“The guy deliberately destroyed my tackle and lied in my face about it,” Clete said.

“Sometimes you’ve got to walk away, Cletus.”

“That’s what I did. And I feel just like somebody put his spit in my ear.”

But I knew what was eating him. After Sally Dee’s plane had smacked into a hillside on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that someone had poured sand into the fuel tanks. Clete blew Montana like the state was on fire. Now, unless he wanted someone asking questions about his relationship to Sally Dee and Sally’s clogged fuel lines, he had to allow one of Sally’s lowlifes to shove him around.

“Maybe the deal with your fly rod was an accident. Why’s a guy like that want to pick a beef with you? Sally’s dead. You said it yourself. The guy in the pickup is a short-eyes. You don’t load the cannon for pervs.”

“Good try.”

“You can use my spinning rod. Let’s go down on the Bitterroot.”

He thought about it, then took off his hat and put it back on. “Yeah, why not?” he said.

I thought I’d carried the day. But that’s the way you think when your attitudes are facile and you express them self-confidently at the expense of others.

IT WAS EVENING when the red pickup with the diesel-powered engine came up the dirt road, driving too fast, its headlights on high beam, even though the valley was only in part shadow, the oversize tires slamming hard across the potholes. The truck slowed at the entrance to Albert’s driveway, as though the men inside the cab were examining the numbers on the archway at the entrance. Clete’s Caddy was parked by the garage, up on the bench, against the hill, its starched top and waxed maroon paint job like an automobile advertisement snipped out of a 1950s magazine.