Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  He fitted on his spectacles and peered down at a fax sheet.

  "It says here you and your partner were investigated in the killing of some drug mules down in Mexico," he said.

  "Rumors die hard," I replied.

  He read further on the fax sheet, his eyes stopping on one paragraph in particular. His eyes became neutral, as though he did not want to reveal the knowledge they now held.

  He picked up a clipboard and propped it at an angle against his desk. "You're not gonna kill anybody up here, are you?" he said.

  "Wouldn't dream of it."

  His pencil moved on the clipboard, then his face lifted up at me again.

  "You're an attorney now?" he said.

  "Yes, sir."

  He wrote something on his clipboard.

  "You know what bothers me? You haven't asked me one question about this guy Wyatt Dixon," he said.

  "A lot of graduates make threats. Most never show up," I said.

  He studied his clipboard and tapped on the metal clamp with his mechanical pencil.

  "I can't argue with that," he said. "But Dixon did five years in Huntsville before he got picked up in Fort Davis for drunk driving. He did time in California, too. His record indicates he's a violent and unpredictable man. You're not curious at all?"

  "I don't know him, Sheriff. If we're finished here…" I said.

  He tossed his clipboard on the desk. A half-completed crossword puzzle was fastened in place under the spring clamp.

  "There's what the press calls 'militia' down in the Bitterroot Valley. I think they're just a bunch of ass-wipes myself. But your friend Dr. Voss is doing his best to stir them up. Maybe he needs a friend to counsel him," the sheriff said.

  "He's not a listener," I replied.

  "I've got the feeling you're not, either," he said. He took a gingersnap out of a paper bag and bit it in half with his dentures. But the humor in his eyes did not disguise the bemused, perhaps pitying look he gave me when I rose to leave his office.

  Doc's HOUSE was at the northern end of a valley above the little settlement of Potomac, and you had to cross the river on a log bridge trussed together with rusted cable and drive five miles on a poor road through dense stands of timber to reach it. At night the light played tricks in the sky. Even though the house was located between cliffs and ridgelines, the clouds would reflect the glow of Missoula, or perhaps the bars in the mill town of Bonner, or cities out on the coast. But through the screen window, as I looked up from my bed, I thought I could see distant places upside down in the sky.

  Doc said Montana was filled with ghosts. Those of Indians massacred on the Marias River, wagoners who died of cholera and typhus on their way to Oregon, the wandering spirits of Custer and the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, whose bodies were sawed apart with stone knives and left on the banks of what the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne called the Greasy Grass.

  But I didn't need to change my geography to see apparitions.

  When the Missoula County sheriff had read the fax sheets in his folder, his eyes had lighted on a detail he chose not to mention.

  Years ago, on a nocturnal and unauthorized raid into Coahuila, I accidentally shot and killed the best friend I ever had.

  Today the spirit of my dead friend accompanied me wherever I went. L. Q. Navarro was lean and mustached, with grained skin and lustrous black eyes, and he wore the clothes he had died in, a pinstripe suit and vest with a glowing white shirt, an ash-gray Stetson sweat-stained around the crown, and dusty boots and rowled Mexican spurs that tinkled like tiny bells when he walked.

  I saw him at evening inside mesquite groves traced with fireflies, sitting on top of a stall in a shaft of sunlight on Sunday morning while I bridled my Morgan to go to Mass, or sometimes idly looking over my shoulder while I fished the milky-green river at the back of my property. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, he assured me the purple wound high up on his chest was not my fault.

  That was L.Q. His courage, his stoic acceptance of his fate, his refusal to accuse became the rough-hewn cross and set of nails that waited for me every night in my sleep.

  When trouble comes into your life in such a marrow-eating, destructive fashion that eventually you are willing to undergo surgery without anesthesia to rid yourself of it, you inevitably look back at the moment when somehow you blundered across the wrong Rubicon. There must have been a defining moment where it all went south, you tell yourself. Great astronomical signs in the sky that you ignored.

