James Burke - Bitterroot

She rose from the bench. It was cool in the shade and she wore a silk scarf tied under her chin.

"I don't ask you to, J.T.," she replied, and walked down the slope toward Nicki Molinari's car. The wind blew the roses into crossed patterns on top of her son's grave.

"She's one I can't read, Sheriff," I said.

"It's not hard. Her husband's crooked money got her little boy killed. Cleo says she didn't know where that money come from. When people got more than they're supposed to have, they always know where it comes from. So she's got to get up every morning, denying to herself that little boy's death is not on her. How'd you like to carry a burden like that?"

We were in the shadow of the Higgins Bridge now, and the sheriff had managed to fling his lure into a willow tree.

"Why'd you tell me about Cleo and Molinari?" I asked.

"It's just a warning. She'd like to see you hung from a meat hook."

"You can sure put it in a memorable way, sir," I said, and started to leave. "By the way, how is it you're so close to Cleo?"

"My son's in that same cemetery. He was killed in Desert Storm. That was rich men fighting over oil, Mr. Holland. My boy was too young to enlist on his own. So I signed the papers for him."

He began jerking his lure to free it from the tree, until the line broke in his big hand.

I BOUGHT avocado and creamed cheese sandwiches and frozen yogurt and cold drinks at a grocery by the university and put it all in an ice chest and picked up Temple at her motel. We drove through Hellgate Canyon, east of town, and out toward Rock Creek to eat lunch. I told Temple about the sheriff's encounter with Cleo Lonnigan in the cemetery. I thought I could simply mention it casually and get it out of the way and not call up unpleasant memories about past relationships. That's what I thought.

"What's God's gift to the Res up to?" Temple said.

"Taking Molinari over the hurdles. He's out of his depth," I said.

"Maybe it's the other way around. Xavier Girard says Molinari is in the sack with his wife. But maybe our girl is asexual or a lesbian and doesn't care. What's your opinion?"

"I don't have one," I said.

"A little sensitive, are we?"

"No, I just wish I hadn't brought this up," I said.

There was no sound in the truck except the hum of the tires on the asphalt. We were in a long valley now and the hills rose up steep and green against the sky. When I turned off the interstate I passed a restaurant made of logs and entered another valley, this one traversed by a wide, pebble-bottomed stream that flowed out of the south, with both meadowland and high, wooded, sharp-peaked mountains on each side.

I drove two miles along the stream, past fishermen up to their waists in the riffles, and did not try to say anything else to Temple. But I could feel her looking at the side of my face.

"You're just going to turn to stone on me?" she said.

"No, I gave up."

"Pardon?"

"I'm tired of sackcloth and ashes," I said.

"You're saying I'm too heavy a burden to deal with?"

Farther up the road was a deep-green piney woods and a rusty turnstile that allowed fishermen to enter the woods on their way to the stream without letting cattle out on the road. Temple waited for me to answer her.

"You know how I feel about you. But you're unrelenting and unforgiving," I said.

She sat very still for a long time, her milky-green eyes filled with thoughts I couldn't guess at. She turned her head and studied my face.

"I don't know how much more of this I can take," she said.

"You want to go back to Texas?"

"After I nail the two guys who tried to bury me alive."

"That's the only reason you're here now?"

"That's a good question. Let me think very hard on it," she said, her mouth pinched with anger.

I pulled off the road into a stand of grand fir and pine trees and parked in a dry slough that fed into the stream. My head was splitting. I wanted to turn around and drive back to town, but Temple had already gotten out of the truck and slammed the door and walked through a clump of huckleberry bushes to the edge of the stream. The wind dropped and I could hear the heat of the truck engine ticking under the hood.

I got the food and a picnic blanket out of the truck and walked down the slough toward the bank. Through the trees I could see a huge dalles and the stream sliding over sculpted boulders the size of small blimps. The air was loud with the roar of the water, sweet and cool with the spray that coated the rocks.

I tripped on a root and looked down at a fresh, hoofed track in the slough, one as long as my foot. To my right the reeds and huckleberry bushes had been broken or mashed down into the moistness of the silt and gravel along the bank.

I set down our food and followed the hoofed tracks through the reeds. I worked my way through an overhang of willows and stepped across a cotton-wood that beavers had cut down, then I saw the moose on a small promontory above Temple, its webbed rack the largest I had ever seen on an animal of any kind, its nostrils puffing with her scent.

She was standing on a sand spit, her hands in her back pockets, looking upstream, and she neither heard nor saw the animal behind her. I moved quickly along the bank, and the moose jerked its rack around, its eyes on me now, its weight shifting on the promontory, dirt scudding down into the water from its hooves.

Then I heard it whirl and turn in the undergrowth and I knew it was coming for either me or Temple.

I ran along the water's edge, yelling Temple's name. She looked at me, startled, then her face went white. I picked her up at the waist, locking my arms around her, and splashed into a side channel and came up onto an island. But the moose was right behind us, its hooves clacking across underwater rocks, its rack cracking a cottonwood limb in half like a twig.

I stumbled and fell, then rose to my feet and picked up Temple again and went over the other side of the island into the stream, into deep water and a fast-running, ice-cold current that swept us through a series of gray boulders that steamed with mist.

We floated around a bend, under an overhang of willows, into a pool that was deep in shadow. I felt the pebbled bottom under my shoes, and I pulled Temple toward me out of the current and we walked chest-deep toward the far bank, behind the protection of a beaver dam. But the bank had been undercut by the current so that it kept shaling under my weight as I tried to get out of the water. I grabbed the bottom of a willow and pulled myself up until I could find purchase with one knee, then I locked my hand on Temple's wrist and hoisted her up after me.

I heard the moose's hooves clatter once more on stone, then saw it lift itself, wet and blowing and magnificent, onto the opposite bank and disappear into the trees. Temple and I fell into the leaves, and I held her against me and kissed her face and hair and neck and covered her with my body and felt the firm muscles of her back and legs and gathered her against me with such force that I could hear the breath coming out of her chest. Her cheek felt as hot as a baby's waking from sleep.

I kissed her hands and mouth and the tops of her breasts and I unbuttoned her shirt and kissed her stomach and touched her breasts and thighs without permission or shame, then felt her hand begin loosening my belt. She peeled off her shirt and bra and threw them aside and put her tongue in my mouth and pulled my weight down on top of her. I rubbed my face in the wetness of her hair and kissed her eyes and sucked her fingers and put her nipples in my mouth, then I was inside her, inside Temple Carrol, inside all her pink warmth and the caress and charity and heat of her thighs. Her mouth opened and her breath rose against my skin with a smell and coolness like flowers blooming in snow, and she pressed me deeper inside her and held me tight with her arms and locked her legs in mine.