“Lew-iss!” Otto stood in diffuse light on the other side of the little factory surrounded by white machinery, supervising while cheese was poured into round flat wooden molds. As each mold was filled, Otto’s son, Karl, took it to the weighing machine, recorded its weight and the mold number, and then stacked it in a corner. Otto said something to Karl and then came across the wooden floor to grasp Lewis’s hand. “How good to see you, my friend. But Lew-iss, you look so got-awful tired! You need some of my homemade schnapps.”
“And you look busy,” Lewis said. “But I’d be grateful for the schnapps.”
“Busy, don’t worry about busy. Karl is handling everything now, I should worry about Karl? He is a good cheesemaker. Almost as good as me.”
Lewis smiled and Otto slapped him on the back and lumbered off to his office, a small enclosure near the loading bay. Otto sank down in his ancient chair behind the desk, making the springs creak; Lewis across the desk from him. “Now, my friend.” Otto bent over and removed a decanter and two thimble glasses from a drawer. “Now we have a good drink. To make your cheeks red again.” He tipped liquid from the decanter into the glasses.
The liquor burned Lewis’s throat, but tasted like a distillation of massed flowers. “Delicious.”
“Of course it is delicious. I make it myself. I suppose you brought your gun, Lew-iss?”
Lewis nodded.
“So. I thought you were the kind of friend who comes into my office and drinks my schnapps and eats my beautiful new cheese”—Otto pushed himself out of his chair and went the short distance to a low refrigerator —”but all the time thinks only about going out and shooting something.” He placed a block of cheese veined with wine down before Lewis and cut off sections with his knife. This was one of the speciality cheeses Otto made to sell under his own name; the wheels of cheddar went to a combine. “Now tell me. Am I right?”
“You’re right.”
“I thought so. But it is fine, Lew-iss. I bought a new dog. Very good dog. This dog can see two-three miles— can smell for ten! Pretty soon I think I give this dog Karl’s job.”
The winy cheese was as good as Otto’s schnapps. “Do you think it might be too wet to take a dog out?”
“No, no. Under those big trees it won’t be so wet. You and me, we’ll find some animal. Maybe even a fox, huh?”
“And you’re not afraid of the game warden?”
“No! They run when they see me. They say, uh uh, here is that crazy old German—with a gun yet!”
Listening to Otto Gruebe’s buffoonery, sitting in his office with a fresh glass of the powerful brandy and his mouth full of intricate tastes, Lewis thought that Otto represented a kind of alternative Chowder Society— a less complicated, but equally valuable friendship.
“Let’s go out and see that dog,” he said.
“Let’s see the dog, hey? Lew-iss, when you see my new dog, you will go down on your knees and propose marriage to her.”
Both men put on their coats and left the office. Outside, Lewis noticed a tall skinny boy of roughly Peter Barnes’s age up on the loading bay. He wore a purple shirt and tight jeans, and he was piling up the heavy molds for pickup. He stared at Lewis for a moment, then ducked his head and smiled.
As they walked toward the kennels Lewis said, “You hired a new boy?”
“Yes. You saw him? He was the poor boy who found the body of the old lady who kept the horses. She lived near you.”
“Rea Dedham,” Lewis said. When he glanced over his shoulder, the boy was still looking at him, half-smiling; Lewis swallowed and turned away.
“Ya. He was very disturbed, and he could not stand to live near there anymore, he is a very sensitive boy, Lew-iss, and so he asked me for a job and got a room in Afton. So I gave him a broom and let him clean the machinery and stack the cheese. It is good until after Christmas, then we cannot afford him so much anymore.”
Rea Dedham; Edward and John; it pursued him even here.
Otto let the new dog out of its kennel, and was hunkering down beside it, rubbing his hands up and down its coat. It was a hound, lean and gray with muscular shoulders and haunches; the bitch did not yip like the other dogs or leap around with joy to be out of the kennel, but stood attentively beside Otto, looking about with alert blue eyes. Lewis too bent to pet it, and the hound accepted his hand and sniffed his boots. “This is Flossie,” Otto said. “What a dog, hey? What a beauty you are, my Flossie. Shall we take you out now for a liddle while, my Flossie?”
