Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "No, I just have to go home and write."

  "You drink B-52's before you write?… Look, I never went asking for no trouble. I'm not a bad guy. You want to see a badass? Check the cowboy in the corner. That's Wyatt Dixon."

  "You need to let go of my arm, Lamar." "I'm paying out thirteen hundred bucks for a new bridge. I didn't press charges against your friend. But I end up on the front page of the fucking newspaper…"

  "I know what you mean," Xavier said, peeling Lamar's hand loose from his arm. "Those news guys don't know character when they see it."

  Then both Xavier and his wife were out the door, and Lamar's face felt full of needles, his ears humming with sound, as though he had been slapped.

  He talked awhile with Sue Lynn at the table, even though she had come to the bar with Wyatt. You had to show Wyatt you weren't afraid of him. Not head on, nothing confrontational, just a little signal you didn't rattle. Then he had gone outside and smoked some Mexican gage with two other bikers, swigging off a long-neck beer on top of their scooters, digging the sunset, watching the log trucks disappear up the grade in the dusk, trying to get rid of the vague sense of humiliation he'd felt when the Girards walked away from him like he was wrapped in stink.

  But reefer and alcohol together always seemed to cook a terminal or two in his head. When he went back inside and sat down with Sue Lynn, he started talking. And talking. And talking. Without control, as though somebody had shot him up with a combo of crystal meth and Sodium Pentothal.

  Then his brain kicked into gear again and he heard his own voice, in mid-sentence, as though waking from a dream, totally unaware of what he had just said.

  Sue Lynn was a breed and looked as if she'd been poured out of two different paint buckets, but that didn't explain the whacked-out stare she was giving him now.

  "I say something wrong?" Lamar asked.

  "Fuck you," she replied.

  "Who put a broom up your ass?"

  Her eyes were red and glistening, as though she'd had a few hits of gage herself. She pushed back her chair and picked up her beer bottle and went out the door and let the screen slam behind her.

  Now Wyatt was looking at him from the corner of the room. How many people in here had any idea what kind of guy was in their midst? They thought Wyatt was one of their own, with his flat-brim cowboy hat and triangular back and narrow waist and small, hard butt inside skintight jeans. But anybody who'd ever been on the yard would scope out a dude like Wyatt Dixon in five seconds.

  Lamar winked and gave him a thumbs-up. But Wyatt just looked at him with those colorless, dead eyes, his mouth like a purple slit, as though he knew something about Lamar's future that Lamar did not.

  Well, eat shit and die, Lamar thought. Why was everybody either in his face or on his case? A doctor, for Christ's sake, knocks his bridge down his throat. An ATF prick gets his jollies describing how his ears are going to get lopped off. He tries to talk reason to this Texas lawyer and the lawyer points a gun at his crotch. A Hollywood movie star and her rumdum husband blow their noses on him in a public place and Sue Lynn tells him to get fucked.

  Maybe it was time to think about losing Montana and heading back out to the Coast. He could almost see himself tooling down the PCH to Neptune's Net on the Ventura County line, staying high on the sounds of surf and salt wind and waves crashing on rocks. Let the shitkickers frolic with the sheep.

  He got on his Harley and bagged it down the road, leaning into the curves, the roar of his exhaust flattening against the cliffs on the roadside. The sun had sunk below the mountains, and the sky was ribbed with strips of purple cloud. A pickup truck came toward him out of the dusk and sucked past him in a rush of cold air, but through the window he recognized the driver, that damned Texas doctor he wished he'd never set eyes on.

  Did the doctor recognize him? He didn't need a return performance of that night in the bar at Lincoln. Lamar watched the truck disappear in his rearview mirror, then lifted his face into the wind again, secretly ashamed of the relief he felt.

  He rounded another curve and saw a cottage supported by pilings on the edge of the river and a white Cherokee parked by the lilac bushes in front. It was the same Cherokee that Holly and Xavier Girard had left the saloon in. There were lights on behind the shades, and smoke rose from a barbecue pit on the deck above the water.

  Maybe the evening still held promise after all.

