Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (3 page)

As he drove past Logan, he thought about stopping, but he didn’t need to. He knew what his parents would say. His mother would worry about his health, driving all night, her sickly son, risking his life. “You don’t even know this white girl,” she’d say. His father would say, “Jesus, Chet, you left the horses without water all day?”

Back at the Hayden place, he fed and watered the horses, and they seemed all right. None of them had kicked through their stalls. He rigged them up in the harness, and loaded the sled with hay, and they dragged it out of the barn. He cut the orange twine on each bale with a knife and pitched the hay off the sled for the cows. The horses trudged uncomplainingly, and he thought about the skittery two-year-olds who’d kicked him everywhere there was to kick, when he was fourteen. The ache in his stomach felt like that. But he hadn’t been treated unfairly by Beth Travis; he didn’t know what he had expected. If she had asked him to stay, he would have had to leave anyway. It was the finality of the conversation, and the protective look the man in the dark suit had given her, that left him feeling sore and bruised.

In the barn, he talked to the horses, and kept close to their hind legs when he moved behind them. They were sensible horses, immune to surprise, but he had left them without water all day. He gave them each another coffee canful of grain, which slid yellow over itself into their buckets.

He walked back outside, into the dark, and looked out over the flat stretch of land beyond the fences. The moon was up, and the fields were shadowy blue, dotted with cows. His hip was stiff and sore. He had to pee, and he walked away from the barn and watched the small steaming crater form in the snow. He wondered if maybe he had planted a seed, with Beth Travis, by demonstrating his seriousness to her. She wouldn’t come back—it was impossible to imagine her doing that drive again, for any reason. But she knew where he was. She was a lawyer. She could find him if she wanted.

But she wouldn’t. That was the thing that made him ache. He buttoned his jeans and shifted his hip. He had wanted practice, with girls, and now he had gotten it, but he wished it had felt more like practice. It was getting colder, and he would have to go inside soon. He fished her phone number out of his pocket and studied it a while in the moonlight, until he knew it by heart, and wouldn’t forget it. Then he did what he knew he should do, and rolled it into a ball, and threw it away.

THE SUMMER SHE TURNED FIFTEEN
, Sam Turner took her last float trip down the river with her father. It was July, and hot, and the water was low. Hardly anyone was on the river but them. They had two inflatable Avon rafts with oaring frames—Sam and her father in one, her uncle Harry and a client from Harry’s new law firm in the other. In the fall, she would be a sophomore, which sounded very old to her. She’d been offered a scholarship to a boarding school back east, but she hadn’t officially accepted it yet. Applying had been her father’s idea, but now he looked dismayed every time the subject came up. Everyone said what an opportunity it was, so much better than the local schools, but neither of them could bring themselves to talk about it.

Sam had been down the river every summer for as long as she could remember—in a dozen rainstorms, and in hot sun that burned the print of swimsuit straps into her shoulders. Harry, her father’s younger brother, sometimes brought his friends, who passed the bottle of schnapps to her when her father was away from the campfire. She liked the smell better than the burning taste. She knew all the campsites and the cliff-shaded turns of the river, and the long flat stretch through pasture at the end. It was a four-day float trip, or five if you dawdled, or three if her father had to get back to work.

Her uncle’s client was the reason they were on the river so late, when it was all sandbars and rocks. Sam hadn’t been told that exactly, but it was the feeling she got—that they were going for this client. He had come from somewhere else, and was staying in Montana only for the case. She met him at the put-in, unloading the gear. Harry introduced her as his niece.

“You got a name?” the client asked.

“Sam,” she said.

“Layton,” the client said. He was younger than her uncle, and he wasn’t tall, but he was big in the chest and arms. He set a full cooler on the ground and put out a hand to shake hers.

“God, I like being up here,” he said. “I’m part Crow, part Blackfoot, part Sioux, I think. Part Jewish.” His eyes were blue. He let her hand go. “You have perfect teeth,” he said. “Did you have braces?”

“No,” she said. She was awkward at fifteen, and praise made her suspicious.

Layton said, “This is gonna be fun.”

Her father and Harry drove both empty trucks downriver to the place they’d take out three days later, to leave one and bring the other back. Sam stayed with the boats, and Layton volunteered to stay with her—to keep her safe, he said. They sat on the bank with the gear, sliding the coolers along the grass as the sun moved, to keep them in the shade. Sam was reading
The Thorn Birds
, bought at the supermarket along with the ice and groceries on the way out of town.

“It’s not on your reading list,” her father had said, dropping it in her lap in the truck. “But it’s the best thing they had.”

