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  Lily knows what her sister will say about her ears, the same thing their mother used to say: "If God had intended for us to have holes in our ears, he would've put them there." She knows what Rosy will say about Fred, too. "He's a walking heart attack." Lily supposes he is. He is a fatty. But a good dancer. At any rate, Lily's heart is not attached to him. That's what she'll tell Rosy if ever she meets Fred: "Here today, gone tomorrow." Rosy will say, "You cannot take a gift from a man you intend to leave." But why not? Anyway, she doesn't intend to leave him today. She wants pampering, and Fred seems willing.

  "What we ought to have, we ought to have fish," Fred calls as he walks over the grass toward her, a bag of groceries in each arm. "River's so low I can see them in there."

  "I'm not fond of fish," Lily says.

  "Are you crazy?" He sets the bags on the table, wipes his forehead with the back of his arm. He's not bad to look at, Lily has decided. His face is more thick than fat, a broad-chinned Saxon face with kind brown eyes, though they sink a little too deep, appear smaller than they are, pillowed by puffy flesh. Still, it's a kind face, not at all bad to look at, and he seems comfortable in his skin. Today he's wearing loose jeans belted with a plain sand-cast Navajo buckle, a white button-down shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled up. These are his work clothes. He sells life insurance.

  "I like tuna salad," she says.

  "You are crazy. You're in the middle of trout country."

  "I know that."

  Fred begins pulling plastic deli containers and packets of white butcher paper from one bag.

  "I like it in lots of mayonnaise with chopped dill pickle. I guess you could say I like fish if I can't taste it."

  Fred shakes his head. He pulls out two sturdy china plates, white linen napkins, and forks, real forks from his home, not plastic, he hates plastic, already she knows this about him.

  "My husband fishes. My ex-husband."

  From the other bag, he pulls out a bottle of champagne, holding it so she can read the label—French. His eyes shine. She wishes she knew something about champagne, because this bottle's clearly a prize.

  "That would be Sam," he says. He takes two champagne glasses, carefully wrapped in paper, from the sack.

  "Uh-huh."

  Fred begins twisting the wire on the bottle. Lily unwraps the glasses, then begins opening deli containers. One has plump raviolis in pesto, pine nuts sprinkled over the top, another assorted olives, another roasted red peppers.

  "Now that's one sport I could never get into," Fred says. He covers the bottle with a napkin and begins pushing the cork up with his thumbs. "Never could see the appeal of sitting on water and getting eaten by mosquitoes." He pops the cork, which makes a satisfying crack. He fills the glasses, clinking his against hers, and says, "Here's to you, pretty lady."

  Lily smiles, sips, enjoying the champagne mist that sprays her nose and cheeks. She wonders how her life would have been had she met a good, caring man like Fred at the beginning instead of now. She knows, she is absolutely certain, it would have been better, and it makes her mad, really, the years she lost to Sam. Fred is here now, though, and she supposes she doesn't care, certainly she shouldn't care, that he's a little on the heavy side, except it's hard to imagine sleeping with him. She hates herself for feeling this way. She does and doesn't want to talk with Rosy about him. Rosy might lecture; Lily usually regrets confiding in her sister. But Rosy can recognize a phony. She's almost always right about people, and Lily is almost always wrong. The fact is, Lily cannot trust herself in character assessment, thank you very much, Sam Behan. He ruined her.

  She rolls the base of her glass between the table-top slats. The table is splattered at one end with bird droppings, and initials and names—HH, ST, LORI—have been carved into the wood. People and birds have left their marks. Lily pushes her tipless tongue against her teeth. Sam's mark on her. A little love bite. Once he had put her through the front window of his car, and she bit the tip of her tongue off. Stupid. He had been trying to race a train. He heard the train, saw the tracks, and before she knew it, he was flooring it, the car flying over the tracks, but it landed hard, and the next thing she knew she was on her knees in the dirt, blood gushing out of her mouth, and he was beside her, cupping the blood, holding her head, apologizing, whispering, "I'm sorry, God, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," and then they were just very still together, as if they were kneeling on fragile ground, praying. He was good in a crisis, always rose to the occasion. Too bad she couldn't make a crisis every minute for Sam. The marriage might have worked.

