Nicki Molinari wore leather hiking shorts rolled tightly around his thighs, alpine climbing shoes with red laces and heavy lugs, and a purple polo shirt scissored off below his nipples. A nest of scars, like pink string, was festooned on his skin between one hip and his rib cage. On his left hand was a sun-bleached fielder's glove with a scuffed baseball gripped inside the pocket.
His eyes searched up and down the tunnel of trees, as though he heard voices in the wind.
"Were you talking to somebody out here?" he asked.
I saw his convertible parked in the sunshine. His men were nowhere around.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"That skank up in the Jocko Valley owes me seven hundred grand. I'll pay you a ten percent finder's fee if you can get it out of her."
"The skank is Cleo Lonnigan?"
"The language I use offends your sensibilities, that's too bad. Her husband was the business partner of some associates of mine. He stiffed them, they stiffed me. I ended up in Terminal Island. The shorter version is I got cluster-fucked eight ways from breakfast and that broad is living on a horse ranch bought with my money."
"Not interested," I said.
He flipped the baseball into the air and caught it.
"You want to play catch?" he said.
"No."
He grinned and tossed the ball at my face so that I had to catch it or be hit.
"See, you can do it," he said. "Come on, I got another glove in the Caddy."
"How about getting out of here?" I said.
"I thought you might have a sense of humor."
I walked past him, into the sunlight, and handed him his ball. I heard him follow me.
"What do you have against me?" he asked.
"You hurt people."
"Oh, you heard the stories, huh? I leave body parts in garbage grinders, throw people off roofs, stuff like that? It's DEA bullshit."
"I don't think so."
"Were you in the service?"
"No."
"I was in Laos, at a place where these sawed-off little guys called the Hmongs grew a lot of poppies. Me and about four hundred other guys. We got left behind. Why do you think that happened?"
"I don't know."
"Yeah, you do. You worked for the G. If you like government mythology about wiseguys, that's your business. What I do in five years don't add up to five minutes of what I seen in Vietnam. That includes dope getting flown out of the Golden Triangle on American planes."
"How'd you get out of Laos?"
"Play catch with me and I'll tell you the whole story," he said.
"Nope."
"Were you in the sack with Cleo?"
"You're out of line, Nicki."
"There's my first name again. I love it. I did some boom-boom with that broad, too. It was like curling up with an ice cube. Tell me I'm wrong."
He bounced the baseball up and down in the pocket of his glove, studying its scuffed surface, his mouth down-hooked at the corners.
That night I dreamed I saw Doc Voss standing waist-deep in a stream, under a yellow moon, his skin prickled with cold. Then his fly line stiffened in the riffle and the tip of his rod bent almost to the water's surface, trembling with tension.
He wrapped the line around his left forearm, so tightly his veins corded with blood, and horsed a long, thick-bodied brown trout through the shallows onto the gravel. He slipped a huge knife from a scabbard on his side and stooped over the trout and inserted the knife point into the trout's anus and slit its belly all the way to the gills.
Doc lifted the trout by its mouth and the unborn roe fell in a gush of heavy pink water from the separated skin in its belly and glistened on the rocks at Doc's feet. He looked up and grinned at me, but I hardly recognized him. His face had become skeletal, his eyes lighted with the moon's reflection off the river.
"Where are your waders, Doc?" I said.
He turned and walked away from me, the blade in his hand glowing with white fire.
I woke from the dream and went into the kitchen and opened a drawer where Doc often stuffed his shopping receipts. It took me a minute to find it, but there it was, crumpled up at the back of the drawer, the carbon of a bill of sale from Bob Ward's Sporting Goods.
"What are you doing in there?" Doc said behind me.
"I saw this receipt a week ago. For a pair of chest waders," I said.
"So?"
"Where are they?" I asked.
"I returned them," he replied.
"Without the receipt?"
"What are you saying, Billy Bob?"
"Did you drown that man?" My voice caught in my throat.
"Somebody else got to him first. Turn out the light when you go to bed," he said.
On Sunday I went to Mass at the Catholic church by the university, then drove out on the Clark
Fork west of town in a sun shower and sat on an enormous flat rock that slanted into the water. The river was wide, the color of green-tarnished copper, and cottonwoods dotted the banks and there were blue mountains in the distance. Upstream, a radio was playing gospel music in a parked pickup truck, and for just a moment I was nine years old again, at a camp meeting in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. The preacher had just lowered me backward into the river, and when the coldness of the water struck my lungs I opened my eyes involuntarily and looked upward at the lacy green canopy of the heartwood trees overhead and at the blue dome of sky and at the autumnal light that broke around the preacher's silhouette as though it had been poured from a gold beaker.
