James Burke - Bitterroot

But try as I might, I always did or said the wrong thing with Temple Carrol.

"You have a reason for staring at me?" she said.

"Sorry," I said.

"I get the feeling you're in a confessional mood about something," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"I was jogging by the campus yesterday. I happened to see you on the roof of a house with another man."

"Really?" I said.

"The postman told me that's the home of a Catholic priest. Are we using the clergy again to rinse out our latest affair?"

"How about some slack, Temple?"

"I'd like to break your damn neck," she replied, and gave me a look. "I interviewed your Dr. Pisspot yesterday. You can really pick them."

"You did what?"

"I went out to Cleo Lonnigan's house. God's gift to the Red Man. She seems to think she glows with blue fire."

"You shouldn't have done that."

"She thinks those bikers killed her child. That makes her a viable murder suspect. By the way, I wouldn't waste my energies being protective of her. She seems to put you on a level with the Antichrist."

"I shouldn't have gotten involved with her. It was my fault. She's not a bad person."

"I don't think you're chivalric, Billy Bob. You're just real dumb sometimes," she said. When she looked at me the milky green color of her eyes had darkened but not with anger. The depth of injury in them, like a stone bruise down in the soul, made me swallow with shame.

ve minutes after I returned to Doc's the phone rang in the living room.

"Hello?" I said.

"Where have you been?" Cleo Lonnigan's voice said.

"Out."

"Then why don't you get a message machine?" she asked.

"Because it's not my home."

"Did you send that nasty little bitch up to my ranch?" she said.

"What did you say?"

"Ms. Carrol. Is she house-trained?"

"You keep your mouth off her, Cleo."

"Do you think you can take a woman to bed and then just say, 'Drop dead, I'm busy color-matching my socks right now'?"

"Good-bye, Cleo. You're an amazing woman. I hope I never see you again," I said, and gently hung up the phone.

I went outside so I would not have to hear the phone ring when she called back.

I WALKED through the cottonwoods and aspens on the riverbank. The river was in shadow under the canopy, but the sun had risen above the ridge and the boulders in the center of the current were steaming in the light. I saw L.Q. Navarro squatting down on his haunches in the shallows, scraping a hellgrammite off the bottom of a rock with the blade of his pocketknife. The bottoms of his suit pants were dark with water, his teeth white with his grin. He threaded the hellgrammite onto a hook that hung from a fishing pole carved out of a willow branch.

"The last couple of days been bard on your pride?"

"You might say that."

"Next time that ATF agent smarts off, you bust his jaw. I never could abide them federal types."

"What am I going to do with Cleo Lonnigan?"

"Get out of town?"

"That's not funny."

"It wasn't meant to be."

Then his attention wandered, as it often did when I imposed all my daily concerns upon him. His hellgrammite had slipped off the hook in the current, and he waded deeper into the water, into the shade, and lifted up a heavy rock from the bed and set it down on top of a boulder and scraped another hellgrammite from the moss-slick underside.

"Hand me my pole, will you, bud?" he said.

I picked up the willow branch he had shaved clean of leaves and notched at one end for his line and walked into the stream with it. The current, filled with snowmelt, climbed over my knees and struck my genitals like a hammer. The sunlight had gone and the tunnel of trees suddenly seemed as cold as the grave.

I realized L.Q. was looking beyond me, at someone on the bank. Then L.Q. was gone and in his place a huge hatch of pink and dark-winged salmon flies churned over the current.

"You always get in the water with your clothes on, Mr. Holland? Hand me your stick and I'll pull you out," Nicki Molinari said from the bank, his cigarette smoke leaking like a piece of cotton from his mouth.

Nicki Molinari wore leather hiking shorts rolled tightly around his thighs, alpine climbing shoes with red laces and heavy lugs, and a purple polo shirt scissored off below his nipples. A nest of scars, like pink string, was festooned on his skin between one hip and his rib cage. On his left hand was a sun-bleached fielder's glove with a scuffed baseball gripped inside the pocket.

His eyes searched up and down the tunnel of trees, as though he heard voices in the wind.

"Were you talking to somebody out here?" he asked.

I saw his convertible parked in the sunshine. His men were nowhere around.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"That skank up in the Jocko Valley owes me seven hundred grand. I'll pay you a ten percent finder's fee if you can get it out of her."

"The skank is Cleo Lonnigan?"

"The language I use offends your sensibilities, that's too bad. Her husband was the business partner of some associates of mine. He stiffed them, they stiffed me. I ended up in Terminal Island. The shorter version is I got cluster-fucked eight ways from breakfast and that broad is living on a horse ranch bought with my money."

"Not interested," I said.

He flipped the baseball into the air and caught it.

"You want to play catch?" he said.

"No."

He grinned and tossed the ball at my face so that I had to catch it or be hit.

"See, you can do it," he said. "Come on, I got another glove in the Caddy."

"How about getting out of here?" I said.

"I thought you might have a sense of humor."

I walked past him, into the sunlight, and handed him his ball. I heard him follow me.

"What do you have against me?" he asked.

"You hurt people."

"Oh, you heard the stories, huh? I leave body parts in garbage grinders, throw people off roofs, stuff like that? It's DEA bullshit."

"I don't think so."

"Were you in the service?"

"No."

"I was in Laos, at a place where these sawed-off little guys called the Hmongs grew a lot of poppies. Me and about four hundred other guys. We got left behind. Why do you think that happened?"

"I don't know."

"Yeah, you do. You worked for the G. If you like government mythology about wiseguys, that's your business. What I do in five years don't add up to five minutes of what I seen in Vietnam. That includes dope getting flown out of the Golden Triangle on American planes."

"How'd you get out of Laos?"

"Play catch with me and I'll tell you the whole story," he said.

"Nope."

"Were you in the sack with Cleo?"

"You're out of line, Nicki."

"There's my first name again. I love it. I did some boom-boom with that broad, too. It was like curling up with an ice cube. Tell me I'm wrong."

He bounced the baseball up and down in the pocket of his glove, studying its scuffed surface, his mouth down-hooked at the corners.

That night I dreamed I saw Doc Voss standing waist-deep in a stream, under a yellow moon, his skin prickled with cold. Then his fly line stiffened in the riffle and the tip of his rod bent almost to the water's surface, trembling with tension.

He wrapped the line around his left forearm, so tightly his veins corded with blood, and horsed a long, thick-bodied brown trout through the shallows onto the gravel. He slipped a huge knife from a scabbard on his side and stooped over the trout and inserted the knife point into the trout's anus and slit its belly all the way to the gills.

Doc lifted the trout by its mouth and the unborn roe fell in a gush of heavy pink water from the separated skin in its belly and glistened on the rocks at Doc's feet. He looked up and grinned at me, but I hardly recognized him. His face had become skeletal, his eyes lighted with the moon's reflection off the river.