Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  His face jerked when he saw me, as though he feared I might be someone else.

  "Wyatt was going to rape Maisey the other night, wasn't he?" I said.

  He put on his glasses and crinkled his nose. A sun shower had burst on the hills rimming the valley and the hills were green and shining with light, but it was not a good day for Terry Witherspoon. His face was pinched with resentment and shame, like a child who had been unjustly punished.

  "You did an honorable deed, Terry. It takes a standup guy to 'front a dude like Wyatt Dixon," I said.

  "He's picking me up. You'd better not be here when he does," he said.

  "Free country," I said.

  "It used to be. Before the likes of y'all took over," he replied.

  "Who's this 'y'all' we're talking about?"

  "Liberals, muff divers, tree huggers, the people who are ruining everything."

  "You want to be a hump for Wyatt the rest of your life?"

  "Don't call me a hump. I'm not a hump."

  "You only listen to people who denigrate you, Terry."

  "Do what?"

  "You grew up being dumped on. So in your mind the only people who really know you are the ones who run you down. A guy like me tells you you're standup and you blow me off."

  He looked out the window, down onto the sidewalk.

  "He's coming. Get out of here," he said.

  "You like Maisey?" I asked.

  He looked at me silently, as though there were a trick in the question.

  "Ellison and his friends already put their mark on her soul. Give her a break. Stay away from her," I said.

  "I'm not good enough?" he said, his glasses full of light.

  "Back in North Carolina you broke into a house and tied two people to chairs and shot the man and cut the woman's throat. They'll stand by your deathbed one day, kid. Count on it."

  His jaw dropped and his breath went out of his mouth as though I'd punched him in the stomach. Then I saw his attention shift to the doorway. I turned and looked into the face of Wyatt Dixon.

  "Why, I be go-to-hell if it ain't the counselor again, right in the midst of it all. Counselor, every time I see you I'm put in mind of a shithog ear-deep in a slop bucket. Search me for the explanation. By the way, did you know that boy of yours pulled a skinning knife on me this morning?"

  He let his grin hang, his eyes dancing with delight at the expression on my face.

  I DROVE BACK to Doc Voss's place on the Black-foot but Lucas wasn't there.

  "You know where Sue Lynn Big Medicine lives?" I asked Maisey.

  "Lucas said by a junkyard in East Missoula," she replied. "You saw Terry this morning?"

  "'Terry? You're on a first-name basis with this ass-wipe?" I said. She was sitting on the porch step with a book splayed open on her knee. Her calico cat was flipping in the dust by her feet. She squinted her eyes at me in the sunlight.

  "That's his name, isn't it?" she said.

  "Don't let that guy get near you, Maisey."

  "I wish you wouldn't tell me what to do."

  "Don't any of you kids have any judgment about the people you associate with?" I asked.

  "Your problem is with Lucas, Billy Bob, not me. Please change your tone of voice."

  There's no feeling quite like being corrected by a sixteen-year-old girl.

  I drove back down the Blackfoot and into East Missoula, a community of trailers and truckstops and low-rent casinos, where the poor and unskilled watched the world they had taken for granted disappear around them. It Wasn't hard to find the junkyard where Sue Lynn lived. Cars that had been crushed and flattened by a compactor were stacked in layers on a knoll above the highway, and the windowless gray-primed stock car she drove, with orange numerals on the doors, was parked by an old brick cottage with a sign over the porch that read Salvage.

  Sue Lynn and Lucas were on their hands and knees in the backyard, working on what I thought was a rock garden. Then I realized the design was far more intricate. They had laid out a circle of stones, with two intersecting lines inside it. One line of stones was painted red, the other black. In the middle of the cross was a willow tree.

  Now Lucas and Sue Lynn were working each of the quadrants with trowels and sprinkling them down with a water can and planting purple and white and pink pansies into the mixture of mulch and black soil. The mongrel dog Lucas had saved from drowning in the Blackfoot River was nosing his snout into the dirt, his tail wagging, his hair matted down with the medicine Lucas had smeared on his mange.

