The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  That’s when I met him. That rainy Thanksgiving Day right after they’d moved back to Washington. When I asked him how he felt about giving up fishing heaven to come back and be nearer the family, he took off his glasses and began to polish the lenses with a tissue. “Never thought I’d hear myself say this,” he mused, “but a man can only catch so many fish and use so much money, and you know…there’s some things in life just more important than fishing.” Said he was shopping for a piece of property over on the Olympic Peninsula. Something on one of the rivers where he could set up a destination fishing lodge. With more than a little envy, I’d wished him luck.

  I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Felt like fine sand under my eyelids. I checked the door to make sure it was locked and then leaned my head against the window. Closed my eyes and dreamed of the way the line stops and then the first tug and then pictures of enormous silver fish, tail-walking across broken water.

  I woke up when she shut the engine off. By the time I’d blinked myself into focus, Rebecca was out of the car, standing in front of an orange-and-white-striped barrier. I got out, stretched, allowed myself a yawn and wandered her way.

  “Problem?” I inquired.

  “It says the bridge is closed for repairs until further notice.”

  “So?”

  She turned to face me. “We’re at the end of the road. My directions to Claudia and J.D.’s place say to go over this bridge.”

  She was right. We were indeed at the proverbial end of the road. You either turned left over the bridge or you turned around.

  “How far back was the last town?”

  “Five or six miles.”

  “Guess we’ll have to go back and ask.”

  When she headed for the car, I got my first good look at the barrier. Not the usual sawhorse barrier made ominous by bright orange signs. No, no…this was a welded steel security gate, custom made to lock directly to the bridge abutments. Both sides. Top and bottom. Big stainless steel chains. They really didn’t want anybody using that bridge. I didn’t get much of a chance to think about it. The notice said the bridge had been declared unsafe by City Inspector Emmett Polster. Behind me the Explorer started. I hustled over, got in and fastened my seatbelt.

  The road back to town was newly paved, still smelling of oil, with only an intermittent series of yellow dots to mark the center. The bullet-riddled sign at the west end of town claimed a population of sixty-seven hundred souls. Stevens Falls used to be a lot bigger place. Twenty years ago, the better part of thirty thousand people had lived at this end of the valley. There’d been half a dozen lumber mills, a couple of plywood plants and enough work in the woods to keep everybody busy. Nowadays it was standardissue Northwest rural. A mill town without a mill. A forest community without a forest. Five blocks on either side of the highway. Ten blocks long. Most of the inhabitants living off in the hills somewhere. One of everything except taverns. Those numbered three.

  Trying like hell to draw tourists. Old West motif. The businesses along the main drag were connected by raised wooden walkways. Cute little hitching posts and horse-watering troughs used for parking barriers. Hanging baskets of flowers were evenly spaced along both sides of the main drag. Red-and-white-striped ice-cream parlor. Antiques. Espresso. Collectibles. Step right up. The surrounding hills were painted with the browns, the reds and yellows of fall. Pretty this time of year, if you didn’t know any better. Nothing but scrub oak, big-leaf maple and madrone. The money trees—the cedar and spruce, the Douglas fir, the pine—they were long gone. In the Pacific Northwest it’s customary to leave fifty yards of tall trees immediately adjacent to all highways. That way the tourists were treated to the illusion of the unspoiled forest and the timber barons could then feel free to clear-cut every saleable stick of timber for the next fifty miles. Or until the next highway, of course. Whichever came first. Around here, they hadn’t even bothered with the fifty-yard tourist barriers. They’d cut down everything that would bring a dime. I pointed to a Texaco station at the far end of town. “Pull in there. I’ll ask.”

  Urban renewal hadn’t gotten this far. Behind the counter a skinny guy in filthy gray overalls. Bad teeth and the narrow eyes of a weasel. He was wiping the grease from his hands with a rough red rag. On the radio Buck Owens was caterwauling about the streets of Bakersfield. “Hi,” I said. A patch on his chest said Linc.

  He nodded slightly, looking me over as if he were thinking of cannibalizing me for spare parts. “What can I do for ya?”

  he asked.

