“Oh, we’ll eat lunch, Joe. I got sandwiches in the truck.”
“What about the hook?”
“It’ll rust out.”
“This ain’t fishing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You wear the fish down, leave the hook in its mouth, and nurse it back to health. Then you turn it loose.”
“That’s right,” Botree said. “About like we’ve done with you.”
Wind fluttered the surface of the river, making it glitter like fire. Water drained from the folds of Joe’s clothes.
“You saying nobody’d care if I took off?” he said.
“The kids would care.”
“Anyone else?”
“Coop and them don’t, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t know what I mean.”
“When you figure it out,” she said, “you tell me.”
“I guess I was wondering about you.”
“I don’t know, Joe. Not yet I don’t.”
“When you figure that out,” he said, “you tell me.”
The river eddied around their bodies, and Botree extended her hand, the skin red from cold. They shook hands as if to seal a bet. Her eyes were dark and large. He tensed his arm and tugged as gently as possible and felt an answering pull. He leaned forward and the water rose along his chest. He could see it darken her shirt as she moved toward him. Their heads brushed. She was smelling him with quick intakes of air. He pressed his forehead to hers and rolled his face across her face. Their lips moved over each other but they didn’t kiss, as if the skin of their faces needed to become familiar first. They leaned together like birds in wind. The river spread around them, Joe tightened his hand around hers.
“I don’t much care for catch and release,” he said.
Botree eased his hand away until he was holding water.
“There’s no catch,” she said.
They ate sandwiches on a log by the truck. His leg felt strong. The horizontal lines of Montana landscape lay before them — a stripe of blue water, the narrow brightness of a rock shore, a long chunk of green forest, the jagged gray mountains and a strip of blue sky. The only vertical lines were cottonwood trunks near the water, like bars to a prison of light and space.
“You’re sure good at fishing,” Joe said.
“Not much else to do around here.”
“I never seen anybody run around like that and catch so many.”
“You want shallow water,” Botree said. “The fish have less room and they become predictable. Like people in town.”
“Did you ever fish the other way?”
“I tried lake fishing, sure. You sit and wait for the fish to come to you. I like to go where the fish are. It’s easier with a raft.”
“It might be drier.”
“Just quicker. A raft gets you from place to place.”
“So rafting is for work. What’s Montana fun?”
“Break horses.”
She smiled easily, the sunlight glowing in her hair. Behind her the sky was thick and blue.
“You know,” Joe said. “I been here awhile now, on my own up Rock Creek, and with you all. I spent some time in town, too. But I always feel like I’m over my head. Like I’m in another country. It’s been that way since I got here.”
“What are you running from, Joe?”
He looked at her and away. A single cloud moved a patch of darkness along the valley floor.
“I know it’s something, Joe. Everyone does. They asked me to spy on you but I wouldn’t do it. So I’m asking now for myself only.”
“Why?”
“Once in Texas I opened the door and found a woman with three kids on my porch. Three of the prettiest little babies you ever saw. They looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why. I knew I didn’t know them. And she just stood there, staring at me. Then she started crying. I thought she was crazy. I asked her what was the matter, and she said she was crying for me. Me, I said, why for me? Because you don’t know, she said. Don’t know what, I said. Then she cried more and said, I’m sorry to have to tell you. What, I said. I was getting mad.
“She touched Abilene, and right then I knew why her kids were so familiar. They looked like Abilene’s daddy. We stood there staring and damned if he didn’t come home. When he saw us, he drove right on without even stopping. I never saw him again.
“I don’t want that happening again, Joe. I couldn’t stand myself if it did.”
“I’ve never been married and I don’t have any kids.”
“There was a time when the only thing that kept me alive was knowing my kids needed me.”
“Good thing you had them.”
“Yeah, but it was having them that made me not want to live.”
“I don’t think I understand exactly.”
“A woman alone with kids is hard is all.”
“I didn’t leave no wife and kids behind.”
“It better be that way.”
“It is. There’s something, all right, but not that.”
She looked at him for a long time. He felt as if she were gauging him, or maybe gauging herself. She had made mistakes. She was making one with him. He was stunned to realize that he loved her.
“How do you know when to move?” he said.
“Back home from Texas?”
“No, not that. Botree, it don’t matter to me what you did down there. I don’t judge a past. All we’ve got’s now.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“Fishing. I seen you going back and forth from place to place,”
“There’s something they call the twenty-minute theory. When a fish is caught, all the trout leave that part of the water. Twenty minutes later, they come back.”
“Maybe it’s the other way around.”
“How’s that again?”
“Maybe the trout know a human will move on within twenty minutes of catching a fish,”
“Maybe,” she said. “Some men move on sooner than that.”
“I got nowhere to go, Botree. This is where I went to.”
“It’s going to take me a while to get used to a man who talk like you.”
“I didn’t used to be this way,” he said.
Rising, she offered a hand, but he pretended not to see it. He wanted to touch her again, but it was more important to work his leg. It had begun to stiffen. He followed her through the brush to the track, with the cane slung across his back, determined not to use it. He remembered how Boyd had quit smoking by keeping a cigarette in his shirt pocket until it crumbled to dust.
Botree drove uphill along a dirt road and slowed for a switchback carved into the mountain. Small stones thrown by the tires dropped over the steep edge and bounced down the slope. She steered with both hands, her head hunched between her shoulders, intent on the narrow road. The trees became smaller, Douglas fir and hemlock, and the ground held little grass. The road ended at a small plateau and Botree left the truck.
Joe followed her along a path that climbed at a gentle angle. Moss campion spread like a carpet along the rocky earth. After half a mile, Joe smelled rotten eggs. Botree stopped amid steam rising from a pool of water. She sat on the warm stone beside the water.
“Animals sleep here in the winter,” she said.
“What is it?” he said.
“Hot springs. This is a safe one. Some are real hot. The old mountain men who found them thought they were passages to Hell.”
“I never seen one before.”
“There’s a lot of them around if you know where to go. One at Lolo feeds a swimming pool.”
“Can you drink it?”
“No, I just thought it might be good for your knee.”
She leaned back on her elbows and stretched her legs. The jeans were taut to her skin. The spring sunlight gave her hair a red cast, her face a golden warmth. Her eyelids drooped. Joe walked to the edge of the rock and followed an animal trail that led higher up the mountain. He bent forward from the waist to keep his weight spread among his limbs. He remembered climbing a sheer rock cliff above the railroad tracks with Boyd as a kid. They’d spent an hour walking the tracks, searching for a loose railroad spike to use as a climbing tool. Boyd had always gained the summit first. He waved his arms over his head and bellowed his triumph and threw his railroad spike high in the air.