Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"You won't hear it from me," I said.

"You got that right," she said, and tossed back her hair and walked to the house.

Doc grinned at me.

"You look a little windblown," he said. "I need to put you on the stand, Doc. That's not a problem, is it?"

"Not for me. What do you reckon Witherspoon was doing around here?" he said.

Later, I asked Lucas to take a walk with me along the water's edge, through the trees, to a pool where you could see the shadows of trout hanging in the current just above the pebbles on the bottom. Under the canopy the ground and boulders and tree trunks were suffused with a cool green light and a tea-colored spring leaked down the lichen into the river.

"Sue Lynn has probably taken off. She wanted me to tell you good-bye," I said.

"Took off where? What for?"

"She killed that biker, Lamar Ellison."

The color drained out of his face. He stopped and picked up a pine cone and flung it at the stream and watched it float down the riffle and disappear under a beaver dam.

"She told you that?" he said.

"More or less."

He kicked at the softness of the ground with his boot. It was one he had worked on oil rigs with, steel-toed, scuffed, laced through metal eyelets with leather thongs. The whites of his eyes were filmed now.

"She didn't leave no note or anything?" he said.

"She's scared. Go easy on her, Lucas. Ellison murdered her little brother."

"Then he had it coming. Why's she letting Doc go down for it?"

I knew words could not lessen his anger or ease his sense of betrayal. Eventually he would forgive Sue Lynn, not at once, not by a conscious choice or arriving at a philosophical moment, but instead one day he would look back through the inverted telescope of time and see her as being possessed of the same moral frailties as himself and hence, in memory, an acceptable part of his life again.

But that day would be a long time coming and these are notions you cannot impart to someone younger than yourself, particularly when the individual is your son.

"What if I take you and Doc and Maisey to the Indian powwow in Arlee?" I said.

"I'm going up to the Swan and find Sue Lynn."

"She's caught air, bud."

He kicked a toadstool into a pulpy spray.

"I'm going to her uncle's and get the dog. I bet she didn't even take the dog," he said.

I walked back to Doc's alone.

I went INTO the barn and took down Doc's ax from between two nails and ripped stumps out of the pasture and weeded Doc's vegetable garden and sprinkled all his flowers and curried his horses and swept the stalls and hauled a truckload of trash down to the dump and buried it with a shovel and generally wore myself out, but I could not think my way out of the problems that seemed to beset me from every direction.

A sun shower was falling on the mountains in the west when I put my shirt back on and went into the barn and hung Doc's ax back on the nails. My skin was filmed with sweat and the wind was cool through the open doors and dust puffed up off the barn floor in my eyes.

At the far end of the barn L.Q. stood against the light, his face lost in silhouette, his coat open and his thumb hooked above the brass cartridges in his gun-belt.

"What are y'all gonna do about that Witherspoon boy?" he said.

"I'd like to cap him and drag the body inside the house. But I've had a bad day and I don't need you to vex me, L.Q."

"If I recall correctly, you told the priest you wasn't gonna gun nobody."