  I told him about our problem with the closed bridge.

  “Ain’t nothin’ over there anyhow,” was his response.

  “Looking for a guy named J.D. Springer,” I said. He looked me over for a long moment and then turned his back and began fiddling with some carburetor parts on the counter. “Told ya, ain’t nothin’ over there,” he said. Ten years ago, I’d have jumped the counter and taught ferret face some manners. Sure it would have involved bail. Probably have to come all the way back for court, but goddammit I’d have felt better. Today, I jammed my hands in my pocket and went back outside feeling old and ineffective. I walked around to the driver’s window.

  Rebecca lowered the window and raised her eyebrows.

  “So?”

  “I think I may be losing my boyish charm,” I said.

  “So…what else is new?”

  “So, I’m going to need to ask across the street. Stay here.”

  I trotted out my best Arnie impression. “I’ll be back,” I intoned. I tried a different tack on the lady in the Laundromat. Not looking for a soul. Just tourists who wanted to get off the beaten path. She pointed with a three-inch purple fingernail. Another bridge eight miles back. Just turn right and you could drive right back to the closed bridge. Longer, bumpier, but eventually you’d get there.

  Eventually, we did. Forty minutes later, we rolled to a stop at the head of a paved driveway. Above the idling engine, I could hear the rush of water somewhere below. Twenty-fouroh-seven, it read. Three Rivers Lodge. Nice hand-crafted sign. A posted NO TRESPASSING sign every fifty feet along the fence.

  Rebecca consulted the paper she’d been holding in her lap.

  “This is it,” she said, turning left down the narrow road. A half a mile later we rolled out of the tunnel of trees onto an open five-acre plateau. Two cars. A battered Chevy Blazer and a shiny new Subaru wagon. To the left, eight new guest cabins were spaced along the top of the bank. Directly in front of us an asphalt ramp ran down to the river. To the right, a moss-encrusted log cabin. The cabin windows were filled with construction-paper ghosts and bats. On the small concrete porch, a thirty-pound pumpkin had been expertly carved into a fierce jack-o’-lantern.

  First Claudia and then J.D. stepped out onto the porch. J.D. looked just like I remembered him, like he’d been chiseled out and left rough. Claudia had gained about twenty pounds and traded the long skirt and the combat boots for a bright yellow Nike jogging suit and a pair of sneakers. Two little blond heads poked out from around and between Claudia’s legs. The minute Claudia saw Rebecca’s face, the high-pitched noises began.

  Claudia and Rebecca hugged and mewed and hugged and squealed and then hugged some more. Tears and tissues. J.D. and I shook hands and traded weather reports. The kids were introduced to their aunt Rebecca and uncle Leo. The boy’s name was Adam. He’d turned two last week, and was quite proud of being nearly potty-trained. The girl was Alicia. Gonna be four on the day before Christmas. Mama’s Christmas angel.

  The place was small. Two bedrooms. No more than twelve hundred square feet. J.D. explained how when they were up and running, the family was going to live over in Sequim and how they were going to gut this place and turn it into a kitchen and dining room for the resort. Iced tea for Rebecca. A cold Moosehead for me.

  We did what people do in those moments. We took turns trying to encapsulate a couple of years’ worth of living into a hundred words or less. Sawing off the peaks and valleys so as to seem
neither boastful nor weak, ending up with fictional renderings of our respective lives that hardly seemed worth the telling.

  The children wormed their way between Claudia and the couch back. She leaned forward. “You’ll have to stay for dinner,” she said.

  I inwardly groaned; Rebecca came to the rescue. “Oh Claudia, we’d love to but…” She looked my way for confirmation. I did my best. “But we’re going to have to be leaving here pretty soon,” she continued. She explained how we were trying to make it down to Ocean Shores before it got too late.

  “You know how bad that road is,” Rebecca said.

  “Wicked at night,” J.D. agreed quickly.

  Claudia flicked a glance at her husband. “They can spend the night with us, can’t they, J.D.? They can have our—”

  “They said they needed to go, Claudia,” he interrupted.