Then he lifted me from the water, my mouth gasping for air. When I walked with him toward the bank, where my father waited for me, the world did not seem changed but redefined in a way I could not explain at the time. The sky was joined to the rim of the earth; the trees fluttered with red and gold leaves all the way to the hazy outline of the Ozarks, and there was a cool, fecund odor of silt and ponded water and disturbed animal nests blowing out of the shade. Then a huge woman with a black-lacquered big-bellied Gibson hung around her neck commenced singing "I Saw the Light."
The preacher was as lean as a scarecrow. He spoke in tongues and clogged on the wood stage, a Bible cupped in his hand, while the congregation clapped and shouted with a thunderous rhythm that made the ground shake. The pitch of their voices was almost orgasmic, filled with joy and visceral release. Even my father, who ordinarily was a sober and reticent man, picked me up with one arm and danced in a circle.
It was a moment that others might parody or ridicule, but I'll never forget it. After my father and I had gotten into our pickup truck and were preparing to leave, the preacher leaned his head through the passenger's window. His hair looked like it had been cut with sheep shears; his face was as long as a horse's, his skin as rough as a wood shingle.
"You wasn't scared, was you?" he asked.
"No, sir," I lied.
"The papists got seven sacraments. We ain't got but one. That's why we really let 'er rip. You're river-baptized, son. From here on out, you take your church with you wherever you go, earth and sky and water and spirit, all of it burned forever into your soul. You ain't never got to be afraid," he said, his dark eyes bursting with certitude.
"What are you doin', slim?" a voice said behind me.
I turned and looked up at Temple Carrol, who stood on the down-sloping rock, her thumbs hooked in her back pockets.
"How'd you know I was here?" I asked.
"I saw you leaving the church, so I followed you."
"What's on your mind?" I said.
She sat down, just a little higher on the rock than I was, her knees pulled up before her. She wore brown jeans and loafers and white socks and she crossed her hands on her knees. "Was I too hard on you the other day?"
"Not in the least," I said. I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the current. The rock we sat on was pink and gray and dappled with the sunlight that shone through a cottonwood. I could see her shadow move next to me, then her fingers lifted a wet leaf off my shoulder and let it blow away in the breeze.
She moved her foot slightly and hit me in the thigh with the point of her shoe.
"Your feelings hurt?" she said.
"I thought I'd give you a couple of days' rest. Don't turn it into a production."
Her foot moved and punched me again.
"Hey," I said.
She poked me in the knee.
"Temple-" I turned around and looked directly in her face.
"What?" she said. Her hands looked small on top of her knees.
"With regularity I say the wrong things to you. I just don't want to do that anymore," I said.
"Come on, get off your butt. I'll buy you lunch," she said, rising to her feet, brushing the rock dust off her rump.
She seemed casual, pushing back her hair, looking at the trees puff with wind. But I could see her watching me out of the corner of her eye.
"Where we going?" I said.
She took a breath and cleared her throat and lifted her blouse off her skin as though the day were warm.
Because she stood higher on the rock than I, we were suddenly the same height. I looked at the milky greenness of her eyes and the color in her cheeks and the roundness of her arms and the way her mouth became like a small flower whenever there was an extended silence between us.
"Temple?" I said.
"Yes?"
"Where we going?"
She smelled like rain and leaves and there was a scent of raspberry soda on her breath. Her mouth was inches from mine and I saw her chest swell, the pulse quicken in her throat. Then she slipped on the rock and her weight fell against me.
Her hair touched my face and I felt her breasts and stomach and the tops of her thighs against me, and her ribs and the taper of her hips were like a gift suddenly placed in my palms when I helped her regain her balance. For just a moment, her mouth parted and her eyes looked into mine in such a way I never wanted to separate from her.
"It's real slippery here," I said, my face burning.
"Yes," she said. "Did you want to go to the restaurant on the river. The pizza place?"
"Sure. That's a grand place," I said. "I'll be right with you. I dropped some change a minute ago."
