Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  The corporation name that recurred again and again was Phillips-Carruthers, old-time union busters whose goons had once loaded Wobblies onto cattle cars and transported them in 115-degree heat into the Arizona-New Mexico desert and left then locked inside without water for two days. Those who didn't die or end up in Yuma Territorial Prison as syndicalists thought twice about trying to shut down a Phillips-Carruthers mine again.

  How far would a bunch like this be willing to go in order to get Doc off the board?

  I heard the tinkling sound of roweled spurs on the plank floor of the barn and looked up and saw L.Q. Navarro peering over my shoulder.

  "There's a story in there about Woody Guthrie and his buds going up against that company in 1947," he said.

  "These are the guys we love to hate. It's too easy, L.Q.," I said.

  "John D.'s hired thugs killed my grandmother at the Ludlow Massacre in 1914. Wasn't no mystery to it," he said.

  "The bad guys are a lot slicker today," I said.

  "They ain't no slicker, son. The good guys are just dumber."

  I started to smile at his joke, but then looked at his face. He was staring out the back of the barn at the thoroughbred and Appaloosa in the pasture, an unrelieved glint of sadness in his eyes. The horses were grazing next to a ribbon-like stream that wound through Indian paintbrush and harebells, tearing at the grass, their tails switching across their rumps.

  "What are you studying on?" I asked.

  He shook the moment out of his face.

  "Remember when we chased that bunch of coke mules across the sand flats? We painted red flowers all over those stovepipe cactus. We took a rum flask out of a dead man's pocket and had a drink and poured the rest on his face. You miss it sometimes?" he said.

  "No," I replied.

  L.Q. pulled his Stetson down over his brow and turned away from me to hide the gentle reproach in his eyes. When I looked at him again he had gone.

  I don't miss it. I know I don't, I said to myself as I walked back toward the house, like the alcoholic on his way to the saloon, denying the nature of his own insatiable desires.

  "Talking to yourself?" a voice said from the porch.

  "Oh, hi, Maisey, I didn't see you there," I said.

  "No kidding?" she said. She wore makeup and khakis and sandals and a low-cut embroidered white peasant blouse and looked older than her years. She picked up an oversize can of beer that was wrapped in a paper bag. She salted the top and drank from it.

  "Where's your old man?" I asked.

  "In town."

  "Early in the morning for a cold one, isn't it?"

  "Billy Bob?"

  "Yes?"

  "Mind your own business. By the way, Lucas said to tell you he was going down to the Milltown Bar with Sue Lynn Big Medicine to see about a job in the band. You want a beer?"

  The Milltown Bar was a legendary clapboard blue-collar anachronism squeezed between river shacks and railroad tracks and a sawmill at the southern tip of the Blackfoot Valley.

  Lucas had no trouble getting a four-night-a-week slot in the house band. Besides guitar, he could sing and play banjo, mandolin, fiddle, Dobro, and stand-up bass. Also, he didn't bother to ask the bar owner how much he would be paid.

  It should have been a fine morning for Lucas. It wasn't. This was the first time he'd seen Sue Lynn Big Medicine since the fight at the dance up in the Jocko. But she didn't act the same anymore. She seemed disconnected, her gaze lingering on his only momentarily, like somehow the fact she was two years older had suddenly become important.

  Outside the bar, while he fitted his guitar case into the backseat of her car, he said, "Something wrong, Sue Lynn?"

  "Not in a way you can do anything about," she replied.

  "I see. There's a problem, but I'm too young or dumb to understand it?"

  "Your father doesn't want me around you. He's probably right."

  "That's just Billy Bob. You watch. He'll be taking us out to dinner."

  But he might as well have been talking to the wind. She started the car, and they drove along the highway, past the sawmill, through the willow-lined streets of Bonner. The car had no windshield and Sue Lynn's hair kept whipping in her face.