  Lamar pulled onto a gravel turnaround against the mountain, killed his engine, and walked back down the shoulder of the road to the Cherokee. He bent down over each tire and sliced off the valve stem with his pocketknife, then stepped back and viewed his handiwork.

  It still needed a little something extra.

  He found some rocks under a culvert, heavy and solid and hand-sized for throwing. He heaved one through the front window and two through the passenger windows, then reached inside with his knife and began slicing the leather seats.

  That's when he heard Xavier Girard running at him.

  It was funny how a celebrity punk thought the real world was like the one he made up in his books. Lamar shifted his knife to his left hand and caught Xavier in the mouth with his right. Xavier went down in the gravel like a sack of grain.

  Lamar shook his fingers.

  "You must have ate your iron pills today. I think you busted my hand, Xavier," he said.

  Xavier didn't answer. He was on his hands and knees now, his mouth dripping blood and spittle, his stomach hanging out of his belt like a balloon full of milk.

  "You're done, Xavier. Don't get up. Oh well, I guess this means I don't get a part in one of your wife's movies," Lamar said.

  He pulled Xavier the rest of the way to his feet, then propped him against the side of the Cherokee and drove his fist into Xavier's stomach, just below the sternum.

  Xavier fell to his knees and vomited, then pressed his forehead against the gravel, gasping for breath, his back shaking.

  "See you around. By the way, I read one of your books in the joint. I thought it sucked," Lamar said, and started back toward his Harley.

  But Xavier's hand caught the calf of his leg, then he wrapped both arms around Lamar's thigh.

  "You want a little soft-shoe? 'Cause this time I'm gonna take out all your teeth," Lamar said, and cocked back his boot.

  Holly Girard seemed to float out of nowhere, holding a nickel-plated revolver with both hands, the tiny bones in her hands whitening behind the cylinder. Her dark blond tresses hung on her cheeks and her mouth was as red and soft-looking as a strawberry that he would have loved to burst against his teeth.

  He stepped back from her, his palms raised upward. Three or four other people had walked out of the cottage behind her.

  "It's over as far as I'm concerned. Your old man shouldn't have dissed me. You want to call the heat, I understand your point of view," he said.

  That ought to leave a fishhook or two in her head, he thought.

  But when he looked at her eyes, then at Xavier and the other people from the cottage, he realized they never heard him, that the loathing and disgust they felt for him was so great they viewed him as they would a voiceless obscenity trapped under a glass bell.

  He walked away, toward his motorcycle, his hobnailed boots crunching on the gravel. When he turned around they were gone, back inside the cottage, probably dialing 911.

  So what? He was probably better off in the can than back on the street. He fired up his Harley and roared down the asphalt.

  Home was a one-room block house made of railroad ties and an open-air tin shed where he sometimes repaired motorcycles. But it was on the Blackfoot, right upstream from a bar that was surrounded by pine trees, and he could cross the water on a cable-hung walk-bridge and shoot deer and bear up a canyon just above the old railroad bed. This spring he had killed a black bear and had hung it by its hind legs from an engine hoist to dress it out, then had gotten drunk and let the meat spoil. The bear still hung in the shed, coated with blowflies, its smell rising up against
the tin roof of the shed as the day heated.

  He sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness of his cabin, stripped to the waist, and smoked a joint and drank a quart bottle of beer, then lay back on the pillow and went to sleep. Tomorrow was another day. The same sun would rise on the jail as on the river. You just stayed on the hucklebuck, man. It didn't matter where you did it.

  In his dream he thought he heard the weight of the black bear swinging slightly from the engine hoist in the tin shed, then he awoke and realized someone was in the room with him.

  A chain locked down across his throat, the links binding and cutting into his skin. Lamar pried at the chain with his fingers, but the dark figure who stood above him fitted a pipe over the boom handle, as a professional logger would, and squeezed down the boom, tightening it until saliva ran from both corners of Lamar's mouth.

