The Bavarian Gate Page 3

  * * *

  Macurdy slept his way across the Idaho panhandle, waking when the train stopped at Spokane, Washington, and again to the clash and jerk of couplings as it started to leave. The next time he awoke, they were rolling across grassy hills and bare rock washes. After they left Pasco, they never stopped at all, rolling down the Columbia River Gorge through scenery that to Macurdy was beautiful almost beyond comprehension. So this is Oregon, he thought. God, Varia, if you could only see it! As newlyweds, moving to Oregon had been a dream, nothing urgent, but something they'd do someday. Now she was in another world with another man, and he was here alone. That should, he thought, have spoiled it for him, but somehow the beauty overrode such considerations.

  * * *

  They spent a day at Portland, swimming in the river with their clothes on to get out most of the soot, then wearing them dry in the sunshine, eating on Macurdy's money, and walking around. They took the elevator to an upper floor of a bank building, where Macurdy stared in awe at distant snow peaks. The nearer, to the east, was Mount Hood, Roy told him, and the one off north, Mount Saint Helens. They spent that night with one of Roy's aunts, who treated Macurdy as a welcome guest. The next day they hiked to the railyard and caught another freight, this one on a branch line, headed for the sawmill town of Nehtaka, where Roy, not so confident as he'd been fifteen hundred miles east, hoped they'd find work.

  4

  Severtson's Camp

  They didn't go to the hiring hall. Instead they hiked a dusty road out of town, past yards of great dark logs, and acres of fragrant lumber stacked in the sun to dry. Past a sawmill, whose shrieking headrig and growling planers they could hear from the road four hundred yards away. Above the mill, a tall stack trailed a pennant of woodsmoke. A slab burner, like a fifty-foot sheet-iron teepee, leaked more of it, from the top and every seam. Like the visual scene, the resinous pungencies charmed Macurdy. Oregon!

  Roy led him to a large, shed-like building covered with asphalt siding. At one end was an office, and it was there they entered. A tall, rawboned blond woman sat at a desk, with a typewriter, a phone, and a pint-sized mug of coffee. On a nearby table sat an electric burner—something Macurdy had never seen before— topped with a large enameled coffee pot, robin's egg blue with black chips. Within the woman's reach was a battered file cabinet, another novelty; Macurdy didn't even know what it was.

  "We come to see Axel," Roy told her. "We're looking for work."

  This was a self-deprecatory Roy Klaplanahoo, figuratively with hat in hand. White men had left Europe to avoid such servility for themselves. She looked them over, then turned toward an open door. "Axel!" she called, "there's a couple of jacks out here looking for work. One's a Klaplanahoo."

  A moment later a tall, big-shouldered, middle-aged man came through the door. He was bald as an egg, but a thatch of flaxen chest hair bushed from his open collar. "Vhere you been?" he said to Roy. "I ain't seen you for a year or more."

  "I been to Oklahoma. I'd heard it was real Indian country, and I wanted to see it."

  "Vas it? Indian country?"

  "Outside the cities it was. The cities were like Portland, only hotter in summer and colder in winter. I didn't like it very much."

  Axel Severtson turned to Macurdy. "Vhere you from?"

  "Indiana."

  "Indiana." Severtson frowned. "You know anything about the voods?"

  "Yeah. I've cut timber off and on all my life."

  The Swede appraised him, checking the heavy shoulders, the large beefy hands. "Come vit' me," he said, and beckoning, led the two of them through another door into the shed end of the building. Mostly it was storage. Tools hung on the walls; large, well-greased spools of cable lay on skids; and there were chests presumably holding other equipment. "You a faller?" Axel asked Macurdy.

  "When we cut, my uncle and me, we did everything: felled, bucked, and skidded."

  "Vhat did you cut?"

  "White oak, more than anything else. Barrel stock."

  The Swede grunted, as if oaks were beneath the attention of real loggers, then took down an axe and tested the blade with a thumb. "C'mon," he said, and led them out the back of the building. A log perhaps three feet in diameter lay there on skids. Someone had already cut into it with an axe; there was a pair of cuts a few feet apart, one of them ragged and rough. Severtson handed Macurdy the axe.

