Odd Partners

by Mystery Writers of America

  Jack took a deep breath. He was shaking. “If you let the gas go here, it’ll go back onto our own lines—”

  “No, it won’t! I’ll throw it at them!” He glared at Karl with wide eyes.

  “Gas is heavier than air, Richards. It doesn’t matter where you put it, it must go down. Like water. You can’t stop that. It’s gravity. In this section, our lines are lower than the Germans’. Or is that what you’re doing, aiming at us? At the men who belittled you?”

  “No! No, of course not…” Richards looked totally confused, and desperately young.

  “What are you trying to do? Prove that you’re not a coward?”

  “I’m not! I was going to kill some Germans. Show those men I’m not afraid…that I can do my bit….”

  “I know that,” Jack said levelly. “They’re fools, and I’ll tell them so. Worse than that, they’re disloyal.”

  “They won’t believe you…” Richards’s voice cracked. He was close to hysteria. His hand holding the gas canister was shaking. Jack feared he would drop it and it would roll downhill, back to the British tunnels.

  Jack took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Deliberately lowered his voice. “They are lying to you, trying to push you into doing something stupid—to cover their own fear.”

  He watched Richards carefully, the confusion in his face, the terror—he was fast slipping out of control.

  “They are only words,” Karl said quietly in English. “They are trying to make you do something they wouldn’t dare. Their fear has made fools of them. You are a better man than they are, and they know it.”

  Richards was confused. He looked from one to the other of the two men facing him, one in British uniform, one in German.

  Jack took a step forward. “Put the canister down, Richards,” he said quietly. “Come back with me. No one else need know about the gas.”

  “They’ll find out…” Richards looked utterly wretched. He raised the gas canister even higher, as if someone were holding on to him and slowly letting go. He lost his balance. The earth under him was crumbling. One of the uprights bent, and there was a tearing sound. Like ripped cloth, only it was wood. Soaked through with slow, creeping water.

  Richards lost his balance. His face filled with terror as his legs buckled underneath him.

  Karl lunged forward, taking the weight of the splintering upright on his back and pushing Richards onto the firmer ground behind him.

  The gas canister fell out of Richards’s hand and rolled away. If the upright fell on it, it would break open. Jack leaped after it, landing hard, twisting his ankle and cutting his hands, but he got it. It was cracked already. He caught the smell of gas. There was only one thing to do with it.

  He took it to the fearsome crack where the upright had come away. He threw the canister as hard as he could, and watched the crumbling earth swallow it almost immediately.

  There was a cry from Richards, high in his throat, choked with anguish.

  Jack turned in time to see Karl disappear and the rock fall as the whole section crumbled to pieces and collapsed into the tunnel below it.

  Richards stood ashen-faced in the thread of lamplight.

  Jack felt a sense of loss so profound it was as if part of himself had gone under those crashing rocks to be buried deep in the earth forever. It could so easily have been him.

  Was Karl an enemy? Or only his own face in a mirror? He stood still, numb with loss, until Richards spoke to him.

  “What are we going to do?”

  Jack turned slowly. Richards looked like a child, bewilderment in his eyes, tears on his face.

  “We’re going back to our own lines,” he said quietly.

  “It’s too late…” Richards began.

  “No, it isn’t,” Jack argued, with no idea if he was right. “There’s comfort in loyalty, even to stand together in the wrong. And there can be a lot of loneliness in the right. You’re too young to have to make a decision like this. But time won’t wait. Karl died for you. I dare say he didn’t mean to, but he did it anyway. You are coming back with me, and you are going to keep silent about this, but you are going to remember it. You are going to help those who are more afraid than you are, and you are going to be a bloody good soldier. Even if you are terrified, you’re not going to give in. You’ve got debts.”

  Richards stared at him, his eyes wide with fear.

  “We’re all scared,” Jack said gently. “But you can sleep if the things you’re scared of are outside you. When they’re inside, you never lose them. Come on, we’re going out. We’re going to put this right.”

