“You did that deliberately,” Clete said, rising to his feet.
“Didn’t see it, Scout’s honor,” the driver said. “I saw them comb Sally Dee and his crew out of the trees. The whole bunch looked like pulled pork somebody had dropped into a fire. You’re a swinging dick, big man. Public campground is five miles south. Catch a fat one.”
CHAPTER 2
CLETE AND MY wife, Molly, and I had come to western Montana at the invitation of a friend by the name of Albert Hollister. Albert was a novelist and retired English professor who lived up a valley off the state road that ascended over Lolo Pass into Idaho. He was an eccentric, a gadfly, and in most ways a gentle soul. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, he had served time on a road gang in Florida when he was eighteen. He had also been a drifter and a roustabout until age twenty, when he enrolled in the same open-door, poor-boy college I had attended.
I had always admired Albert for his courage and his talent as an artist. But I tried not to let my admiration for him involve me in his quixotic battles with windmills. His rusted armor always lay at the ready, even though his broken lances littered the landscape. Unfortunately, many of his causes were just ones. The tragedy was they were not winnable, and they were not winnable because the majority of people do not enjoy the prospect of being tacked up on crosses atop a biblical hill.