"Can I help you?" I asked.
"I took your advice and started hitting some meetings. My sponsor said I needed to come out here and tell you that," he said.
"Well, I appreciate that," I replied, not knowing what else to say.
"I hear you had a talk with Nicki Molinari."
"Yeah, I happened to be in his neighborhood."
"He's quite a guy."
"That's one way to put it," I said, my sense of discomfort starting to grow.
"I guess you don't think much of me. I mean, letting the guy get in the sack with my wife."
"I don't remember much of that afternoon, sir," I said, studying a spot of the riverbank.
"Nicki's free ride is over. I've learned in the program I don't have to take bullshit off greaseballs or anybody else."
"I didn't know AA worked like that."
"It's a great life. Everybody ought to try it," he said.
"You bet," I said, and glanced at my watch. "Well, big day ahead. All the best to you."
I walked back into the house, then looked through the window at his Jeep Cherokee bouncing across the field toward the dirt road.
"Was he drunk?" Maisey asked.
"He says he's out of the saloons."
She waited for me to continue.
"It's no accident a lot of saloons have revolving doors," I said.
The TRUTH was I didn't care what Xavier and Holly Girard or Nicki Molinari did with their lives. The truth was I had even stopped worry
ing about Doc. The truth was I could not get the sadistic injury done to Temple Carrol by Wyatt Dixon and Terry Witherspoon off my mind, done to her in all probability with the approval of Carl Hinkel.
I put my rucksack and fly vest and fly rod and creel into my truck and picked up Temple at her motel and took her for breakfast at a truck stop in Lolo. Then we drove deeper into the Bitterroot Valley, up a dirt road through meadowland to a canyon with a roaring creek and a chain of deep-water pools at the bottom. A trail followed the creek up a steady incline, winding under cliffs and the ponderosa that grew out of rock, until the creek and a series of falls were far below us. Then the trail leveled out in a box canyon filled with birch trees and we came out on the creek again, and sat on a table rock just above a pool that was so clear you could see the cutthroat and brook trout ginning in the current, ten feet below the surface.
I had known Temple most of her life. She hid her pain, rarely complained, and never accepted defeat. But now she had the same detached cast in her eyes that I had seen in Maisey's after Maisey was gang-raped. I flipped a dry fly at the head of the pool and hooked a small cutthroat, then wet my hand and released it and gave the rod to Temple.
"Cast it over on the other side. There's usually a fat one hanging under the bank," I said.
She was sitting against a birch tree with her knees pulled up before her. The rock was mottled with lichen and the leaves overhead flickered against the sunlight.
"I'll just watch," she said.
"I tried to get Lucas to go back to Deaf Smith. You wouldn't consider that yourself, would you?"
"I'll pass, thanks," she said.
I laid down my fly rod and sat next to her. I put my hand on her shoulder and brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. When she looked into my eyes I could read no meaning in them.
"What are you thinking, Temple?" I asked.
But she didn't answer. She leaned her head back against the tree and watched a bighorn sheep that stood on a ledge high up on the canyon's far wall. Her complexion had the glow and smoothness of a newly opened rose. I rested my hand on top of hers.