Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

“Fine!” Kramer had exploded. He balled up the paper and slammed it in the stove, and that was when he started with the silent treatment. When Gowen had said to him, “You want to do something back to him? I’ll help you if you want,” Kramer had just looked at him with his eyes bugging out, and about then Gowen figured two things: one, shut up, he’s ready to whack you, and two, get your own story together, because you don’t know what the hell he’s going to do.

Gowen spent Friday, the day after the blast, away from the house, not wanting to be there when the law knocked on the door. He had gone from the store to the Vildefeld Lunch and then to the tavern, managing to kill the whole day. At first he tried to avoid people, but then, after a few beers, it was business as usual. He kept waiting for it, but no one said to him. Hey, what happened up your way? What was the big noise? It crossed his mind, all that jazz about the local acoustics, Kramer’s Bend acoustics in particular that Kramer made such a big deal out of, like the big boom — three of them really, a big one and then boom! boom! two more right after — had been held in place, or maybe deflected somewhere, bounced up into the sky or into some other neighborhood, or maybe somehow actually sucked back into that cul-de-sac where the big big-leaf maple stood beside Old Frick’s Spring. No one said anything about the fire either, but then a heavy rain had started up just as Kramer was getting out of there. Like the landscape itself didn’t want the news broadcast. He didn’t believe this, just liked to play with the idea of it in his mind as he got into a good buzz from the beer and, later out behind the tavern with the guys, the reefer.

Kramer had gone to work that day with his broken foot. When Gowen came home, he was looking out the back window through the binoculars. He still wasn’t talking.

“Anybody say anything to you?” Gowen asked him. No answer.

“The Mexicans are gone. Cleared out completely, looks like.” Still nothing.

“Jeanellen and Lydia too. Left the goats behind. Can’t believe that.”

Kramer sighed loudly through his nose.

“I don’t get it. Where are the cops?”

Kramer rose and advanced upon him so suddenly he started back. As Kramer rocked past him on the busied foot, he punched the binoculars into Gowen’s chest. It was almost friendly, some communication at least. Gowen focused the binoculars on Old Frick’s. Wes Greenly was over there, feeding the wolves.

Over the space of the next two weeks Gowen weighed one cover story after another as he waited for the authorities to show up. Between him and Kramer the binoculars were kept on Old Frick’s and on the flank of Long Andrew Ridge a good percentage of the daylight hours and into the night. They watched Wes coming and going. No timber cruiser appeared overhead in a helicopter or drove a truck up Long Andrew Road through the blackened patch of timber. They didn’t see any firewood poachers, although it was a bad time of year for that anyway with the mud and the snow up high. Hunting season was over, fishing had yet to commence. It could well be that Fisher’s meth customers figured he had had to make a quick move, or had been taken by the law. Doubtful Fisher had a dear old mom who called Sundays to see how he was doing, or an ex-wife waiting for a support check.

No one, no deputy sheriff, no state trooper came to the Kramers’ door to ask: What happened? What do you know? What did you see? Hear?

Lurking in the back of Gowen’s mind when he was sober and let out for a gleeful prance when he was loaded, the wacky idea that had first visited him in the Trail’s End Tavern the first day after the blast began to assert itself as belonging to the realm of daylight and reality. Kramer hadn’t called the cops, the Mexicans with no green cards wanted none of it, Wes Greenly obviously wasn’t about to, nor was Fisher’s — now Wes’s — little meth whore. That left Jeanellen and Lydia to tell the world. Maybe they hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Figured someone else would surely have called it in and they were best out of it. Wes the recipient of a backhanded female absolution: washed that man right out of their hair right away. Or they had told but without picking up a phone to the authorities, their interlocutors maybe disbelieving them, or believing them and wagging their heads still without anybody picking up a telephone.

It was May already. Could it be, was it possible, that such a large event had gone unnoticed by the world? Indeed, it looked as if the only physical testimonials to the murder by dynamite of Mr. Wolf-man Fisher and the spectacular wipeout of his enterprise were to be the clunky wad of plaster and cloth applied to Kramer’s foot by the alcoholic homeopath in PeeDee, who asked no questions, and, against the deepening pea soup of spring growth on the flank of Long Andrew Ridge the still visible — though at fifty miles per hour only if you happened to look at exactly the right moment between the corner of the Kramer house and the tall stand of trees by the Hinsvaark Bridge — great blackened skeleton of the big-leaf maple.

“It occur to you,” he asked Kramer, “that it’s just you, me, Wes, and the Fisher woman gonna deal with this crime? Or not, as we choose?”

Kramer just smiled back at him and didn’t say anything.

May passed, and June. Kramer had gone back to work with the cast still on his foot, his face screwed up with pain, but that had not lasted long. Out of unthinkable carelessness he neglected to face-cut a small alder, and it barber-chaired, smacking him on the crown, luckily a glancing blow but enough to knock him cold. Summarily furloughed until he healed up, Kramer had uncharacteristically given in to his codeine prescription. He slept, and when awake seemed only preparing for more sleep.

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.