  Fred pours more champagne into her glass and begins opening the packets of butcher paper. "We've got provolone and Swiss, hot salami, corned beef and roast beef. Anything you don't like?" He begins spearing slices of cheese and meat, piling them on her plate.

  "Just a little, not so much," Lily says. She sips the champagne.

  Fred takes some of the slices off her plate and piles them on his own. Lily, watching, presses her lips together and looks away, twisting around to take in the river and Smelter Mountain behind it. She pulls her legs out from under the table, turning to lean her back against it.

  Fred turns so that he's facing the river, too, bringing his plate with him. He sits close enough that his arm brushes hers. She can smell the spiced meat, which he rolls into logs and eats with his fingers. "What do you say I take the rest of the afternoon off and we move the party to my house? I've got a very nice Merlot."

  Lily smiles. She gazes upstream at kids walking down the center of the river, carrying yellow rubber rafts over their heads. She can feel Fred's eyes on the side of her face.

  "Lil?"

  She says, "Somebody ought to tell them they need water to float." She glances at him. He's studying her, his eyes half closed. She takes a slice of salami from his plate and pops it into her mouth. "Why is it that food off of somebody else's plate always tastes better?"

  He looks downriver at the disappearing rafters. He doesn't say anything. Lily leans into him, pressing her thigh against his. He sits still, moving neither away from nor toward her, and for a moment she feels dizzy, like she used to with Sam, as if she were leaning against a hollow body.

  "Well," he says, turning and putting his plate on the table, picking up the container of raviolis and turning back. He forks a ravioli, holds it out to Lily, who takes it between her lips, and he watches while she chews and swallows, then takes his napkin and wipes the oil from her lips. He is himself again. The hollow man has disappeared. He is not like Sam. He's smiling at her. "On the other hand," he says, "I should probably get back to work."

  But she doesn't want that, either. "Work?" She doesn't want to be alone. She just wants to sit here, that's all. "Get me liquored up and then leave me?"

  He laughs. He puts his arm around her, pulling her to him, nuzzling her hair. She can smell the spiced meat on his breath, and she feels like she's being pulled rapidly underwater.

  "Okay, then," he says. "That Merlot has your name on it."

  Sun glints off patches of the Animas where water still flows. Once she watched Sam dive from a rock just upstream from here and torpedo headlong through the rapids. He was drunk, of course, and she was certain that he'd crack his skull, but he didn't. Like an animal navigating on instinct, he wove in and out of the shallows, a white fish, then pulled himself out right about here. Just like a child.

  When Lily stands, her temples throb and her legs feel waterlogged. She turns to help Fred pack up. He's leaning over the table, gathering food. His shirt has come untucked, and she can see the rolling country of his lower back, a broad pink swatch of skin, which makes her want to cry. The thing she never tired of was Sam's body, solid, compact.

  She drains her glass. She says, "What a lovely day, Fred. What a lovely picnic. Thank you. This is the kind of thing my ex would never do."

  Fred looks at her, a funny look in his eyes, and snaps the lid on the raviolis.

  4

  AT THE MARATHON MARINA, it's always cocktail ho
ur after dark, and tonight, when Sam Behan steps out onto the deck of his houseboat, he can hear martinis in the lilting voices. All around him there's a mumble of languages, Spanish and English, and he can smell fish grilling. He takes a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket, shakes one out, and lights it. He leans against the railing, smoking and looking over the line of boats from here to the shore. They bob in the water, some glowing like Christmas, with lights running up masts and soft yellow lights in kitchens, where he can see people, women mostly, standing at counters while men tend the outside grills. Across the way, there's another row of bobbing houses.

  When he's done with the cigarette, he pitches the butt into the water and goes inside. If Alice were here, she'd tell him to eat. She likes to say that he's the only man she knows who needs to be reminded. Liked to say? Alice didn't winter with him here last year. She said it was because she had to stay on the reservation and help her mother with the farm. He wonders, though. For the past seventeen years, Alice Atcitty has spent the winter months with him here on the boat. Spring and summer she follows the rodeo. But Alice's winters in Florida have gotten shorter over the years. He wonders if there might be another man in the picture.

