Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

Dad waded out over his shoes. But when he reached for the fish, Dummy started sputtering, shaking his head, waving his arms.

  “Now what the hell’s the matter with you, Dummy? The boy’s got hold of the biggest bass I ever seen, and he ain’t going to throw him back, by God!”

  Dummy kept carrying on and gesturing toward the pond.

  “I ain’t about to let this boy’s fish go. You hear me, Dummy? You got another think coming if you think I’m going to do that.”

  Dummy reached for my line. Meanwhile, the bass had gained some strength back. He turned himself over and started swimming again. I yelled and then I lost my head and slammed down the brake on the reel and started winding. The bass made a last, furious run.

  That was that. The line broke. I almost fell over on my back.

  “Come on, Jack,” Dad said, and I saw him grabbing up his pole. “Come on, goddamn the fool, before I knock the man down.”

  That February the river flooded.

  It had snowed pretty heavy the first weeks of December, and turned real cold before Christmas. The ground froze. The snow stayed where it was. But toward the end of January, the Chinook wind struck. I woke up one morning to hear the house getting buffeted and the steady drizzle of water running off the roof.

  It blew for five days, and on the third day the river began to rise.

  “She’s up to fifteen feet,” my father said one evening, looking over his newspaper. “Which is three feet over what you need to flood. Old Dummy going to lose his darlings.”

  I wanted to go down to the Moxee Bridge to see how high the water was running. But my dad wouldn’t let me. He said a flood was nothing to see.

  Two days later the river crested, and after that the water began to subside.

  Orin Marshall and Danny Owens and I bicycled out to Dummy’s one morning a week after. We parked our bicycles and walked across the pasture that bordered Dummy’s property.

  It was a wet, blustery day, the clouds dark and broken, moving fast across the sky. The ground was soppy wet and we kept coming to puddles in the thick grass. Danny was just learning how to cuss, and he filled the air with the best he had every time he stepped in over his shoes. We could see the swollen river at the end of the pasture. The water was still high and out of its channel, surging around the trunks of trees and eating away at the edge of the land. Out toward the middle, the current moved heavy and swift, and now and then a bush floated by, or a tree with its branches sticking up.

  We came to Dummy’s fence and found a cow wedged in up against the wire. She was bloated and her skin was shiny-looking and gray. It was the first dead thing of any size I’d ever seen. I remember Orin took a stick and touched the open eyes.

  We moved on down the fence, toward the river. We were afraid to go near the wire because we thought it might still have electricity in it. But at the edge of what looked like a deep canal, the fence came to an end. The ground had simply dropped into the water here, and the fence along with it.

  We crossed over and followed the new channel that cut directly into Dummy’s land and headed straight for his pond, going into it lengthwise and forcing an outlet for itself at the other end, then twisting off until it joined up with the river farther on.

  You didn’t doubt that most of Dummy’s fish had been carried off. But those that hadn’t been were free to come and go.

  Then I caught sight of Dummy. It scared me, seeing him. I motioned to the other fellows, and we all got down.

  Dummy was standing at the far side of the pond near where the water was rushing out. He was just standing there, the saddest man I ever saw.

  “I sure do feel sorry for old Dummy, though,” my father said at supper a few weeks after. “Mind, the poor devil brought it on himself. But you can’t help but be troubled for him.”

  Dad went on to say George Laycock saw Dummy’s wife sitting in the Sportsman’s Club with a big Mexican fellow.

  “And that ain’t the half of it—”

  Mother looked up at him sharply and then at me. But I just went on eating like I hadn’t heard a thing.

  Dad said, “Damn it to hell, Bea, the boy’s old enough!”

  He’d changed a lot, Dummy had. He was never around any of the men anymore, not if he could help it.

  No one felt like joking with him either, not since he’d chased Carl Lowe with a two-by-four stud after Carl tipped Dummy’s hat off. But the worst of it was that Dummy was missing from work a day or two a week on the average now, and there was some talk of his being laid off.

