by Mary Daheim
It was a coincidence, but not an amazing one. Although the original mill closed in 1929, logging had continued as a major enterprise, right up until the recent—and most serious—controversy over the spotted owl. The two smaller mills, located at opposite ends of the town and supplied by gyppo loggers, were outstripped by Blackwell’s operation between Railroad Avenue and the Skykomish River. Jack Blackwell also owned some big parcels of land—on Mount Baldy, Beckler Peak, and along the east fork of the Foss River. It struck me as odd that I hadn’t met Blackwell until today.
“Does Blackwell live here?” I asked.
“Part of the time. He’s got operations in Oregon and Idaho. Timbuktu, for all I know.” Vida spoke impatiently, going through the rest of her story. Jack Blackwell was obviously a side issue. “So Dani and Cody got married when they didn’t have enough sense to skin a cat, and they had a baby—a full nine-month one, I might note—but the poor little thing died at about six weeks. Crib death, very sad. Then about two months later, the marriage blew up and Dani flew south. Five years later, with some big-shot director’s backing, she’s a star.” Vida gave an eloquent shrug. “How much of that do you want me to put in?”
I accepted defeat gracefully. “I was hoping she’d starred in the senior play or something. How did the press kit cover her background?”
Vida waved a hand. “Oh, some tripe about how she came from a quaint Pacific Northwest logging town up in the mountains with snow on the ground half the year and deer sleeping at the foot of her trundle bed. You know—the sort of nonsense that makes us look like we’ve got moss growing around our ears and we’re still wearing loincloths.”
I inclined my head. Having spent all of my life in Seattle, Portland, and Alpine, I was accustomed to the attitudes of outsiders. Let them think we ate raw fish for dinner and held a potlatch instead of hosting cocktail parties. Maybe it would keep them away. I allowed Vida to put her story in the copyediting basket.
“What’s the name of this picture Dani’s doing?” I asked, feeling a bit passé. The life of a single mother running her own business didn’t leave me with a lot of leisure time for moviegoing.
Vida, another single working mother, albeit with children out of the nest, had to look down at the press release on her desk. “Let me see … here it is. ‘A film by Reid Hampton, starring Dani Marsh and Matt Tabor. Blood Along the River.’ Ugh, what a stupid title.”
I had to agree. Maybe they’d change it. It never occurred to me that it might be not only stupid, but prophetic.
Chapter Two
DURWOOD PARKER WAS under arrest. Again. Durwood, who had once been Alpine’s pharmacist, was probably the worst driver I’d ever had the opportunity to avoid. Drunk or sober, Durwood could nail any mailbox, hit any phone pole, or careen down the sidewalk of any street in town. Since not all the streets in Alpine have sidewalks, Durwood often tore up flower beds instead. His latest act of motoring menace had been the demolition of Francine Wells’ display window at Francine’s Fine Apparel on Front Street. Francine was in a red-hot rage, but Durwood was stone-cold sober. For his own protection, Sheriff Milo Dodge had locked Durwood up overnight.
“We have to run it,” Carla Steinmetz announced the following morning as she went over the blessedly short list of criminal activity for the past twenty-four hours. “It’s a rule, isn’t it? Any name on the blotter is a matter of public record, right?”
I sighed. “I’m afraid so. Poor Durwood. Poor Dot. His wife must be a saint.”
“She’s got her own car,” put in Vida. “She’d be crazy to go anywhere with Durwood. Did you know he drove an ambulance in World War II?”
“Who for?” I asked. “The Nazis?”
Vida’s response was stifled by Kip MacDuff, our part-time handyman and full-time driver. Kip was about twenty, with carrot red hair and cheerful blue eyes. He was, he asserted, working his way through college. Since I had never known him to leave the city limits of Alpine, I assumed he was enrolled in a correspondence school.
“Hey, get this!” Kip exclaimed. “Dani’s coming in by helicopter! She’s going to land on top of the mall! The high school band is coming out to meet her!”
I gazed at Vida. “I guess you’d better get a picture.”
But Carla was on her feet, jumping up and down. “Let me! This is incredibly cool! When I was going to journalism school at the University of Washington, I never thought I’d get to meet a movie star in Alpine!”
