David Dun: At The Edge

Here, not two feet from his nose, someone else's early-blooming dogwood grew outside the window of the small antique shop. This downtown store had a timeless feel to it-reminding him that there were those certain moments that could make a person's destiny. Dan wondered if this might be one of those moments, for he carried $500,000 in cash in his leather briefcase. It was an extraordinary sum and he was delivering it to a rather unusual person.

Amid the store's velvety brown hues of old wood, the smells of scented polish and beeswax, shoppers talked in lower tones and seldom let their cigarette ash hit the floor.

The place exuded personality. When he had stepped inside to kill some time, Dan instantly knew that the proprietor's hand was connected to his heart instead of his wallet. In this small town by the sea, where the locals made lumber, caught fish, worked for the government, or catered to the tourists, and consequently had modest budgets, such a store could have been more profitably filled with cheap furniture sold on easy terms.

A freestanding armoire from Gascony, France, shone with quiet grandeur. According to the placard, it had been hand made in the mid-1800s. Beside the armoire hung the object of his attention-a photograph seemingly yellowed with age. It intrigued him. He'd been around the perimeter of the place twice-the consequence of being early-and this was his third time back to the narrow space in front of the photo.

The photo had been taken in black and white, probably with a large-lensed box camera manufactured around the turn of the last century. He had a passing interest in photography and knew the look created by large, slow cameras using photo plates. Or maybe it was the clothing of the subjects that made him think the camera was from another era. A giant redwood tree served as the backdrop for the composition. In front of the tree stood a woman, a man, a dog, and a young woman. Dan somehow knew the dog belonged to the man. It was doubtful that the woman even liked the dog, although he could surmise from the look of things that she liked the man.

But it was the younger woman who piqued Dan's interest. She wore a skirt appropriate to the day, drawn in tight at the waist, ballooned out, then falling straight down from the hips to the top of her sharp-toed black boots, not unlike the boots he had seen on female clients at his law office-in winter, never summer.

Her face had a lean angularity, the nose strong but not too prominent, and the cheekbones high. If only he could see the detail of the eyes that looked at him, that tugged at the darkest recesses of his mind. He knew that those eyes held a child's innocence, that they owned the sun, that under the sepia tone of the photograph her eyes were golden, surrounded by blue.

The first time he looked at the photo, it had taken him a moment to recognize her. He had watched her from across the courthouse hallway a couple of weeks ago. Last summer, he'd sat a foot away from her in a pickup. It was now apparent that Maria Fischer's reason for choosing to meet at Muldoon's Pub, next door to the antique shop in Old Town Palmer, was that she had some connection to this place.

He checked his watch: 9:55 a.m. He took a new grip on the briefcase. Even though the handle was slick with sweat, its contents growing heavy, he didn't want to put it down. He stroked his lip, where up until this morning there had been a mustache. He was unable to escape the odd feeling that someone might be watching him. Yet the many mirrors revealed no one.

"Can I help you?"

The salesclerk wore a raw silk blouse and black pants that looked modern Italian, and she wasn't quite what Dan expected.

"I've been looking at this photo. It's made to look antique."

She smiled broadly. "Right. It's a good fake. It was taken last year."

"I suspected."

''Actually, it's my cousin with her mom and dad. A friend of hers took it with a plain old Nikon 35mm."

"The dog belongs to Dad," he said.

"How did you know?"

"Your cousin is a lawyer?"

"You know her?"

"The earth woman."

"And you are?"

"Oh, I'm just a colleague, and I'm late. Nice meeting you, though." He tossed the words over his shoulder as he strode out.

Context. Everything was context. You would barely recognize your own mother if you knew, just knew, you were looking at a photo that was one hundred years old.

Dan wondered what Maria Fischer would do when she recognized him. He had only had one face-to-face conversation with her and it was about a year ago. He had waded into a demonstration at an Otran mill and had headed for the speaker's platform with a request that the crowd disperse or face the police. Things had gotten a little rowdy in the crowd; she had jumped off the pickup bed that served as a platform and then pulled him into the cab. It was an old red Ford with dents and rust, and with blankets tacked on the upholstery. There they had a shouting match before they made a deal that she would get the demonstrators away from the mill gates in a half hour.

Now he was giving her money. He and his clients had to trust her to keep it quiet-although they had gone over that part very carefully. Everything about the drop was covered by the attorney-client privilege and it was inviolate. Even a judge could not order disclosure of the facts concerning the handoff. He had worked that out carefully and they had reduced it all to writing. Technically at the moment of the drop, she and her clients were clients of his and the opposite was true. Accordingly, for this very limited purpose on this one occasion, the courier and the donor were clients of hers, even though Maria personally had no notion of either the courier's or the donor's identity.

Since Maria didn't know Dan well and he was without his mustache, he wondered if in the dark corner of a tavern he could, for a few minutes, disguise his identity. Even if only for a short while, he wanted to talk to Maria Fischer without her hating him. And it was the sort of humor he couldn't quite resist.

Dan Young was a member of an old-school law firm that worked for private industry, mostly a group of lumber companies owned by one Jeb Otran. Unlike the other attorneys in his firm, Dan was anything but traditional. He had distinguished himself early on, not only because he was daring and shrewd, but because under the country-boy exterior was a man who prepared like a bean counter and spoke with the eloquence of a prophet. He wore cowboy boots, usually without the barnyard mud.

Dan had grown up on a ranch in eastern Oregon near the Deschutes River, outside of Maupin on Deep Creek (pronounced "crick"), in the baking-summer tan-sand hills and winter-bleak snowdrifted valleys. He had learned to string fences, doctor cows, and take in the hay; on Friday nights he'd drink beer and dance with Tess until 10 o'clock; then they'd adjourn to the Young family home and he'd fall asleep on his mother's old tan couch with his head in Tess's lap, her fingers combing his blond hair or tracing the faint white lines that ran across his palms and the backs of his wrists-scars from years of handling barbed wire.

His mother, Gertrude, and father, Lucas, had worked the land all their lives, seldom driving their 1972 Dodge pickup farther than Maupin or the Dalles except when they went to the cattle auctions in Portland. Although neither had a college education, they were well-read, never having owned a TV and not being much on socializing. Winters were long, dark, and cold. Lucas had inherited the family ranch when his brothers and sisters had moved off to the cities. He had hoped the same legacy for his eldest boy, Dan.

Even after Dan graduated from Harvard Law School, Lucas still wanted him to take over the ranch, even conspired with Tess's dad to expand it. There was talk of merging the Young ranch with a portion of the Johnson ranch, making the "JY" a sprawling place with 500 acres irrigated, maybe 20,000 acres total, beginning 2 miles farther down Deep Creek.