Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  A drunk cowboy in front of us heard the last statement and turned around and grinned.

  "How about saving it till later?" I said to Temple.

  "Fine," she replied, and sipped from her soda can, her throat streaked with color.

  I touched her on the top of her hand in hopes she would look back at me. But she didn't.

  The crowd out on the dance slab was hard-core working class: truck drivers, horse wranglers, waitresses, gypo loggers, Indian feed growers, bale buckers, 4-H kids, women who drank beer with one hand and smoked with the other while they bumped rumps, petty criminals scrolled with jailhouse art, barroom strippers dancing for their own gender with undisguised erotic joy, a group of fist-fighting drunks charter-bused from a saloon, and three Indians who kept squatting down below eye level to inhale huge mouthfuls of white smoke off a crack pipe.

  Then I saw my son dancing with Sue Lynn Big Medicine, like kids from the early fifties. She wore a black cowboy hat and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off at the armpits and black jeans that were dusty in the rump. She danced close to Lucas without actually touching his body, her blond-streaked hair hanging to her shoulders, her chin lifted in the air. With each beat in the music she raised one booted foot behind her, her Roman profile opaque, the brim of his hat touching hers when he leaned over her, his shadow like a protective screen between her and the glare of the world.

  "You going to talk to me at all?" I said to Temple.

  She finished her soda and set the empty can between us. She seemed to concentrate on the stage. "Was Haggard really in the pen?" she said.

  "Yeah, Quentin or Folsom."

  "I don't think he's the only graduate here. Take a look at that bunch by the side of the stage," she said.

  Three head-shaved, bare-chested young men, wearing laced, steel-toed boots and bleached jeans without belts, were drinking canned beer and watching the dancers from the edge of the cement slab. Their skin was jailhouse white, emblazoned with swastikas and red and black German crosses, their torsos plated and tapered with the muscle development of dedicated, on-the-yard bench pressers. Each wore a stubble mustache and goatee, so that his mouth looked like a dirty hole leering out of the whiteness of his face.

  "Is that Carl Hinkel with them?" Temple said.

  "That's the man. The George Lincoln Rockwell of the Bitterroot Valley."

  Then two other men walked from the rest room area and joined them. One was a slender kid with glasses and a crooked smile on his mouth, an ever-present facial insult that allowed him to offend others without giving them sufficient provocation to tear him apart. His companion had large, wide-set teeth and virtually colorless eyes and wore a flowered green shirt with purple garters on the sleeves, a polished rodeo buckle against his corrugated stomach, and new, stiff jeans that were hitched tightly around his genitalia.

  Temple was watching my face. "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "That's Wyatt Dixon. I can't think of a worse time for that guy to show up."

  Dixon had seen Lucas and Sue Lynn out on the dance slab. He put a cigar into his mouth and popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail and cupped the flame to the cigar in the shadow of his hat. He stood duck-footed, smoking, an amused light in his face, and watched Lucas and Sue Lynn dance. Then he walked out onto the slab, his shoulders pushing aside anyone who chanced to move into his path.

  When, as a father, do you intervene in your son's life and perhaps steal his self-respect? I'd never had an answer to that question.

  "I'll be back," I said to Temple, and walked down the wood stairs onto the cement slab.

  Dixon stood inches from Lucas and Sue Lynn, his back to me, saying something I couldn't hear. But I saw the heat climb into Sue Lynn's face and the bewilderment in Lucas's.

  "You want to talk to me, Mr. Dixon?" I said.

  He screwed his head around, his cigar clenched in his teeth, his profiled right eye like a clear glass bubble.

  "I declare, people from all walks of life has shown up here tonight. It ain't accident you and the boy favor, is it?" he said.

  "How about I buy you a beer?" I said.

  "No, thank you, sir. I aim to dance. Sue Lynn don't mind. She and me has bellied up before in what you might call private-type situations."

  Lucas's hat was pushed back on his head and his hands hung awkwardly at his sides. There were red circles, like apples, in his cheeks.

  "What's with you, man?" he said to Wyatt Dixon.