And, I thought cruelly, her professors probably never thought she’d get a job in newspapers. But here was Carla, now in her second year as a reporter on The Advocate. Why, I asked myself for the fiftieth time, did all the good ones go into the electronic media? Or were there any good ones these days? Was I getting old and crotchety at forty-plus?
Vida was only too glad to let Carla take the assignment. “I’ve been looking at Dani Marsh since she was waddling around in diapers and plastic pants. Just make sure you load the camera this time, Carla. You remember what happened two weeks ago at Cass Pidduck’s hundredth birthday party.”
Carla, who usually bounces her way through life, looked crestfallen. “I left the film in the car.”
Vida nodded. “At least you had it with you.”
Carla’s long dark hair swung in dismay. “So I went out to get it, but when I came back, Mr. Pidduck had died.”
“Yes, I know,” said Vida, “but his children liked that shot of him slumped forward in his birthday cake. They said it was just like old Grumps. Or whatever they called him,” Vida added a bit testily. “Frankly, the Pidducks never did have much sense. Cass may have been long in the tooth, but he was short in the upper story.”
Accustomed to Vida’s less than charitable but often more than accurate appraisals of Alpine residents, I withdrew to my inner office. The usual phone messages had accumulated, including one from my son, Adam, in Ketchikan. After two years and no foreseeable major at the University of Hawaii, my only child had decided to go north to Alaska. He was spending the summer working in a fish packing plant, and had a vague notion about enrolling for fall quarter at the state university in Fairbanks. I looked at Ginny Burmeister’s phone memo with my customary sense of dread whenever my son called in prime time.
He was staying in a dormitory owned by the fish co-op, which meant that I was put on hold for a long time while somebody tried to determine if he was on or off the premises. For ten minutes, I counted the cost and perused the mail. Adam should be at work in the middle of the day. Maybe he’d had an accident. Or had gotten sick. I lost interest in the numerous bills, press releases, irate letters to the editor, advertising circulars, and exchange papers that jammed my in-basket—especially on Mondays. At last Adam’s clear young voice reached my ear:
“Hey, Mom,” he began, “guess what? Fairbanks is seven hundred miles away! I thought I could take the bus to campus.”
Adam’s sense of geography, or lack thereof, was astounding. Indeed, I had tried to explain the vastness of Alaska to him before he flew out of Sea-Tac Airport. I might as well have saved my breath.
“Is that why you’re calling at two o’clock on a Monday afternoon when you ought to be at work?” I demanded. “Bear in mind, Fairbanks is so far away it’s in another time zone, twice removed.”
“I worked Sunday,” Adam said, sounding defensive. “Didn’t I tell you I’m on a different shift this month?”
He hadn’t. Adam was well over six feet tall, weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds, was approaching his twenty-first birthday—and still qualified as my addled baby. One of these days, I’d turn around and find him gainfully employed, happily married, and the father of a couple of kids. And maybe one of these days I’d fly to Mars on a plastic raft.
“So you just discovered you couldn’t commute to Fairbanks?” I said, wondering whether to be amused or dismayed. At least he’d never suggested taking a degree in transportation.
“Well, yeah, but that’s okay. I’ll just move there next month. I can take a plan
e.” His voice dropped a notch. “If you can advance me the price of a ticket.”
“So why are you working? I thought you made big bucks in Alaska.”
“I got tuition, room and board, you know—I didn’t count on having to pay for an airline ticket.” He sounded faintly indignant, as if it were my fault that Alaska was so spread out.
“I’ll see what I can do.” I didn’t have the remotest notion how much it cost to fly from Ketchikan to Fairbanks. It appeared I’d have to dip into savings. At least I still had some, thanks to a fluke of an inheritance that had allowed me to buy both The Advocate and my green Jaguar. Still, it crossed my mind that this was one of those times when it would have been nice to have Adam’s father around, instead of off raising his own kids and taking care of his nutty wife.
“Thanks, Mom.” My son spoke as if the ticket purchase was a fait accompli. “Hey, I just talked to some guy who’s leaving for Seattle this afternoon and then going on to Alpine. Curtis Graff. You know him? He works here in the cannery as a foreman.”
The name rang a bell, but it was off-key. “Cody Graff I know. At least I know who he is. His name just came up a few minutes ago.” There was no point in boring Adam with details. “How old is Curtis?”
