“When you can clean the collard greens out of your mouth, we might have ourselves a conversation.”
He unhooked his aviator sunglasses from his ears and rubbed a place next to his nose with his thumbnail. Perhaps because of the sky overhead, his eyes had taken on a degree of color, a grayish-blue, with pupils like burnt matchheads. He picked up a battered work hat, one with dents in its domed crown, and fitted it on his head. “About ten years ago Darrel McComb offered me five thousand dollars to do a job on a man—the tools could be of my choosing. Believe that?” he said.
“No.”
“Don’t blame you. If you seen what I seen of the world, you wouldn’t be no different from me. Study on that the next time you and Miss Temple are at the church house,” he said.
“There’s a parking ticket under your windshield wiper.”
“I declare, this life is sure fraught with trouble, ain’t it?” he said. He wadded up the ticket and tossed it on the sidewalk.
You didn’t get the last word with Wyatt Dixon.
I WAS TIRED of feeling like the odd man out, somehow allowed to know only the edges of a situation that even a morally insane person like Dixon seemed privy to. I called the Phoenix office of the FBI and told an agent there who I was. He did not seem impressed. I asked if he would call Seth Masterson in Missoula and tell him I’d appreciate his contacting me immediately.
“I’m not real sure where he is. But I’ll see if I can get a message to him,” the agent said.
“That’s really good of you. Keep up the fine work,” I said.
Fifteen minutes later Seth called my office. “Trying to light up my colleague’s pinball machine down in Arizona?” he said.
“Why do federal agents always sound arrogant over the phone?” I said.
“Search me.”
Seth was notorious for his laconic speech and his reticence about his job. In fact, a joke about him in the Phoenix office went as follows: There were three words in Seth’s vocabulary—“Yep,” “Nope,” and, when he was in a talkative mood, “Maybe.” But Seth also had a weakness.
“Want to meet a rainbow trout I know up Rock Creek?” I asked.
“That’s a possibility,” he replied.
An hour later he met me outside my office, dressed in khakis, a fly vest, and a bill cap with a green visor on it. We drove east up the Clark Fork in my Tacoma, through Hellgate Canyon, past the confluence with the Blackfoot River and into alluvial floodplain dotted with cottonwoods and bordered by thickly wooded mountains whose slopes were already dropping into shadow.
We turned off the four-lane at the juncture of Rock Creek and the Clark Fork and entered a long, steep-sided valley where the afternoon light had turned gold on the hilltops and the meadows were full of grazing deer and the creek was steaming in the cooling of the day.
Seth rode with the glass down, the wind in his face, as we passed beaver dams, flooded cottonwoods, and dalles where the creek coursed over boulders that were larger than my truck. I almost felt guilty at the pastoral deceit I had perpetrated on him.
“Gonna ask me a question or two?” he said, looking straight ahead, his eyes twinkling.
“You working the home invasion at Johnny American Horse’s place?”
“Yep.”
“But his spread isn’t on res land. He’s an independent ranch owner.”
“Doesn’t matter. The perps were crossing and recrossing a federal reservation during the commission of a felony,” he replied.
“So the Phoenix office is now investigating reservation crimes in the Northwest?” I said.
He grinned at me. “Think a wooly worm might bring those big ones up?” he asked.
Trout season had not opened yet, so we released the half-dozen rainbows and the one bull trout we caught, and walked back up through fir trees toward the truck. The sun had dipped down through a crack in the mountains, and the water and the rocks in the creek were bathed with a red glow. Upstream, a moose clattered across the stream and chugged huffing uphill into woods that were now black with shadow.
I unlocked the shell on the bed of my Tacoma and put my fly rod, vest, and waders inside. Seth was quiet for a long time, his eyes obviously troubled by an unresolved conflict inside himself. “I’ve been thinking about taking early retirement,” he said.
“Doesn’t sound like you,” I said.
“I don’t always like the cases I catch anymore. Get my drift?”
“I’m kind of slow sometimes,” I said.