  Richards looked at him for a long moment, then he turned and faced the fallen earth behind him, under which Karl was buried. He gave a small, tight smile, then came smartly to attention and saluted.

  Jack swallowed hard and did the same.

  The Nature of the Beast

  WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER

  I am Neanderthal. Part of me anyway. Or so say the geneticists who have studied Eurasian DNA. I think of this ancient ancestor of mine as brutish, but that’s not how I see myself. I’m a modern man, educated, sophisticated. Still, I know that even modern men have a brute in them somewhere. If you’re lucky, you never have to come face to face with this beast out of time. But luck has never been my strong suit.

  Often, in the gray of first light on summer mornings, I leave my house in St. Croix Falls and head to the Balsam River, a lovely flow of water a few miles south of town. It’s a good trout stream that runs through a broad meadow bordered on the north by an enormous stand of old-growth white pines. In northern Wisconsin, most of those giants were cut a century and a half ago, felled to feed our nation’s insatiable appetite for cheap lumber. That great stand, which us locals call Weyerhausen Woods, was spared by the great lumber baron Lucius Weyerhausen, who maintained a cottage in the heart of the forest, a little hermitage. The woods and the hermitage, which long ago fell to ruin, passed down to his family, along with the broad meadow where the trout stream runs. Generation after generation, they’ve left all that beautiful land untouched.

  It was a warm June morning. I stood in the middle of the Balsam River, casting my line. I was trying out a new fly that I’d tied myself. The stream was clear and clean, as it always is. The air was fresh and scented with the tang of pine. I felt lucky. Not just in what I might catch that morning, but lucky to be in such a place, a rare kind of Eden. I had just cast, dropping my fly at the upstream edge of a little pool. That’s when I looked up and saw that I was not alone.

  He stood at the edge of the woods, eyeing me warily. At first, because we were so far from any house, I thought he was just a stray dog. But his size made me think again, and I studied him more carefully. When I understood what I was looking at, I wondered if I should be afraid. I’d never seen a wolf in the wild.

  I was concerned that any movement I made might startle him, but my line had drifted far downstream and I began to pull it back in. The wolf didn’t move. I cast again and studied the animal more closely. His fur was mostly gray but with a bit of white, and a snowy patch on his forehead shaped roughly like a star. Although I knew nothing about wolves, the animal seemed unhealthy, far too thin. I wondered if hunger was a part of the reason he had ventured so close to civilization.

  Then a trout struck my fly. I began playing the fish, and my attention shifted away from the wolf. When I pulled the trout from the stream and held it aloft, the wolf stepped nearer, his blue eyes steady on my catch. He limped as he moved, favoring his left forepaw, which was covered with dried blood.

  I’m normally a catch-and-release angler, but after I’d removed the fly’s barbless hook, I tossed the trout toward the wolf. At that sudden movement, which must have seemed threatening, he shied away, but when the trout landed in the wild grass near him, he froze. He eyed me and he eyed the flopping trout, and his hunger gave him little choi
ce. He lunged for the fish, snatched it up in his jaws, turned, and made quickly for the woods, where he melted among the great pines and disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  “A wolf?” Robin said. My wife was at the stove, frying eggs for us both. I was sipping orange juice at the breakfast table as I told her of my encounter that morning.

  “One of his paws was hurt,” I said. “I wondered if he’d been caught in a trap.”

  “If he was desperate, he might have attacked you.”

  “I don’t think so.” But what did I know? Maybe she was right.

  “Wolves travel in packs, don’t they? Maybe there were others, and if they were all hungry, how safe would you be then?”

  A question worth considering, I supposed. But it didn’t stop me. I returned to the stream the next morning. I angled, but my real focus was on the stand of white pines. The wolf didn’t appear. Which was probably safest, I told myself, but I was disappointed nonetheless.