“Oh—thirty, maybe. He went to Alpine High, worked in the woods, was a volunteer fireman, and went out with the daughter of the guy who owns the Texaco station.”
Adam’s thorough account amazed me. Usually, I was lucky to get the last name of his acquaintances. But I still couldn’t place Curtis Graff, unless he was Cody’s brother. Vida would know. “What’s he bringing down?” I inquired. Surely Adam couldn’t pass up the chance to have somebody hand-carry videos that were six weeks overdue, a broken CD player, or a torn jacket that only Mother could mend.
“Nothing,” my son replied, sounding affronted. “I just thought it was kind of strange that there was somebody else up here from Alpine. It’s not exactly the big city.”
“True,” I agreed, thinking wistfully of the metropolitan vitality I still missed since moving to Alpine. But my years on The Oregonian in Portland and my upbringing in Seattle seemed far away. I had committed my bank account to The Advocate and my soul to Alpine. My heart was another matter.
We chatted briefly of mundane concerns before Adam announced he had to race off and help somebody fix an outboard motor. I turned my attention back to the other phone messages, the mail, and the print order for the weekly press run in Monroe. It was after one o’clock when I realized I’d skipped lunch. I said as much to Vida, who had already consumed her diet special of cottage cheese, carrot and celery sticks, and a hard-boiled egg.
“You eat alone too much,” she announced, depositing two wedding stories with accompanying pictures on my desk. “I’ll come with you. I could use a cup of hot tea.”
“Good.” I started to sign the print order just as Carla returned, bubbling like a brook.
“Dani Marsh isn’t much taller than I am,” Carla declared, dancing into my office. “She’s in terrific shape though, works out for two hours a day, and drinks nothing but cabbage extract. Her skin is amazing! But you ought to see Matt Tabor! What a hunk! He’s six-two, with the greenest eyes ever, and muscles that ripple and bulge and—”
Happily, the phone rang, cutting short Carla’s bicep recital. The mayor, Fuzzy Baugh, was on the line, his native New Orleans drawl characteristically unctuous. He wanted to make sure we included an article about the celebrity bartenders who were going to be on duty at the Icicle Creek Tavern during Loggerama. He and Doc Dewey Senior; Dr. Starr, the dentist; and Sheriff Milo Dodge would make up the star-studded cast of mixologists, unless they got lucky and enticed somebody from the movie crew to take part. That struck me as dubious, since the Icicle Creek Tavern makes Mugs Ahoy look like the Polo Lounge. Located at the edge of town, the rival watering hole is famous for its Saturday night brawls which usually involve raucous loggers hurling each other through the windows. I frankly couldn’t imagine Fuzzy or any of our other more dignified citizens having a beer at the place, let alone serving the rough-and-tumble clientele. But this was Loggerama, and apparently a truce was in effect.
I was still listening to the mayor’s long-winded description of how he planned to give civic-minded names to his libations (citizen schooner, mayor’s mug, political pitcher—I didn’t take notes) when Ed Bronsky staggered in, looking as if he’d been attacked by wild beasts.
“Inserts!” he wailed, clutching at the doorjamb. “In color! Every week! It’s worse than I expected!”
Inwardly, I was elated. Enough color inserts might pay for Adam’s ticket from Ketchikan to Fairbanks. But between Fuzzy yammering about his Beer à la Baugh, the star-struck Carla still twittering to Vida, and Ed now threatening to have an aneurism over Safeway’s advertising temerity, I was anxious to escape. Hastily, I shoved the print order at Vida to sign for me while I relented and took down the dates and times that the various so-called celebrities would be at the Icicle Creek Tavern. At last I was able to hang up, console Ed, listen to Carla, and get out the door before some other obstacle rolled my way.
“Burger Barn,” I said, feeling the full impact of the sun overhead. The Advocate wasn’t air-conditioned, but its proximity to the Skykomish River gave an illusion of cold water and fresh air. Outside, I could see the dry foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Even the evergreens seemed to droop. To the north, Mount Baldy was bare of snow, with wild heather blazing under the blank blue sky. The forest fire danger was extreme, and all logging operations had been curtailed. After over a month without rain, we natives were beginning to feel as if our own roots were drying up and withering our souls.
