Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "Lab work on peeping Tom complaints? Yeah, we got time for that. When we ain't busting up crack labs and trying to keep them goddamn Crips out of here."

  "I really don't like being your straight man, Sheriff."

  "Son, you were born for it. Lord God, I wish you people would move to Los Angeles," he said, and hung up.

  Temple Carrol picked me up at Doc's house the next morning, and we drove into Missoula for breakfast. She wore khakis and scuffed boots and a yellow pullover, and because of her short height she steered with her chin tilted slightly upward. She was one of those women whose contradictions made both her admirers and her adversaries misjudge her potential.

  Her eyes were a milky green that changed color when she was angry, as though dark smoke swam inside them, and she had a distracting habit of chewing gum or piling her hair on top of her head while I talked to her, as though she were not listening. Then I would discover days later she could repeat a conversation back to me, word for word, and accurately correct my own memory of it.

  She kick-boxed on a heavy bag every day at a gym in Deaf Smith and could touch the floor with the flats of her hands. She was often dirty from work in her garden, the seat of her shorts grass-stained, her hair full of leaves, her body glowing with sweat and the smell of crushed flowers. She cared nothing for other people's opinions, thought politics were foolish, kept guns all over her house, and fed every stray animal on the west side of the county. Anyone who mistook her eccentricities for weakness and crossed a line with her did so only once.

  As I looked at the pinkness of her skin, the baby fat on her arms, the way a strand of her chestnut hair kept blowing in her eye, I wanted to touch her, to place the back of my hand on the heat of her cheek, to rest my arm across her shoulders. As she drove along the river, through the blueness of the morning, her profile and the angle of her mouth contained all the innocence and loveliness of a high school girl waiting to be kissed, and I felt ashamed of my own impulses and all the times I had been cavalier about her loyalty and friendship.

  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.

  Chapter 16

  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.

&nb
sp; "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.

  "Where are your waders, Doc?" I said.

  He turned and walked away from me, the blade in his hand glowing with white fire.

  I woke from the dream and went into the kitchen and opened a drawer where Doc often stuffed his shopping receipts. It took me a minute to find it, but there it was, crumpled up at the back of the drawer, the carbon of a bill of sale from Bob Ward's Sporting Goods.

  "What are you doing in there?" Doc said behind me.

  "I saw this receipt a week ago. For a pair of chest waders," I said.

  "So?"

  "Where are they?" I asked.

  "I returned them," he replied.

  "Without the receipt?"

  "What are you saying, Billy Bob?"

  "Did you drown that man?" My voice caught in my throat.

  "Somebody else got to him first. Turn out the light when you go to bed," he said.

  On Sunday I went to Mass at the Catholic church by the university, then drove out on the Clark

  Fork west of town in a sun shower and sat on an enormous flat rock that slanted into the water. The river was wide, the color of green-tarnished copper, and cottonwoods dotted the banks and there were blue mountains in the distance. Upstream, a radio was playing gospel music in a parked pickup truck, and for just a moment I was nine years old again, at a camp meeting in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. The preacher had just lowered me backward into the river, and when the coldness of the water struck my lungs I opened my eyes involuntarily and looked upward at the lacy green canopy of the heartwood trees overhead and at the blue dome of sky and at the autumnal light that broke around the preacher's silhouette as though it had been poured from a gold beaker.

  Then he lifted me from the water, my mouth gasping for air. When I walked with him toward the bank, where my father waited for me, the world did not seem changed but redefined in a way I could not explain at the time. The sky was joined to the rim of the earth; the trees fluttered with red and gold leaves all the way to the hazy outline of the Ozarks, and there was a cool, fecund odor of silt and ponded water and disturbed animal nests blowing out of the shade. Then a huge woman with a black-lacquered big-bellied Gibson hung around her neck commenced singing "I Saw the Light."

  The preacher was as lean as a scarecrow. He spoke in tongues and clogged on the wood stage, a Bible cupped in his hand, while the congregation clapped and shouted with a thunderous rhythm that made the ground shake. The pitch of their voices was almost orgasmic, filled with joy and visceral release. Even my father, who ordinarily was a sober and reticent man, picked me up with one arm and danced in a circle.

  It was a moment that others might parody or ridicule, but I'll never forget it. After my father and I had gotten into our pickup truck and were preparing to leave, the preacher leaned his head through the passenger's window. His hair looked like it had been cut with sheep shears; his face was as long as a horse's, his skin as rough as a wood shingle.