She walked back up the rock through a stand of birch trees that were white-trunked and stiff and arching slightly in the wind, while I pretended to hunt for coins down below, my back turned to her to conceal a problem involving a form of male rigidity that made me wonder at my level of maturity.
Maisey and Doc Voss'S Sunday evening began with an argument in the barn over a parrot, one Doc had just brought her from the pet store.
"You don't keep birds in cages! I don't want it!" she shouted.
"Then take it back. Or go feed it to an owl," he replied.
"That's a cruel and stupid thing to say!" They insulted and shouted at each other and slammed doors all over the house, breaking a bottle of milk in the sink, stepping on the cat's tail, briefly pausing in opposite parts of the house to refocus their anger and then find the other and reopen every wound possible.
While her father kicked an empty bucket over a fence in the yard and ground the starter on the truck, only to find, after starting the engine, that he had a flat tire, Maisey locked herself in her bedroom and changed into black panties and a black silk bra and loose khakis and a white blouse that exposed her navel and cleavage, and put on hoop earrings and rouged her cheeks and lipsticked her mouth and went to work on her eyes with liquid eyeliner and mascara and eye shadow.
When she flung open the bedroom door she looked out the front window and saw her father's truck lights disappearing in the dusk. A strange sense of disappointment and abandonment flooded through her, although she could not explain the Sense of desertion and fear that she felt.
She telephoned Steve, the boy down the road, and lit a cigarette over the sink and opened one of her father's bottles of beer and drank it on the front porch while she waited for her friend, her heart pounding without explanation.
The evening sky had turned yellow with dust and wind whipped the trees on the ridge above the house, and she could smell the rain that floated like a lavender vapor on the hills to the north. But whatever portent the evening held, whatever misadventure might wait for her down the road, she told herself she would shape and master it, that the martial energy beating in her temples would vanquish all the adversaries that invaded her sleep and degraded her person, that were made incarnate in the waking day by the sting of her father's words and the way he tried to control her.
That's what he couldn't understand, she thought. Every word of chastisement he used was like the probing fingers and tongue and phallus of the each of the faceless men who had raped her. It had never been so clear to her. Why couldn't her father see it? She wanted to scream the question in his face.
She and Steve drove in his car to a nightclub in Mis-soula, on a street that had once housed bordellos, then workingmen's bars, before it had been absorbed into the gentrification of the town as the town lost its blue-collar ways and gave itself over to art galleries and boutiques.
But there was still one nightclub on the street that shook with noise every night of the week. When Maisey and Steve walked to the entrance, the foothills had turned red in the sun's afterglow, and the bowl of sky above the valley was filled with plumes of yellow and purple cloud, as though they had been scoured out of the valley floor, and the dust that blew in the wind was cold and mixed with rain and as hard as grains of sand against her skin.
But even though a storm threatened the valley, the evening was nonetheless a grand one, and the smell of the air was so good and clean inside her lungs she didn't want to disconnect from it.
Maybe she and Steve should just drive out on the river someplace, maybe watch the deer drift down out of the trees to drink, maybe just eat hamburgers in a brightly lit restaurant full of family people and go to a movie afterward.
No, that's exactly what her father would want her to do, the kind of anal-retentive agenda he might as well write out on a clipboard for her.
She hesitated at the doorway. Men who wore motorcycle boots and gold earrings and leather vests without shirts stood at the bar, knocking back shots with beer chasers, their arms blue from the wrists to the armpits with tattoos. But young women, not much older than she, were in the club, too, and a rock 'n' roll band was belting it out on the stage, and three college boys who looked like football players were taking a breath of air at the entrance, grinning good-naturedly at her.
She smiled back at them, as though they were all old friends, and went inside, with Steve in front of her, his shirt hanging out of his pants, his flip-flops slapping on the floor, his face as trusting and vulnerable as a fawn's. But the football players never even glanced at him. Instead, she felt their eyes light on her mouth and rouged cheeks, her blouse, which hung on the tops of her breasts, the crease in her exposed hips when she walked. Unconsciously she slipped one hand in her back pocket to cover the elastic edge of her panties, which she believed had worked its way above the beltline of her khakis.
She and Steve sat in back, and when he was in the rest room she used her forged ID to order him a draft beer and a vodka collins for herself.
