The feds found only bread and cake at Stanley’s.
* * *
—
A hot day in June. Caleb showed up when she was outside tinkering with the Ford’s engine. “I’m going for a swim,” he told her, leaning against the car. “You can come if you want.” He put on his most charming smile. “You can even give me a ride if you ask nice.”
“Jamie will be home in an hour,” she said. “He’d want to come, too.”
Caleb was looking at her the way he did before he named the price of a haircut. “I don’t feel like waiting an hour.”
She thought about lying, saying she had to work, but she knew she would just sit around being regretful after he left, ashamed for not having dared. He was watching her, waiting. He took out a silver case full of hand-rolled cigarettes and lit one for each of them.
“Fancy,” she said about the case.
“I took a rich guy hunting,” he said. His eyes were still on her. He knew she was scared.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”
She drove them west out of town, turned south where the Bitterroot wound in tight bends through flatland. Caleb whistled as they rattled along. He took a flask from his pocket and offered it to her. The moonshine burned her throat. She winced, handed it back.
“You need a haircut,” he said, reaching to touch her neck with one finger.
“I’m fine for a while,” she said, tipping her head away.
She parked among the trees, lemony sunlight in the branches. As they walked toward the water, Caleb said, “Is Jamie going on with school next year?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I haven’t seen him lately. I’m always gone.” Caleb had been spending more time in the mountains, sometimes alone, often as a hunting guide for men who paid him to find the game, to take the shot if they missed and pretend he hadn’t. Marian had bought him a good rifle, and he had paid her back even more quickly than promised. People talked about him, the seventeen-year-old kid who knew where the animals would be. They talked about the serene deadliness with which he shot. It helped his business, he’d admitted, that Wallace had always been after him about his grammar. He spoke well.
“Then we should have waited,” Marian said. When Caleb didn’t reply, she asked, “Do you think Jamie’s soft for not hunting?”
Caleb thought before he answered. “Last time we went fishing,” he said, “we met some kids who’d covered a dog with a blanket and were throwing stones at it. I had to stop Jamie from killing the kid who didn’t run fast enough. So, no, I don’t think he’s soft.”
Marian remembered. The dog lived with them now, creeping after Jamie like a temple slave, watching him from beneath tables and beds. The boy had needed to go to the hospital. Jamie was lucky the kid’s father had a grimy past and no interest in involving the police. Otherwise Jamie might have been sent to the correctional school at Miles City.
I think I was levitating, Jamie had said. I was so mad I could have killed that kid, and I wouldn’t have felt bad at all. I wanted to kill him.
You taught him a lesson, Marian had said.
No, I didn’t. Some people are rotten inside, and the rottenness will never go away.
They came to the river’s edge, to a pool sheltered from the current. Caleb shed his clothes out in the open, but Marian went behind some trees. Privacy lay only in speed. Naked, she sprinted for the water, trying to cover herself with her hands. A whoop burst from her as she splashed in. Stones bruised her feet. She crouched, breathless from cold and anticipation, her teeth chattering. Caleb was standing in water up to his chest, his arms moving in broad arcs under the surface as though he were smoothing the sheets on a bed. He came toward her. He’d been holding the flask underwater and offered it to her now, dripping. She unscrewed the top, coughed from the cold moonshine.
Caleb tipped his head back, submerging his long hair. His clavicle strained against his skin. “You know I went to see one of Miss Dolly’s girls. I saved up.”
She tried to hide her urge to recoil. “Why would I know that?”
“I thought they might have told you. Why are you mad?”
“I’m not mad. Which girl?”
“Belle.”
Marian didn’t mean to make a face but did.
“What?” Caleb said. “She’s the prettiest one.”
“She’s just—” She wanted to say common, as though she were a snobbish character in a novel. But what authority did she have? Here she was naked in a river with a boy.