"He's got skag and coke in that house."
"How do you know?"
"A friend told me."
"Purcel?"
"No."
"Ah, the Indian girl."
"What do you know about her?"
"Nothing. She's just some gal Purcel picked up. They come and go at Sally Dee's. What's your point about the coke and the skag?"
"Get a warrant and bust the place."
"When I put Sal away, it's going to be for the rest of his worthless life, not on a chickenshit possessions charge. He'd have one of those lamebrain beach boys doing his time, anyway."
"I spent some time up at the Flathead courthouse. Why's he buying and leasing up property around the lake?"
Nygurski set his cup in the saucer and looked out the window at the backyard. The grass was wet and green in the shade, and the sunlight was bright on the tops of the trees across the alley.
"He thinks casino gambling's going through the legislature," he said.
"The time's right for it. People are out of work, they've used up all their compo, agriculture's in the toilet. Casino gambling could turn Flathead Lake into another Tahoe. Sal would be in on the ground floor."
"It's that simple?"
"Yeah, more or less. I don't think it's going to happen, though. People here don't like outsiders, anyway. Particularly greasers and Californians."
"What did you come over here to tell me?"
"Don't worry about it. Come on, I've got an appointment with an eighteen-inch rainbow."
We drove up through the Blackfoot River canyon, which was still dark and cool with shadows and smelled of woodsmoke blowing up from the mill at Bonner. Then we broke out into meadowland and ranch country and sunshine again, turned off the highway and crossed the river on a planked log bridge, and began climbing on a dirt road through hills and lodgepole pine and scrub brush, where white-tailed deer sprang in a flick of the eye back into the dense cover of the woods. Then we came back into the canyon again, into the most beautiful stretch of river that I had ever seen. The rock cliffs were red and sheer and rose straight up three hundred feet. The crests were thick with ponderosa, and the water, blue and green, turned in deep pools where the current had eaten under the cliffs. The rocks along the shore were bone white and etched with dried insects, and out beyond the canyon's shadows, the great boulders in the middle of the river were steaming in the sun and flies were hatching out in a gray mist above the riffle.
I tied a renegade fly on the tippet of my nylon leader and followed Nygurski into the shallows. The water was so cold inside my tennis shoes and khakis that my bones felt as though they had been beaten with an ice mallet. I false-cast in a figure eight above my head, laid out the line upstream on the riffle, and watched the fly swirl through the eddies and around the boulders toward me. I picked it up, false-cast again, drying it in the air with a whistling sound inches from my ear, and dropped it just beyond a barkless, sun-bleached cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream. The riffle made a lip of dirty foam around the end of the log, and just as my leader swung around it and coursed across the top of a deep pool, I saw a rainbow rise from the bottom like an iridescent bubble released from the pebble-and-silt bed and snap my renegade down in a spray of silvery light.
I raised my rod high and stripped off-line with my left hand and let him run. He headed out into the current, into deep water, and my Fenwick arched and vibrated in my palm, drops of water glistening and trembling on the line. Then he broke the surface, and the sun struck the red and pink and green band on his side. I had to go deeper into the current with him, up to my chest now, and strip off my line to keep from breaking the tippet. I kept walking with him downstream while he pumped against the rod and tried to wrap the line around a submerged boulder, until I was back in the deep shade of the canyon, with the wind cold on my neck and the air heavy with the smell of ferns and wet stone.
Then I was around a bend, up into shallow water again, the gravel firm under my tennis shoes. It was all over for him. I worked him up into a small lagoon, watched him gin impotently over the clouded bottom with his dorsal fin out of the water; then I wet my hand and knelt in the shallows and picked him up under the stomach. He felt cold and thick in my hand, and his mouth and gills pumped hard for oxygen. I slipped the fly loose from the corner of his mouth and placed him back in the water. He hovered momentarily over the gravel, his tail moving for balance in the light current, before he dropped away over a ledge and was gone in the current.
While Nygurski fished farther upstream, I kicked together a pile of driftwood out in the sunlight, started a fire on the stones, and fixed a pot of cowboy coffee from his rucksack. It was warm in the sun. I sat on a dead cottonwood and drank the coffee black from one of his tin cups and watched him fish. There was a ranch farther upstream, and curious Angus wandered out of the unfenced pasture and nosed through the willows and clattered across the stones on the beach into the shallows. I saw Nygurski break his leader on a snag, then look back at me in frustration. I pointed to my watch.
He walked up the beach with his fly rod over his shoulder. His jeans were wet up to his thighs. He slipped his straw creel off his shoulder, slit open the stomachs of three rainbow, scooped out the guts and threw them back into the willows. Then he stooped by the edge of the stream and dug the blood and membrane out of the vertebrae with his thumbnail.