  “I heard what they said, J.D. There’s nothing wrong with my ears.” Her tone had that singsong quality people develop when they spend too much time talking to children. I felt like I’d walked in on the last act of an art film. The knotted muscles along his jawline suggested that he was about to tell her what parts of her anatomy did indeed have something wrong with them. He opened his mouth, thought better of it. “Hot in here,” he said. “I’m gonna take a little walk.”

  He took two quick strides across the room, jerked open the door and was gone. Screen door banged. Children stood still and silent. The air was magnetic with tension. Amazing the kind of nonverbal communication you develop with a partner over time. I was already halfway out of my seat when Rebecca shot me look number forty-nine. The one that meant I should follow J.D. so’s she could find out from Claudia what was really going on here. She didn’t have to ask twice.

  J.D. was walking in circles in the driveway, rubbing the back of his neck and looking up into the racing gray sky.

  “How’s fishing?” I tried. Seemed like a good bet. To fishermen, the only thing as good as wetting a line is talking about it. No go.

  “Fishing,” J.D. snorted. “What’s that? Heck, Leo…I don’t even remember the last time I went fishing.” Behind him loomed the forest primeval. North America’s only rain-forest. A hundred-fifty-foot canopy of leaves and needles so deepgreen thick that, in places, the sun never reaches the ground. Sodden and springy underfoot, a serpentine maze of fallen limbs and eight-foot sword ferns so thick and tangled you have to crawl. Perpetually wet and smelling of decay. Everything covered with thick iridescent moss. Everywhere the sound of moving water.

  “Sorry about…in there,” he said.

  “You ought to hear Rebecca and me on a bad day.”

  He snorted again. “Lately, seems like that’s the only kind me and Claudy have.”

  He laughed at himself. “Listen to me…sound like I ought to be on Oprah or something. Come on. I’ll show you around.”

  I fell in beside him. We walked down the asphalt ramp. To my left, directly beneath the guest cabins, a pair of spanking-new jet boats sat beached on the rocky shore. Aluminum, twenty-footers. Probably thirty grand apiece. Same Three Rivers logo painted on the sides. At the bottom of the ramp, a gray Avon raft was pulled partway up onto the pave ment. The wooden floor of the inflatable was littered with pop cans, candy wrappers and orange life jackets. At the bottom, we turned right, picking our way along the bank for sixty yards, until we came to a rocky point. We stood at the crux of an inverted Y. A genuine confluence. Over one shoulder was the Bogachiel, over the other, the Hoh. In front was the two miles of tidal flow called the Quileute River. Beyond that…Tokyo.

  Yesterday’s rain had leached the red clay banks down into the water, leaving both rivers murky and out of fishing shape.

  “There’s the beauty of it,” he said emphatically, as if he were trying to convince one of us of something. “You own this property, you own the last seven miles of the river before it empties into the ocean.”

  He turned and pointed upriver. “You can see there…see how steep the banks get?” I saw. No more that a half mile upstream, the river was the better part of thirty feet below the forest. He pointed out in front of us. “Half a mile downriver right at the end of this property, it becomes a big tidal mudflat. No way to get anything in there to pull a boat.”

  He pointed out toward the ocean. “Between us and the ocean there’s something like a thousand acres of private land with the reservation on three sides and the ocean on the other. This was a homestead. It was here before the reservation. Old guy I bought it from, Ben Bendixon, his grandfather lost an arm to a Hoh musket ball.”

  “A lucky find,” I commented.

  He looked up at the leaden sky. “Yeah…that’s what I thought,” he said.

  I didn’t figure him for the type who’d readily tell his troubles to somebody he’d only met once before, and I sure as hell wasn’t the type who particularly wanted to hear them, but something inside of me had the urge to draw him out.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  He picked up a stone and threw it out over the water, trying to skip it. Sunk like…yeah, you guessed it.

  “It’s the local yokels,” he said. He threw another rock. Two skips. He slapped himself on top of the head. “Why am I boring you with this? You don’t want to hear this stuff.”

