Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

He waded into the river and picked up the Frisbee and walked to the shade of the rock, where the college boys were sitting on blankets with an ice chest set among them. They were suntanned and hard-muscled, innocently secure in the knowledge that membership in a group of people such as themselves meant that age and mortality would never hold sway in their lives.

"This dog's wore out. If you want to feed him, why not just do it? Don't make him drown hisself to get a little food," Lucas said.

One of the boys propped himself up on his elbow and squinted into the sun with one eye.

"You think that up all by yourself?" he asked.

"It's five of y'all, one of me. I know what you can do. But don't torment a dumb animal," Lucas said.

One of the other boys removed his sunglasses and started to his feet, sand sifting off of his

body. But the boy who was propped on one elbow put a hand on his friend's arm.

"You got a point. Why don't you feed him?" he said, and tossed a sack of lunch trash to Lucas.

Lucas started up the trail, then knelt and gave the dog a half-eaten weenie.

"Hey, buddy, what's your name?" the college boy yelled after him.

"Lucas Smothers."

"How about throwing our Frisbee back, Lucas Smothers?"

Lucas sailed it through the air, then picked up the dog under the stomach and put it into the backseat of Sue Lynn's car.

Sue Lynn had watched it all without saying a word. Now she was staring at him with a strange light in her face, pushing her hair out of her eyes, tilting her chin up as though she were having a conversation with herself.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"I'd better get home. Billy Bob gets in trouble if I ain't around."

"You want to drive?" she asked.

"I don't mind."

They headed up the highway, following the Blackfoot, through timbered canyons and meadow-land, through sunlight and shady areas where spring-water leaked across the asphalt. The dog was already sound asleep on the backseat. Sue Lynn moved closer to Lucas and took his right hand off the steering wheel and held it in hers.

When he looked over at her, her gaze was focused straight ahead, her eyes sleepy with thoughts he couldn't fathom.

Tell me women ain't a puzzle, he thought.

Chapter 15

The next day I drove to a Catholic church in Missoula's university district. The chapel area was empty, the confessional booths stacked with furniture. A secretary in the pastor's office told me I could find the pastor at his home down the street. I walked a block under maple trees to a tan stucco house with a neat yard and tulip beds and saw a tall man in an undershirt and black trousers up on the roof.

"Can I help you?" he said, peering down through an overhang of maple leaves.

"I'd like to go to Reconciliation," I replied.

"You have a problem with heights?"

I climbed the ladder and joined him in a flat, sunless place where he had hung his tool bag on the chimney and was eating his lunch. The blueness of the sky overhead looked like a river through a gap in the canopy of the maple trees, as though the earth were turned upside down and we were viewing a riparian landscape from high above.

The priest's name was Hogan and he offered me a sandwich from his lunch sack. He talked politely for a moment, then realized the origin of my awkwardness with the ritual that Catholics today call Reconciliation.

"You're not a cradle Catholic?" he asked.