"I saw you turn that big one loose," he said.
"I don't keep them much anymore. I don't have a Montana license, anyway."
"You hunt?"
"I used to. I don't much anymore."
"You give it up in the army?"
"Something like that."
He poured himself a cup of coffee, took two wax-paper-wrapped pork chop sandwiches out of his rucksack and gave me one, then sat down on the log next to me. The veins in his thick neck stuck out like webs of cord when he chewed.
"What kind of gun do you have?" he said.
"An army .45 automatic."
"You have a permit for it?"
"In Louisiana I do. Not here."
"They're not real big on gun permits in Montana, but let's get you one, anyway."
"What are we talking about?"
"We have a tap on Sally Dio's telephone. He knows it."
"So?"
"He doesn't know that we have a tap on a pay phone down the shore from his house. The one that he uses for some of his longdistance calls."
I picked up a small, flat, gray stone and skipped it out on the water.
"He called a bar in Vegas," Nygurski said.
"He said to the guy who answered, Tell Charlie I've got a yard job for him up here." You know what that is?"
"No, that's a new one."
"I've heard a couple of Quentin graduates use it. It's when they do somebody out on the yard. The last time we heard Sal say something like that on a tap, a witness against him got a .22 magnum round behind the ear. But we don't know who Charlie is."
I tossed another small stone in a gentle arc out on the water. It made a circle like a trout rising, then the circle floated on down the riffle into white water.
"Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with you," he said.
"The Dios have lots of enemies."
I brushed the gravel off my palms and I didn't say anything for a while. The sun was hot now, and flies were hatching out of the cattails and rainbows popping at them in a shaded pool under the cliff.
"What do you think I ought to do?" I said finally.
"Maybe it's time to go back to New Iberia."
"You think he'd bring in a mechanic, risk his whole operation, because of pride?"
"Look, he's got a little clout in the mob because he's Frank Dio's son. But basically Sal's a loser. He's a lousy musician, he did time for stolen credit cards, his wife dumped him after he broke her nose, his friends are bought-and-paid-for rummies and coke heads Then you come along and remodel his face while everybody gets to watch. What do you think a guy like that is feelin
g for you right now?"
"It won't matter, then, if I go back to Louisiana or not."
"Maybe not."
I looked at my watch. Across the stream I saw a hawk drop suddenly into a meadow and hook a field mouse in its talons.
"Thanks for the fishing trip. I need to pick up my truck now," I said.
"I'm sorry to be the one to drop this on you."
"Don't worry about it."
"Why in God's name did you do it, Robicheaux?"
I didn't sleep that night. As we say in AA, the executive committee held a session in my head. I thought about sending Alafair back to Louisiana, to stay with my cousin or Batist and his wife, but then I would lose all control over her situation. I doubted that Harry Mapes would make a move against either of us as long as my trial was pending and it looked like I was going to take the fall for Dalton Vidrine's murder; but then again you can't second-guess a psychopath, and I believed that's what he was.
I still wasn't convinced by Dan Nygurski about Sally Dio's calling Vegas to bring in a contract killer. The mob, or at least its members I had known in New Orleans, did not operate like that. They whacked out witnesses, Colombian competitors, and each other, but they didn't hit ordinary people because of a personal grudge. Their own leadership didn't allow it; it brought down too much heat on their operation and compromised their hard-bought relationships with politicians, police officials, and judges. Sally Dee was a vicious punk, but his father was smart and cautious, a survivor of gang wars and Mafia power struggles. I just didn't believe they would be willing to blow it all over a broken tooth.
So the executive committee stayed in session until the false dawn and then adjourned with little resolved. As always when I was weak and drained and absolutely burnt-out with my own failed attempts at reasoning through a problem, I turned it over to my Higher Power; then I cooked sausage and eggs for our breakfast, walked Alafair to school, made arrangements for her to stay with the baby-sitter, put my .45 and an extra clip under the truck seat, and headed over the Divide for the Blackfeet Reservation.
My fan belt broke ten miles south of the reservation, and I hitched a ride with an Indian feed grower to a filling station at a four-corners four miles up the road. I bought a new fan belt, then started walking on the shoulder of the road back toward my truck. It was a mistake. Rain clouds drifted down over the low green hills to the east, shadowing the fields and sloughs and clumps of willows and cotton-woods; suddenly the sky burst open and a hard, driving rain stung my skin and drenched my clothes in minutes. I took cover against the rock face of a small hill that the road cut through, and watched the storm shower work its way across the land. Then a paint less and battered school bus, with adhesive tape plastered on its cracked windows, with bicycles, collapsed tents, shovels, and two canoes roped to its sides and roof, came high balling around the corner like a highway-borne ghost out of the 1960s.
