“What, then?”
“She’s an Indian. Salish-Kootenai.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Around here it sure does.”
Johnny slumped in the seat. Joe wondered if Botree would mind that he went to a strip club with her brother. He jerked his head as if to sling the thought from his mind, and tried to think of Abigail, a wedge he could slip into the gap. Abruptly he knew that he had never loved her. At the fore of his feelings lay sympathy. They’d been together because the community had expected it. He suddenly understood that he’d spent his life following patterns that were designed by other people.
He felt the faint glimmerings of actual freedom, a sensation that scared him. At a red light he looted through the front window of a tavern. There was another bar across the street. Town was where people went when they didn’t have anywhere else to go. They drank and loved and fought, and Joe wished he could be one of them, but knew he never would. He was tired of trying to be like everyone else.
19
By June the days were long slabs of sun. Weather moved down the valley like water in a ditch. Joe limped around the house without his cane, saving it for outdoor walks on rough ground. He tied a leather strip to its handle and carried it slung over his back like a carbine. He no longer wore a bandage on his knee.
Botree offered to take him fishing. They rose early and drove the mud-spattered ranch rig to a dirt road heading south. Owen and Johnny watched the boys. An overnight snow lay like shredded lace against the red rock slopes.
“I can’t believe it snowed in summer,” Joe said.
“When I was a girl, it snowed in July.”
“At least August’s safe.”
“Coop said they got snowbound in August when he was a kid. They wore long underwear all year long.”
“Must be hard on kids in winter.”
“Winter’s hard on everything.”
“I mean school,” Joe said. “I had to walk up and down a hill every day for twelve years.”
“I don’t see having that problem.”
“The school bus come all the way out to the ranch?”
“No,” Botree said. “I’ll be home schooling.”
“What’s that?”
“Teaching them at home. They’re already off to a good start. Dallas knows the alphabet and can count to a hundred.”
“You won’t send those boys to school?”
Botree shook her head.
“Don’t the state get on you?”
“Not here,” she said. “A lot of people do it. You’d be surprised.”
“How come?”
“Freedom to learn, Joe. School doesn’t have anything to do with learning anymore.”
“It doesn’t?”
“You take a puppy and you train it for a month. Then you put it on a bus fall of other puppies. When it comes back home it starts shitting in the house again.”
“You lost me already.”
“Schools aren’t educating kids, Joe. They’re raising them. That’s my job.”
“Teaching is the school’s job. Teachers go to college for it. They’re trained, like any work.”
“Trained to make kids shut up and sit down,” Botree said. “They have class until the bell rings, then it’s time to stop. That doesn’t have anything to do with learning.”
“Keeping your kids out of school doesn’t sound that great to me.”
“If I sent them, it would make me a hypocrite.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s supported by taxes, which I don’t believe in paying.”
“This is a state road.” Joe said, “Does driving it make you a hypocrite, too?”
Botree swerved to avoid a rough spot. “Tax money working hard there.”
“I tell you what,” Joe said. “It’s pretty easy not to believe in something. Do you have a driver’s license?”
“No.”
“How about a telephone?”
“No.”
“Reckon your kids don’t believe in brushing their teeth or taking baths.”
“You leave them out of this.”
Along the river, rock bluffs glinted orange and green, laced with crevices like dark veins. Botree stopped for gas. The attendant wore a cap emblazoned with the emblem of the Buffalo Bills and carried a pistol on his hip. Leaning behind the counter was a military rifle gleaming with oil. Botree paid and left.
“It’s still the Wild West out here, ain’t it?” Joe said.
“Not really. All those guys were from the East — Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp. Billy the Kid was from New York. Families back East sent their crazy sons out here. That lawless time only lasted about twenty years.”
“Still pretty wild to me.”
“Only for somebody like Johnny. He believes that Code of the West stuff. It’s a big crock, but you can’t tell any of them.”
“Them?”
“All the young boys,” Botree said. “The worst is when they start trying to be outlaws because they think outlaws are cool. They can’t rob trains or rustle cattle anymore, so the only thing left is moving drugs.”
“You know a lot about it.”
“Don’t take much to know. Over half the people locked up are in for drugs, including Dallas’s daddy. That leaves the real outlaws free.”
“If a drug dealer ain’t an outlaw, what is?”
“Killer. Rapist. Robber. People who like to hurt people.”
“Are you saying they don’t lock them up?”
“I’m saying half of them go free because the cells are already filled with guys who picked the wrong drug.”
“Well, what’s the right drug?”
“Alcohol, or cigarettes.”
“Look, Botree. The way you talk and all, I guess it makes me think you might be a dope addict or something.”
The truck weaved from her laughter. She lifted her foot from the accelerator and straightened the wheel, still laughing.
“No,” she said. “I don’t even smoke or drink.”
“Then what’s this all about?”
“Making something illegal doesn’t stop people from doing it, it Just turns them into criminals. Laws should protect us from bad people. Nothing else. If they protect us from ourselves, they hurt freedom.”
Joe was astonished not only by Botree’s words but also by her vehemence. He had never spoken with such conviction about anything, not even his work or family. What she said made a certain sense but he couldn’t put the bootlegger at home in the same category as a town drug dealer.
“All I know,” Joe said, “you all sure got a funny way of being free. Don’t pay taxes or get a driver’s license. Coop don’t believe in daylight saving time, and you don’t believe in schools. What’s Owen against?”
“Gun laws, mainly.”
“So’s that guy at the gas station. That looked like some kind of machine gun he had.”
“No, it was an AR-15.”
“Reckon you’re a gun expert, too.”
“It’s made by Colt. The civilian model of an M-16. The only difference is it doesn’t have the full-auto lever. Takes the same ammunition as an M-16,”
“And what’s that?”
“Two twenty-three caliber in a thirty-round magazine.”
She rounded a curve and the river valley opened before them, like a fan. An eagle dove at an osprey that carried a fish. The osprey dropped the fish and the eagle caught it in midair and glided to a bare tree limb.
“What’s so special about Frank’s place?” Joe said.
“Who told you about that?”
“Your brother.”
“If it was Owen, you’d know what was special. So it must have been Johnny and he let something slip.”
“You know your brothers all right.”
“If this has to stand between us, there’s nothing we can do. I can’t tell you about Frank.”
“Can’t or won’t.”