of the birds and bees, destroyer of fried eggs.
She loved him, she had said most passionately. That she had once loved him was obvious. But now? I didn’t believe a word of it.
Chapter Six — The Pleasures of Calamity
I had to push the squared-off snout of the VW microbus against a wind the guy at the gas station said was gusting to sixty miles an hour — according to the weather dude on the radio.
When I was a kid, the westward tilt of the trees and shrubs in the gorge didn’t mean a whole lot more than that the wind never stopped. It was more of a pain in the ass than anything else. Later, the wind was a source of tourist bucks in Hood River on the Oregon side and White Salmon on the Washington shore; wind-surfers from all over the world gathered for races. The surfers loved the ever-blowing crisp wind, and there must have been close to a hundred of them just whipping over the water, holding on to their colorful sails, backs arched, arms outstretched.
I sat forward in my seat and held on to the steering wheel with both forearms for the hour-long white-knuckler to Portland from The Dalles.
Boogie Dewlapp’s normal procedure in a case like this was to send a neophyte lawyer from Seattle down to spring the clients from the hoosegow and plead for time to prepare a case. This had been done.
Next, Boogie would hire me, or someone like me, to run a preliminary investigation which he would then study to determine what kind of defense was needed and which of his lawyers was required. He had good ones and bad, beginners and pros, including his brother Olden down in Portland and Boogie himself. If it was an obvious, simple win, he’d assign a beginner. If it was a real twister, or promised headlines or extraordinary fees, the mighty Boog himself might condescend to enter the fray.
Boogie’s secretary had reserved a cabin, one of the Kokanee Vacation Cottages, a half mile up the Lewis River from the village of Calamity, Washington — about sixty miles north of Portland and sixteen miles south of Sixkiller. This was at the southern foot of Goat Mountain, itself due west of Mount St. Helens.
She said the decision to lodge me in Calamity rather than the larger Sixkiller was because Calamity was closer to the Harkenrider residence. Unstated: The Kokanee Cottages were cheaper than anything she could find in Sixkiller.
Boogie had temporarily assigned a lawyer named Wesley Spooner to the case. Boogie said. Spooner was a good one, having recently graduated twenty-sixth in his law class at the University of Puget Sound. After springing the Harkenriders, young Spooner was to bring the couple to my cottage tomorrow afternoon so I could hear their version of what had happened.
Willie Prettybird and I had been throwing at a dart tournament in St. Helens, Oregon, when the mountain across the Columbia River popped her cork and lost fifteen hundred feet from her top in one gaudily dramatic Sunday afternoon — in the end trailing a path of ashes across Washington, Idaho, and Montana; it had been quite a show.
While we’d waited our turn at the board, Willie and I had sat on the front steps of the Klondike Tavern and watched the action across the river. Talk about SuperPanavision wrap-around sound or whatever. We were at the right place at the right time; it was as though we were watching the riffling of ten thousand cosmic postcards …
As the smoke and ashes billowed to the heavens on that warm, clear day, Willie went into one of the special trances he entered from time to time. Later, when we were driving back to his friend’s place in Portland where we had crashed the previous day, Willie sank into a despondent gloom.
I asked him if he had been talking to the animal people about what had happened on Mount St. Helens.
He said yes, he had. He said the eruption was the result of geologic indigestion, and there had been much roiling and boiling and gurgling in the earth’s innards long before the mountain blew its top. He said the long crack in the earth’s crust that runs from Alaska to Chile was in fact the earth’s ass. The San Andreas Fault in California was this ass opened as wide as possible.
When large amounts of gas built up in the earth’s innards, it had to go somewhere. He said we humans had to blow