The boarding school had sent her a summer reading list with thirty books on it, books like
The Portrait of a Lady
and
Tender Is the Night
, but in her reluctance she’d forgotten to bring one along.

Layton took out a shotgun, to clean and oil it. “I bet you’re a crack shot,” he said. “Montana girl like you. I bet you’ve got your own guns.”

Sam shook her head and kept reading. He brought the gun over to show her the sight, which was just a notch of steel on the barrel. He crouched close to her shoulder and she could smell the oil on the gun.

“You don’t need a fancy sight for a shotgun,” he said. “You ever fire one?”

“No,” she said. Her father had guns, but he hadn’t been hunting since her mother died. Sam barely remembered her mother; she’d hit black ice driving to Coeur d’Alene when Sam was four. She sometimes wondered if her father had quit hunting because he’d been busy taking care of her, or if he’d just stopped liking to shoot things.

“Ho, boy,” Layton said. He stood up. “We gotta take care of that. Get you a pheasant.”

“It isn’t bird season.”

“No one’ll know out here,” he said. He ran a cloth over the barrel.

“There are houses on the river,” she told him. “It’s not very remote.”

Layton laughed. “Remote. That’s a good word.”

She felt her cheeks heat up, but didn’t say anything.

“I don’t need
very
remote,” he said. “Just a little remote.”

Sam knew that her father wouldn’t tolerate poaching, so she left it for him to take care of. But when he and Harry drove up, her father just looked hard at the shotgun and started loading his boat.

They put in that afternoon, and in spite of the low water they got to the first campsite before dark. Her father had a two-man tent for himself and a burrow for her—a waterproof sack just big enough for a sleeping bag, with a mosquito net at the top. She set up the burrow with her sleeping bag inside, and Layton and Harry built a fire and talked about the case.

Harry was childless, and had been jobless on and off. He had always seemed to take pride in being the wild younger brother—Sam’s father was a district judge—but something had come over him a few years ago, and he had gone to law school and managed to pass the bar. He was a big man with a belly, and everyone liked him. He was trying to get out of debt, and the lawyer he had joined up with had given him Layton’s case.

There were four other plaintiffs, all lab workers with neurological damage from exposure to organic solvents. One of them couldn’t remember her children’s names if someone nearby was wearing perfume. Diesel fumes, bathroom cleaners, scented soaps, new carpet—anything could set it off. Another had stopped driving, because she didn’t always know whether a red light meant stop or go. Layton was a key plaintiff, because he had nothing in common with the women except the lab, where he had worked for a month on the wiring, and his tests matched all of theirs. It was good, too, to have a man involved; people were less likely to assume that he was inventing his symptoms. But his symptoms were milder, and he’d had to be cajoled into joining the lawsuit, and then into sticking around to go to depositions and have more tests. Sam guessed the river trip was part of the cajoling.

“I dunno,” Layton said, standing over the fire ring. “I lose my car keys sometimes, but I did that before. I’m not very litigious. I might just take that job in Reno and scrap this whole thing.”

Harry frowned at his tower of twigs. “When you could be here?” he said. “Fishing and hunting?”

“It’s not even bird season yet,” Layton said, and he winked at Sam. “If this thing drags out much longer, I’ll go nuts.”

Harry said nothing, but worked on the fire.

THE NEXT MORNING
Layton was in the water before breakfast, fishing in waders, which no one ever brought in a boat on the river—they just waded out in shorts. He caught a little brown trout, clubbed its head, and threw it in the raft. Sam’s father held the fish to the marks on the raft’s rubber bow and said it wasn’t big enough.

“Pull on the tail a little,” Layton said. “It’ll stretch.” He was already moving back into the current, and the fish was dying. Sam saw Harry give her father a look, and her father put the fish in the cooler.

They packed up early and got on the river. Sam rode in the front of her father’s raft, lying across the cooler that slid into the metal frame. She read for a while and then fell asleep with the sun on her back, waking to jump in the water and drag the raft over sandbars.

At camp that afternoon her father went fishing and she walked away from the river, up toward the hills. The grass in the open was pale yellow, and the path through the trees spiked with sunshine, but she was thinking about boarding school. She had a sense that she wasn’t equipped for it. And she was wondering if she really had perfect teeth, and if anyone but adults would ever care. When Layton came through the trees she knew she’d wanted him to show up, though she hadn’t known it before. His attention was different from other adult attention.

“I brought you something,” he said.