  “The man’s going off the deep end,” Dad said. “Clear crazy if he don’t watch out.”

  Then on a Sunday afternoon just before my birthday, Dad and I were cleaning the garage. It was a warm, drifty day. You could see the dust hanging in the air. Mother came to the back door and said, “Del, it’s for you. I think it’s Vern.”

  I followed Dad in to wash up. When he was through talking, he put the phone down and turned to us.

  “It’s Dummy,” he said. “Did in his wife with a hammer and drowned himself. Vern just heard it in town.”

  When we got out there, cars were parked all around. The gate to the pasture stood open, and I could see tire marks that led on to the pond.

  The screen door was propped ajar with a box, and there was this lean, pock-faced man in slacks and sports shirt and wearing a shoulder holster. He watched Dad and me get out of the car.

  “I was his friend,” Dad said to the man.

  The man shook his head. “Don’t care who you are. Clear off unless you got business here.”

  “Did they find him?” Dad said.

  “They’re dragging,” the man said, and adjusted the fit of his gun.

  “All right if we walk down? I knew him pretty well.”

  The man said, “Take your chances. They chase you off, don’t say you wasn’t warned.”

  We went on across the pasture, taking pretty much the same route we had the day we tried fishing. There were motorboats going on the pond, dirty fluffs of exhaust hanging over it. You could see where the high water had cut away the ground and carried off trees and rocks. The two boats had uniformed men in them, and they were going back and forth, one man steering and the other man handling the rope and hooks.

  An ambulance waited on the gravel beach where we’d set ourselves to cast for Dummy’s bass. Two men in white lounged against the back, smoking cigarettes.

  One of the motorboats cut off. We all looked up. The man in back stood up and started heaving on his rope. After a time, an arm came out of the water. It looked like the hooks had gotten Dummy in the side.

  The arm went back down and then it came out again, along with a bundle of something.

  It’s not him, I thought. It’s something else that has been in there for years.

  The man in the front of the boat moved to the back, and together the two men hauled the dripping thing over the side.

  I looked at Dad. His face was funny the way it was set.

  “Women,” he said. He said, “That’s what the wrong kind of woman can do to you, Jack.”

  But I don’t think Dad really believed it. I think he just didn’t know who to blame or what to say.

  It seemed to me everything took a bad turn for my father after that. Just like Dummy, he wasn’t the same man anymore. That arm coming up and going back down in the water, it was like so long to good times and hello to bad. Because it was nothing but that all the years after Dummy drowned himself in that dark water.

  Is that what happens when a friend dies? Bad luck for the pals he left behind?

  But as I said, Pearl Harbor and having to move back to his dad’s place didn’t do my dad one bit of good, either.

  So Much Water So Close to Home

  My husband eats with good appetite but he seems tired, edgy. He chews slowly, arms on the table, and stares at something across the room. He looks at me and looks away again. He wipes his mouth on the napkin. He shrugs and goes on eating. Something has come between us though
he would like me to believe otherwise.

  “What are you staring at me for?” he asks. “What is it?” he says and puts his fork down.

  “Was I staring?” I say and shake my head stupidly, stupidly.

  The telephone rings. “Don’t answer it,” he says. “It might be your mother,” I say. “Dean—it might be something about Dean.”

  “Watch and see,” he says.

  I picked up the receiver and listen for a minute. He stops eating. I bite my lip and hang up.

  “What did I tell you?” he says. He starts to eat again, then throws the napkin onto his plate. “Goddamn it, why can’t people mind their own business? Tell me what I did wrong and I’ll listen! It’s not fair. She was dead, wasn’t she? There were other men there besides me. We talked it over and we all decided.

  We’d only just got there. We’d walked for hours. We couldn’t just turn around, we were five miles from the car. It was opening day. What the hell, I don’t see anything wrong. No, I don’t. And don’t look at me that way, do you hear? I won’t have you passing judgment on me. Not you.”

