Where I'm Calling From

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