She waited, but he kept on up the trail, and she followed him. They got over the first hill from camp, and up a second, higher one, and down again into a clearing. There weren’t any farms or houses, and they were a long way from the river. Layton reached under his shirt and pulled out a small pistol, dark gray, with a short, square barrel. There was a fallen tree ten yards away, with small branches sticking up, and he stood an empty beer bottle upside down on one of the branches. The last of the beer stained the bark of the tree. Then he walked back and gave her the pistol. It was still warm from his skin, and heavy.

“Nine-millimeter Ruger semiautomatic,” he said. “My pride and joy.”

“Can they hear it?”

“I don’t think so, with those hills,” he said. “Anyway, we’re legal. We’re not killing anything.”

He took her right hand and shaped it around the gun.

“One hand like this, arm straight, just like the movies,” he said. He reached around her shoulders and positioned her left hand. “The other underneath.” He kicked the instep of her right foot. “Bring this leg back.”

Sam stepped back and pointed the gun at the bottle, not really breathing, with his chest against her back.

“Close one eye,” he said. “Cover your target with the barrel. The gun’s going to kick up, but it’ll drop right back where you need it. You only need to squeeze a little.” He let her go and stepped away.

She missed the bottle completely on the first shot, and the kick surprised her: the gun’s explosion shot through her hands and shoulders and down into her legs. The second time she blew away the upended bottom. The third time she hit the broken-off neck. Then there was just a little triangle of glass sticking up from the tree.

“Go for it,” Layton said.

She did, and hit it, and there was nothing left but a stub of branch.

“Hit the branch,” Layton said.

And she did. She’d never been so proud of anything. Layton reached out and rubbed the top of her head, quick.

“She’s a sharpshooter,” he said. “You’re not afraid of the kick yet, so you’re not anticipating anything. You’ve got to keep that.”

“Okay,” she said. She could feel herself grinning like an idiot.

“Those perfect teeth,” Layton said.

She closed her mouth and looked at the scarred tree where the bottle had been, which made her want to smile again, but she didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” Layton said.

“That’s okay,” she said.

When they walked back to camp, Layton veered off, so they came from different angles. Her father and Harry didn’t say anything. Sam thought they must have heard the shots, but she figured it could have been Layton shooting alone. She had hit quarters propped in the tree bark, and made a smiley-face in a piece of paper. In the pocket of her shorts she carried an exploded hollow-point, which Layton said wasn’t legal to buy anymore, and a warped quarter. Layton slipped the folded smiley-face into the camp garbage bag, and told Harry he didn’t think there were pheasants out here at all.

Sam’s father was making enchiladas, and chipping ice for margaritas with a pick. He made one without tequila for Sam. Layton asked for a virgin, too—alcohol made him nauseated since the work in the lab—and got out a little stereo with batteries. Sam’s father said it would ruin the silence of nature, but pretty soon he was dancing at the cookstove, singing along with reggae covers. It was still light, and the swallows dived in the canyon. Her father two-stepped over with a big plastic spoon and a chip full of salsa, singing in falsetto, “No you ain’t—seen—nothin’ like the Mighty Quinn.” He gave her the chip and kissed her on the forehead.

Her uncle Harry had too many margaritas and started talking about the case, about those poor, sick women with their lives ruined, and the gall of the lawyers who said they were making it up. When it got dark he went to bed. The other three sat close around the orange coals of the fire, and her father made up blues songs on the harmonica.

After a while, Layton said, “I need someone to walk on my back if I’m gonna row tomorrow. I’d ask you,” he said to Sam’s father, “but I’m guessing you weigh about two-fifty.”

Her father didn’t say anything, he kept playing harmonica.

Layton looked to Sam, who looked at the fire.

“It just takes a minute,” he said. “I threw it out on a job, and rowing that boat messed it up.”

Her father kept his eyes closed, the harmonica wailing. Sam stood up.

“Shoes off,” Layton said.

She slipped off her sandals and left them by the fire. Layton lay on his stomach on the ground. “Okay, step on careful,” he said. “Right in the middle.” She stepped, squeezing the air out of his voice. “Now the other foot,” he said. “Keep your balance.” She could feel his ribs beneath her toes. “Now walk forward, slowly, then back,” he said.

She did, and her father got up from the fire. “I’m beat,” he said. “We should get an early start tomorrow.”

Sam looked at him and he nodded, as if agreeing with himself. He put away his harmonica and disappeared into the dark where his tent was pitched. She could hear the rustle of nylon and the whine of the zipper, and then the night was quiet.

“One more time,” Layton said. “That’s so great. Now if you kneel with your knees between my shoulder blades, that’s all I need.”