  I squatted on my haunches outside the circle of stones and took off my hat and put a peppermint stick in the corner of my mouth. "It looks real good," I said.

  "It's an Indian prayer garden. The willow is the Tree of Life. One part of the cross is the red road. That's the good way in this world. The other one, the black road, that one's not so cool," Lucas said.

  "Wyatt Dixon said you pulled a knife on him."

  "He's full of shit. I took out a pocketknife to peel an apple and he made some kind of wise-ass remark about it," Lucas replied. "Why's he want to think I'd pull a knife?"

  "So he can kill you, son." I felt my gaze break at the content of my own words. I also realized I'd never called Lucas son before.

  "Maybe he'll get a surprise," Lucas said.

  "Don't talk that way," I said.

  "Should I leave?" Sue Lynn said.

  "How are you, Sue Lynn?" I said.

  She pressed the roots of a petunia into the damp soil and didn't answer. She wore cutoff jeans and a halter, and the tips of her hair were wet with perspiration and there were sun freckles on the tops of her breasts.

  "Who owns this place?" I asked.

  "My uncle. He did time in Marion," she replied.

  "As joints go, that's real mainline."

  "I told you once before I don't get to choose where I live."

  "You ever read Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt?" I asked.

  "I never heard of it," she replied.

  "You should. This prayer garden is in his book."

  "My grandfather was a Crow holy man and you're an asshole, Mr. Holland," she said.

  "Come on, Sue Lynn," Lucas said.

  I got to my feet and put my hat back on. The hills across the river were velvet green and rose abruptly into the sky and ponderosa pine flowed from the crests down into the arroyos.

  "My apologies to you, Ms. Big Medicine. Y'all have a fine day," I said, and walked back to my truck.

  I saw Lucas running to catch me before I got out on the highway. I winked at him and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  That night Lucas played at the Milltown Bar. The tables and dance floor were filled, the crowd happy and drunk and raucous. When Lucas came to the microphone to sing his first song of the evening, his eyes were watering from the cigarette smoke and the heat of the stage lights that shone upward into his face. He clicked the floor switch with his boot and the banks of white lights died and cooled, and he clicked a second switch and four overhead flood lamps wrapped with tinted cellophane came on and bathed the stage with a soft reddish-blue glow.

  He blotted the sweat out of his eyes and the room came into focus, then he looked down into a face that made him twitch inside.

  "During your break I'd like to compare notes with you on Sue Lynn. She can really rise to the occasion if you can get down past that wore-out part," Wyatt Dixon said.

  The next evening Doc and I attended a town meeting hosted by the Phillips-Carruthers Corporation at the Holiday Inn in Missoula. The crowd was a hostile one. Things had not been going well for Phillips-Carruthers. The previous day a famous female country singer had agreed to visit the mine site. Perhaps because of the fact she chain-smoked cigarettes and looked as if she had just been blown through the doors of a beer joint, the mine operators thought they had a sympathetic vehicle for their message. Also, like most greedy and obtuse people, they believed news media existed for no other purpose than to promote their business interests. Hence, they arranged for both p
rint and television journalists to be at the mine site when the singer was escorted from a company helicopter to the water processing shed that supposedly neutralized any contaminants that might leak into the ecosystem.

  On camera, a smiling company executive filled a drinking glass from a tap and offered it to the singer.

  "It's as clear as spring water, ma'am. I'd give it to my grandchildren," he said.

  "Thank you, sir. But I don't care to have nuclear-strength spinach growing out of my lungs," she replied, and smiled sweetly at him.

  Probably due to the influence of a PR person with a brain, tonight the mine operators played over the heads of the audience and made use of their hostility. There was no shortage of fanatics and professional naysayers in the crowd, people who wore their eccentricity like a uniform and loved conflict and acrimony so they would not have to contemplate the paucity of significance in their own lives. The mine operators paraded working people in front of the microphone, both men and women who spoke sincerely about their dependence upon the mine for their homes and livelihoods. You could almost feel the mine executives praying under their breaths for a catcall from the audience.

