Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "I think you've convinced me, Mr. Dixon."

  "I don't rightly follow you, sir. But I have to say I'm in awe of your military background. You had Lamar Ellison spotting his drawers."

  "I'm glad to hear that," Doc replied. The woodstove was inset in an old stone hearth. Doc picked up two chunks of split pine from the woodbox and opened the stove's doors and threw them on the fire. Then he opened the damper on the chimney and watched the flame bloom inside the stove's iron walls.

  All the while Wyatt Dixon watched him as though he were a spectator rather than a participant in the events taking place around him.

  "Cut me loose and give me a knife and let's see how it shapes up. I'm making a bona fide gentleman's offer to you, sir," he said.

  But Doc had walked past Wyatt Dixon's line of vision and was now at the cookstove again, where this time he reached behind it and ripped a length of flex pipe from a steel container. Suddenly the smell of butane filled the room.

  "I can see you are a man of purpose, sir," Wyatt Dixon said. "Was you in that bunch over there that would slip into a village and cut people's throats in their sleep and paint their faces yellow so their folks would get a major surprise at daylight?"

  When Doc went out the door and closed it behind him, Wyatt Dixon was staring at the fire in the woodstove, his face whimsical, as though an idle and insignificant thought were hovering in front of his eyes.

  But whatever passions had driven Doc as a Navy SEAL had become little more than ashes on a dead fire. He came back into the log house and screwed down the valve on the butane tank and opened the windows and filled a plastic bucket in the sink and threw the water on the flames in the woodstove. Smoke billowed up into the room.

  Wyatt Dixon watched him with a bead in his eye, his hands opening and closing behind him.

  Doc flung the bucket at the sink and walked back outside, leaving the door open behind him.

  But just as he started his truck he saw Wyatt Dixon walk out of the door, strands of silver tape hanging from his wrists, a splintered piece of chair leg still bound to the calf of his leg. His silhouette seemed haloed with light and smoke.

  "You don't have it in you, sir. Know what that means? I own you. You and yours. If I've a mind, I'll split your little girl in half and take the bones out of the Holland boy. Once more please pardon my language, but, sir, you done fucked with the devil hisself," he said.

  Chapter 19

  "He's a Satanist?" I said to Doc the next morning.

  "I don't know what he is," he replied.

  "What have you done, Doc?"

  The sun had not broken above the ridgeline and the house was in shadow. Doc picked up his uneaten breakfast and threw it out the back door.

  "I'm going into town. You want to come?" he said.

  "No," I said, my anger as thick as a walnut in my throat.

  I walked down to Lucas's tent on the river and crouched down and pulled open the flap. He raised his head up from his sleeping bag.

  "Anything wrong?" he asked.

  "Doc stoked up Wyatt Dixon. I think you should go back to Deaf Smith."

  "Why?"

  "He made a threatening statement about you and Maisey."

  "Fuck him."

  "I had a feeling you might say that. Excuse me for waking you up."

  "Joan Baez is playing at the university tomorrow night," he said.

  I waited for him to go on.

  His eyes shifted off mine. "I told Sue Lynn you give us two tickets. Can you let me have forty dollars?"

  I went BACK into the house and opened the Mis-soula phone directory and began the long process of trying to contact a federal agent for whom I had no business card. Finally I reached a Treasury Department switchboard in Washington, D.C., and after three transfers was able to leave my name and number.

  Then I went to Bob Ward's Sporting Goods and bought a.38 revolver with a two-inch barrel and a clip-on holster and a box of cartridges.

  By that afternoon I had heard nothing back from my inquiry at the Treasury Department.

  I called the Missoulian and asked for the classified ad department.

  "Is there still time to get a two-column boldface in tomorrow's paper?" I asked.

  "Yes, I think we can do that. What do you want it to say?" a woman replied sweetly.

  "'Amos Rackley, Please Get in Touch. Urgent.' Sign it 'Billy Bob Holland.'"

  "That's it?" she asked.

  "No. Let me make an addition," I said.

  That evening I picked up Temple at the airport. She had been called back to Texas to testify at a trial and I had not seen her since I had impetuously kissed her in the picnic grounds by the river. When she walked off the plane I felt that the best friend I had on earth had just come back into my life.

  "Anything happen while I was gone?" she asked.

  "A little bit. Doc garroted Wyatt Dixon with Lucas's guitar strings and taped him to a chair and came within an inch of blowing up him and his house with butane gas."

  "You're making this up?"

  "I wish Doc had finished what he started."

  "Say again?"

  "Dixon said he might take Lucas's bones out. Those are the words he used," I said, and felt myself swallow.

  Temple put her suitcase into the bed of my truck and got into the cab. I started the engine and drove out on the highway. The hills across the river looked low and humped in the sunset and the sky was dull gold and flecked with dark birds. I felt her watching the side of my face.

  "Don't be too hard on Doc," she said.

  "He wants it both ways. He whips a rope on these guys, but he's not willing to go to the tree with them."

  "You better hope he doesn't."

  We didn't speak for several moments. Then I said, "Do you want to have supper?"

  "I ate on the plane. Another time, okay?" she said, and smiled wanly.