  "Let's see vhat you can do vit' it."

  Macurdy hefted it—the handle was longer than he was used to—checked an edge for himself, then stepped onto the log, planted his feet and began, his strokes measured and powerful, precise. Chips as big as books began to fly. Halfway through, the Swede called a halt. "Okay," he said, "you'll do. I got some guys didn't come back from the Memorial Day veekend, and I ain't vun of those that goes to Portland to bail them out of yail."

  * * *

  Axel sent him back into town to get boots and caulks—said it wasn't safe working without them—and tin pants and whatever else he needed. After giving him a note saying he was hired, in case he needed credit in the stores. Macurdy invested in a toothbrush, too, but not a razor. Like most Macurdy men, he grew little hair except on his skull—because of his ylvin genes, Varia had told him. He'd never grown more than a faint down on cheeks and jaw.

  By noon they were on their way to camp, in a truck hauling rigging gear. They ate a late lunch of sandwiches in the messhall—the crew carried their lunches—then were taken into the woods. Macurdy wondered how it was possible to cut timber on such steep slopes. And the stumps! Most were between fifty and ninety inches across, maybe twenty inches high on the uphill and five feet on the downhill side. On this job, he would learn, most of the trees stood between two hundred and two hundred eighty feet tall. He'd never imagined such forest.

  They had to wait a few minutes while the foreman—the youngest Severtson brother, Lars—finished marking out a new cutting strip for a pair of fallers. Then Lars assigned a bucker to fell trees with Roy. Finally Macurdy was given the ex-bucker's long one-man saw and steel tape measure, and told what to do. He realized now why buckers worked alone: Most of the prostrate trunks were too large for men to work together on opposite sides.

  "You ever do this before?" Lars asked. His accent was slight; he'd come over as a child, and gone to school in Nehtaka.

  "Not in trees like these," Macurdy answered.

  "Let's see how you do."

  The cut had been started, and the saw left in the kerf. Macurdy took hold of the handle, and after a few strokes got the feel of it. "Okay," Lars said. "Remember, I don't stand for nobody loafing, even if this is piece work. If you don't get the wood out, you go down the road."

  He left then. As Macurdy drew and pushed the long saw, he decided he was going to like this job.

  * * *

  In Severtson's camp, buckers slept in their own shack, and fallers in another. The choker setters and whistle punks shared still another, as did the cooks, the riggers and skinners and donkey engineers, the cookees and swampers and stable boys and bullcook, the filers and blacksmiths. They ate together though, at long tables bent beneath food, served by the several cookees—mostly boys, but with an old timer whose back couldn't stand the heavier work any longer, and a Finn with a stumpy foot, earned in the always dangerous woods.

  For two weeks Macurdy bucked fir—two weeks in which he also learned to file a saw like a pro. The camp had filers, but the general attitude was that any real honest-to-god sawyer filed his own. Macurdy's dad had taught him as a boy, but he'd never been more than adequate before. Now he learned the fine points of swaging, and how to get the set so even, the cut surface was as smooth as if planed.

  Then Roy's felling partner was afflicted with terminal thirst, and left for Portland to drink up his money. Roy suggested Macurdy for a replacement, and Lars agreed to give him a trial. Skill with the axe was the most demanding part of the faller's job, and axemanship Macurdy's best woods skill; they became not only a successful team, but by Macurdy's second week felli
ng with Roy, they were in contention for the highest producing team, and the big monthly prize of twenty dollars each.

  The previously dominant team included a man everyone stayed clear of, so far as possible. Even his partner was wary of him. Like Macurdy, Patsy Hannigan was new in the area, but already had a reputation as both a logger and a troublemaker. His aura reminded Macurdy of the late Lord Quaie's, in Yuulith, with cruelty smoldering at the surface, poorly concealed.

