Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  That night, outside a small settlement near the Idaho border, a truncated man with arms that were too short for his torso was carrying everything he owned out of a clapboard house and packing it into his automobile. The moon had just risen above the hollow where the man lived, and the crests of the mountains were black against the sky and the hard-packed dirt road in front of the house wound like a flattened white snake under the railroad trestle, past other dilapidated houses, out to the four-lane highway the man planned to drive full-bore all the way to the Cascades and Seattle.

  The man's name was Tommy Lee Stoltz, and he wore a black cowboy hat mashed down on his ears and engineering boots with double soles and heels and thick glasses that made his eyes look like large marbles. Tiny blue teardrops were tattooed just below the corners of his eyes so that he appeared to be in a state of perpetual mourning. The night air was cold but he was sweating inside his clothes and his heart raced each time he heard automobile or truck tires on the dirt road.

  Why had he ever left Florida? He'd had a good life dry-walling, hanging in open-air bars down on the beach, getting ripped on beer and cheap weed that was smuggled in from the islands, and opening up his scooter on Seven-Mile Bridge. Even that one-bit he did on a road gang in the Keys wasn't bad. The winter days were beautiful, and the fish was fresh and deep-fried and, if you wanted it, the Cubans on the serving line at the stockade would heap shitpiles of black beans and rice on your plate.

  It was in California that his luck did the big flush, over a union card, locked out of the Operating Engineers because he couldn't pass a tenth-grade arithmetic test. Then he got evicted from his hotel in Santa Monica and had to sell his scooter and move into South Central. A Crip shoved him down a stairs. Two Bloods listened to him ask directions to the bus line, then roared at his cracker accent, and tossed him from a fire escape into a Dumpster filled with rotting produce.

  Screw that. If he had to live in a toilet, he might as well go native and enjoy it. So he got in on the next Los Angeles riot. The gangbangers, the illegals, the pipeheads, the out-of-work peckerwoods like himself, everybody on the South Side was burning out the Koreans, looting liquor stores and pawnshops, pulling business types out of their cars and robbing them and busting bottles over their heads, all of it on TV, helicopters swirling overhead while the cops stood behind their own barricades and watched. It was like going apeshit in a war zone, except the other side wasn't allowed to shoot back. There was definitely an upside to slum life and social protest, Tommy Lee told himself.

  But after five days of watching the city burn, the Army finally moved in, setting up sandbags and machine guns, herding looters into six-bys. Guess who they nail? Because he was white, that was it. Three dozen cannibals are running out of the appliance store, carrying TVs and stereo players on their heads, and here he comes, tripping through the broken glass, trying to heft a huge microwave out the window for this black broad who promised she'd haul his ashes if he scored something nice for her kitchen, and whop, he gets a baton right across the spine.

  Then lands on all fours and watches a.25 auto spill out of his pocket onto the sidewalk.

  Next stop, San Quentin, the beaner and melon picker capital of America. Where a short white dude with fishbowl glasses and a hush-puppy accent is anybody's portable pump.

  That's when he met Lamar Ellison, out on the yard, Lamar wearing mirrored sunglasses, eye-balling the cannibals, cleaning his nails with a toothpick. "I can put you with the AB, Tommy Lee. They're righteous dudes and they look after their own. You'll walk on water, my man," Lamar said.

  You couldn't mistake the AB out on the yard, clanking iron, their bodies glowing with stink, sweat popping on their tattoos, their shaved heads wrapped with blue and red bandannas to show their contempt for the Crips and the Bloods.

  Three years in Quentin and not one black dude or East L.A. bean roller ever put a hand on him. No one stole cigarettes or scarf out of his house, and the worst wolf in the joint would emasculate himself before trying to put moves on him in the shower. Business types thought they had respect? Unless you'd been in the Aryan Brotherhood, you didn't know the meaning of the word.

  The downside was the nature of the dues. The AB was for life.

  He was going to miss Montana. Next week Merle Haggard was playing at the Mule Palace up in the Jocko Valley. Man, he'd like to see that, the Hag, an Okie by way of Bakersfield, who'd done two and one half years at Quentin and was still a legend there, bigger than Cash or Paycheck, living proof you could wear state blues and still reenter the world and get sprinkled with starshine.