"There're some biker guys at the bar, Maisey. One of them just barfed in the washbasin, then mopped the puke off his mouth on the roller towel, and went back outside like nothing happened," Steve said when he came back to the table.
"Thanks for describing that, Steve," she said.
"Why'd you want to come here? It's full of losers," he said, surveying the other tables.
"Stop staring at people," she said.
"I wish I hadn't left you alone that night. I wish I'd had my father's.357. My father says the welfare system is producing armies of subhumans that are moving into the Northwest."
His presumption that he was responsible for her fate, that his presence could have prevented it, infuriated her and somehow diminished the level of injury that had been visited upon her. Steve twisted around and hooked one arm on the back of his chair and stared at the bikers as though he were visiting a zoo.
"Steve, until somebody puts his penis in your ass and comes in your mouth, don't tell me about subhumans," she said.
"That's sick," he said.
"I think if you say another word I'm going to slap your face," she said.
"Excuse me for telling you this, your attitude not only sucks, you look deeply weird in those clothes and that Frankenstein makeup," he said, and got up from the table and went through the front door onto the street.
The noise from the bandstand seemed to envelope her. She was alone now and suddenly regretted the rashness of her words. She looked around to see if anyone was watching her. But the people at the other tables, the crowd at the bar, the couples on the dance floor, were all involved with themselves and their drinks and their own conversations. It was dumb to think anyone cared what Maisey Voss was doing.
Through the open front door she saw Steve's car drive away, the neon glow from the nightclub rippling across his profile.
She would have to call her father for a ride home. She couldn't bear to think about it. She opened her purse and took out the money for another vodka collins.
The vodka was both cold and warm inside her at the same time. She chewed the cherries and orange slices on her molars and drank the sugar and melted ice in the bottom of the glass and went to the bar and ordered another drink and watched the bartender while he made it. A biker's arm brushed hers, but before she could react the biker turned and apologized, then resumed his conversation with his girlfriend, as though Maisey were not there.
The bartender wrapped a napkin around her drink and set it in front of her. She began counting out the money from her purse to pay for it but the bartender said, "Man down at the end's already got it."
"Which man?" she said, looking past the bikers into the haze of cigarette smoke.
But the bartender only shrugged and walked away.
She drank her vodka collins at the table and tried not to think about the phone booth in the corner, the one she would eventually walk to, almost like entering a Catholic confessional, where she would shut herself inside and drop the coins into the slot and admit to her father she couldn't get home by herself.
But the three college boys she had passed at the entrance were using it. Their upper torsos looked huge in their short-sleeve workout jerseys, and she decided the boys were part of the group she had seen running plays in pads and sweat shorts on the university practice field by the river.
Somehow their presence made her feel more at ease. In spite of their size there was nothing aggressive or mean-spirited about them. In fact, their buzzed haircuts, the youthfulness in their faces, the shine of cologne on their freshly shaved jaws, made her think of country boys back home who could twist a steer into the ground by its horns but who wouldn't get on a dance floor at gunpoint.
One of them nodded at her, then turned his attention back to his friends.
"You want another drink, hon?" the waitress asked.
"Yeah. Let me pay you now, though," Maisey said.
"That's a new one," the waitress said.
After Maisey finished her drink, she went to the rest room. When she came back, the waitress was picking up her empty glass and setting down another vodka collins on a napkin.
"Who paid for this?" Maisey said.
"Some guy at the bar," the waitress replied.
"Which guy?"
"Honey, this is a dump. One of these bozos buys you a drink, marry him," the waitress said, and walked away, her short skirt swishing across the tops of her fishnet stockings.
Maisey slid another cigarette from her pack, then realized she didn't have matches to light it. Her face was hot, her ears humming with the noise in the room. The electronic feedback in the band's speaker system was beginning to affect her like fingernails on a blackboard. She took a long swallow out of her glass and felt the coldness of the vodka flow through her like wind blowing across snow.
One more drink and she would call her father. By that time his silence and the depression he would wear like a mantle on the long ride home, the acknowledged failure of their relationship that would almost form a third presence in the car, the echoes of all the insults they had hurled at each other earlier, would be lost in fatigue and the ennui that always followed their arguments and the residual numbness of the vodka that now nestled in her system like an old friend.
A boy in his early twenties, in beltless khakis and a pressed, long-sleeved denim shirt with a pair of glasses in the pocket, was standing by her chair now. He held a green and gold can of ginger ale in his hand, and the wetness of the can dripped through his fingers. His eyes crinkled at the corners.