When the driver stopped for me I could hear screws scouring into brake shoes, the twisted exhaust pipe hammering against the frame, the engine firing as if all the spark plug leads had been deliberately crossed. The driver threw open the folding door with a long lever, and I stepped inside of what could have been a time capsule. The seats had all been torn out and replaced with hammocks, bunks, sleeping bags, a butane stove, a bathtub, cardboard boxes bursting with clothes. A woman nursed a child at her breast; a white man with Indian braids sat on the floor, carving an animal out of a soap bar; another woman was changing an infant's diapers on the backseat; a bearded man in a pony tail slept facedown in a hammock, so that his body looked like a netted fish's suspended from the ceiling. I could smell sour milk, reefer, and burnt food.
The driver had dilated blue eyes and a wild red beard, and he wore leather wristbands and a fatigue jacket open on his bare chest, which was deeply tanned and scrolled with dark blue jailhouse tattoos. He told me to sit down in a wood chair that was located next to him at the head of the aisle. Then he slammed the door shut with the lever, crunched the transmission into gear, and we careened down the road in the blowing rain. I told him where I was going, and held on to a metal rail to keep from bouncing out of the chair.
"That's a bad place to stand, man," he said.
"There's fuckers come around that curve seventy miles an hour, crazy sonsobitches in log trucks think they own the fucking road. What one of them needs is somebody to wind up a brick on a string and put it through his window. You live around here?"
"No, I'm just a visitor."
"That's a weird accent. I thought maybe you was a Canuck."
"No, I'm from Louisiana."
His eyes were curious, and they moved over my face. The bus drifted toward the shoulder.
"Say, there's a cafe up on the right. I think I'll get off and get something to eat," I said.
"I said we'd take you to your truck. You'll get there, man. Don't worry about it."
The woman who was breast-feeding the child wiped his chin with her shirt, then put his mouth on the nipple again and looked impassively out the window. Her face was without makeup, her hair dull brown, long, and stuck together on the tips.
"You keep looking in the back of the bus. Something bothering you?" the driver said.
"Not at all."
"You think we're spikers or something?"
"What?"
"Spikers. You think we go around driving railroad spikes in trees?"
"No, I don't think that."
"Cause we don't, man. A tree is a living thing, and we don't wound living things. Does that make sense to you?"
"Sure."
"We live up on the reservation. We're a family. We lead a natural way of life. We don't get in nobody's face. All we ask is nobody fuck with us. That ain't a lot to ask, is it?"
I looked out the streaked windowpanes of the folding door. The countryside was green and wet and covered with a gray mist.
"Is it?" he said.
"No, it's not."
"Cause a lot of people won't let you alone. They're at war with the earth, man. That's their fucking problem. You don't do it their way, they try to kick a two-by-four up your ass."
The ride was becoming increasingly more uncomfortable. I figured it was three more miles to my truck.
"Do you know a girl named Darlene American Horse on the reservation?" I said.
"I don't know her."
"She's from there."
"That might be, man, but I don't know her. Check with my old lady." He nodded backward toward the woman with the child at her breast.
I asked her about Darlene. She wore large wire-rimmed glasses, and she looked at me quietly with no expression in her face.
"I don't know her," she said.
"You've lived there long?"
"A year."
"I see."
"It's a Blackfeet reservation," she said. Her speech had that flat quality of quasi-omniscience that you hear in women who have reached a certain gray plateau in their lives from which they know they'll never escape.
"Yes?" I said.
"They're all Blackfeet. The Sioux live over in South Dakota."
"I don't understand what you mean."
"American Horse is a Sioux name," she said.
"He fought with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse against the whites."
It's her married name, I thought.
"You know how they bought it, too?" the driver said.
"Dealing with the Man under a flag of truce. They went into the fort and got their asses shot. That's what happens when you trust those fuckers."
My God, why didn't I see it, I thought.
"Hey, you're looking a little gray," the driver said.
"What?"
"You want some food? We got extra," he said.
"No. Thank you. Did y'all know a guy by the name of Clayton Desmarteau?"
"You better believe it. Same outfit as me. First Cav."
"Did he have a sister?"
"What d'you mean 'did'?"
"You haven't seen him around in a while, hav
e you?"
He thought for a moment.
"I guess not," he said.
"Do you know if he had a sister?"
"I don't know nothing about his family. He don't live on the reservation. He used to come on it to organize for AIM against them oil and gas companies. They're gonna mess up the East Front, try to build pipelines and refineries and all kinds of shit." ' "What color were his eyes?"
"His eyes?" He turned and grinned at me through his red beard. His teeth were missing in back.
DR03 - Black Cherry Blues Page 18