  He threw the last box of his belongings into his car and went back into the house to unscrew all the lightbulbs, remove the toilet paper roll, and tear out the elk rack the last tenant had left nailed above the living room door.

  But no matter how he tried to occupy himself or stay in motion, he could not shake a recurring image out of his head.

  It was the Voss girl. With her face pressed down under the pillow, her body writhing, her fists striking at his chest. Why had he let Lamar talk him into busting a sixteen-year-old girl, one who'd dime them all as soon as she could get to a phone?

  But secretly he knew the answer. He'd been afraid of Lamar. And not only of Lamar, but of Tommy Lee's father, who'd been a gunbull in the Georgia penal system, of people who made fun of his sawed-off torso, of guys who rode with the Jokers and Outlaws and Angels and Banditos and kept him around like a pet, a motorized goof they sent for cigarettes and beer and sometimes cheap rock down in Boon Town.

  In fact, Tommy Lee could not remember when he had not been afraid.

  But Lamar had gotten his. Big Time. Soaked in paint thinner and flame-roasted from head to foot like a burned burrito. Man, he didn't want to think about it. Nor about the fact the girl's father was out on bail, a doctor who was some kind of government-trained killing machine.

  A doctor who kills people? The illogic of it hurt his head.

  Time to slide on down the road, he thought. He stuffed two lightbulbs into his jeans pockets and hefted a box of canned goods on one shoulder and the elk rack on the other and pushed open the front door and stepped out into the coldness of the night.

  A hatted figure was standing at the corner of the house, holding a revolver in two hands, the barrel pointed at the ground.

  "Who is that?" Tommy Lee said.

  There was no answer. The hatted figure raised the revolver at arm's length and aimed, the knees squatting slightly into a classic shooter's position.

  Tommy Lee knew that somehow he could make words come out of his mouth that would show the hatted figure he was no threat to anyone, that in the big scheme of things his worst offenses were only those of a motorized goof, a harmless, good-natured little guy the swinging dicks took care of. What did this guy in the hat want? Why didn't the guy say something? Tommy Lee's skin felt as if it were being peeled off his face.

  He couldn't keep his thoughts straight. In his mind he saw the farm in Georgia where he had grown up, a girl who had asked him to dance with her at a high school prom, a red molten sun descending into the Gulf of Mexico. He wanted all these things back in his life and would pay any price to return to them. If he could only make that happen, he would correct all the wrongs he had done and make amends to every person he had ever harmed.

  If only the hatted figure with the shadowed face would please point the revolver somewhere else.

  He had almost formed the sentence that would contain all those thoughts when the pistol barrel exploded with light and sound and the copper-jacketed round punched a neat hole through the right lens of his glasses and blew a single spurt of blood out the back of his head onto the grass.

  Chapter 13

  Sheriff J. T. Cain knocked on Doc's door early the next morning.

  "Where were you last night?" he said.

  "Here," Doc said.

  "All night?"

  "Yeah, I was here all night."

  "Doing what?" the sheriff said.

  "
Sleeping."

  "You vouch for that?" the sheriff said to me.

  "What's this about, Sheriff?" I said.

  "Nothing much. Another dead man. Step out here, please," he said to me.

  I followed him to his car. The sun wasn't up yet, and fog rose off the boulders in the river and hung in the trees. The sheriff stood with his hands on his hips, his cowboy hat slanted on his head, his wide red tie clipped to his shirt.

  "That man in there didn't leave the house last night?" he asked.

  "To my knowledge, no."

  "To your knowledge, huh? Take a ride with me."

  "What for?"

  "You defense lawyers spend too much time in your office. I want you to see the handiwork of our shooter."

  I got into his car and we rode west of Missoula, up the long grade toward the Idaho line. The mountains were green with Douglas fir, the crests tumbling higher and higher against a salmon-colored sky. Then the Clark Fork dropped away in the canyons below us and finally disappeared from view altogether.