  "I'm a great admirer of womanhood, son. I respect every part of their God-made bodies, and this 'un here done won my heart a long time ago. Now go over yonder and sit down and drink you a soda pop. Ask your daddy to tell you about my sister, Katie Jo Winset. Her fate was a great Texas tragedy."

  Dixon reached out with two forked knuckles toward Lucas's nose, but Lucas stepped backward and slapped Dixon's hand away, disbelieving the insult to his person even as it took place. Dixon smiled and glanced toward the purple glow on the hills, breathing in the heavy fragrance of the evening, then lowered his hand between Lucas and Sue Lynn and fastened it on Lucas's scrotum. That's when Lucas hit him.

  The blow knocked Dixon's hat off his head, but the grin never left his face.

  "I still got your package in my hand, boy. You want, I can tear it out root and stem," he said.

  I swung my fist into Dixon's ear but it was like hitting stone. He turned his head slowly toward me, his ear bleeding, his right hand tightening on my son's genitalia.

  "I'm gonna come for you, Mr. Holland. You'll smell me in the dark, then you'll feel my hand fasten on you, and the next day you'll be somebody else," he said.

  I swung my fist into his mouth and felt the edges of his teeth cut into my skin. Then his friends were upon me.

  The fight rolled through the concession area. I can't describe what happened with any certitude, because since I had been a young boy anger had always affected me in the same way whiskey does a drunkard. I would hear whirring sounds in my ears, then I would be inside a dead zone filled with shards of red and yellow light, a place where I felt neither physical pain nor any form of moral restraint.

  I remember being knocked into the side of a horse tank, of hearing hooves thudding inside the livestock pens, then picking up a shaved wooden pole, about four foot in length, and smashing it into the face of a man who had a swastika tattooed between his eyes. I kicked a man who was on the ground, hard, in the spleen, and again in the head. Women were screaming, an overweight rent-a-cop was flung into a water puddle, and I swung the wood pole like a baseball bat and saw blood fly against the canvas side of a tepee and saw the man I'd hit fall on his knees and weep.

  But it was Wyatt Dixon I wanted. As in a dream, I flailed at my attackers, but the source of my rage stood on the edge of the fray and grinned, adjusting the garters on his sleeves, one ear leaking a scarlet line down his jawbone.

  The rent-a-cop struggled to his feet from the water puddle, wheezing for breath, his uniform flecked with mud. The strap on his revolver had popped loose and the checkered handle protruded loosely from the holster, the heavy, brass-cased rounds fat and snug inside the cylinder.

  I pushed someone out of the way and reached for the revolver. Then I heard horse's hooves and suddenly the side of an enormous buckskin mare knocked me senseless into a rick fence.

  I stared up from the ground at the silhouette of the rider. He was huge, the backs of his hands traced with scar tissue, his face a mixture of pity and incomprehension.

  "I ain't playing with you, son. I'll whip you with a blackjack if I have to," he said.

  Then I felt the world come back into focus and saw Temple and Lucas bending down toward me, touching me with their hands.

  "Why, how you doin', Sheriff?" I said to the man on horseback. "You like Merle Haggard?"

  Chapter 14

  My wrists were cuffed behind my back, and I was put in a holding cell at the county jail, where I stayed, without being booked, until early the next morning.

  Sheriff Cain walked dow
n the corridor behind a trusty who was wheeling a food cart from cell to cell. The sheriff picked up a Styrofoam container of scrambled eggs and tiny sausages and a cup of coffee and a cellophane-wrapped plastic fork from the tray and set them on the apron of the food slit.

  "Them three skinheads you whacked with that pole are still in the hospital," he said.

  "Gee, I'm sorry to hear that," I replied.

  "I was gonna ride in the parade last night. I was really looking forward to it. Somebody should glue warning labels on you. You're a traveling shit storm."

  "Do I get out of here?"

  "You got a bloodlust, Mr. Holland. I seen it in your face."

  "I don't apologize for it."

  "Then I hope you can live with it, 'cause it'll plumb eat you up. A federal agent wants to talk with you. When he's done, I'll kick you loose," the sheriff said, and walked away heavily, like a man who knew his knowledge of the world would never have an influence upon it.

