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pencil, though I didn’t see it until the men’s room at the Helena airport. Was I so far gone I was identifying with a corpse?
    “What an awful child you were,” Grandma said. “Already drinking in the sixth grade. What would have become of you if I hadn’t put you in Catholic school? It was your salvation and thank goodness the voodoo wore off in time. It wasn’t easy humoring those silly nuns. They never took their hands out of their sleeves the whole time you were there.”
    “Uh, Grandma, excuse me, but I have to see a man about a horse.” I jogged along the riverbank until I was well out of earshot, and lighting a cigarette, I called the sheriff’s office on my cell. I let the dispatcher know who I was and asked if the sheriff or one of the deputies was available. “I’ll check. What’s the topic?” The dispatcher’s tone let me know how they felt about me at the sheriff’s office.
    “I’m down on the river, and a corpse just went by. Across from the dump. It’s going to pass under the Harlowton Bridge in about ten minutes.”
    “There’s no one here right now. Marvin has a speeder pulled over at the prairie dog town. Maybe he could get there.”
    “Next stop after that is Greycliff. Somebody’d have to sit on the bridge all day.”
    “Please don’t raise your voice. Any distinguishing features?”
    “How’s ‘dead’ sound to you?”
    I went back to find Grandma lifting her face in the directionof the sun and seeming contented. A few cottonwood leaves fluttering in a breath of wind onto the surface of the river revealed the speed of the current. Every so often people floated by on rafts, blue rafts, yellow rafts, their laughter and conversations carried along on the water like a big, happy wake following a corpse.
    “Are you ready to eat?” I asked.
    “In a bit, unless you’re hungry now. It smells different than when we were here in August. I think something happens when the leaves begin to turn, something cidery in the air, and yesterday’s rain stays in the trunks of these old trees.” It had rained for about two minutes yesterday. Grandma’s got all these sensations dialed in as though she’s cramming the entire earth before she croaks.
    I walked down to the river, took off my shoes and socks, and rolled up my pant legs. I waded in no more than a few inches when I heard my phone ring. I turned just in time to see Grandma groping for it next to where I left the box lunches. Oh, well. I kept wading and noticed three white pelicans standing among the car bodies on the far side of the river. I’d have thought they’d have gone south by now. I dug a few flat stones off the bottom and skipped them toward the middle of the river. I got five skips from a piece of bottle glass before going back to Grandma.
    “That was the sheriff’s office.”
    “Oh?”
    “They wanted you to know that it was a jilted groom who jumped into Yankee Jim Canyon on Sunday. What day is today?”
    “Wednesday.” Must have averaged a couple miles an hour.
    “Why would they think you’d care about a jilted groom jumping into Yankee Jim Canyon?”
    “Idle curiosity,” I said sharply.
    “And the sheriff was calling just to fill you in? I don’t understand one bit of that, not one bit.”
    I wasn’t about to let Grandma force me to ruin her outing by telling her what I had seen. So I opened the box lunch, spread a napkin on her lap, and there I set her sandwich, sliced cucumbers, and almond cookie. She lifted half of the sandwich.
    “What is this? Smells like deviled ham.”
    “It is deviled ham.”
    “Starving.”
    Must have been: she fucking gobbled it.
    “I see where you had another DUI.”
    You didn’t see that, you heard it, and I could reliably assume that Mrs. Devlin made sure of it. “Yes. Grandma, drunk at the wheel.” Of course I was making light of this, but secretly I thanked God it had stayed out of the papers. When you work with young children, it takes very little to tip parents