  I turned my attention to my casting, and after a while, a trout took the fly. It gave me a satisfying fight as I worked it in. When I lifted it from the clear water, the wolf was there, at the edge of the stream, eyeing not me but the fish. I tossed the trout into the grass on the bank, the wolf snatched it up and limped back to the pines. Before he vanished, he turned the white star on his forehead toward me and gave me an ice-blue stare. Then he was gone.

  I went back to the stream that evening, this time taking a big, raw, bone-in ribeye that I’d put in my creel, and that I’d refrained from mentioning to Robin. I angled for a bit, but it wasn’t long before the wolf appeared. I waded to the bank where I’d left the creel, took out the ribeye, and heaved it to the far side of the stream. The wolf didn’t shy at the toss. He limped to the steak, took it between his teeth, gave me another long, penetrating look, and returned to the woods.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next couple of weeks, I brought offerings, morning and evening. I wasn’t sure if this was the wisest course, but the animal’s thin look began to improve, and his limp grew less noticeable. I made no mention of this to Robin or to any of our friends. Partly this was because I was sure that feeding a wild animal this way, particularly a wolf, was something they might object to. And partly it was because I didn’t want anyone to intrude.

  One evening, well into our relationship, I brought a big ham bone with lots of meat left on it to throw to the wolf. But when he came from the forest, I saw that he held a rabbit in his jaws. He approached the bank of the stream, studied me, and let the rabbit fall. He remained a few moments, then returned to the dark among the white pines. I waded the stream and accepted what I believed was an offering.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Armand Grogan showed up. And that’s where this story takes a dark turn.

  I didn’t see the big man until he hailed me from the meadow. He came wading through the tall grass and the wildflowers, leaving a path of crushed vegetation in his wake. I judged him to be maybe sixty, with a broad, tanned face and an enviable head of silver-gray hair that had been razor cut. He was huge and lithe and moved with an athletic grace, such that I thought he might have been a pro football lineman in his younger days. Or an action movie star because of his good looks. He wore khakis with a knife-blade crease down each pant leg. His shirt was tailored to fit the broad expanse of his chest exactly. His shoes were of some fancy Italian design.

  He paused on the bank and smiled at me as I cast my line in the middle of the stream. “Catch anything?”

  “Not yet,” I said, trying to sound congenial, although the truth was that I bridled at his intrusion in this place which, over the years, I’d come to think of as my own little sanctuary. I’m not the only angler who fishes the stream, but everyone knows this spot is mine. Also, I hadn’t seen the wolf yet, and I figured that, because of this intruder, I wasn’t likely to.

  “Any idea who owns this land?”

  I told him the name of the family.

  “Do they live around here?”

  “Chicago,” I said.

  He turned toward the old-growth white pines. “Haven’t seen trees like this before.”

  “Not likely to again,” I said.

  “Chicago,” he said. “Thanks, friend.” He turned back the way he’d come, but instead of retracing his steps, he waded through the meadow following a different route, crushing more lovely flowers as he went.

  * * *

  —

  We received word a week later. Armand Grogan, who I learned had been the intruder that evening, had made an offer on the land, which the Weyerhausen family was seriously considering. Grogan, we understood, intended to build a luxury Northwoods lodge among the white pines, with a view overlooking the Balsam. It would require roads and the felling of many of those beautiful old pines, devastating news to all of us in St. Croix Falls, even those who didn’t angle for trout. We’d all grown up picnicking along the river and exploring Weyerhausen Woods.

  We held a hastily called town meeting, and our collective decision was to make the Weyerhausen family a counteroffer. As a community, we would buy the land to ensure its preservation. We weren’t certain how we’d raise the money, but putting a halt to Grogan’s plan was the first order of business.

  While we awaited a reply from the Weyerhausen family, I continued fishing the stream, morning and evening, and the wolf was often my companion. I didn’t need to offer food anymore. He no longer limped, and I could see that he’d fattened himself to a healthier look. I honestly didn’t know why he showed up, except that maybe he was the proverbial lone wolf, and even a lone wolf craves companionship once in a while. He would sit on his haunches, watching me cast, and sometimes I found myself talking to him, as if he could understand. One of the things I talked about a lot was the uncertain fate of Weyerhausen Woods, and so of him.

