“I meant to,” I said. “I kept meaning to.”

“It wouldn’t be so hard,” he said. “You know?”

“I know.”

“Man, you wouldn’t believe how good mail feels. I think I told you that.”

“I will, I’ll write,” I said. “I didn’t know what to say.”

“That’s the thing, is you don’t have to say anything special,” he said. “I told you it’s okay, about what happened. They would have got me anyway. I fucked up. But I mean this, you could talk about anything, talk about the weather, talk about your day. Just so you put it in an envelope and put it in the mail.”

“Okay,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to be a tome,” he said.

I drove home as the sky was beginning to darken. A sign in Deer Lodge advertised dinner theater, the Old Prison Players doing Arsenic and Old Lace at eight in the old stone prison building. I wondered where they found customers, but I didn’t wonder enough to go be one.

I wasn’t sleeping alone then, which was the only news in my life since I had seen Sawyer last, but I might as well have been. The guy was a prosecutor who never left the office before midnight, and sometimes then he’d stop by. So the evening stretched before me: long blue-gray clouds on the horizon, the abandoned work on my desk, my empty house. I could go back to the office, maybe catch my secretary locking up, say good night and stay to work until I was hungry again, and could get a bite to eat and a bath and go to bed. I would maybe be awakened to news of my prosecutor’s militia case, and to sex, and then go back to sleep with another body in the bed.

It was a tolerable plan but I couldn’t focus on it. What I did was watch the sky. As it changed, as the clouds stretched out and the orange flared up and pink reached out to meet the blue, I started thinking of it as a description, a letter, not a lawyer-sounding one, and not a tome, but a start, an account for Sawyer and for me of what the day did out here, and what it was like.

FOUR LEAN HOUNDS,
CA. 1976

THE FIRST TIME Hank slept with Kay—the only time—was the night her husband drowned. Her husband was his best friend, had been for years. Duncan was a great diver, a crack shot, a good storyteller. He seemed to like being in the world more than most people did. He’d married Kay on the grassy bank of a lake up in the Swan River Valley, and everyone danced barefoot and camped out for the weekend. The way Kay looked at Duncan, it was like he was the whole world. Everyone who saw them knew that.