  No, you simply took the wrong exit off a freeway into what appeared to be a deserted neighborhood lighted by sodium lamps, or trustingly signed a document handed you by a good-natured, bald-headed man, or released the deadbolt on your door so an accident victim could use your telephone.

  Doc asked me to meet him and a ladyfriend at a restaurant and bar in the mist-shrouded, logging town of Lincoln, high up in the mountains by Rogers Pass. I parked my truck and walked past a dozen chopped-down Harleys into the warmth and cheerful brightness of the restaurant and saw Doc sitting in a booth with a tall woman whose dark hair was pushed up inside a baseball cap.

  An empty pitcher of beer rested between them.

  There was a flush in Doc's throat, an unnatural shine in his eyes.

  "This is Cleo Lonnigan. She practices meatball medicine at the Res," Doc said.

  "That means I work part time at the free clinic," the woman said. She had dark eyelashes and brown eyes and a mole on her chin. Her high shoulders and slacks and beige silk shirt, one that changed colors in the light, made me think of a photograph taken of my mother when my mother worked in an aircraft plant in California during the war.

  Somebody in the bar turned up the jukebox so loud that it shook the wall, then the bartender came from behind the bar and turned the volume down again. A woman laughed in a shrill voice, as though enjoying an obscene joke.

  "You see those bikers back there? They think they're nineteenth-century guys who've found the last piece of the American West," Doc said. "What I'm saying is they're actually victims. It's like a bug on a highway facing down an eighteen-wheeler. They're just not students of history, you follow?"

  "I'm ready to order. Do you want a steak, Doc?" Cleo said, smiling, obviously not wanting him to drink more.

  "Sure. I'll get us a refill," Doc replied.

  "Not for me," I said. But he wasn't listening.

  I watched him work his way between the tables toward the bar, excusing himself when he bumped against someone's chair.

  "Doc's usually not a drinker," I said.

  "You could fool me," she said.

  So she hadn't known him long, I thought, with more interest than I should have had as Doc's friend.

  I heard the door open behind me and saw her eyes go past me and follow three men who had just entered. They wore yellow construction hats and khakis and half-topped boots, and their faces looked pinched and red from the wind. They sat at a table in the corner, one with a red-and-white-checkered cloth on it, and studied their menus.

  "Those guys are from the Phillips-Carruthers Corporation. It's just as well Doc doesn't see them," Cleo said.

  "Why not?"

  "They work at the gold mine. They use cyanide to leach the gold out of the rock," she said.

  "Near the river?" I said.

  "Near everything."

  I turned and looked at the men again. One of them glanced back at me over his menu, then sipped from his water glass and through the window watched a truck boomed down with logs pass in the rain.

  "You think Doc's going to be all right?" I asked.

  "I doubt it."

  She looked at the expression on my face.

  "He's an idealist. Idealists get in trouble," she said.

  The waitress took our order. I heard more noise in the bar area and saw Doc talking to three bikers at a table, his graceful hands extended as though he were holding his spoken sentences between them.

  "Excuse me a minute," I said.

  I walked to the r
ear of the restaurant, which opened into a darkened, neon-lit bar area that was layered with cigarette smoke. I passed Doc without looking at either him or his listeners and continued toward the men's room. But I could smell the bikers, the way you smell a wild animal's presence in a cage. It was a viscous, glandular odor, like sweaty leather and unwashed hair and body grease and testosterone that has dried and become part of the person's clothes.

  Behind me, Doc continued his earnest instruction to his audience: "See, you guys motor on in to Lincoln because you think it's a place with no parameters. The home of the Unabomber, right? A guy who had stink on him that would make buzzards fall out of the sky but who went unnoticed by the locals for twenty years.

  "See, what you don't understand is these people are very square and territorial. One time a bunch of guys like you decided to take over a town in the Gallatin Valley on a Saturday afternoon. They started shoving people around in bars, busting beer bottles in the streets, riding their hogs across church lawns, you know, like in the Marlon Brando film The Wild One.

  "Guess what? In two hours every mill worker, gypo logger, and sheepherder in the county came into town. They parked their log trucks across the roads so the bikers couldn't get out. They broke arms and legs and bent Harleys around telephone poles. Some of the bikers got down on their knees and begged. The townies left enough of the bikers intact to take the wounded into Billings."