  "Sure," I said, and pulled into the parking lot of her motel on East Broadway, not far from Hellgate Canyon, which had been named by Jesuit missionaries after they saw the litter of human bones left from the Blackfoot ambushes of the Flatheads.

  She hefted her suitcase out of the truck bed and yawned. The wind was cool and the light had gone pink on the trees that grew along the crest of the canyon and I could see white-water rafters bouncing through the rapids on the river.

  "Can you come in a minute?" she said.

  "Sure," I said, and walked behind her into her room.

  She set her suitcase down and shut the blinds and closed the door and turned on the lights. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked into space for a moment, and I could see the fatigue of the trip seep into her face.

  "Maybe I should come back tomorrow," I said.

  "No, stay," she said, and pulled off her loafers and unscrewed her earrings and set them on the night-stand. Then she took a breath and smiled and let her eyes rest on mine. "It's been a long day."

  "I guess it has," I said, and saw an ice bucket and two drinking glasses on the desk. "I'll get a couple of sodas if you like."

  "No, that's all right," she said, and lifted her large shoulder bag onto her lap. "A friend of mine got ahold of Carl Hinkel's sheet. I thought we should go over it."

  "Hinkel's sheet?"

  "Yeah. This guy recruits ex-cons like Lamar Ellison and Wyatt Dixon over the Internet. He was a college professor once, can you believe that?"

  "You wanted to go over Hinkel's sheet?"

  "You'd rather not do it now?"

  "Hinkel's a bucket of shit, Temple. Who cares what his history is?"

  "I just don't believe I've come back to this," she said.

  The next morning was Saturday and I went into town by myself and ate steak and eggs in a cafe by the rail yards, then took a walk across the Higgins Street Bridge and along the river by an old train depot that was now used for offices by an environmental group. The walkway by the river was still deep in shadow, the runoff loud through the cottonwoods and willows. I didn't hear the car that pulled off the bridge an
d drove down a ramp and stopped behind me.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a car door open and a crew-cut blond man in a suit suddenly running at me, his arm outstretched. I turned and ripped my elbow into his face and felt the bone break in his nose.

  He cupped his hands to his face and an unintelligible sound came out of his mouth. His white shirt was splattered with blood and his eyes were filled with pain and rage. His hand went inside his suit coat and closed on the butt of an automatic pistol.

  I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and tore my.38 from its clip-on belt holster and slammed him against the front of his car and wedged the.38 into his mouth, my hand still gripped on his wrist. He gagged on the two-inch barrel and I pushed it deeper into his throat, bending him back against the car. Blood and spittle ran from his mouth and I heard the automatic fall from his hand onto the cement.

  Then someone pressed a pistol against my temple.

  "Let Jim go, Mr. Holland," Amos Rackley said.

  "Kiss my ass. You take that gun away from my head," I said.

  "You're not in a bargaining position," he replied.

  "Watch this," I said. I fitted my left hand on the throat of the man called Jim and shoved the.38 deeper into his mouth and cocked the hammer with my thumb, the cylinder actually clacking against his teeth now. "You take your piece away from my head or I'll empty his brainpan on the hood."

  Rackley lowered his gun. I released the man named Jim and stepped away from him.

  "You fucking lunatic," Rackley said.

  "You jump out of cars at people and pull guns on them, this is what you get," I said.

  "What do you call this?" he said, and reached into the backseat of his car and shoved the morning newspaper at me. It was folded back to a red-circled classified ad that read, "Amos Rackley, Please Get in Touch. I Don't Feel Like Cleaning Up Your Mess- Billy Bob Holland."

  "I think you're deliberately letting Wyatt Dixon and Carl Hinkel stay in circulation so they'll lead you to other conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombing. In the meantime they're hurting innocent people."

  "You just assaulted a federal agent," he replied.

  "There're must be twenty spectators watching this from the bridge. I wonder what they'll have to say about who assaulted whom. You want to get a news reporter down here?"

  "You're threatening me?"

  "It's not a threat, Mr. Rackley. You point a gun at me again and I'll pick your cotton."

  He tossed the newspaper at my face. The pages broke apart in the wind and blew down the walkway. His fellow agent cleared his mouth of blood and spat it on the cement, then bent over and retrieved his automatic and replaced it into its holster. There was a large red knot on the bridge of his nose.

  "I'm sorry I hurt you," I said.

  "Blow me, Gomer," he replied.

  I slipped the.38 back into its clip-on holster. I saw his eyes travel to the holster's position on my belt.

  "It's unconcealed. I don't need a permit for it. Welcome to Montana," I said.

  That night I took Temple to the Joan Baez concert at the university. The auditorium was packed, the air stifling. But the crowd didn't care. They were wild about Joan. George McGovern was in the audience and she introduced him as an old friend. She was sweating in the lights, her clothes sticking damply to her skin. Finally she touched her wrist to her brow in desperation and said, "I have to be honest with you. I've never been so hot in my life. Sweat is actually running down the backs of my legs."

  A man in the balcony stood up, cupping his hands to his mouth, and shouted, "That's all right, Joan! You're still beautiful!"