  The family rejected our offer. They explained it was all business, and Armand Grogan had countered with an offer of his own. The family gave us two weeks to decide if we wanted to make another, better offer.

  In the time we considered our options, which were dreadfully few, I found solace in angling the Balsam River. I was out there one evening when Grogan himself showed up, wading through the meadow, which had recovered from the destruction of his previous passage. He came to the riverbank and stood watching me a long, silent time, as if making some important assessment. Whether it was of me or my activity or the river, I couldn’t say. My line jerked and I played in a trout, removed the hook, and returned the fish to the stream.

  Grogan shook his head and finally spoke, in a congenial tone. “Never saw the use of fishing if all you do is throw the damn thing back.”

  “In large measure, it’s a contemplative exercise,” I told him.

  “Fancy name for a waste of time.”

  “Do you ever find yourself in deep contemplation of anything, Mr. Grogan?”

  He laughed, flashing teeth perfect and even, like tight rows of white marble gravestones. “I learned a long time ago never to think about a thing too long or the chance to strike is gone. A philosophy, my friend, that’s taken me pretty far in the business world. Do you have a name?”

  “Perry Palin,” I told him.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Mr. Palin.” The look on his pretty-boy face was grievous, and his tone reminded me of maple syrup dripping down a stack of cakes. “As much as it pains me to deprive anyone of such an obvious pleasure, I intend to close the river to public fishing when this land is mine. I’ll have to reserve that privilege for the guests of my lodge. I’m sure you understand.”

  He gave me a smile that appeared warm but chilled me like ice water, then turned away abruptly and wandered along the riverbank, where he flushed a covey of quail. He lifted his arms as if sporting a shotgun and pretended to fire. I mimicked him with an i
maginary rifle of my own, and put an imaginary bullet in the back of that handsome, empty head.

  He kept strutting along the apron of the meadow that separated Weyerhausen Woods from the Balsam, a privileged squire surveying his estate. I watched him, then swung my gaze to the woods. In the shadowy dark under the trees, the wolf watched him, too. When the man was far away, the wolf turned his glacial-blue eyes to me and we stared at each other for a long, thoughtful while.

  * * *

  —

  In the two weeks given us, the good folks of St. Croix Falls couldn’t muster the financial wherewithal to better Grogan’s offer, and the land was sold. Our county commissioners held an emergency meeting to discuss what might be done legally to preserve the integrity and beauty of our little Eden. Practically the whole population of our small town was there.

  Grogan somehow got wind of the meeting and came up from Minneapolis to attend. He brought his wife with him, a woman of great beauty, easily thirty years younger than he, a trophy bride, but with the look and attitude of a muzzled animal on a leash. She sat quietly through the meeting, her eyes never once making contact with anyone in the room. I felt sorry for her. She made me think of a beautiful creature in a cage. He also brought a lawyer from one of the best firms in the Twin Cities. The commission considered zoning regulations, taxes, estoppels of any kind they could think of. The lawyer had a legal counter to them all. In the end, it was quite clear that Grogan had us by the throat, and there was nothing to be done.

  At meeting’s end, the big man stood and said to the gathering, in a voice so unctuous I wanted to throttle him, “Believe me, I do understand how you must feel. And I hope you understand that there’s no personal malice in any of this. It’s just what I do. I see something I want and I take it.” He shrugged, as if in resignation to a force over which he had no control. “The nature of the beast.” He smiled, a savage grin with no charm in it at all. “But I’ll tell you what. Any of you I decide I like, you’ll be welcome to visit Grogan’s Northwoods Lodge. And”—his eyes settled on me—“if I like you and you fish, I might even allow you access to the trout stream once in a while.”