  I sat on a smooth black boulder. Watched him pitch rocks at the river for a while. On the far side of the Hoh, two blacktail does bent low over the water for a drink.

  “What about the locals?” I pressed.

  “It started with vandalism,” he said. “Had all the signs torn down several times. Then somebody hooked a truck to the fence and pulled out a couple of hundred feet. Left it just laying there in the road. Threatening phone calls all hours of the day and night.

  “Got the numbers on my caller ID. Took ’em down to the sheriff. Nothing.” Then, he told me how the family came home from a weekend with the grandparents and found their new station wagon missing. Glass all over the ground. Thought it was stolen until he noticed the glass on the boat ramp and the oil in the water. It took a Navy diver and three tow trucks to pull it out of the river. Totaled. Squashed nearly flat by the force of the water. Insurance had replaced it with the new Subaru in the driveway. He picked up a rock the size of a baseball and heaved it out into the river.

  “Right there,” he said. “There’s a hole in the bedrock nearly twenty feet deep. Right off the end of the ramp. You can feel it in your feet when you’re in the boat. Millions of years with two rivers beating on it. It’s like a black hole. Anything you throw in there, it don’t come out.” He shook his head and continued the story.

  When none of that worked, the road was suddenly under construction. Closed. Tore it down to bare rock and then just left it that way. Six months they had to come in the way we came in today. J.D.’s attorney complained to the state Highway Commission. Finally the state started nosing around and the powers that be had to get on with the project. Then, thebridge. Soon as the road was paved, they closed the bridge. Said it was unsafe.

  “Is it?”

  “Not one darn thing wrong with it. Heck, for a month or so after they closed it, I just pulled the barrier aside and drove right on over.”

  “Until they got serious about the gate.”

  He nodded. “You noticed.”

  I said I had. He picked up on what I was thinking.

  “I know it sounds paranoid. Every time I say it out loud I wonder about myself, but I swear, Leo, it’s the truth. They’re trying to run me out of business.” He skipped another rock across the surface. Three.

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  “’Cause Ben sold me the property.”

  “So?”

  Seems the county had been making a major effort to buy the property, but this Bendixon character had steadfastly rebuked all offers for the place. Said he was born there and, by cracky, he was gonna die there. When he suddenly reversed field and sold out to J.D, things turned ugly, ’cause first thing J.D. did was to post the place NO TRE
SPASSING, which meant that every other boater and fisherman had to pull out way upriver at the town boat ramp. Either that or learn Japanese. What had heretofore been one of the most heavily used boat launches and fishing holes in this neck of the woods was suddenly off limits. Needless to say, feelings ran high.

  “How come he sold it to you?”

  He told me about how he and the old man had met one day. Both of them out bank-fishing. Ben had invited him to the cabin for coffee. How they became friends. About how he used to stop and make an offer on the property whenever he was around this part of the peninsula. Trying to win out on pure persistence. How it got to be a joke between them and how one day, out of the blue, the old man left him a message on his voice mail. You want the property, get yourself over here.

  “I’d given up. I was looking at eighty acres on the Dungeness. I think he was lonely. By the end, if you wanted to find him during the day you just went to the Timbertopper Tavern. He didn’t drink much but…and then the dog…” he began. “I think that was the last straw.”

  “What dog?”

  “Ben lived out here for the last fifteen years with this old springer spaniel named Chappy. His wife died back in the mid-eighties. Ever since then, it was just Ben and that old dog.” He could tell I was lost. “Chappy died the day before Ben called me. I don’t think Ben wanted to live out here all by himself. I think Chappy dying kind of put him over the edge, if you know what I mean.”

  I said I did. “Where’s the old man now?”

  “Moved in with his daughter in Port Townsend.” He searched the ground, kicked up a flat stone and then sent it sailing. One skip.

  “I guess he knew I’d take care of the place,” he said finally. I asked the obvious question. “No way to avoid posting it?”

  “What was I going to do?” he asked me. “Let the locals do for free what I’m charging customers thousands of dollars to do?” He had a point, but I could see how that move could make J.D. more than a bit unpopular with the local sporting set.