  I sat down on the bench in the cell and drank from the Styrofoam coffee cup. Amos Rackley, the ATF agent who had told me he'd break my nose off if I put it in government business again, walked to the cell door and propped his arms across a horizontal iron plate, then removed them and dusted off his sleeves.

  His face was smooth-grained and handsome, his sandy hair neatly parted. He took a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and kept clicking the button on top with his thumb.

  "Can you explain to me what your son is doing with Sue Lynn Big Medicine?" he said.

  "Dancing, the last time I saw her."

  "You were an officer of the federal court. You know how our operations work. You know the danger that certain individuals are exposed to. Where's your judgment, man?"

  I set the Styrofoam cup down on the bench and stood up. My khakis and leather jacket and boots were powdered with dust, my body sore and stiff all over from the fight at the concert.

  "Y'all are still after the Oklahoma City bombers. You don't care about the rape of a teenage girl. You don't care about the assault on my son's person. You lost friends in the Murrah Building and I can understand the feelings you have now. So I don't want you to take it personally when I tell you to go play with your pencils and stay out of my life."

  He bit his lip and looked down the corridor at nothing, then fixed his eyes on me again.

  "You know what I wish, Mr. Holland? That I could forget who I was for just ten minutes and stomp the living shit out of you," he said.

  Two NIGHTS LATER Doc was in Missoula, buying groceries, when an electric storm rolled up the Blackfoot canyon. Bolts of lightning crashed on the ridges above the house, bursting ponderosa trees into small fires that flared and died in the rain. Then the storm passed and the rain stopped and black clouds sealed the sky, flickering with lightning that gave no thunder. Just above the river, the mountainsides were hung with mist, the air sweet with smoke from wood-stove pine.

  Bears had been in the garbage before sunrise that same day and had pushed against the windows with their paws, trying to slide the glass. Now a sow and two cubs came down out of the trees on the far side of the river and waded into the shallows and crossed the deepest part of the current by jumping from boulder to boulder until they lumbered belly-deep into the water on the near side and walked dripping up the bank past the garden.

  Maisey went into the bathroom and undressed for her shower, then heard the garbage cans rattle. She rubbed the moisture off the window glass and looked out at the log barn and saw the bears ripping the bungee cords off the garbage can tops and pulling the vinyl bags out with their teeth. One of the cubs dug into a split bag and flung the garbage backward through his hindquarters.

  She got into the shower and stayed under the hot water until her skin was red. When she toweled off, the window was clouded with steam and she thought she saw a bear's paw push and flatten against the glass. She wrapped the towel around her head and approached the window, leaned one way and then the other in order to see outside, then used her arm to wipe a swath through the moisture on the glass.

  The face of a young man stared back at her. He wore glasses and his eyes traveled the length of her nakedness and his mouth formed a red oval as though he wanted to speak.

  From the living room I heard her scream, then the sound of feet running outside. I pulled Doc's sporterized '03 Springfield from the gun rack and went out the front door and around the side of the house. Dry lightning jumped between the clouds and the valley floor turned white. I saw a slender man run past the barn, toward the river.

  I slid a round into the chamber and locked down the bolt, wrapped the leather sling around my left arm, and put the Springfield to my shoulder. I aimed through the iron sights, leading the target just slightly, waiting for lightning to leap between the clouds again.

  Maybe he had seen me, because he seemed to know that someone had locked down on him. He jumped a rock fence like a deer, then zigzagged across a field, glancing back once as though a round was about to nail him between the shoulder blades. When the clouds pulsed with lightning I saw the reflection on his glasses, his brown hair, his body that was as lithe and supple as a young girl's.

  I swung the rifle's sights ahead of him and fired a single round that whined off a rock into the darkness.

  The running figure disappeared into the trees.

  Maisey came out on the porch in her robe, the towel still wrapped on her head.

  "He was at the bathroom window. He was watching me take a shower," she said.

  "Did you recognize him?" I asked.

  "The glass was steamed over. I saw him for just a second."