For the first time the bitch showed animation, tilting its head and swishing its tail. The well-schooled animal, Otto jug-eared and happy beside it, the nearness of the trees and the pervasive odors of cheesemaking, all of this seemed to swing Lewis in an arc away from the blue-jeaned boy behind him and the Chowder Society which lurked behind the boy, and he said, “Otto, I want to tell you a story.”
“Ya? Good. Tell me, Lew-iss.”
“I want to tell you about how my wife died.”
Otto cocked his head and for a moment absurdly resembled the hound kneeling before him. “Ya. Good.” He nodded, and reflectively ran a finger around the base of the hound’s ears. “You can tell me when we go up in the woods for an hour or two, hey? I’m glad, Lew-iss. I’m glad.”
Lewis suspected that if they tried anything like that this time, they’d have to clear it with Flossie first. The sleek little animal was wholly businesslike. She did not go after birds or squirrels like half the other dogs, but padded along in front of them, tilting her head from side to side, her tail switching. “Flossie is going to make us work,” he said.
“Ya. I paid two hundred dollars to look like a fool in front of a dog, hey?”
Once they were up the valley and into the trees Lewis felt his tension begin to leave him. Otto was showing off the dog, whistling to make it go out on a wide tangent, whistling again to call it back.
Now they were moving through thick woods. As Otto had predicted, it was colder and dryer up here than in the valley. In exposed territory melting snow made rivulets, and marshy ground beneath the remaining snow sucked at their boots, but under a curtain of conifers it was as if the thaw had never come. Lewis lost sight of Otto for ten minutes at a time, then caught flashes of his red jacket between green fir needles and heard him communicating with the dog. Lewis lifted his Remington to his shoulder and sighted down on a pine cone; the dog switched and skirmished up ahead, looking for a scent.
Half an hour later, when she found one, Otto was too tired to follow it. The dog began baying, and streaked off to their right. Otto lowered his blunderbuss and said, “Ach, let it go, Flossie.” The dog whimpered, turned around to stare disbelievingly at the two men: What are you clowns doing, anyhow? Then it lowered its tail and walked back. Ten yards off, it sat down and began licking its hindquarters.
“Flossie has given up on us,” Otto said. “We are not in her class. Have a liddle drink.” He offered Lewis a flask. “I think we need to be warm, hey, Lewis?”
“Can you build a fire around here?”
“Sure I can. I saw a liddle deadfall back a teeny bit —lots of dry wood in there. You just scoop a hole in the snow, get your tinder and presto. Fire.”
Seeing that the hill came to its rise only twenty yards above them, Lewis climbed up while Otto went back to the deadfall to collect dry wood and tinder. Flossie, no longer interested, watched him stumble upward toward the ridge.
He did not expect what he found: they had come farther than he had thought and below him, down a long forested slope, was a streak of highway. On the other side of the highway the woods resumed again, but the few cars traveling the highway were a despoilation. They ruined his fragile mood of well-being.
And then it was as if Milburn had reached out even here, to point at him on the crest of a wooded hill: one of the cars moving rapidly down the highway was Stella Hawthorne’s. “Oh, God,” Lewis muttered, watching Stella’s Volvo cross through the space directly before him. It, and the woman driving it, brought the night and the morning back to him. He might as well have pitched a tent on the square; even out in the woods, Milburn whispered behind him. Stella’s car traveled up the road; her turn indicator flashed, and she pulled onto the shoulder. A moment later another car pulled in beside her. A man got out and went around to Stella’s window and rapped until she opened her door.
Lewis turned away and went back down the slippery hill to Otto.
He had already started a little fire. At the bottom of a hole scooped in the snow, on a bed of stones, a flame licked at tinder. Otto fed it a larger twig, then another, then a handful, and the single flame grew into a dozen. Above this Otto built a foot-high tepee of sticks. “Now, Lew-iss,” he said, “warm your hands.”
“Any schnapps left?” Lewis took the flask and joined Otto on a fallen log dusted of its snow. Otto dug in his pockets and withdrew a homemade sausage sliced neatly in half. He gave half to Lewis, and bit into his own half. The fire leaped up into the tepee and warmed Lewis’s ankles through his boots. He extended his hands and feet and around a bit of sausage said, “One night Linda and I went to a dinner in one of the suites of the hotel I owned. Linda didn’t live through the night. Otto, I think the same thing that got my wife is after me.”