  It's a little after nine o'clock. He makes coffee, then takes the carton of eggs from the refrigerator and breaks three into a bowl, whisks them with a fork. From the dish drainer he takes the frying pan, puts it on the burner, and starts the heat. It's one of those no-stick fancy pans Alice left here. While it's heating, he switches on the little battery-operated radio. Radio Marti. Cuban jazz. He's been lucky on these clear nights. The station comes in good. He opens the cupboard over the stove and takes down his gray tackle box, puts it on the table, opens the lid. He also takes down packets of feathers and synthetic foams.

  When the eggs are ready, he stands over them, eating from the pan and looking over the tackle box on the table. It's a tiered box with hooks, eyes, and colorful threads—shimmering greens, corals, and silvers—in the top tier. His tools are in the tier below, vises, pliers, bobbins, threaders, and bone—actually plastic sticks that look like bone. Fish bone.

  Finished with the eggs, he pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down, taking ten sticks from the box and arranging them lengthwise in front of him. Twelve inches long, they will make spines for tempting lures to attract big fish that are easily tricked by flash and color. A flash of silver, a streak of coral—it isn't necessary, Sam knows, to make a pretty fly. The right presentation of color, a fly well tied, light and sturdy. A fat marlin will blush when teased with the right fly.

  He takes out vise, wire, and epoxy. It's big-fish season. For little fish he'll use single hooks and tie on feathers from guinea hens, mallards, ostrich, hair from elk, deer, rabbit. But he needs bulk for big flies, so he uses synthetic foams with names like secret streamer hair, crystal flash, and ice chenille. Mostly Sam ties flies by touch. His eyes can't focus on the fine close-up work anymore, but he has always been able to trust his hands. At the uranium mill he kept the machinery in repair, working blind when an ore roaster blew, feeling into the parts of the machinery for fissures and flaws. It was what he was good at, and now he's good at this, fly-tying. Jorge Molina will give him a dollar a fly for little flies and two-fifty for the big ones. People want Sam's flies, according to Molina. Jorge says Sam has built himself a little reputation.

  From another compartment, he takes ten more sticks, these four inches long. He dabs epoxy near the top of the long sticks, lays the smaller sticks across them, pressing down, then gets up, finishes his coffee, and pours more from the pot. He opens the freezer. The top shelf is still full of yellowfin, finless now, gutted and cleaned, chopped into steaks, each in its own baggie, the baggies crusty with freezer burn. He and Alice brought in the big fish together two seasons ago. He's saving the steaks for her.

  From the bottom shelf, he takes out a bottle of Stoli. He prefers gin, but he ran out today ... Yesterday. One of the days. This bottle was a gift from Tom Leroi, who has a little yacht three docks over. Last weekend Leroi caught a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound marlin with one of Sam's fancy hand-tied flies and showed his gratitude with the Stoli. Sam pours a couple inches of vodka into his coffee, leaves the bottle on the counter.

  He's been thinking it might be time to take a trip out west. He hasn't been back since the divorce from Lily. He has an excuse to go. Yesterday he got an invitation to Maggie Mahoney's wedding in the mail. On the bottom of it, Ryland had penned a message that made Sam smile: GET ON THE DAMN PLANE AND COME TO THE DAMN WEDDING.

  Rosy sent a photo at Christmas. Ryland's eyes were sunken and tired, his lips blue-rimmed. Sam should go see Ryland.

  Money is an obstacle. Sam doesn't have much on hand. He hasn't been keeping up, hasn't been to Molina's to sell flies in six, seven weeks. He keeps his cash under the mattress, but the stash has been dwindling. He sends money to Alice. Last month he sent an envelope full of twenties. He sends the money for the kid, their kid, Delmar, though the kid's hardly a kid anymore. Last Sam heard, his son was in jail.

  To get money, he needs to sell a shitload of flies. He's been making them steadily. He has grocery bags stuffed full of flies just getting moldy in the boat. He could go to Molina, sell his inventory, and get cash, but Moley might give him trouble. He doesn't like to keep stock in the storeroom. Molina's motto: "Keep people wanting 'em, they'll keep paying."