  "Maybe he just wandered in off the highway," I said, my eyes avoiding hers. I ejected the spent shell from the rifle and pressed down the rounds in the magazine with my thumb and slid the bolt over them so the chamber remained empty, then propped the rifle against the porch rail and traced the footprints of the voyeur from the bathroom window back to a rick fence he had climbed through by the barn.

  A fuel can lay on its side by the bottom rail of the fence, leaking gas into the mud.

  I called the sheriff's department. A half hour later a tall, overworked deputy with a black mustache walked with me out to the fence and looked down at the can and then at the house. His breath fogged in the dampness of the air.

  "He didn't come here to borrow gas. The can's almost full. He was watching the girl through the window?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "It looks like he was going to torch your house and got distracted. I'd say you're lucky."

  "I don't think the Voss family feels lucky, sir," I said.

  "No offense meant. Some people around here would have shot him and drug his body through the door. Who do you think he was?"

  "Y'all got a file on a kid from North Carolina by the name of Terry Witherspoon?"

  Wednesday morning Doc answered the cordless phone in the kitchen, then handed it to me and walked out of the room.

  "I'm trying to figure out what your idea of a relationship is. I'm sure the problem is mine," Cleo's voice said.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Just for a minute, can't you lose that obtuse attitude?"

  "I haven't called you? That's what we're talking about?"

  "What do you think?" she asked.

  "I figured I'd struck out."

  "Maybe you decided you'd just find another chickie and cut a new notch on your gun."

  "I don't think that's a real good thing to say, Cleo."

  "Then maybe we need to have a serious talk."

  "What do you call this?" I said.

  "Come to the house."

  "I have an appointment at the sheriff's office."

  "Screw your appointment," she said.

  "I'm going to hang up now. Good-bye, Cleo."

  I eased the receiver down in the cradle, my skin tingling, as though I had just walked through a cobweb.

  Doc WAs BOARDING an Appaloosa and a thoroughbred for a neighbor. I went outside and propped my forearms across the top r
ail of the rick fence that enclosed the horse lot and began to shave an apple with my pocketknife. The barn was made of ancient logs that were soft with decay. Through the open back doors I saw both horses walk out of the pasture, through the cool darkness of the barn, their hooves powdering dust in the air, sawing their heads as they approached the fence.

  I quartered the apple and fed pieces to each of them with the flat of my hand. Inside the barn, his pinstripe suit and ash-gray Stetson slatted with sunlight, I saw L.Q. Navarro perched atop a stall, idly spinning the rowel on a Mexican spur.

  "You're getting sucked in, bud," he said.

  "With Cleo?"

  "I'm talking about these skinheads and bikers. Doc was trying to shut down that gold mine. Now he's charged with murder and you're rolling in the dirt with a collection of tattooed pissants whose mothers was probably knocked up by a spittoon."

  "I didn't have much selection about it, L.Q."

  "That's what we told each other when we was blowing feathers off them Mexican drug mules."

  "Anything else you want to tell me?"

  He flicked the rowel on the spur and lifted his eyes.

  "I'd sure like a couple of ice-cold Carta Blancas," he said.

  I WENT BACK up on the front porch, where Doc was trying to tie a blood knot in a tapered leader. But it was obvious he could not concentrate on the task at hand. He squinted at the tippets, missed threading a nylon tip through a loop, then gave it up and dropped the leader on top of a cloth creel by his foot.

  "Can you show me all the information you have on that mining company?" I said.

  "What for?"

  "They have a vested interest in seeing you jammed up."

  "I remodeled Lamar Ellison's face in that bar. I got my daughter raped. I thought I was through with free-fire zones. Instead, I carried one back from Vietnam."

  "Don't put this on yourself, Doc."

  "That stuff you want is out in the barn. You can burn it when you're finished," he said.

  I spent the next two hours rooting through the cardboard boxes that Doc had stuffed with news clippings and documents on extractive industries in Montana. File folders filled with aerial photographs showed miles of clear-cuts and once-virgin wilderness areas that had been turned into stump farms or chemical soup. Networks of creeks that fed the upper Blackfoot River looked like gangrene in living tissue. The cumulative damage wasn't just bad. It numbed the mind.