“You’ve stepped into a pile of pig flop, Billy Bob. I’d get a lot of gone between me and Johnny American Horse.”
“Hate to hear you talk like that.”
“Not half as bad as I do,” he replied.
In the cab he pulled his hat down and pretended to sleep the rest of the way back to town.
THAT NIGHT I visited Johnny at St. Pat’s Hospital. He had taken stitches in one eyebrow, behind his ear, and on the jawbone. “Quit looking at me like that. I get out in the morning,” he said.
“You’re being charged with attempted assault on a law officer. Why’d you have to get in McComb’s face?” I said.
“Dude leaves a big footprint. This is still the United States. I fought for this damn country,” he said.
“When wars are over, nobody cares about the people who actually fought them.”
“Doesn’t matter. McComb tore up my home. He tried to hit on Amber. He didn’t do it because he’s a cop, either. He did it because he’s a white redneck and he knew he could get away with it,” he said.
“I’ve got to know why Ruggles and Eddy Bumper came after you, Johnny.”
He raised his hands and dropped them on the sheet. “My coalition has sued a couple of oil companies to stop them from drilling test wells on the east slope of the Divide. In the meantime we’re trying to kick a pipeline off the res. I kind of went out on my own on this anthrax stuff, too.”
“Say that last part again?”
“A private grudge I brought back from the first Gulf war, I guess. Sometimes I see things in my head, in broad daylight, that make me wish I wasn’t on the planet,” he said.
I didn’t want to hear it.
IT WAS LATE and I was tired when I got back home. Temple had already gone to bed. I fixed a ham-and-egg sandwich and poured a glass of buttermilk and ate at the kitchen table. The moon was up and through the side window I could see elk and deer in the pasture and hear our horses nickering in the darkness on the far side of the barn.
I grew up on a small ranch in the hill country of south-central Texas. My mother was a librarian by profession and my father a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines all over Texas and Oklahoma. Both of them dearly loved our ranch, in spite of the meager income it provided them. They also loved the Victorian purple brick home in which I grew up. They loved the horses, dogs, goats, cats, sheep, beehives, fish in the ponds (called tanks in Texas), and even poultry in the chicken run on our land. My father named our ranch “Heartwood,” and he burned the name into a thick red-oak plank with the intention of hanging it from the front gate.
But the man who had landed at Normandy, and who had walked all the way across Europe to the Elbe River, was killed in a natural gas blowout at Matagorda Bay and never got to hang his sign. So I hung it for him down in Texas, and now I had hung it above our gate in Montana, up a valley that was the most beautiful stretch of land I had ever seen.
I brushed my teeth and lay down next to Temple. I felt her weight turn on the mattress and her hand touch my back. “Your muscles are stiff as iron. What’s wrong?” she said.
“Heartwood is the best place I’ve ever been. It’s not one spread, either. It’s the place where I grew up and it’s the place we’ve built together, here, in Montana,” I said.
She raised herself on her elbow so she could look into my face. “What happened tonight?” she said.
“Seth Masterson tried to warn me off Johnny’s case.”
“Who the hell does he think he is?”
“You do
n’t know Seth. He broke all his own rules. Johnny American Horse is in the meat grinder. You were right. Johnny might pull us down with him.”
She pressed her face next to mine. “Listen to me, Billy Bob. You tell the FBI to screw themselves. Nobody threatens us,” she said.
I turned and looked into her eyes. They were milky green, the color of the Guadalupe River in summer, sometimes with shadows in them, the way the river was when it flowed under a tree. “You’re special,” I said.
She pulled her nightgown over her knees and sat on top of me, then leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. I cupped her breasts, then heard her say “Wait.” She worked her gown over her head and I put her nipples in my mouth and ran my hands over her baby fat and felt my own hardness touch her stomach.
