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“Blow it off,” I said.
We were sitting on wood chairs on the porch now. My fly and spinning rods were propped against a hitching rail, my waders hanging upside down from pegs on the front wall. The hillsides that bordered Albert’s ranch were dotted with ponderosa and larch and Douglas fir trees, and when the wind blew, it made a sound like floodwater coursing hard through a dried-out streambed.
“The guy deliberately destroyed my tackle and lied in my face about it,” Clete said.
“Sometimes you’ve got to walk away, Cletus.”
“That’s what I did. And I feel just like somebody put his spit in my ear.”
But I knew what was eating him. After Sally Dee’s plane had smacked into a hillside on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that someone had poured sand into the fuel tanks. Clete blew Montana like the state was on fire. Now, unless he wanted someone asking questions about his relationship to Sally Dee and Sally’s clogged fuel lines, he had to allow one of Sally’s lowlifes to shove him around.
“Maybe the deal with your fly rod was an accident. Why’s a guy like that want to pick a beef with you? Sally’s dead. You said it yourself. The guy in the pickup is a short-eyes. You don’t load the cannon for pervs.”
“Good try.”
“You can use my spinning rod. Let’s go down on the Bitterroot.”
He thought about it, then took off his hat and put it back on. “Yeah, why not?” he said.
I thought I’d carried the day. But that’s the way you think when your attitudes are facile and you express them self-confidently at the expense of others.
IT WAS EVENING when the red pickup with the diesel-powered engine came up the dirt road, driving too fast, its headlights on high beam, even though the valley was only in part shadow, the oversize tires slamming hard across the potholes. The truck slowed at the entrance to Albert’s driveway, as though the men inside the cab were examining the numbers on the archway at the entrance. Clete’s Caddy was parked by the garage, up on the bench, against the hill, its starched top and waxed maroon paint job like an automobile advertisement snipped out of a 1950s magazine.
The pickup truck accelerated and kept coming up the road, spooking the horses in the pasture. Molly was inside the cabin, broiling a trout dinner that we had invited Albert and Clete to share with us. I watched the pickup truck turn in to the lane that led to our cabin, and I knew in the same way you know a registered-mail delivery contains bad news that I had sorely underestimated the significance of Clete’s encounter with the security personnel on the ranch owned by a man named Wellstone.
“Can I help you?” I asked, rising from my chair on the porch.
The two men who had gotten out of the truck cab looked exactly as Clete had described them. The one with the recessed eye socket stared up at me, a faint grin on his face. He wore a short-sleeve print shirt outside his slacks. “My name is Lyle Hobbs,” he said. “That yonder is Albert Hollister’s place, is it?”
“What about it?” I said.
He glanced at the Louisiana tag on the back of my pickup truck. “Because the owner of that Cadillac parked up yonder told me he wasn’t working for any bunny huggers. But that’s not so. That means he lied to me.”
“He doesn’t work for anyone. At least not in this state.”
“My instincts tell me otherwise. I hate a lie, mister. It bothers me something awful.”
I let the implication pass. “Maybe you should go somewhere else, then.”
The other man, who was unshaved and had thick, uncut black hair with a greasy shine in it, stepped in front of his friend. “What’s your name, boy?” he said.
“What did you call me?”
“I didn’t call you anything. I asked you your goddamn name.”
I heard Molly come out on the porch. The eyes of the two men shifted off me. “What is it, Dave?” she said.
“Nothing,” I replied.
“You tell Mr. Purcel he’s sticking his nose in the wrong person’s business,” Lyle Hobbs said. “Mr. Wellstone is an honorable man. We’re not gonna allow the likes of Mr. Purcel to besmirch his name. You tell him what I said.”
“Tell him yourself,” Molly said. She was holding a heavy cast-iron skillet, the kind used to cook large breakfasts for bunkhouse crews.
The man with black hair rubbed his thumb and forefinger up and down the whiskers on his throat, his eyes roving over Molly’s figure, a matchstick elevating in his mouth. “Sounds like somebody is whipped to me,” he said.
I stepped down off the porch, my old enemy ballooning in my chest, tingling in my hands. “I strongly recommend y’all drag your sorry asses out of here,” I said.
Lyle Hobbs continued to stare directly into my face, his eyes jittering. “We’re leaving. But don’t make us come back,” he said. “Those aren’t idle words, sir.”
