Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

I started to wave, then thought better of it.

"What's wrong?" Temple asked.

"Nothing," I replied. But Temple followed my eyes to Cleo.

"Oh, it's Dr. Bedpan," Temple said.

"Come on, Temple," I said.

"Is she still staring at us?"

"No."

"Good. I was worried. I thought it was she who was rude and needed correcting."

Temple gazed benignly up at the stage. At the end of the concert the audience brought Joan back on stage three times. The auditorium was sweltering now, the air fetid with body odor. After Joan left the stage a final time, someone opened a side door and the auditorium was suddenly flooded with cool air. I put my hand on Temple's arm and steered us for the exit.

Too late.

Cleo Lonnigan stood solidly in our path. "Was Little Miss Muffet whispering about me?" she asked.

"Muffet?" Temple said.

"I'm sure you get my meaning," Cleo said.

"Shut your mouth, Cleo," I said.

"Hey, Cleo, let's ease on out of here," Eric, Cleo's carpenter friend, said.

"I'm sure that's just part of Dr. Lonnigan's regular pillow talk. She doesn't mean anything by it," Temple said to me.

"Look at me," Cleo said.

"Oh, I don't think so," Temple said.

"If you ever whisper behind my back or try to ridicule me in public again, you'll wish you were back waiting tables or whatever you did before somebody let you in a junior college."

I put my arm around Temple's shoulders and almost forced her out the door.

"Would you get your arm off me, please?" Temple said, flexing her shoulders, her neck flaring with color.

"I apologize for that in there."

"You actually went to bed with her? It must be horrible remembering it."

"Why don't you ease up, Temple?"

The sky was green, the evening star glittering like a solitary diamond over the mountains in the west.

"Billy Bob, don't you see it?" Temple said.

"What?" I said, confused.

"It's that woman in there, or it's me, or a female DEA agent, or an old girlfriend from high school. We're just Valium. You're married to the ghost of L.Q. Navarro."

That night dry lightning rippled through the thunderclouds that sealed the Blackfoot Valley. The wind was up and the trees shook along the riverbank and I could see pine needles scattering on the surface of the water. I walked through Doc's fields, restless and irritable and discontent, a nameless fear trembling like a crystal goblet in my breast. The Appaloosa and thoroughbred in Doc's pasture nickered in the darkness and I could smell river damp and pine gum and wildflowers and wet stone and woodsmoke in the air, as though the f

our seasons of the year had come together at once and formed a dead zone under clouds that pulsed with light but gave no rain. I wished for earsplitting thunder to roll through the mountains or high winds to tear at barn roofs. I wished for the hand of God to destroy the airless vacuum in which I seemed to be caught.