  But it didn't happen. The audience was respectful, the occasional dissenting moan in a listener hushed by those around him. Then Carl Hinkel, the militia leader from the Bitterroot Valley, rose from his chair in the third row and gave the mine operators what they needed, a dignified presentation that belied his agenda, that mixed patriotism and blue-collar attitudes with positive economic statistics and Montana traditions.

  He wore a western-cut sports coat with pads on the elbows and a maroon shirt and a flowered tie and charcoal slacks. His beard was freshly clipped, his shoulders straight, his corncob pipe cupped in his palm. His Tidewater accent, empty of anger or malicious intent, was both foreign and intriguing to the audience. Their faces seemed to be reconsidering all the impressions they had previously formed about him.

  "You're not going to spike this guy's cannon?" I said to Doc.

  But Doc just looked at his feet.

  "The Earth was put here for a purpose, to nurture and sustain us. The minerals we take from the ground are like the vegetables we grow on our farms. They're all gifts of the Lord," Hinkel said. "It seems to me a terrible arrogance to reject that gift. I don't mean to offend anyone here. I love this state. I think it's our charge to be good stewards of the land. I appreciate the opportunity you've given me to speak here tonight. God bless every one of you, and God bless these working folks who need their jobs."

  When Hinkel sat down no one rose to rebut him. A long-haired kid in a fatigue jacket with a feather dangling from one earring stood up and made a rambling speech about Native Americans and wind power and the timber industry and missile silos east of the Divide. People's eyes crossed with boredom. Carl Hinkel now seemed like Clarence Darrow. "Say something, Doc."

  "Fuck it. If they need the likes of me for a leader, they're not worth leading," he replied.

  The sky was still bright when the meeting broke up and the audience drifted outside. The clouds were mauve-colored in the west and the rain blowing in the canyon at Alberton Gorge looked like spun glass against the light. I could smell the heavy, cold odor of the Clark Fork and the wetness of the boulders in the shadows along the banks and the hay that someone was mowing in a distant field. The riparian countryside, the purple haze on the mountains, the old-growth trees that were so tall they looked as if they lived in the sky, were probably as close to Eden as modern man ever got, I thought. But this wonderful part of the world was also one that Carl Hinkel and his friends, if given the opportunity, would turn into a separate country surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.

  People who should have known better had stopped to chat with him. He was obviously a strong man physically, and he demonstrated his strength by picking up a plump little girl of ten or eleven and holding her out at arm's length.

  "Excuse me, Mr. Hinkel," I said.

  "Yes?" he said, turning toward me, his eyebrows raised.

  "I keep having trouble with Wyatt Dixon. I don't think he does anything without your permission. The next time he bothers my son, I'm going to be out to your place and kick a nail-studded two-by-four up your sorry white ass."

  "I'm afraid I don't know who you are," he said. "Oh, really?"

  "I'm sixty years old, sir. It seems to me you embarrass your son and degrade yourself. But if you wish to physically attack me, do it and be done," he said.

  The conversation died around us and every person on the motel's grass swale and tree-shaded driveway was now staring at me. Carl Hinkel waited, then put his pipe into his mouth and drew a thumbnail across the top of a match and lit the tobacco in his pipe bowl and gazed into the distance.

  My face was red with shame. I turned and walked away, unable to believe my own vanity and stupidity. I heard Doc at my elbow.

  "You're going about it the wrong way, bud. These guys don't fight fair," he said. "Tell me about it."

  "My father always said God loves fools. Join the club. Don't worry. They're all going down," Doc said. He cupped his hand around the back of my neck like a baseball catcher mothering a pitcher who had just been shelled off the mound.

  I turned and looked into his face.

  "All going down?" I said.

  I GUESS I had misjudged Doc's potential. Or at least Wyatt Dixon had.