  We went through the little town of St. Regis, then turned off the four-lane under a train trestle and entered a hollow traversed by a dirt road that was dotted with clapboard houses on each side. The yards were strung with washlines and littered with debris, like a scene out of Appalachia.

  The sheriff had said very little during our journey.

  "See all that old growth timber up there? That's the way it used to be everywhere," he said. "We didn't have cyanide in the river and runoff from the clear-cuts destroying the spawning beds. We didn't have no Aryan Nation or Christian Identity or militia people coming in here from Idaho, either. You know why they like it up here in the woods?"

  "They're cowards. They fear blacks and Jews and locate in places where they'll never have to face them on equal terms."

  He turned his head and stared at me and almost drove us off the road.

  "Damn, son, you may have more sense than I give you credit for," he said.

  The coroner had been late in arriving at the crime scene and was just finishing his work. Two paramedics were waiting by the road with a gurney. An empty black body bag lay unzippered on top of it.

  The impact of the round had blown Tommy Lee Stoltz off the porch and into the yard. A roll of toilet paper from the box of groceries he had been carrying had bounced down the steps and rolled back under the porch into a pool of brown water. Stoltz lay on his back, staring at the sky, his shattered glasses crooked on his face. The right lens was embedded in the eye socket, coated with blood.

  The sheriff from Mineral County stooped under the front door and walked out on the porch and looked at me and Sheriff Cain. He had a broad stomach and red face and graying blond hair and mustache. He wore a sheep-lined vest and a blue baseball cap with the letters MCSD on it.

  "Who's he?" he said to Cain.

  "An ex-Texas Ranger along for the ride. What have you got?" Sheriff Cain said.

  "A neighbor heard the shot and looked out the window and saw somebody in a hat and a long coat with a chrome-plated pistol. We didn't find any brass, so the shooter picked it up or he was using a revolver. I don't think we'll get much from ballistics. The exit wound and the splatter tell me that round's way up on the hillside somewheres. This one of the guys you pulled in for questioning in the Voss rape?"

  "Yep," Sheriff Cain said.

  "Where was the girl's father last night?"

  "He says he was at home," Sheriff Cain said.

  "You believe him?"

  "I haven't decided," Sheriff Cain said.

  "J.T., you quit running these morons into my jurisdiction," the Mineral County sheriff said.

  "You folks got a lot more room over here," Sheriff Cain said.

  The Mineral County sheriff lit a pipe and smoked it out on the road while the paramedics loaded the body into an ambulance. I was beginning to look at Sheriff Cain in a new light.

  "Why'd you introduce me as an ex-Ranger and not as Doc Voss's attorney?" I asked.

  "I felt like it. What do you think Stoltz got hit with?" he said.

  "Something big. Probably with a jacket on it."

  "A.44 Magnum?"

  "Maybe."

  "Dr. Voss has got one registered in his name."

  "There're.44 Magnums all over this state." And in my mind's eye, I saw the heavy, chrome-plated revolver that Cleo Lonnigan had used to threaten Nicki Molinari at her house. "You really figure Doc for this?"

  The sheriff squinted at the sun breaking over the top of the hollow and chewed on the end of a toothpick until it was flat.

  "Whoever killed Stoltz just wanted him dead. The person who killed Lamar Ellison wanted him to suffer first. I think we got two different perpetrators," the sheriff said.

  "I think you're an intelligent man."

  "Your friend ain't off the hook. Come on, let's eat breakfast. I been up since four. I got to find me another job. This morning my old woman told me I'm the reason our grandkids are ugly," he said.

  "Doc didn't kill Ellison, Sheriff."

  "How do you know?"

  "He would have made Ellison fight for his life. Then he would have cut him from his scrotum to his throat."

  "That'll make a fine defense, won't it?" he replied.

  Friday evening Lucas walked up from his tent on the river and took a shower in Doc's house and was combing his hair in the mirror when I inadvertently opened the bathroom door on him. His cheeks glowed with a fresh shave and his back was white and cuffed with sunburn around the neck.

  "Where you headed, slick?" I asked.

