“A thermometer. So I can take your temperature,” she had replied.
Then early this morning he had gotten up and met a man outside who was driving a new Ford pickup, one with an extended cab. She had watched through a crack in the curtains while Troyce took everything he owned from the SUV, plus a cake box and a big paper bag from Albertsons, and put it in the truck.
“Get dressed. We’re going up Rock Creek,” he said.
“What for?”
“It’s that kind of day.”
“Where’d the truck come from?”
“Bought it.”
“Why?”
“’Cause an SUV is a big box on wheels that carries air around inside itself and don’t have no other purpose.”
“Troyce, has this got anything to do with—”
“With what, little darlin’?”
“That man you been chasing — Jimmy Dale Greenwood. He saved me from getting acid thrown in my face. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Get in the truck, you little honey bunny.”
“Stop calling me dumb names.”
“They ain’t dumb. They’re from the heart, too.”
“You do it when you don’t want to talk about things.”
“If you ain’t Venus de Milo on skates.”
She shook her head in dismay.
They drove through Hellgate Canyon and crossed the Blackfoot River and followed the Clark Fork for another ten miles, then entered a spectacular mountain drainage called Rock Creek. The mountains on either side of the valley were thickly timbered and rose straight up into the sky, and the creek down below ran fast and clear over a bed of green and purple and apricot pebbles, the riffle undulating out of boulders marked with water-worn troughs like creases in elephant hide.
Troyce parked the truck in a grove of aspens and cottonwoods and dropped the tailgate. The wind was cool and fluttered the leaves in the grove and smelled of wood smoke from a log house set back in a meadow. “I want to show you something,” he said. He removed an antler-handled knife from the scabbard threaded on his belt. He gripped the blade between the tips of his fingers and his thumb, the handle pointed down. His whole body became motionless, the veins in his forearms as thick as soda straws. “You watching?”
“What are you doing, Troyce?”
He kept his eyes straight ahead. Then he flung the knife sideways, end over end, into a cottonwood trunk ten feet away. The blade embedded cleanly in the bark, the handle quivering with tension.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked.
“To show you what I can do in a fair fight. Except the man who busted off a shank in my chest don’t fight fair.”
“I’m not saying he does. I’m just saying sometimes you got to let the past go, no matter what people do to you.”
He pulled the knife from the tree trunk and wiped the blade on a square of paper towel he took from the grocery bag. “Would you get a fire
started?”
He didn’t tell her; he asked.
He untied the leather thong on a canvas rucksack and removed two GI mess kits from it. Then he began slicing tomatoes and onions on a chopping board, his eyes darting sideways as she hunted for sticks and pinecones to place inside an old fire ring. “You like ham-and-cheese omelets?” he asked.
“Everybody does.”