The Burger Barn is both restaurant and drive-in, located two blocks west on Front Street, across from Parker’s Pharmacy, once owned by the wayward Durwood. Fleetingly, I wondered how he was managing in jail. In Alpine, the county prison consists of six cells in the building that houses the sheriff’s office. Usually, the only inhabitants are drunk drivers, transients, and the occasional spouse batterer. Durwood probably had the place to himself. I mentioned the fact to Vida, who snorted loudly.
“He’ll probably ask to stay an extra day. Dot Parker talks like a cement mixer. Non-stop, just grinding her jaws away.” She took a stutter step, then waved, a windmill gesture that might have stopped traffic had there been more than three cars on Front Street. “Marje! Yoo-hoo!”
At the entrance to the Burger Barn, Vida’s niece, Marje Blatt, returned the wave. She was accompanied by a lanky young man wearing cutoffs and a tank top. As coincidence would have it, he was Marje’s fiancé, Cody Graff. Introductions were made, but before I could inquire about Curtis Graff, Vida whisked us inside the Burger Barn.
“We might as well sit together,” said Vida, heading for an empty booth that looked out toward the bank across the street. “I’m just having tea.”
Marje and Cody looked a little reluctant, but docilely sat down. “I’m on my lunch hour,” said Marje. She was in her mid-twenties, with short auburn hair, bright blue eyes, and a piquant face. Unlike her more casual counterparts in many big city medical offices, Marje wore a crisp white uniform. She scanned the menu as if it were an X-ray. “Why am I looking at this?” she asked, pitching the single plastic-encased sheet behind the napkin holder. “I’m having the Cobb salad.”
The waitress, a pudgy middle-aged woman named Jessie Lott, stood with order pad in hand, blowing wisps of hair off her damp forehead. Cody asked for the double cheeseburger, fries, and coffee. I opted for a hamburger dip au jus, a small salad, and a Pepsi. Vida requested her tea. The waitress started to wheel away, but Vida called her back:
“There’s a minimum per table setting, right?”
Jessie Lott shrugged. “Really, that’s just when nobody else orders more than—”
“In that case,” Vida interrupted, “I’ll have the chicken basket with fries, tartar sauce on the side, and a small green salad with Roquefort.” She threw Jessie a challenging look and de
ep-sixed the menu. “Well,” Vida said, eyeing her niece and Cody, “when’s the wedding? I heard you ordered the invitations last week.”
“October nineteenth,” replied Marje in her brisk voice. She didn’t look at all like her aunt, but some of their mannerisms were similar. Both were no-nonsense women, devoid of sentiment, but not without compassion. “We’re going to Acapulco for our honeymoon.” She turned her bright blue eyes on Cody, as if daring him to differ. “We’ll love it.”
Cody, who had been toying with the salt and pepper shakers, gazed ironically at his beloved. “Yeah, sure we will, Marje. Especially the part where we both get the Aztec two-step.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Marje retorted. “You just don’t drink water out of the tap, that’s all. Or eat in strange places. Good Lord, Cody, don’t be such a wimp!”
Cody drew back in the booth. He was sharp-featured, with straw-colored hair, restless gray eyes, and a sulky cast to his long mouth. Though he was narrow of shoulder, his bare upper arms were muscular, and I supposed that younger women would find him attractive, especially with that petulant air. He struck me as spoiled, but I hoped—for Marje’s sake—that I was wrong. Certainly she seemed to be getting her way about the honeymoon.
“You just wanted to go fishing in Montana or Wyoming or some godforsaken place,” Marje was saying. “As if you don’t hotfoot it out to the river every chance you get around here.”
“Fishing stinks in this state,” declared Cody. “There isn’t a river in Washington that isn’t fished out. I haven’t caught a trout bigger than eight inches since I was sixteen. And steelheading is a joke. You’re lucky if you get one of those babies every season.”
Cody wasn’t exaggerating, but I kept quiet, not wanting to take sides. But Cody wasn’t finished with his griping: “Everything stinks around here these days,” he proclaimed, flexing his biceps for emphasis. “Take all these wimpy environmentalists trying to wipe out the logging business. How does a guy like me live in this state? I don’t know how to do anything but work in the woods. Do they want me sitting on a street corner with a tin cup and a sign that says WILL WORK FOR FOOD? Work at what? It pisses me off.”