  The next night he was at home in the small log house Carl Hinkel had given him to use on the back of Hinkel's property. The moon was up and from his window he could see the lines of cottonwoods along the Bitterroot River and the monolithic shapes of the mountains against the sky and the thick stands of timber that grew into the canyons. A star shower burst above the valley and Wyatt Dixon wondered if the tracings of light across the darkness of the heavens were a sign, perhaps an indicator that an enormous historical change was at hand for him and his kind.

  Or perhaps he thought nothing at all.

  The night was cold, but neither cold nor heat had ever had an appreciable effect on him. He wore only a nylon vest over his skin when he walked down to the river with a cane pole and a can of worms and bobber-fished in an eddy behind a beaver dam. Two nights earlier he had spread the surface of the water with cornmeal, and now, in less than five minutes, he hooked what was at least a twenty-five-inch bull trout. He let the trout swallow the treble hook, down the throat and into the belly, so there would be no chance of its slipping off, then he horsed it onto the bank and picked it up by the tail and swung it like a sock full of wet sand and bashed its brains out on a rock.

  As he walked back to his house he saw car lights through a stand of lodgepole pine on the neighbor's property, but the lights disappeared and he gave them no more thought. He slit the belly of his fish under an outside faucet and raked out the guts and threw them to one of Carl's cats, then he scrubbed his hands clean under the faucet and threaded a stick through the trout's gills and mouth and went inside his house.

  Just inside the doorway a piece of bronze wire glistened once on the edge of his vision, then looped over his head and tightened around his neck, squeezing tendon and artery, shutting off air to his lungs and blood to his brain.

  He lost both his sight and his consciousness as though he were watching a red-black liquid slide down the lens of a camera.

  When he awoke his head snapped upward, like that of a man rising from a coffin, and the room, with all its familiar gunracks and deer and elk antlers and assortment of western hats and Indian blankets on the furniture and logs burning in the woodstove, came back into focus, everything in its right place, even the plastic suction device on the kitchen table that he used to clean impurities from the pores of his facial skin.

  He realized he was seated in a chair and the wire loop that had razored into his flesh was no longer around his throat but on the floor by his foot and he saw that the loop had been fashioned from guitar strings. But his arms had been pinioned behind the chair and his wrists crossed and taped together, and his calves were
secured to the chair's legs with wide strips of silver tape from his ankle to the knee. He looked at the intruder who sat on a straight-back wood chair no more than three feet from him.

  "Howdy do, sir? My name is Wyatt Dixon. What might yours be?" he said.

  "You don't know?" the intruder said.

  "My guess is you're Maisey Voss's daddy. If that be the case, I'm honored to meet a decorated soldier such as yourself. That Bowie knife on your hip could saw the head off a hog, couldn't it?"

  "You were going back into the men's room at the truck stop to buy rubbers?" Doc said.

  "That's not a fit question to be asking a man, sir."

  "You planned to rape my daughter."

  "Some weight lifters or football farts, I don't know which, was trying to get into her pants. Excuse the language I use to describe what could have been a repeat scene for your poor little girl. But that's what happened, sir."

  "What I don't understand about you is that evidently you're a brave man. Cruel people are almost always cowards. How would you explain the discrepancy, Mr. Dixon?"

  "I can tell you are Mr. Holland's friend. You both are natural-born orators. Your speech is filled with philosophic content that is far beyond the understanding of a rodeo cowboy."

  Doc got up from his chair and walked to the butane cookstove that was set in a small curtain-hung alcove that served as a kitchen. He turned the butane on and listened to it hiss through the unlit jets, then turned it off.

  "It won't give you no satisfaction," Wyatt Dixon said.

  "Why not?" Doc asked.

  "'Cause you'll have given me power. 'Cause I'll live in you every morning you get up. Ask them who run Old Sparky at Huntsville Pen. They don't never eat breakfast alone."

  "That doesn't apply to you?" Wyatt Dixon's silky red hair hung in his eyes like a little boy's. He shifted his weight on his small, hard buttocks and wet his lips.

  "There's people that's different. We all know each other, though. It's a bigger club than you might think," Wyatt Dixon said.