  "You wasn't scared, was you?" he asked.

  "No, sir," I lied.

  "The papists got seven sacraments. We ain't got but one. That's why we really let 'er rip. You're river-baptized, son. From here on out, you take your church with you wherever you go, earth and sky and water and spirit, all of it burned forever into your soul. You ain't never got to be afraid," he said, his dark eyes bursting with certitude.

  "What are you doin', slim?" a voice said behind me.

  I turned and looked up at Temple Carrol, who stood on the down-sloping rock, her thumbs hooked in her back pockets.

  "How'd you know I was here?" I asked.

  "I saw you leaving the church, so I followed you."

  "What's on your mind?" I said.

  She sat down, just a little higher on the rock than I was, her knees pulled up before her. She wore brown jeans and loafers and white socks and she crossed her hands on her knees. "Was I too hard on you the other day?"

  "Not in the least," I said. I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the current. The rock we sat on was pink and gray and dappled with the sunlight that shone through a cottonwood. I could see her shadow move next to me, then her fingers lifted a wet leaf off my shoulder and let it blow away in the breeze.

  She moved her foot slightly and hit me in the thigh with the point of her shoe.

  "Your feelings hurt?" she said.

  "I thought I'd give you a couple of days' rest. Don't turn it into a production."

  Her foot moved and punched me again.

  "Hey," I said.

  She poked me in the knee.

  "Temple-" I turned around and looked directly in her face.

  "What?" she said. Her hands looked small on top of her knees.

  "With regularity I say the wrong things to you. I just don't want to do that anymore," I said.

  "Come on, get off your butt. I'll buy you lunch," she said, rising to her feet, brushing the rock dust off her rump.

  She seemed casual, pushing back her hair, looking at the trees puff with wind. But I could see her watching me out of the corner of her eye.

  "Where we going?" I said.

  She took a breath and cleared her throat and lifted her blouse off her skin as though the day were warm.

  Because she stood higher on the rock than I, we were suddenly the same height. I looked at the milky greenness of her eyes and the color in her cheeks and the roundness of her arms and the way her mouth became like a small flower whenever there was an extended silence between us.

  "Temple?" I said.

  "Yes?"

  "Where we going?"

  She smelled like rain and leaves and there was a scent of raspberry soda on her breath. Her mouth was inches from mine and I saw her chest swell, the pulse quicken in her throat. Then she slipped on the rock and her weight fell against me.

  Her hair touched my face and I felt her breasts and stomach
and the tops of her thighs against me, and her ribs and the taper of her hips were like a gift suddenly placed in my palms when I helped her regain her balance. For just a moment, her mouth parted and her eyes looked into mine in such a way I never wanted to separate from her.

  "It's real slippery here," I said, my face burning.

  "Yes," she said. "Did you want to go to the restaurant on the river. The pizza place?"

  "Sure. That's a grand place," I said. "I'll be right with you. I dropped some change a minute ago."

  She walked back up the rock through a stand of birch trees that were white-trunked and stiff and arching slightly in the wind, while I pretended to hunt for coins down below, my back turned to her to conceal a problem involving a form of male rigidity that made me wonder at my level of maturity.

  Maisey and Doc Voss'S Sunday evening began with an argument in the barn over a parrot, one Doc had just brought her from the pet store.

  "You don't keep birds in cages! I don't want it!" she shouted.

  "Then take it back. Or go feed it to an owl," he replied.

  "That's a cruel and stupid thing to say!" They insulted and shouted at each other and slammed doors all over the house, breaking a bottle of milk in the sink, stepping on the cat's tail, briefly pausing in opposite parts of the house to refocus their anger and then find the other and reopen every wound possible.

  While her father kicked an empty bucket over a fence in the yard and ground the starter on the truck, only to find, after starting the engine, that he had a flat tire, Maisey locked herself in her bedroom and changed into black panties and a black silk bra and loose khakis and a white blouse that exposed her navel and cleavage, and put on hoop earrings and rouged her cheeks and lipsticked her mouth and went to work on her eyes with liquid eyeliner and mascara and eye shadow.

  When she flung open the bedroom door she looked out the front window and saw her father's truck lights disappearing in the dusk. A strange sense of disappointment and abandonment flooded through her, although she could not explain the Sense of desertion and fear that she felt.

  She telephoned Steve, the boy down the road, and lit a cigarette over the sink and opened one of her father's bottles of beer and drank it on the front porch while she waited for her friend, her heart pounding without explanation.