I rolled on top of her, then she reached down and held me with her hand and placed me inside her, her knees widening, her face turned to one side, her eyes closing, then, slowly, her mouth puckering as though she were warming the air before she breathed it. Her skin was moist and pink in the glow of the moon through the window, then she began to come and I felt as though the two of us were dropping down inside a well that swirled with starlight at the bottom.
She held me tighter, then even tighter than that, and made a sound in my ear that was like the cry of the loon, and I was sure in that moment no evil would ever touch our lives.
Chapter 6
ON TUESDAY MORNING, when Johnny was about to be transported from the hospital to face the trumped-up attempted assault charges filed against him by Darrel McComb, he was formally placed under arrest for the murder of Charlie Ruggles and taken in handcuffs to a cell at the county jail. I caught Fay Harback at the coffee stand by the back entrance of the courthouse. “No,” she said, raising her hand prohibitively. “I don’t want to see you.”
“This is bogus, Fay. You’re being a dupe,” I said.
“How would you like to have this coffee thrown in your face?”
“My client is the victim, not the perpetrator. You’re helping a collection of assholes gang up on an innocent man.”
“Did I ever tell you, you make my blood boil? I want to hit you with a large, hard object,” she said. People were starting to stare now. “Come outside.”
We went through the big glass doors onto the lawn. It was cold in the shade of the building and the grass was stiff with frost. “Which collection of assholes are you talking about?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s beautiful. You just slander people in public without knowing why?”
“The Feds are involved in this stuff. An agent tried to warn me off last night.”
“Let me make it simple for you. American Horse’s tennis shoes matched a perfectly stenciled impression on the floor right next to Charlie Ruggles’s bed.” She raised a finger when I started to speak.
“Hear me out. Your client not only left behind a signature with his foot, he dropped a Jiffy Lube receipt on the floor. It has his name on it and his fingerprints. We found a pair of greens in a service elevator. They smelled of booze.”
“How could Johnny have gotten past the guard at the door? All the deputies know him,” I said
For just a second, no more than a blink, I saw the confidence weaken in her eyes. “The deputy went to help an elderly man use the bathroom. It’s not his fault,” she replied.
“Who said it was?”
“Johnny was in a bar down the street from the hospital. He’s a mercurial, unpredictable man. He killed Ruggles. There’s no conspiracy here,” she said.
“Hell there’s not.”
She looked into space, as though my words contained a degree of credibility which, for reasons of her own, she would not acknowledge. “I do my job. I don’t always like it. Don’t ever try to embarrass me in front of people like that again,” she said.
THAT AFTERNOON, I visited Johnny at the lockup. We sat at a wood table in a small room that contained a narrow, vertical slit for a window, through which I could see the old buildings and brick streets down by the train yards. Johnny wore a bright orange jumpsuit with the word JAIL lettered in black across the back.
“How do you explain the Jiffy Lube receipt and the prints of your tennis shoes in Ruggles’s room?” I said.
“Somebody must have taken the shoes out of the house and put them back later. The receipt for the oil change was in my pickup.”
His eyes wandered around the room. I touched him on the wrist to make him look at me. “You get pretty swacked Saturday night?” I said.
“No.”
“No blackouts?”
“Amber was with me all night. We were at the Ox, Charley B’s, and Stockman’s. I went down to Red’s for a few minutes to meet a guy who wants to buy my truck. But he wasn’t there.”
“You went to Red’s by yourself?”
“Like I said.”
“Has a Fed named Masterson been in here?”
“No. Who is he?”
“Johnny, nobody wants to believe in conspiracies anymore. People want to trust the government. They don’t want to believe that corporations run their lives, either. But everything you do and say sends them another message. You hearing me on this?”
“Not really,” he said.
They’re going to burn you at the stake, I thought. I banged on the door for the turnkey to let me out.
“You still my attorney?” Johnny said.
“Nobody else will hire me,” I replied, and winked at him.