"Can I help you with something?" she asked.
"I heard you talking and I knew you were from the South. I'm from North Ca'lina. So it was me bought you the drinks. Did you mind I did that?" he said.
She tried to sort through what he had just said. Behind him, on a revolving bar stool, sat a man in a white, wide-brim Stetson and a cowboy shirt that rippled with an electric blue sheen. He was watching her and the boy with the naked curiosity of an animal. "Say again?" Maisey said.
"I didn't want to offend you by buying those drinks without asking, but you're really a pretty lady," the boy said.
"Who's that man watching us?" she said, then realized her anxiety had made her seek reassurance from a stranger whose features disturbed her for reasons she didn't understand, like someone who belonged inside a drunk dream.
"That's Wyatt. He wants me to rodeo with him, but I think I'm gonna study aeronautical engineering at the university."
"Aeronautical engineering at the University of Montana?"
"I haven't made up my mind. I might study religion or forestry instead. You want to dance?"
"I have to go home."
"Another vodka collins is coming. You got to stay for the drink. It's bad manners if you don't stay for the drink."
"Your friend is using his hand for a codpiece. Who are you?" she said, her head spinning.
"I'm the guy bought the drinks," he replied, and wrinkled his nose.
She gathered up her purse and rose from the table and walked toward the front door, realizing, as the blood rushed to her feet, that she was drunk.
Outside, the air was cold, the wetness of the street glazed with yellow light. She walked toward the main thoroughfare, although she had no idea what she intended to do. The door of a parked car opened in front of her, and one of the football players stepped out on the sidewalk and grinned at her.
Then he was joined by his two friends. They towered over her, like trees. No matter which direction she turned, she could see nothing but the size of their chests and arms, the necks that were as thick as fire hydrants, the tautness of their grins.
"I want to catch a cab. Can I get one on Higgins?" she said.
"We'll take you home," one of the boys said.
"No, that's all right. I have money for a cab," she said.
"Come on, get in back. You shouldn't be out on the street by yourself," the same boy said.
His face seemed to come into focus for the first time. He had bad skin and his crewcut hair was peroxided. A tiny green shamrock was tattooed on his throat.
"I'm going now. Let me get by," she said.
But one of the other boys placed his arm around her shoulders. He inflated his bicep against her, like someone spinning the handle of a vise to show its potential, and the testosterone smell of his armpit rose into her face.
"Let go of me," she said, her eyes looking between their bodies at the backs of a couple who were walking in the opposite direction.
"There's a lot of street people around here, Maisey, guys with dirty things on their minds," the first boy said.
How did he know her name? she thought. They were pressing her inside the car now, not all at once, not in a violent fashion, just with the proximity of their size, almost as though they were her attendants, as though they knew her and what she thought and what her history was and what she deserved from them.
She was halfway in the car now, and the boy with peroxided hair leaned close to her face, blocking out all light from the street, his breath sweet with mouth spray.
He raised one finger to his lips. "Nobody's out here. Just us, Maisey. Don't act like a kid," he said. She got her hand inside her purse and felt it close on a metal nail file. His right eye suddenly looked as big as a quarter, as blue and deep as an inkwell.
But a pair of high-beam headlights pulled in behind the boys' car. The three boys stood erect, their heads turning. A car door opened, and a figure walked out of the headlights' glare, and Maisey could see the physical size of the three boys somehow deflating, like air leaking from a balloon.
"That's my friend. Y'all shouldn't be bothering her," the boy who had bought her the drinks said.
But the football players, if that's what they were, were not looking at the boy who'd said he was from North Carolina. Instead, they stared at the man in the wide-brim white hat and blue silk shirt who stood behind him, his hands curled inward, simian-like, toward his thighs.
"We got no quarrel with you, buddy," the boy with peroxided hair said.
"That's right, you don't," the man in the hat said. "That's why you little farts are gone."
Maisey looked on in disbelief as her three tormentors walked away.
"We'll get you home safe," the boy from North Carolina said.
"I can get a cab," she said.
"Those guys will come after you when me and Wyatt leave. They're always causing trouble here'bouts. Is your name Maisey?" he said.
"How did you know?"