  Hannigan was not a particularly large man—six-foot one and one hundred seventy pounds—but sinewy, and tough as a bullwhip. He'd gone to Nehtaka for Memorial Day, and fought twice; both his opponents were hospitalized. He fought dirty— not the usual thing among loggers. The only men in camp who didn't seem leery of him were Lars and Macurdy—and possibly Klaplanahoo; it was hard to be sure about the Indian. Lars's reputation as a fighter was well established; his older brother had made him woods boss at age eighteen, and several brawlers of reputation had quickly tested him. He'd never been whipped, and since then had seldom needed to fight.

  Surprisingly, Hannigan had shown no inclination to call the foreman out, but the general belief in camp was that when "the Irishman" decided to hit the road, he'd try taking the boss before he left. Or possibly Macurdy, whom most felt could take him, though they'd never seen Macurdy fight.

  It never happened. Hannigan discovered Hansi Sweiger instead. Hansi, seventeen years old, had come with his family from Germany at age eight, and in school had lost his accent entirely, though his family still spoke German at home. When he'd graduated from high school that spring, he'd come to work as a whistle punk. Now, belatedly, Hannigan had discovered the kid was German. It was the excuse he needed to abuse him verbally, as if Hansi had been personally responsible both for the World War and Germany's defeat in it. Macurdy had expected Lars to call Hannigan on it, but he never did. Roy said it wasn't done that way; in the camps, a man stood up for himself, though in Hansi's case, no one doubted that if he ever stood up to Hannigan, he'd be beaten half to death.

  That never happened either. Because one morning the sheriff and a deputy came to camp, Axel with them, bearing a warrant from Coos County for Hannigan's arrest on charges of rape and murder. They came into the messhall to serve it.

  The crew had finished breakfast, and the men were gathered at the lunch tables, packing their lunches. As soon as the sheriff identified his purpose, Hannigan's hand went inside his shirt and emerged with a flat .38 caliber pistol, firing even as he drew. The first shot tore through the sheriff's right bicep, spinning him around; the second hit the deputy in the middle of the forehead; the third struck Axel high in the chest. Then, for a reason that would never be known, Hannigan turned his pistol toward Hansi Sweiger, who stood big-eyed by the coffee tank, thermos in hand.

  His fourth shot hit no one, however, because Macurdy threw his heavy sheath knife, taking Hannigan between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left, barely missing the breastbone and plunging into the heart. Hannigan shot into the floor as he fell.

  Macurdy used an Ozian shaman's version of first aid to help Axel and the sheriff. The deputy and Hannigan were beyond help, though Macurdy wouldn't have helped Hannigan anyway.

  He had no idea what Hannigan had done for him, nor had Hannigan.

  5

  Mary Preuss

  Lars sent the crew to the woods anyway. Axel wasn't dead, he said, Hannigan was, and dead or alive, the sonofabitch wasn't going to shut down Severtson's camp.

  Production wasn't up to standard that day, of course, except by Klaplanahoo and Macurdy. There was a lot of talking, much of it about Macurdy: how quickly he'd moved, how accurately and powerfully he'd thrown.

  Two days later a deputy arrived with a court order: Macurdy was to come in for a hearing. Lars demanded to know why. Because, the deputy told him, anyone who willfully killed someone, even with good cause, had to have a court hearing, to establish in law that the act had been necessary. That way, he explained, no one could ever claim he'd done wrong by it.

  Lars explained back that that was a lot of bullshit—that no one could ever say there was anything wrong with what Macurdy had done. But he took the deputy out to Roy's and Macurdy's cutting strip, and Macurdy left for town in the sheriff department's new 1933 Ford V-8, with a radio like the police car in Miles City. Macurdy wasn't worried; the deputy's aura reflected friendly admiration.

  In town, the sheriff, Fritzi Preuss, sat behind his desk with his right arm and shoulder in a cast. His face was drawn, his aura marked by trauma and the strong analgesic he'd been given for pain. Hannigan's bullet had smashed through his humerus, an injury much more traumatic than a flesh wound or ordinary fracture. Nonetheless he got to his feet, shook left hands with Macurdy, and with a mild German accent, asked some routine questions. One was where he'd come from—county, state, and home address—Fritzi writing the answers slowly in careful, left-handed block letters.

