief that his wife would imminently be returning from Astoria — where she had gone fifty or so years before with money to pay their back taxes and instead had hopped a steamer for San Francisco — had become the butt of dark humor the point of which had not revealed itself to child Albert until that moment of looking down into the pale blue, dead eyes still open to the sky between the old man’s legs. Aha!: you don’t live forever. Albert in turn had been discovered standing over the dead old man by Grandma Elise. When he said to her, showing off his new insight, “He’s still waiting for Grandma Grace to come back!” she had slapped him full across the ear and yarded him all the way back to the house by his hair.

This bellringing Kramer had retained as one of very few memories of the paternal grandmother, who a year later, subsequent to Grandpa Walter’s stroke and drowning in the river along with his D-1 °Cat, had departed for California just as her mother-in-law had done. Of Grace, however, there were many almost-memories, vivid swatches of reminiscence from Old Kramer, who could and did read her diary out loud, of rounding the Horn in steerage, fending off the rats with her good silver soup ladle and the terrible thirst by drinking her baby’s urine, of the panther crouching in the soft mud of the new road as she rode her white pony to Vildefeld. As to reasons Grace may have had for deserting husband and child there was nothing — since she was perpetually, hah! coming right back — just as there was not a word, not of protest or even of surprise, when Grandma Elise left. Similarly, when Kramer and Gowen’s mother, Jenny Bergersen Kramer, hit the road with a truckdriver in Kramer’s thirteenth year and Gowen’s third, there was no explanation offered and, with Frank Kramer into the bottle big-time then, none sought. When, all in that same year, Frank died right in front of the house in the path of a log truck, Uncle Curley was killed in the woods, and Aunty Gert had gotten “the hell out of here, boys!” the same day the insurance check arrived, that was it, the men were dead and the women had split.

The last female in the family hadn’t even been properly in the family. Gowen had brought a bride home from the university where he had gone for a year on his G. I. benefits. She was an artist, the real thing, a painter in oils and watercolors who said the Neslolo was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. She had arrived in spring. Then winter and rain and darkness. Kramer had listened to her slow, cigarette-smoking footsteps go room to room, window to window in the wornout homestead house that rocked on its poles when the wind came up and had never quite come up with anything in particular to say to her. Yet he had understood the problem long before the groom. Women hated rain. They needed sun. They were something like tomatoes, which refused to ripen in that country because the nighttime temperatures were so seldom above fifty-five degrees. They craved the company of other women, which otherwise was a good thing, for where there was one there might come others.

Kramer, notorious tightwad that he was, had sprung for a new TV and satellite dish. But around Christmas she had split anyway, leaving half her stuff behind. Kramer hadn’t understood why Gowen hadn’t gone after her. He briefly considered it himself, but then what would he have said to her when he caught up with her? Kramer sensed without being able to put words to it that he had come to count on the status that went with having a beautiful young woman in the house. And by inertia of some obscure illogic he had come to believe that he too would soon find a wife. And now he had lived like a maiden aunt with his brother for an additional decade and the same logic dictated that the bride’s name never be spoken.

It was a Saturday in April. Spring had turned around to play with winter, dumping pea-sized hail and cold rain here and there while up the road a warm sun was shining. It was raining where Kramer turned off the highway onto the rocky mainline that led through a second-growth fir plantation to Wes Greenly’s driveway. There was an easterly wind, so it would be colder up high where Barber Logging Company’s timber show was. Kramer pictured himself working Monday in wet snow. Maybe Barber would call a day off. How would he spend a day off? Wiping Gowen’s butt, he thought. That’s how I spend my time.

A week earlier Gowen had come back from steelhead fishing in a state of rage. The new neighbor with the wolves had run him off the north bank of the river with a shotgun. Kramer could see Gowen’s argument — they had fished there their whole lives — but at some point Gowen just had to cool down. After all, the wolf guy was paying rent over there. Plus, without any doubt whatsoever, Gowen had been guilty of snooping around.

Kramer had followed Gowen as he went kicking and thrashing his way through the house and had nearly come to blows with him getting his pistol away from him. Kramer had locked up all the guns then, and Gowen, in the grand finale of his tantrum, had packed up and trekked over to the framed lent he kept on Long Andrew Ridge for lending his pot plantation. Kramer had spotted him up there in his binoculars the night before, his shadow sitting still on the surface of the tent for as long as Kramer watched. Old Frick’s house was on the same ridge as the tent, about three-quarters of a mile away overland, and Old Frick’s Spring was even closer, east and downhill, half a mile at most. Kramer had caught himself hoping the law would somehow get wind of what was going on, whatever it was that was going on. Kramer himself could never call the cops, but maybe somebody would.

Countering the steep slant of Wes Greenly’s driveway, Kramer shoved his rear end into the back of the pickup’s seat and feathered the brakes over the deeply potted track. The rain slacked off, and momentarily a sun break swept across the clearcut around him. It was not often he went to Wes and Jeanellen’s these days, although he and Wes went back a ways and they still worked for the same gyppo outfit. More or less worked, since lately Wes hadn’t even shown up on the landing half the time, and usually when he did at least one guy on the crew wanted to kick his ass for something stupid he had done or said.

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.