Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. Maile Meloy
into their buckets.
He walked back outside, into the dark, and looked out over the flat stretch of land beyond the fences. The moon was up, and the fields were shadowy blue, dotted with cows. His hip was stiff and sore. He had to pee, and he walked away from the barn and watched the small steaming crater form in the snow. He wondered if maybe he had planted a seed, with Beth Travis, by demonstrating his seriousness to her. She wouldn’t come back—it was impossible to imagine her doing that drive again, for any reason. But she knew where he was. She was a lawyer. She could find him if she wanted.
But she wouldn’t. That was the thing that made him ache. He buttoned his jeans and shifted his hip. He had wanted practice, with girls, and now he had gotten it, but he wished it had felt more like practice. It was getting colder, and he would have to go inside soon. He fished her phone number out of his pocket and studied it a while in the moonlight, until he knew it by heart, and wouldn’t forget it. Then he did what he knew he should do, and rolled it into a ball, and threw it away.
THE SUMMER SHE TURNED FIFTEEN, Sam Turner took her last float trip down the river with her father. It was July, and hot, and the water was low. Hardly anyone was on the river but them. They had two inflatable Avon rafts with oaring frames—Sam and her father in one, her uncle Harry and a client from Harry’s new law firm in the other. In the fall, she would be a sophomore, which sounded very old to her. She’d been offered a scholarship to a boarding school back east, but she hadn’t officially accepted it yet. Applying had been her father’s idea, but now he looked dismayed every time the subject came up. Everyone said what an opportunity it was, so much better than the local schools, but neither of them could bring themselves to talk about it.
Sam had been down the river every summer for as long as she could remember—in a dozen rainstorms, and in hot sun that burned the print of swimsuit straps into her shoulders. Harry, her father’s younger brother, sometimes brought his friends, who passed the bottle of schnapps to her when her father was away from the campfire. She liked the smell better than the burning taste. She knew all the campsites and the cliff-shaded turns of the river, and the long flat stretch through pasture at the end. It was a four-day float trip, or five if you dawdled, or three if her father had to get back to work.
Her uncle’s client was the reason they were on the river so late, when it was all sandbars and rocks. Sam hadn’t been told that exactly, but it was the feeling she got—that they were going for this client. He had come from somewhere else, and was staying in Montana only for the case. She met him at the put-in, unloading the gear. Harry introduced her as his niece.
“You got a name?” the client asked.
“Sam,” she said.
“Layton,” the client said. He was younger than her uncle, and he wasn’t tall, but he was big in the chest and arms. He set a full cooler on the ground and put out a hand to shake hers.
“God, I like being up here,” he said. “I’m part Crow, part Blackfoot, part Sioux, I think. Part Jewish.” His eyes were blue. He let her hand go. “You have perfect teeth,” he said. “Did you have braces?”
“No,” she said. She was awkward at fifteen, and praise made her suspicious.
Layton said, “This is gonna be fun.”
Her father and Harry drove both empty trucks downriver to the place they’d take out three days later, to leave one and bring the other back. Sam stayed with the boats, and Layton volunteered to stay with her—to keep her safe, he said. They sat on the bank with the gear, sliding the coolers along the grass as the sun moved, to keep them in the shade. Sam was reading The Thorn Birds, bought at the supermarket along with the ice and groceries on the way out of town.
“It’s not on your reading list,” her father had said, dropping it in her lap in the truck. “But it’s the best thing they had.”
The boarding school had sent her a summer reading list with thirty books on it, books like The Portrait of a Lady and Tender Is the Night, but in her reluctance she’d forgotten to bring one along.
Layton took out a shotgun, to clean and oil it. “I bet you’re a crack shot,” he said. “Montana girl like you. I bet you’ve got your own guns.”
Sam shook her head and kept reading. He brought the gun over to show her the sight, which was just a notch of steel on the barrel. He crouched close to her shoulder and she could smell the oil on the gun.
“You don’t need a fancy sight for a shotgun,” he said. “You ever fire one?”
“No,” she said. Her father had guns, but he hadn’t been hunting since her mother died. Sam barely remembered her mother; she’d hit black ice driving to Coeur d’Alene when Sam was four. She sometimes wondered if her father had quit hunting because he’d been busy taking care of her, or if he’d just stopped liking to shoot things.
“Ho, boy,” Layton said. He stood up. “We gotta take care of that. Get you a pheasant.”
“It isn’t bird season.”
“No one’ll know out here,” he said. He ran a cloth over the barrel.
“There are houses on the river,” she told him. “It’s not very remote.”
Layton laughed. “Remote. That’s a good word.”
She felt her cheeks heat up, but didn’t say anything.
“I don’t need very remote,” he said. “Just a little remote.”
Sam knew that her father wouldn’t tolerate poaching, so she left it for him to take care of. But when he and Harry drove up, her father just looked hard at the shotgun and started loading his boat.
They put in that afternoon, and in spite of the low water they got to the first campsite before dark. Her father had a two-man tent for himself and a burrow for her—a waterproof sack just big enough for a sleeping bag, with a mosquito net at the top. She set up the burrow with her sleeping bag inside, and Layton and Harry built a fire and talked about the case.
Harry was childless, and had been jobless on and off. He had always seemed to take pride in being the wild younger brother—Sam’s father was a district judge—but something had come over him a few years ago, and he had gone to law school and managed to pass the bar. He was a big man with a belly, and everyone liked him. He was trying to get out of debt, and the lawyer he had joined up with had given him Layton’s case.
There were four other plaintiffs, all lab workers with neurological damage from exposure to organic solvents. One of them couldn’t remember her children’s names if someone nearby was wearing perfume. Diesel fumes, bathroom cleaners, scented soaps, new carpet—anything could set it off. Another had stopped driving, because she didn’t always know whether a red light meant stop or go. Layton was a key plaintiff, because he had nothing in common with the women except the lab, where he had worked for a month on the wiring, and his tests matched all of theirs. It was good, too, to have a man involved; people were less likely to assume that he was inventing his symptoms. But his symptoms were milder, and he’d had to be cajoled into joining the lawsuit, and then into sticking around to go to depositions and have more tests. Sam guessed the river trip was part of the cajoling.
“I dunno,” Layton said, standing over the fire ring. “I lose my car keys sometimes, but I did that before. I’m not very litigious. I might just take that job in Reno and scrap this whole thing.”
Harry frowned at his tower of twigs. “When you could be here?” he said. “Fishing and hunting?”
“It’s not even bird season yet,” Layton said, and he winked at Sam. “If this thing drags out much longer, I’ll go nuts.”
Harry said nothing, but worked on the fire.
THE NEXT MORNING Layton was in the water before breakfast, fishing in waders, which no one ever