  He looked at her Roman profile, the coffee-and-milk color of her skin, a threadlike white scar on her cheek, the soft purple hue of her mouth. He wanted to touch her, but her silence and the roar of the gutted muffler against the asphalt fed his irritation and ineptitude.

  "Why do you drive a junker like this, anyway?" Lucas said.

  "Because I live in a junkyard. Because the government tells me what I have to do. Because I don't have choices about my life," she said.

  Her hands had tightened on the wheel. When she looked over at him her eyes were blazing.

  "Pull over," he said.

  "No!"

  "Stop acting like you got to talk in code. It's a real drag, Sue Lynn," he said, and grabbed the wheel so that the car drove across the opposite lane onto a flat turnaround above a sandy beach that flanged the Blackfoot River.

  "I made a mistake. I shouldn't have gone to the dance with you. Wyatt Dixon and Carl Hinkel and their friends are animals. They'll tear you in pieces," she said.

  "Back home their kind are a dime a tote sack." "You're just a boy. You don't know what you're talking about."

  She got out of the car. He thought she was going to kick the door, but instead she stared silently at the river, the wind blowing her hair in her face, a look of regret in her eyes that he couldn't explain.

  "I'm sorry for getting mad. I like you a lot, Sue Lynn. But I ain't no kid and you got to stop talking to me like I am one," he said.

  "I'm not who you think I am, Lucas. I'm not a good person," she said.

  She walked down a footpath to the beach. Five college boys in swim trunks were sitting in the shadow of a huge egg-shaped rock, drinking beer and sailing a red Frisbee out on the river for a mongrel dog to retrieve. Each time the dog brought back the Frisbee, one of the boys would give it a piece of hamburger bun.

  Lucas caught up with Sue Lynn by the water's edge. The Frisbee sailed like a dinner plate past her head and landed far out in the current. The dog splashed into the water and swam after it. Its back was lesioned with mange, its ribs etched against its sides.

  "What gives you the right to be saying you're no good? That's like telling folks who believe in you they're stupid," Lucas said.

  "I'm going to drive you back home now," she said.

  "Billy Bob give me two tickets to the Joan Baez concert at the university," he lied.

  "I'm glad I met you, Lucas, but I'm not going to see you again."

  "That's a rotten damn way to be," he replied.

  "One day it'll make sense to you."

  "Right," he said.

  The dog had just returned the Frisbee to one of the college boys and was trying to nose a piece of bread out of the sand. The dog was trembling with exhaustion, the wet hair on its hindquarters exposing the emaciated thinness of its legs. The college boy flung the Frisbee through the air again. It plopped on top of the riffle and floated downstream.

  "Just a minute," Lucas said to Sue Lynn.

  He waded into the river and picked up the Frisbee and walked to the shade of the rock, where the college boys were sitting on blankets with an ice chest set among them. They were suntanned and hard-muscled, innocently secure in the knowledge that membership in a group of people such as themselves meant that age and mortality would never hold sway in their lives.

  "This dog's wore out. If you want to feed him, why not just do it? Don't make him drown hisself to get a little food," Lucas said.

  One of the boys propped himself up on his elbow and squinted into the sun with one eye.

  "You think that up all by yourself?" he asked.

  "It's five of y'all, one of me. I know what you can do. But don't torment a dumb animal," Lucas said.

  One of the other boys removed his sunglasses and started to his feet, sand sifting off of his
body. But the boy who was propped on one elbow put a hand on his friend's arm.

  "You got a point. Why don't you feed him?" he said, and tossed a sack of lunch trash to Lucas.

  Lucas started up the trail, then knelt and gave the dog a half-eaten weenie.

  "Hey, buddy, what's your name?" the college boy yelled after him.

  "Lucas Smothers."

  "How about throwing our Frisbee back, Lucas Smothers?"

  Lucas sailed it through the air, then picked up the dog under the stomach and put it into the backseat of Sue Lynn's car.

  Sue Lynn had watched it all without saying a word. Now she was staring at him with a strange light in her face, pushing her hair out of her eyes, tilting her chin up as though she were having a conversation with herself.