  “You know,” I say and shake my head.

  “What do I know, Claire? Tell me. Tell me what I know. I don’t know anything except one thing: you hadn’t better get worked up over this.” He gives me what he thinks is a meaningful look. “She was dead, dead, dead, do you hear?” he says after a minute. “It’s a damn shame, I agree. She was a young girl and it’s a shame, and I’m sorry, as sorry as anyone else, but she was dead, Claire, dead. Now let’s leave it alone.

  Please, Claire. Let’s leave it alone now.”

  “That’s the point,” I say. “She was dead. But don’t you see? She needed help.”

  “I give up,” he says and raises his hands. He pushes his chair away from the table, takes his cigarettes and goes out to the patio with a can of beer. He walks back and forth for a minute and then sits in a lawn chair and picks up the paper once more. His name is there on the first page along with the names of his friends, the other men who made the “grisly find.”

  I close my eyes for a minute and hold onto the drainboard. I must not dwell on this any longer. I must get over it, put it out of sight, out of mind, etc., and “go on.” I open my eyes. Despite everything, knowing all that may be in store, I rake my arm across the drainboard and send the dishes and glasses smashing and scattering across the floor.

  He doesn’t move. I know he has heard, he raises his head as if listening, but he doesn’t move otherwise, doesn’t turn around to look. I hate him for that, for not moving. He waits a minute, then draws on his cigarette and leans back in the chair. I pity him for listening, detached, and then settling back and drawing on his cigarette. The wind takes the smoke out of his mouth in a thin stream. Why do I notice that? He can never know how much I pity him for that, for sitting still and listening, and letting the smoke stream out of his mouth….

  He planned his fishing trip into the mountains last Sunday, a week before the Memorial Day weekend.

  He and Gordon Johnson, Mel Dorn, Vern Williams. They play poker, bowl, and fish together. They fish together every spring and early summer, the first two or three months of the season, before family vacations, little league baseball, and visiting relatives can intrude. They are decent men, family men, responsible at their jobs. They have sons and daughters who go to school with our son, Dean. On Friday afternoon these four men left for a three-day fishing trip to the Naches River. They parked the car in the mountains and hiked several miles to where they wanted to fish. They carried their bedrolls, food and cooking utensils, their playing cards, their whiskey. The first evening at the river, even before they could set up camp, Mel Dorn found the girl floating face down in the river, nude, lodged near the shore in some branches. He called the other men and they all came to look at her.

  They talked about what to do. One of the men—Stuart didn’t say which— perhaps it was Vern Williams, he is a heavy-set, easy man who laughs often—one of them thought they should start back to the car at once. The others stirred the sand with their shoes and said they felt inclined to stay. They pleaded fatigue, the late hour, the fact that the girl “wasn’t going anywhere.” In the end they all decided to stay.

  They went ahead and set up the camp and built a fire and drank their whiskey. They drank a lot of whiskey and when the moon came up they talked about the girl. Someone thought they should do something to prevent the body from floating away. Somehow they thought that this might create a problem for them if it floated away during the night. They took flashlights and stumbled down to the river. The wind was up, a cold wind, and waves from the river lapped the sandy bank. One of the men, I don’t know who, it might have been Stuart, he could have done it, waded into the water and took the girl by the fingers and pulled her, still face down, closer to shore, into shallow water, and then took a piece of nylon cord and tied it around her wrist and then secured the cord to tree roots, all the while the flashlights of the other men played over the girl’s body. Afterward, they went back to camp and drank more whiskey. Then they went to sleep. The next morning, Saturday, they cooked breakfast, drank lots of coffee, more whiskey, and then split up to fish, two men upriver, two men down.

  That night, after they had cooked their fish and potatoes and had more coffee and whiskey, they took their dishes down to the river and rinsed them off a few yards from where the body lay in the water.