  Having come to Oregon to keep from being traced, the questions made Macurdy uncomfortable. "I'd rather my folks don't get word of this," he said. "They'd worry."

  Fritzi grunted. "Your address I need only for the record. I'm not going to write to your family. But the law says I also have to contact the county there, to find out if you have a criminal record." He paused, fixing Macurdy with his eyes. "Do you have a criminal record?"

  Macurdy shook his head. "No sir."

  Fritzi smiled lopsidedly. "Good! I tell you what: We kill two birds with the same stone. I tell them I want the information because I'm considering hiring you as a deputy. I am, you know; to replace Marvin. You should make a good deputy. You are big; that helps when loggers are in town. You think quick; that's always good for a lawman. And after what you did, you will have a reputation. They will talk about you in camps all the way to Canada, to California."

  Macurdy stared.

  "Its a better job than logging," Fritzi continued calmly. "I know. I have done both. There won't be lay-offs, you won't have to live in a bachelor camp, the work isn't as hard, and you don't get rained on so much." He half smiled again. "It's safer, too."

  "I don't know," Macurdy said. "I like logging."

  The sheriff grunted. "Axel says you are new here. Do you know we get seventy inches of rain a year? Sixty of it between October and May. All you've seen is the dry season."

  A phone rang. Fritzi ignored it; a deputy picked it up. "Well," Fritzi went on, "you don't have to decide right now. But I'll handle it that way with your county back east."

  "Excuse me, sheriff," the deputy said, "it's Onni Hautala. That fire on Devils Creek has crowned and crossed the ridge; spotted all over the next drainage. He says he's got a bad blowup on his hands, and wants you to shut down all the logging in the county till we get some rain."

  The sheriff stood and took the phone. "Onni," he said, "you really think it's that bad? ... That will make problems— hundreds more people not working. Hundreds more eating on credit or the county, or not eating at all. ... All right, if it's that bad, we'll shut them down. Maybe the state will hire them to fight the fire. ... Okay, I'll tell them you said it."

  Fritzi hung up and turned to Macurdy. "So now the logging is shut down for a while, and you got to find something else. Probably fighting fire day and night. The deputy job is yours if you want it, unless we find something wrong. Now I've got a lot of phone calls to make. Come to my house at 6:30 for supper, and we talk."

  * * *

  Macurdy bought a watch, and it was 6:30 sharp when he knocked on the sheriff's door. A girl answered, in her late teens he thought, fair, blonde, and slender, not remarkably pretty, but nice-looking in a flowered print dress. Her eyes in particular took his attention. They were blue, with a tilt that reminded him of Varia's, though she'd hardly have Varia's pointy ears.

  "I'm Curtis Macurdy," he said. "The sheriff told me to be here at 6:30."

  She stepped aside, motioning him to enter. "Come in, Mr. Macurdy. I'm Mary Preuss. Dad just phoned. He'll be here in a few minutes." She was poised,
her voice quiet, her aura reflecting—not self-deprecation, just modesty, he decided. And maybe a little shyness around men she doesn't know. An elderly woman stood in the living room, square-framed like Fritzi, wearing an apron, her gray-blond hair braided and coiled. She nodded, then exchanged words with Mary in a foreign language. His name was part of it.

  "My grandmother doesn't speak English," Mary told him matter-of-factly. "Her name is Klara Preuss; she's dad's mom. She came from Germany—East Prussia, actually—after my mom died. To keep house and take care of me." She gestured toward an upholstered chair, straight-backed with wooden arms. "Won't you sit down?"

  Macurdy sat. Mary took a similar chair opposite, while her grandmother chose a wooden chair close to the kitchen door, as if to keep an eye on the stove. For an awkward moment no one spoke, then Mary broke the silence.