  Lamar heard the rattle of liquid inside a tin container, then a splashing sound on the floor. The unmistakable sharpness of paint thinner climbed into his nostrils. A match flared in the figure's hands and just briefly in the illumination Lamar saw a face that was both strange and familiar at the same time.

  The fire spread under his bed in seconds. He thrashed his legs, twisting his head back and forth, and beat his fists against his own skull.

  The fire swelled over him in a cone, and inside the flames he thought he heard a sound like blowflies and he saw himself, for just an instant, hanging upside down over a bright fissure in the earth he had long ago convinced himself did not exist.

  Chapter 10

  With the clarity of vision and singleness of purpose that seemed to characterize everything Sheriff Cain did, he arrested Doc Voss the next afternoon and lodged him in the county jail.

  I went into the sheriff's office without knocking. He lowered the newspaper he was reading and looked at me over his spectacles.

  "You grow up in a hog lot?" he said.

  "What makes you think you can get away with something like this?" I said.

  He took his feet off his desk. "Let's see if I understand you correctly," he said. "Putting a friend of yours in jail on a murder warrant is somehow outside my job description?"

  "On what evidence?"

  He yawned sleepily. "On a previous occasion he almost killed the victim in a bar. The victim later raped the suspect's daughter. The suspect, that's Dr. Voss I'm talking about, was in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and probably did things to human beings that would make most people vomit. If you were still a Texas Ranger, who'd you be looking at?"

  "Because he was in Vietnam doesn't make him a murderer. What's the matter with you?"

  "Did I mention that a bone-handled skinning knife with the doctor's fingerprints on it was found at the crime scene?" the sheriff asked.

  I wanted to speak, to say something that would refute his words, but my throat was suddenly dry, my palms damp and stiff and hard to close.

  "Shut the door after you leave," the sheriff said.

  "Ellison was in Doc's house. He took the knife then. Were his prints on the knife?" I said.

  "No."

  I rubbed my forehead, trying to think.

  "Look, Maisey said at least one of the men who raped her had gloves on. That was Ellison," I said.

  "Good. Dr. Voss's defense attorney can say all that in court."

  "Ellison was a snitch. His own people wanted him dead. Talk to the ATE," I said.

  "I classify most of those federal boys as A.A. Which means I leave them alone," he replied.

  I looked at him incredulously. "You're saying the feds are drunks?"

  "Arrogant Asswipes. Now go piddle around on the trout stream or visit your friend up in the holding tank or whittle some shavings outside under a tree. To tell you the truth, son, my estimation of the Texas Rangers has plummeted."

  I went out of his office, my ears ringing. But I couldn't let go of his remarks. I opened his door again and went back inside.

  "I'm representing Dr. Voss. He's not to be questioned unless I'm present. I'm going to hang this case around your neck," I said.

  "Damn, I wish you would. I hate this job," he said, and picked up his newspaper again.

  It was Saturday and Doc's bail would not be set until his arraignment Tuesday afternoon. I rode the elevator up to the jail section of the courthouse with a deputy sheriff and waited in a small interview room until the deputy brought Doc down the corridor in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit.

  "How about it on the cuffs?" I said to the deputy.

  "They stay on," he answered, and closed the door on us.

  "I'll get you out Tuesday, Doc," I said. Doc stood at the window, looking down on the maple trees along the streets. "How bad is this going to be?" he asked.

  "You know that knife I gave you?"

  "Yeah, I couldn't find it the other day."

  "It was in Ellison's cabin. With your prints on it."

  That's not good, is it?" He lifted his manacled wrists and propped them on the windowsill. The hills north of the train depot were green and domed against the sky and clumps of whitetail were grazing on the slopes.

  "Take good care of Maisey, will you?"

  "Doc, you didn't do it, did you?"

  He started to answer, then stared out the window silently. His ill-fitting, orange jumpsuit looked like a clown's costume on his body.

  By Monday afternoon I had read the homicide investigators' reports on Lamar Ellison's murder and had retraced Ellison's movements of Friday evening back to the tavern on the Blackfoot. I had also managed to interview a bartender at the tavern, Holly and Xavier Girard, and a biker who'd been at the table with Sue Lynn and Ellison.