DARREL MCCOMB BELONGED to an athletic club downtown, one frequented primarily by middle-class businesspeople during their lunch hour or just before they drove home from work. But Darrel did not go to the club for the tanning services it offered or for the state-of-the-art exercise machines most members used while they read magazines or watched a television program of their selection, the audio filtering through the foam-rubber headsets clamped on their ears. Darrel was there to clank serious iron, benching three hundred pounds, curling forty-pound dumbbells in each hand, the veins in his muscles rippling like nests of purple string.
He also liked to smack the heavy bag, getting high on his own heated smell, diverting an imaginary opponent with a left jab, then ripping a vicious right hook into the place where his opponent’s rib cage would be, under the heart, driving his fist so deep into the leather the bag rattled on its chain.
But on that particular Tuesday evening Darrel was disturbed for reasons he couldn’t adequately explain. As he sat in the steam room by himself, he experienced a sense of depression about his life and about who he was that few people would understand.
Not unless they had grown up abandoned by their parents in a town that was hardly more than a dusty crossroads inside several million acres of Nebraska wheat. Not unless at age fifteen they had blown an orphanage where the kids scrubbed floors with rags tied on their knees. Not unless they had piloted Flying Boxcars through AK-47 ground fire with a guy named Rocky Harrigan.
Rocky was a legend. He had dog-fought the Japanese in the skies over the Pacific, made airdrops to the Tibetan Resistance, and lit up the Pathet Lao with fifty-gallon drums of gasoline mixed with Tide laundry detergent. Then, in the mid-eighties, Rocky had hooked up with a CIA front in Fort Lauderdale, telephoned his young friend Darrel McComb, who was spraying crops and dodging power lines in Kansas, and invited him to join the fun down in Central America.
But planes crashed, names spilled into headlines, and the era of Ronald Reagan came to an end. Darrel McComb always believed he had shared a special moment in history, one whose complexities and dangers few people were aware of. The Iron Curtain had collapsed, hadn’t it? American companies were opening textile mills and creating jobs in Stone Age villages where Indians still lived in grass huts, weren’t they? None of that would have happened if it hadn’t been for men like Rocky and himself, would it?
Let the peace marchers and the bunny huggers light candles and sing their hymns, he thought. They would never be players. This was a great country
. Guys like Rocky gave up their lives so the jackoff crowd could revel in their own ignorance. In Cuba they’d be diced pork inside somebody’s taco.
But the splenetic nature of his thoughts brought him little peace. What was really on his mind? he asked himself, sitting on the tile stoop in the steam room, his skin threaded with sweat. For an answer he only had to glance down at the erection under his towel.
Amber Finley.
He thought about her all the time, in ways he had never thought about a woman. In fact, women had never been an issue in his life. He went to bed with them occasionally and had even been married for a few months. An Army psychiatrist had once told him he was probably homoerotic, a categorization that oddly enough didn’t offend him. But the sight of Amber Finley filled his head with images and sounds that beset him like a crown of thorns, leaving him sleepless at night and throbbing in the morning.
What was it that attracted or bothered him most about her? The blueness and luminosity of her eyes? Her heart-shaped face? Or the throaty quality of her laugh and the irreverence in her speech? Perhaps the perfect quality of her skin, her education and intelligence and the fact she spent it like coin in lowlife bars with people like Johnny American Horse?
No, it was all of it. Amber Finley could walk down a street and make his innards drain like water.
He shouldn’t have lost it with that Indian kid. American Horse was going down anyway; he might even ride the needle for the gig on Ruggles. Why did Darrel have to make a martyr of him and probably earn himself a civil rights beef in the bargain? He’d flushed himself good with Amber, and acquired a dirty jacket on top of it.
He showered, dressed, and ate supper by himself in a workingmen’s café on Front Street. The evening was warm, the color of the sky as soft as lilacs, the flooded willows on the riverbanks clattering with birds. There were many places he could go—a movie, a concert in the park, a minor league baseball game, a bar where cops drank and he sometimes joined them with a soda and sliced lime. But Darrel had no doubt where he would end up as soon as the sun began to sink, and that thought more than any other filled him with an abiding shame.
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