  They drank again and then they took out their cards and played and drank until they couldn’t see the cards any longer. Vern Williams went to sleep, but the others told coarse stories and spoke of vulgar or dishonest escapades out of their past, and no one mentioned the girl until Gordon Johnson, who’d forgotten for a minute, commented on the firmness of the trout they’d caught, and the terrible coldness of the river water. They stopped talking then but continued to drink until one of them tripped and fell cursing against the lantern, and then they climbed into their sleeping bags. The next morning they got up late, drank more whiskey, fished a little as they kept drinking whiskey. Then, at one o’clock in the afternoon, Sunday, a day earlier than they’d planned, they decided to leave. They took down their tents, rolled their sleeping bags, gathered their pans, pots, fish, and fishing gear, and hiked out. They didn’t look at the girl again before they left. When they reached the car they drove the highway in silence until they came to a telephone. Stuart made the call to the sheriff’s office while the others stood around in the hot sun and listened. He gave the man on the other end of the line all of their names—they had nothing to hide, they weren’t ashamed of anything—and agreed to wait at the service station until someone could come for more detailed directions and individual statements.

  He came home at eleven o’clock that night. I was asleep but woke when I heard him in the kitchen. I found him leaning against the refrigerator drinking a can of beer. He put his heavy arms around me and rubbed his hands up and down my back, the same hands he’d left with two days before, I thought.

  In bed he put his hands on me again and then waited, as if thinking of something else. I turned slightly and then moved my legs. Afterward, I know he stayed awake for a long time, for he was awake when I fell asleep; and later, when I stirred for a minute, opening my eyes at a slight noise, a rustle of sheets, it was almost daylight outside, birds were singing, and he was on his back smoking and looking at the curtained window. Half-asleep I said his name, but he didn’t answer. I fell asleep again.

  He was up this morning before I could get out of bed—to see if there was anything about it in the paper, I suppose. The telephone began to ring shortly after eight o’clock.

  “Go to hell,” I heard him shout into the receiver. The telephone rang again a minute later, and I hurried into the kitchen. “I have nothing else to add to what I’ve already said to the sheriff. That’s right!” He slammed down the receiver.

  “What is going on?” I said, alarmed.

  “Sit down,” he said slowly. His fingers scraped, scraped against his stubble of
whiskers. “I have to tell you something. Something happened while we were fishing.” We sat across from each other at the table, and then he told me.

  I drank coffee and stared at him as he spoke. Then I read the account in the newspaper that he shoved across the table: “… unidentified girl eighteen to twenty-four years of age… body three to five days in the water… rape a possible motive… preliminary results show death by strangulation… cuts and bruises on her breas’ts and pelvic area… autopsy… rape, pending further investigation.”

  “You’ve got to understand,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that. Be careful now, I mean it. Take it easy, Claire.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me last night?” I asked.

  “I just… didn’t. What do you mean?” he said.

  “You know what I mean,” I said. I looked at his hands, the broad fingers, knuckles covered with hair, moving, lighting a cigarette now, fingers that had moved over me, into me last night.

  He shrugged. “What difference does it make, last night, this morning? It was late. You were sleepy, I thought I’d wait until this morning to tell you.” He looked out to the patio: a robin flew from the lawn to the picnic table and preened its feathers.

  “It isn’t true,” I said. “You didn’t leave her there like that?”

  He turned quickly and said, “What’d I do? Listen to me carefully now, once and for all. Nothing happened. I have nothing to be sorry for or feel guilty about. Do you hear me?”

  I got up from the table and went to Dean’s room. He was awake and in his pajamas, putting together a puzzle. I helped him find his clothes and then went back to the kitchen and put his breakfast on the table.

  The telephone rang two or three more times and each time Stuart was abrupt while he talked and angry when he hung up. He called Mel Dorn and Gordon Johnson and spoke with them, slowly, seriously, and then he opened a beer and smoked a cigarette while Dean ate, asked him about school, his friends, etc., exactly as if nothing had happened.

  Dean wanted to know what he’d done while he was gone, and Stuart took some fish out of the freezer to show him.