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "Nothing," she said.

  "I'd better get home. Billy Bob gets in trouble if I ain't around."

  "You want to drive?" she asked.

  "I don't mind."

  They headed up the highway, following the Blackfoot, through timbered canyons and meadow-land, through sunlight and shady areas where spring-water leaked across the asphalt. The dog was already sound asleep on the backseat. Sue Lynn moved closer to Lucas and took his right hand off the steering wheel and held it in hers.

  When he looked over at her, her gaze was focused straight ahead, her eyes sleepy with thoughts he couldn't fathom.

  Tell me women ain't a puzzle, he thought.

  Chapter 15

  The next day I drove to a Catholic church in Missoula's university district. The chapel area was empty, the confessional booths stacked with furniture. A secretary in the pastor's office told me I could find the pastor at his home down the street. I walked a block under maple trees to a tan stucco house with a neat yard and tulip beds and saw a tall man in an undershirt and black trousers up on the roof.

  "Can I help you?" he said, peering down through an overhang of maple leaves.

  "I'd like to go to Reconciliation," I replied.

  "You have a problem with heights?"

  I climbed the ladder and joined him in a flat, sunless place where he had hung his tool bag on the chimney and was eating his lunch. The blueness of the sky overhead looked like a river through a gap in the canopy of the maple trees, as though the earth were turned upside down and we were viewing a riparian landscape from high above.

  The priest's name was Hogan and he offered me a sandwich from his lunch sack. He talked politely for a moment, then realized the origin of my awkwardness with the ritual that Catholics today call Reconciliation.

  "You're not a cradle Catholic?" he asked.

  "I was baptized by immersion in a fundamentalist church when I was a child. I became a convert after the loss of a friend."

  "You want to tell me what's bothering you?"

  "I went to bed with a woman. It was a self-serving act, impulsive and badly thought out," I said.

  "I'm getting the sense things didn't turn out as you planned."

  "That's an understatement, sir."

  "I'm not quite sure what we're owning up to here. You mean you acted lustfully or you feel you've used somebody, or you simply regret getting involved with the wrong person?"

  "How about all of the above?"

  "I see."

  "I've done this previously. For reasons that mask a more grave sin in my past."

  "I'm not sure I follow," he said.

  In the silence I could hear the maple branches sweeping against the roof.

  "I accidentally shot and killed my best friend. I did this while we were killing other men. His death is with me morning and night. His specter never leaves me," I said.

  The face of the priest remained impassive, but he lowered his eyes so I could not see the sadness in them.

  "Is there anything else you want to tell me?" he asked.

  "No, sir."

  He placed one hand on my shoulder. "You all right, partner?" he said.

  "Right as rain," I said, hoping he would not hold my lie against me.

  That afternoon a waxed black car drove through the field behind Doc's house and parked in front, the sunlight wobbling like a yellow flame on the tinted windows.

  Amos Rackley, the ATF agent, got out of the passenger seat and knocked on the door with his fist, rattling a picture on the wall. He wore shades and a dark suit that seemed to contain and intensify the heat and energy in his body. His gum snapped in his mouth and his jawbone was slick with perspiration.

  When I opened the door, he said, "It must be the genes."

  "What?"

  "Your family. Like a stopped-up commode that keeps overflowing on the floor. First I have trouble with you. Now your kid."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "We sent somebody to ring the doorbell at a certain Indian gal's house. Guess who answers the door?"

  "Lucas?"

  "Not wearing shirt or shoes. With long red scratches on his back. I'm surprised he took time to zip his fly."

  "You guys should have had jobs at Salem in 1692. You would have fit right in," I said.

  "You listen, you arrogant prick…"

  But he was so angry he couldn't talk. He took the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on a post and opened a folder full of eight-by-ten photographs. They showed blood-streaked people being lifted from rubble, a woman crying with a dead child in her arms, a white police officer giving mouth-to-mouth to a black man on a stretcher.