  I went into the men's room. When I came back out, Doc was still talking. The bikers smoked cigarettes and poured beer into their glasses and drank in measured sips, tipping their ashes into an empty can, occasionally glancing at one another.

  One of their girls was watching the scene from the cigarette machine, her arms folded in front of her. She was an Indian, perhaps part white, her long hair streaked with strands of dull yellow. She wore a lavender T-shirt and Levi's that hung low on her hips, exposing her navel. She stared directly into my eyes. When I looked back at her, she tilted her head slightly as though I had not understood a point she was making.

  "The waitress is fixing to throw your food out, Doc," I said.

  "Go on. I'll be there," he replied, waving me away.

  I went back out into the restaurant and sat down across from Cleo. A strand of her hair hung out of her baseball cap across one eye.

  "Where do you and Doc know each other from?" I said, glancing back at the bar area.

  "A support group," she replied.

  "Pardon?"

  "It's a group that meets in Missoula. For people who have-" She saw that I was still watching the bar area. "What are you asking for?"

  "I'm sorry," I said, my attention coming back on her face. "You said a support group. I didn't know what you meant."

  Her left hand was turned palm down on the table. There was no wedding ring on it. "It's for people who have lost family members to violence. Doc's wife died in a plane crash. My husband and son were murdered. So we attend the same meetings. That's how we met. I thought that's what you were asking me," she said.

  The skin of my face felt tight against the bone. The restaurant seemed filled with the clatter of dishes and cacophonous conversation about insignificant subjects.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-" I began, but the waitress arrived at the table and began setting plates of steak and potatoes in front of us. Cleo had already lost interest in anything I had to say by way of apology.

  Behind her, the Indian biker girl from the bar walked between the tables, watching me, as though she knew me or expected me to intuit private meaning in her stare.

  "Why not get a new cigarette machine instead of putting tape all over it? It not only looks like shit, the cigarettes don't come out," she said to the woman behind the cash register.

  "Let me give you some breath mints instead. Oh, there's no charge. Don't they sell cigarettes on the reservation?" the cashier said.

  The Indian girl took the last cigarette out of her pack and put it in her mouth, her weight on one foot, her eyes staring into the cashier's.

  The cashier smiled tolerantly. "Sorry, honey. But you should learn how to talk to people," she said.

  "My speech coach says the same thing. I'm always saying blow me to patronizing white people," the Indian girl said.

  She paused by our booth and momentarily rested her fingers on the tabletop and lit her cigarette.

  "Your doctor friend is in Lamar Ellison's face. I'd get him out of here," she said, her eyes looking straight ahead.

  She walked away, toward the bar.

  "Who is that?" Cleo said.

  "I don't know. But I don't like eating at the O.K. Corral," I said.

  I got up from the table and went back to the bar.

  "Your food's getting cold, Doc," I said.

  "I was just coming," he replied. Then he said to the bikers, "Y'all think on it. Why get your wick snuffed being somebody's hump? I'll check with you later."

  I placed my hand under his arm and gently pulled him with me.

  "What's wrong with you?" I said.

  "You just got to turn these guys around. It's the rednecks who win the wars. The liberals are waiting around on a grant."

  "We're eating supper, then blowing this place. Or at least I am."

  "You're in Montana. This is no big deal."

  He cut into his steak and put a piece into his mouth and drank from his beer, his eyes looking reflectively at the three engineers from the gold mine.

  I waited for him to start in on another soliloquy, but an event taking place in the bar had suddenly captured his attention.

  Two men and a woman had come in, people who were obviously from somewhere else, their features soft around the edges, their shoulders rounded, their faces circumspect yet self-indulgent and vaguely adventurous. They had taken a booth in the bar, then perhaps one of them had glanced at the bikers, or said something or laughed in a way a biker did not approve of, or maybe it was just their bad luck that their physical weakness gave off an odor like raw meat to a tiger.