  "To see Merle Haggard. He's playing at a place called the Mule Palace. You ever been there?" His words were hurried, as though he wanted to distract me from an impending question.

  "No, I've never been there. Who you going with?"

  "Sue Lynn Big Medicine."

  "Tell me, bud, did you come all the way up here to see how much grief you could get into?"

  "Since you're already pissed off at me, can I share something else with you?"

  "What might that be?" I said.

  "I need to borrow your truck," he replied.

  Ten minutes later I watched him shine his boots on the porch and slip them on his feet and walk back down to the tent and put on a long-sleeve white cowboy shirt embroidered with roses and his wide-brim cream-colored straw hat, with a scarlet cord around the crown, and climb into my truck and start the engine.

  But before he could get out of the yard I waved my hand to stop him. He wore mirrored sunglasses, and I could see my reflection bending down toward him, distorted, a bit comical, the constant deliverer of rhetoric that was meant to compensate for my years of absence as a father.

  He waited for me to speak. When I didn't, he said, "What was you gonna say?"

  "Nothing. Y'all have a good time."

  "Say, you couldn't let me have a ten-spot till I cash a check, could you? Tickets are twenty-five dollars," he said.

  I ate supper with Doc and Maisey, then took a walk along the river and threw pinecones into the current and watched them float downstream into the shade. I saw L.Q. Navarro sitting in the fork of a cottonwood tree.

  "Quit picking on that Indian gal," he said.

  "She keeps company with people you wouldn't spit on, L.Q. Don't lecture at me."

  "You got a way of getting upset when that boy takes up with minority people."

  "That's a dadburn lie."

  "Then leave him alone."

  "All right, I will. Just stop pestering me."

  "Where you goin?" L.Q. said.

  "None of your business."

  I walked back to the house and called Temple Carrol at her motel in Missoula. "You like Merle Haggard?" I asked.

  Temple picked me up at Doc's and we drove back down the Blackfoot highway toward Missoula. The sun was still above the mountains in the west, but the bottom of the canyon was already in shadow. When the wind gusted, the leaves of the cottonwoods and aspens along the riverbank flickered like paper against the copperish-green
tint of the current.

  "Your hot water bottle occupied tonight?" Temple said.

  "Pardon?"

  "Your girlfriend, the one who works at the clinic on the Reservation."

  "I haven't seen her."

  "A friend ran her name through NCIC. He got a hit."

  "Cleo?"

  "Her ex-husband was Mobbed-up with a gangster named Molinari on the West Coast."

  "I know all about it," I said.

  "Good," she said, and didn't speak again until we reached the top of the long, timber-lined grade that fed into the Jocko Valley.

  The concert was being held outdoors on the edge of the Flathead Indian Reservation. The sun had just gone down behind the mountains, and the hills were plum-colored and the floor of the valley a dark green under a light-filled sky that gave you vertigo when you looked directly up into it. The air was heavy with the cool smell of water in irrigation ditches and the pine trees that were in shadow on the hillsides and the faintly acidic warm odor of mules and horses penned outside the viewing stands. To one side of the stage, concessionaires were grilling sausages and hamburgers on open pits and selling beer and soda pop out of galvanized horse tanks swimming with crushed ice. Merle Haggard had just walked out on the stage with his band, and the crowd on the cement dance slab was shouting, "Hag! Hag! Hag!"

  Temple and I sat midway up in the stands. Her cheeks were as red as a doll's, her mouth like a small purple flower, her face glowing with the perfection of the evening. But it was obvious her thoughts were far away.

  "I came up to Montana because Doc asked me to. But maybe I should head back to Deaf Smith," she said.

  "I need you here, Temple," I said, my eyes looking straight ahead.

  "I'm not convinced Doc's an innocent man," she said.

  "Guilty or innocent, we still defend him."

  "Let me put it another way. You've got a girlfriend with Mob connections. She also has an obsession about this biker gang, the Berdoo Jesters."

  "The sheriff told you this?"

  "Don't worry about who told me. If you want me to work with you, you'd better haul your head out of your ass."