  "Moley," Sam says, shaking his head. He picks up one of the skeletons, testing the epoxy's hold, which is strong. Outside, the cocktail hour is getting louder. Somewhere a motorboat buzzes, and the floor under him begins to buck gently with the churning waves. On the dock very close to his window, a girl says, "Shut up," then says it again, "Shu-ut up." She is laughing, and a male voice is talking low, teasing.

  Alice is in her midforties. Forty-four? Forty-five? He can't remember. Women at that age frequently start needing a little excitement. Last time he saw her, she'd added a layer to her hipless hips, and her hair had long strands of gray here and there.

  He winds the thread tightly where the bones cross, pinching down, leaving a thread loose on one side, catching its mate, looping in a spiral across the T-bone to the end, affixing a hook, front hook down, tying off, catching the loose thread and spiraling, a tight wind, across the other side of the T, affixing the other hook, tying off, sipping the coffee, cool now from the frigid vodka. He works in a line, ten Ts, ten flies, he is a human factory, and the tide is coming in, his house shivering. In Cuba tonight the jazz is live, piano and horn. Static. Then music.

  Fifty-six minutes into it, he has ten synthetic mackerel that will hold their own against any live bait. He stretches his arms, ripping through the stale cabin air that always seems to cocoon around him when he concentrates. He just made twenty-five dollars, double his hourly wage at the uranium mill.

  He made it if Molina will pay it.

  5

  SUMMER WEEKENDS when there's a little wind, Becky Atcitty and her friend Arnold Gardner go to Morgan Lake to watch the windsurfers. The Saturday after her visit with the Mahoneys, Arnold picks Becky up in his new Saab, and they cross the San Juan River, heading up Power Plant Road, windows open. Becky breathes deeply, hungry for air that isn't contaminated by the stench of illness. Six months ago, when her father relapsed, she gave up her apartment in Farmington and moved back to her parents' house in the valley just outside of town to help her mother. Becky's mother doesn't drive, and now her father is too weak, so Becky spends much of her free time chauffeuring her father to doctor appointments and running errands.

  Morgan Lake is an artificial lake at the base of Four Corners Power Plant. The water supplies coolant for the plant, which creates a wonderland of artificial weather on the mesa. Cottony white smoke blooms from the stacks, painting the sky with clouds on a cloudless day, and even when there isn't a hint of breeze anywhere else, something magical and warm stirs the water, which in turn massages the air over the lake, making windsurfers happy. It wasn't always so. Becky is twenty-five. When she
was a little girl in the early seventies, the clouds coming from the power plant were black, filled with toxic particles that made her cough, and nobody went to the lake. Now the stacks are filtered, the fish thrive, and the scenery is easy on the eyes.

  Arnold pulls off the road and onto the lake's bank, which is baked clay in the dry season but turns the texture of wet cement when it rains. A mud-plastered pickup is embedded in the bank near the water, buried to its hubcaps. It's been there since last August. Today a group of surfers are milling around the truck, which holds their gear and coolers of beer.

  There's no shade on this side of the lake, just gray reeds and scrubby trees at the water's edge. Arnold parks near some boulders, and they get out, leaving the Saab doors open. Bob Marley and the Wailers blare from the tape player. As a tribute to the tenth anniversary of Marley's death in May 1981, Arnold has been listening to nothing but the Wailers all summer. Becky has now memorized everything Bob Marley ever wrote.

  They sit on the ground, propped against the boulders. Surfers are tossing around bottles of sunscreen, rubbing lotion on themselves and on each other's backs. "That one," Arnold says, watching a longhaired guy in baggy white trunks head into the water with his board, his back a perfect, muscled V, the trunks roped low on his thin hips. As he gets far enough into the water for the wind to catch the sail and for him to climb on the board, the trunks turn sort of transparent, so that even from a distance Becky and Arnold can see sculpted butt and chiseled thighs.

  "That one?" Becky says. "That guy's why you should join the gym. He works there. He's really funny. Even when he's training people he watches himself in the mirror. I mean constantly. Actually, he's just your type."

  "Do I have a type?"

  "You definitely have a type. You just don't get any action." Arnold sighs audibly. "Which is completely your fault," she adds.

  "Grr."