Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"Where?"

"Down the road. Any place you've a mind. I don't care."

She watched my face, then picked up her purse.

We got into my truck and drove as far as the motel next door. I parked under the porte cochere. Through the lobby window I could see a girl of high school age behind the counter.

"You sure this is what you want?" Cleo said.

"Don't you?"

She didn't answer. She opened the truck door for herself and stepped out in the rain. The neon glow on her skin seemed to disfigure her face. For a moment I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro under the porte cochere, raising his hand in a cautionary way.

Inside the room I turned off the lights and sat in a chair and pulled off my boots with the awkwardness of a man who in reality had never been good with intimacy. A crack of light shone through the drawn curtains and I could see her silhouette as she undressed, a bare thigh, a crinkle in her hip as she pushed her panties down over her knees. The window was open and down below we could hear sounds from the gravel parking lot. I took off my trousers and shirt and walked up behind Cleo and placed my hands on her shoulders and started to turn her toward me. But her attention had been captured by the voices that rose on the wind from the parking lot.

"No! Let me alone!" a little boy was shouting.

"You get in the car, Ty!"

"I'm not going. You can't make me! Get away from me!" the boy yelled.

Cleo held back the curtain, indifferent to her nudity, and stared down at a middle-aged man in a white shirt and tie trying to pull a small boy by his wrists inside an automobile. Cleo's face wore an expression of unrelieved sadness.

"That's the family we saw in the lobby. The kid's probably throwing a temper tantrum," I said.

"I know," she said.

"He's all right," I said.

"I know that. I know that he's all right."

Later, in bed, I tried to pretend to myself that I wanted to give more than I wanted to receive. But I knew the selfishness that was always at work in my life, the heat and the repressed nocturnal longings and the violent memories that made me wake sweating in the false dawn, the dust and blood splatter that flew from L.Q. Navarro's coat the night I shot him, all these things that burned inside me, that made me ache for the absolution of a woman's thighs and breasts and the forgiveness of her mouth and the kneading pressure of her palms in the small of my back.

I buried my face in the smell of Cleo's hair and held her tightly against me and felt my heart twist and a dam break in my loins and all the sound and light in my body enter her womb.

I propped myself up on my arms and looked down into her face. Her stomach and thighs were moist against mine, and I was smiling at her and expected her, at least perhaps, to open her eyes lazily and smile back, her mouth ready to be kissed again. But her eyes were tightly shut, her brow creased with three deep lines, as though I had just made love to a fantasy and she was looking up into a hot sky that was tormented by carrion birds.

And I knew what Doc had meant when he said that neither the weight of headstones nor our heartbreaking and vain attempts at re-creating first love would ever disallow the hold of the dead upon the quick.

The next night Lamar Ellison was in a bar up the Blackfoot River, crashed on beer and reds, listening to the country band, talking to Sue Lynn, splitting a pitcher with Hollywood movie types who liked to float the Blackfoot and the Little Big Horn in safari hats and fly vests that showed off their suntans. Who knows, maybe he'd end up in the movies himself. Hey, look what happened to the Angels when they latched on to Leary and all these middle-class pukes who couldn't wait to fry their heads with Osley purple.

There was Holly Girard over at the bar, her husband, too. Xavier was big shit with the writers' community around here. Big shit in New York and Hollywood, too. European television crews interviewed him in lowlife bars, which Lamar couldn't figure out, because why would a guy who owned a mansion above the river wan

t everybody to see him on camera with drooling rummies?

Had Xavier heard about that rape beef? That doctor, the SEAL, was a writer or poet, too, wasn't he? Man, that wasn't good. Xavier had keys to the right doors and got an artistic buzz or something goofing with bikers and guys who'd been inside. Besides, the guy's wife was a first-rate box of chocolates.

Lamar took the pitcher back up to the bar and stood next to Xavier, nodding at both him and his wife, blowing his cigarette smoke at an upward angle to show the right respect.

"Hey, my man Xavier," Lamar said.

"Yeah, Lamar, what's happenin'?" Xavier said. But his eyes were oblique, focused on the band and the dancers out on the floor, a swizzle stick deep in his jaw.

His wife was even worse, gazing out the door, chin in the air, like her shit should be bronzed and used for paperweights.

"I got some bad press. It was a bum beef, though. The sheriff knew it from the get-go. That's why he cut me loose. I got no bad feelings against that doctor. The dude was in Force Recon. I went to Wal-Mart to buy his book but they didn't have it," Lamar said.

"I don't read the papers a lot, so I'm not real tuned in on it. We're about to boogie, Lamar," Xavier said.