James Burke - Bitterroot

"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.