  One of the bikers took a toothpick out of his mouth and set it in an ashtray. He rose from his chair and walked to their booth, drinking from a long-necked beer bottle, his jeans bagging in the seat. He stared down at them, not speaking, the stench of his body and clothes rising into their faces like a stain.

  "Somebody's got to put a tether on those boys," Doc said.

  "Don't do it, Tobin," I said.

  Doc wiped the steak grease off his mouth and hands with a napkin, the alcoholic warmth gone from his eyes now, and walked back toward the bar.

  Cleo rested her forehead on her fingers and let out her breath.

  "This was a mistake. It's time to go," she said. She looked up at me. "Aren't you going to do something?"

  "It's somebody else's fight," I said.

  "How chivalric," she said.

  "Doc resents people mixing in his business."

  "I'm going to get him out of there if you won't."

  "Ask the waitress for the check," I said, and returned to the bar area.

  The biker towering over the three tourists wore a leather vest with no shirt and steel-toed engineering boots; his jaws and chin were heavy with gold stubble, his hair tangled in snakes like a Visigoth's. His arms were scrolled with tattoos of daggers dripping blood, helmeted skulls, swastikas, a naked woman in a biker cap chained by the wrists to motorcycle handlebars. The three people in the booth looked at nothing, their hands and bodies motionless, their mouths moving slightly, as though they did not know which expression they wanted their faces to form.

  "Excuse me, but you were pinning my friends," the biker said. "Then I got the impression you cracked wise about something. Like your shit don't stink, like other people ain't worthy of respect. I just want you to know we ain't got no beef with nobody. Ain't no biker here gonna hurt you. Everybody cool with that?"

  The two men in the booth started to nod imperceptibly, as though their acquiescence would open a door in an airless, superheated room. But the biker was watching the woman.

/>   "You want another beer?" he asked her. He reached out with one finger and touched her lips. "Smile for me. Come on, you got a nice mouth. You don't want to walk around with a pout on it."

  Her throat swallowed and her eyes were shiny, her nostrils dilated and white on the edges.

  "Here, let me show you," the biker said. He worked his finger into her mouth, wedging it open, forcing it past her teeth, reaching inside her cheek.

  "Now, just a minute," the man next to her said.

  "You don't want to touch me, Jack. That's something you really don't want to do," the biker said, while the woman's saliva ran down his finger.

  Doc stepped into the biker's field of vision, raising his hand as a peacemaker might.

  "You need to walk outside and get some air, trooper… No, no, it's not up for debate," Doc said.

  The biker didn't speak. Instead, his left hand, the index finger still wet from the woman's mouth, seemed to float like a balloon toward the side of Doc's head, as though he were about to caress it.

  Doc's movements were so fast I was never sure later whether he hit the biker first with his hand or his foot. I saw him spin, then the biker's head snapped back and his mouth exploded in the air. Doc spun again, his foot flying out in a reverse back kick, and I was sure this time I heard bones or teeth snap.

  The biker was on the floor now, and I could see spittle and blood on his lips. But his pain and disfigurement were the least of his problems. He was strangling to death.

  "Get out of the way!" I heard Cleo say behind me. Then she was on her knees by the biker, pressing his tongue down with a spoon, reaching into his windpipe with her fingers, extracting part of a dental bridge.

  I walked outside, past the row of parked Harleys, and removed L.Q. Navarro's blue-black, holstered.45 from the shell on the back of my pickup truck. I dropped the pistol on the front seat and waited for the sheriff's deputies and the paramedics, who I knew would be there momentarily. The sky was black, the mountains steep-sided, the trees suddenly pale green when lightning jumped between the clouds. Down the highway I saw the red emergency lights of an ambulance roaring toward me inside a vortex of rain.

  Nailed to a telephone pole was a drenched, wind-torn poster advertising a rodeo in Stevensville, down in the Bitterroot Valley. On the ad was an action photo of a rodeo clown distracting a bull that had just thrown a cowboy into the boards. For some reason the incongruous image of the helpful clown, dressed in vagabond clothes, wearing a derby hat with horns attached to it, would not leave my mind.