  The biker's name was Clell Miller and he ran a welding business in a tin shed on the west side of Missoula. He was shirtless and wore black goggles up on his forehead, and sweat ran down his torso into the underwear that was bunched out over the top of his jeans.

  "What were Lamar and Sue Lynn talking about?" I said.

  "It didn't make no sense. Lamar was stoned. Something about kids," he said. "Look, man, I don't want to speak bad of the dead. The Mexican Mafia had a hit on the guy. He ratted out some people inside. So maybe they cooked him. That's their style. They'll Molotov a guy in his cell."

  "You think Wyatt Dixon might have lit up his life?" I said.

  He shut down the valves on the acetylene torch he had been using. He wiped the sweat and soot off his face with a rag.

  "I ain't said nothing about Wyatt Dixon. I ain't even told you he was there."

  "That's right. You haven't said a word about him. Where'd you get the Confederate flag on your wall?" I said.

  "At the Indian powwow in Arlee. What do you care?" he said, irritably.

  "Is Wyatt a bad dude?"

  "I know what you're trying to do, man. This all started 'cause your friend's daughter pulled a train. The way I heard it, she invited them guys over and couldn't get enough. Flush it any way you want, chief, you either beat feet or I'm gonna fry up some Texas toast."

  He popped his welding torch alight.

  When I got back to Doc's place I saw an old sedan parked in the trees, down by the river. Its windshield and headlights had been removed, the body sprayed with gray primer, and two large numerals were painted in orange on the driver's door.

  The back door of the house was open. I walked inside and saw Maisey in her bedroom, lying on her side, her back to me. The Indian girl named Sue Lynn sat on the mattress beside her, stroking Maisey's hair. The plank floor creaked under my foot, and Sue Lynn's face jerked toward me.

  "What are you doing in here?" I said through the doorway.

  "I came to see about the doctor. Is he going to be all right?" she said, standing up now.

  "He's in the county jail, charged with murder. Does that sound all right?" I said.

  "Don't talk to her like that, Billy Bob. She came here to help," Maisey said.

  "She's buds with Ellison's motorcycle pals, Maisey," I said.

  "What do you know?" Sue Lynn said.
<
br />   "I think you're here for self-serving reasons," I said.

  "Then sit on this," she replied, and raised her middle finger at me.

  She tried to stare me down, then her eyes broke. She hurried out the far bedroom door into the living room and kept going, through the front screen and down the slope toward the riverbank. I went after her.

  "Listen to me," I said. "I used to be a lawman. I think the G put you inside the Berdoo Jesters. You know who set fire to Ellison, don't you?"

  She was standing in the shade of the trees, and her dark skin was freckled with the sunlight that shone through the canopy.

  "You should have kept the doctor away from Lamar in the bar up at Lincoln. You wouldn't listen to me. This is all on you," she said.

  "What's your last name?"

  "Big Medicine."

  "You're a Crow?" I said.

  "How did you know that?" she said.

  "One of the scouts for Custer at the Little Big Horn was a Crow Indian named Big Medicine. The scouts wanted to sing their death song before they rode into Sitting Bull's village. Custer accused them of cowardice and fired them. They were the only survivors of the massacre."

  She began backing toward her automobile, her eyes fixed uncertainly on mine, as though I possessed omniscience or some form of magic. Even though the air was cool in the shade, there was a bright chain of sweat around her throat.

  "The car belongs to a stock-car driver. It doesn't have lights. I have to get it back to the junkyard before sunset," she said.

  "Wyatt Dixon is a dangerous man. Don't let those federal guys use you."

  She felt behind her for the handle on the car door, then a moment of resolve, perhaps even cautious trust, seemed to form in her face.

  "Say I do know some government fucks? Why would they be asking me if Lamar and the others have been in Kingman, Arizona?" she said.

  "The men who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City hung around there at one time or another," I said.

  Her lips moved silently, as though she were repeating the words to herself, as though the enormity of their connotation would not come into focus behind her eyes.