  "That's the Alfred P. Murrah Building, motherfucker," he said. "I'm betting my career this shit goes back to Hayden Lake, Idaho. But you and now your son have decided to factor yourself in, either because you've got cooze on the brain or you just can't stand to let things alone. So why don't we just walk out in the woods here, you and me, and see what develops? I can't tell you how much I'd enjoy that."

  I stepped out on the porch. The day was bright, the wind cold on my face in the shade.

  "My son has nothing to do with your investigation. His interest in Sue Lynn Big Medicine is romantic. You were that age once. Why don't you show a little empathy?" I said.

  "That's a great word coming from a disgraced Ranger who killed his own partner. I changed my mind about you, Mr. Holland. I wouldn't dirty my hands fighting a man like you. You turn my stomach."

  When he drove away I could feel my eyes filming, the ridgeline and ponderosa and cliffs distorting into green and yellow shapes. I wanted to turn and see L.Q. standing by the barn or down in the shade of the cottonwoods by the river or perched atop a rail by the horse lot.

  "L.Q.?" I said.

  But there was no reply except the wind in the trees.

  Toward evening Maisey and I saddled the Appaloosa and thoroughbred that Doc boarded for his neighbors and rode them up a switchback logging road in the hills behind the house. In the distance we could see old clear-cuts and burned stumps along the sides of the Rattlesnake Mountains.

  "I overheard what that Treasury agent said to you this morning, Billy Bob. Why'd you let him get away with that?" she said.

  "He lost his friends in Oklahoma City. He can't do anything about it, so he takes his grief out on others. That's the way it is sometimes."

  "My father says under it all you're a violent man."

  "I have been. That doesn't mean I am today."

  "The sheriff called this morning. He wants to talk to my father again."

  "What for?"

  "The third man who raped me is dead. I'm glad. I hope he suffered when he died," she said. Her face was narrow with anger, her mouth pinched with an unrelieved bitterness.

  "Maisey, I can't argue with your feelings, but-"

  "Don't say anything, Billy Bob. Just please don't say anything."

  She turned her horse away from me and rode into the shade, then dismounted and began picking huckleberries and putting them into her hat, even though they were green and much too sour to eat.

  Down below I saw the sheriff's cruiser pull into the yard.

  I rode the th
oroughbred down the hill and took off my hat and looked at the greenness of the country and grinned at the sheriff and waited for him to explain the cloud in his face.

  "I don't care to look up at a man on horseback," he said.

  I got down from the saddle and hung my hat on the pommel and tied the reins to the porch railing. I let my hand trail off the thoroughbred's rump, my eyes fixed on the sheriff's.

  "Where was the good doctor yesterday afternoon?" he said.

  "I don't know. Ask him," I replied.

  "I would. If I could find him." The sheriff stood by the open door of his vehicle, his face cut by light and shadow, the wind flapping his coat. "The third suspect in Miss Voss's rape was pulled out of a river two days ago in Idaho. He had chest waders on and was submerged standing up in the bottom of a pool like a man with concrete boots on."

  "Sounds like an accident to me," I said.

  "Except he wasn't carrying no fishing gear, never owned a fishing license, and was never known to fish. Also, most sane people don't wear chest waders in July."

  "Well, we'll all try to feel as bad as possible about his passing, Sheriff."

  "I love to hear you talk, Mr. Holland. Every time you open your mouth I'm convinced this is indeed a great country, that absolutely any little dimwit can become an attorney. Tell Dr. Voss to call me before I come out here and put him in handcuffs."

  I watched his cruiser drive across the field behind the house, then disappear down the dirt road. A half hour later my head was still pounding with his remarks. I called him at his office.

  "Did you bother to check out this kid Terry Witherspoon?" I asked.

  "The voyeur? Yeah, I did. He says he never looked in Maisey Voss's window and was never on her property."

  "What did you expect him to say? Did you lift any prints off that gas can?"