"I heard that guy use your name, that's all," he replied. He held the door open for her, his face suffused with goodwill. Maisey looked back at the nightclub. One of the football players stood just inside the entrance, cleaning his nails with a toothpick. She got into the car.
The man named Wyatt sat in back and the boy, who said his name was Terry, started the engine. The car was red, low-slung, high-powered, with a stick shift on the floor, and Terry drove it full out, tacking up on the curves as they headed toward Bonner and the Blackfoot River, dropping back in front of a semi so abruptly the car shook on its springs.
But even though he drove too fast, she began to feel all the evening's fear and apprehension and self-condemnation go out of her chest.
"What'd you say your last name was?" the man named Wyatt said.
"Voss. Maisey Voss," she said.
"You related to a doctor by that name?" Wyatt asked.
"He's my father."
"I read about him in the paper. Man named Holland live with y'all?"
Maisey turned in the seat. "Billy Bob Holland does," she said.
"I declare. Now that's a fellow I admire. He was the lawyer for my sister, Katie Jo Winset. Ain't this world a miracle of coincidences?" Wyatt said.
"I don't understand," Maisey said.
"A sweet thing like you don't have to." Wyatt leaned forward, his arm propped on the back of her seat, his eyes close to hers. "You like Terry?"
"Pardon?"
"He likes you. He gets that possum grin on his face and I know what he's thinking about." "Lay off it, Wyatt," Terry said. Wyatt's hand lay close to her shoulder. The nails were clipped and clean, the fingers as pale and thick and gnarled as turnips. The back of his ring finger touched her skin. She felt herself jerk, as though she had been burned with a piece of ice.
"Mr. Holland got a young'un up at Dr. Voss's place? A boy named Lucas?"
"Yes," Maisey said, looking straight ahead now, watching a lighted gas station slide behind them in the darkness.
"You know who I am, don't you?" Wyatt said at the back of her head.
"No."
"You ever go to Sunday school?"
"Yes."
"Then you know it's a sin to lie."
"Give it a rest, Wyatt," Terry said. The inside of the car became very quiet. Maisey forced herself to turn and look in the backseat. Wyatt was staring at Terry, his head tilted slightly. Terry glanced in the rearview mirror, his eyes like two marbles caught inside the glass.
"I'm gonna pull in for gas," Terry said.
"You do that," Wyatt said.
"Wyatt?"
But Wyatt only grinned and didn't answer. "Wyatt?" Terry said again.
"Lend me your comb. This beautiful girl has made me sweat inside my hat," Wyatt said.
Terry pulled off the highway into a truck stop and parked the car by a gas pump. He got out and put the nozzle into the gas tank and began cleaning the windows. He seemed to study Wyatt's face through the glass.
"You want me to pay for it?" Terry asked.
"No, I'm going in. Maybe get us some fried pies. Other supplies, too," Wyatt said, as though coming out of a trance. He smiled in a knowing way at Terry and pushed Maisey's seat forward and got out of the car.
Terry watched him enter the truck stop, then he pulled the gas nozzle from the tank and clanked it back on the pump and got into the car. Through the truck stop window he watched Wyatt pay for the gas, then return to the counter and exchange a dollar bill for silver and go into the men's room.
Terry chewed on his lip, his eyes busy with thought.
"What are you doing?" Maisey said.
"Don't worry about it," Terry said, and started the car and burned rubber onto the highway.
They roared through Bonner, passing the lumber mill and a church and a school and rows of company houses with birch trees in the yards. Terry poured on the gas at the edge of town and the tires squealed on the curves above the Blackfoot River.
"Slow down," she said.
"Don't be telling me what to do, Maisey," he said.
"Where are we going?"
"To your house. Where you think?" he replied.
"I didn't tell you where I live."
"Yeah, you did. You just don't remember."
He had his glasses on now and he was breathing through his mouth, like a fish on land, his cheeks and neck bladed with color.
"You were the man at my window," she said.
"I'm taking you home now. That's all you should care about. Then I'm going back for Wyatt. You don't realize what you've made me do."
"Made you do what?" she asked.
"Things just don't work out for me," Terry said, and hit his fist on the steering wheel. "I just don't know why. They just never work out. I'd like to tear somebody apart right now."
He squeezed the floor shift knob tightly in his hand and passed a camper on the double stripe, whipping back into the proper lane an instant before an oncoming log truck crested the hill in front of them. He shot the finger at the truck's headlights.