  The crowd roared. Her humor and grace, her sustained youthfulness and lack of any bitterness, and the incredible range of her voice were a conduit back into an era thirty years gone. For two hours it was 1969 and the flower children still danced barefoot on the lawn at Golden Gate Park.

  But seated in the second row, in the seat next to the right aisle, was a man in a domed white hat with an Indian band around the crown and garters on his sleeves. In the glow of the stage lights his face looked as smooth as moist clay, clean of all imperfections, flat-bladed, the jaw hooked, the eyes fascinated, like those of a visitor in an alien environment.

  He never applauded nor did his facial expression ever change from one of bemused curiosity. At intermission he remained in his chair, his rectangular posture like stone, so others had to labor to get around him.

  "L.Q. Navarro used to say there are two Americas," I said to Temple.

  "How's that?" she said, watching the musicians regroup on stage.

  "One bunch wants good things for the world. The other bunch thinks the earth is there to be ground up for profit. The cutting edge for the second bunch are guys like Wyatt Dixon."

  "Are you telling me he's here?" But just at that moment the man in the domed white hat went out the fire exit and let the metal door slam behind him.

  "I just miss L.Q. sometimes," I said. The lights went down and Joan Baez came to the microphone and introduced her niece. Temple was whispering to me behind her hand, something about the song "Silver Dagger," when I realized Cleo Lonnigan and her gay carpenter were seated three rows in front of us. Cleo had happened to turn and look up the aisle, and suddenly I was staring into her face.

  I started to wave, then thought better of it.

  "What's wrong?" Temple asked.

  "Nothing," I replied. But Temple followed my eyes to Cleo.

  "Oh, it's Dr. Bedpan," Temple said.

  "Come on, Temple," I said.

  "Is she still staring at us?"

  "No."

  "Good. I was worried. I thought it was she who was rude and needed correcting."

  Temple gazed benignly up at the stage. At the end of the concert the audience brought Joan back on stage three times. The auditorium was sweltering now, the air fetid with body odor. After Joan left the stage a final time, someone opened a side door and the auditorium was suddenly flooded with cool air. I put my hand on Temple's arm and steered us for the exit.

  Too late.

  Cleo Lonnigan stood solidly in our path. "Was Little Miss Muffet whispering about me?" she asked.

  "Muffet?" Temple said.

  "I'm sure you get my meaning," Cleo said.

  "Shut your mouth, Cleo," I said.

  "Hey, Cleo, let's ease on out of here," Eric, Cleo's carpenter friend, said.

  "I'm sure that's just part of Dr. Lonnigan's regular pillow talk. She doesn't mean anything by it," Temple said to me.

  "Look at me," Cleo said.

  "Oh, I don't think so," Temple said.

  "If you ever whisper behind my back or try to ridicule me in public again, you'll wish you were back waiting tables or whatever you did before somebody let you in a junior college."

  I put my arm around Temple's shoulders and almost forced her out the door.

  "Would you get your arm off me, please?" Temple said, flexing her shoulders, her neck flaring with color.

  "I apologize for that in there."

  "You actually went to bed with her? It must be horrible remembering it."

  "Why don't you ease up, Temple?"

  The sky was green, the evening star glittering like a solitary diamond over the mountains in the west.

  "Billy Bob, don't you see it?" Temple said.

  "What?" I said, confused.

  "It's that woman in there, or it's me, or a female DEA agent, or an old girlfriend from high school. We're just Valium. You're married to the ghost of L.Q. Navarro."

  That night dry lightning rippled through the thunderclouds that sealed the Blackfoot Valley. The wind was up and the trees shook along the riverbank and I could see pine needles scattering on the surface of the water. I walked through Doc's fields, restless and irritable and discontent, a nameless fear trembling like a crystal goblet in my breast. The Appaloosa and thoroughbred in Doc's pasture nickered in the darkness and I could smell river damp and pine gum and wildflowers and wet stone and woodsmoke in the air, as though the f
our seasons of the year had come together at once and formed a dead zone under clouds that pulsed with light but gave no rain. I wished for earsplitting thunder to roll through the mountains or high winds to tear at barn roofs. I wished for the hand of God to destroy the airless vacuum in which I seemed to be caught.

  My heart raced and my skin crawled with apprehension. It was the same feeling I'd had when L.Q. Navarro and I had waited in ambush for Mexican tar mules deep in Coahuila, our palms sweating on our weapons, our wrists tingling with adrenaline. We washed the salt and insects out of our eyes with canteens and could hardly contain our excitement, one that bordered almost on sexual release, when we saw silhouettes appear on a hill.

  Lucas was still not back from the concert. I drove to East Missoula and parked in front of the brick cottage where Sue Lynn Big Medicine lived with her uncle. As I walked up to the porch I thought I heard voices behind the building.

  "Is that you, Lucas?" I said into the darkness.

  "Oh, hi, Billy Bob," he replied, walking toward me. "Something wrong?"

  "I'm not sure. What's Sue Lynn doing?"

  "She says a prayer to all the Grandfathers. Those are the spirits who live in the four corners of the universe."

  "A prayer about what?"

  "People got their secrets," he replied.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" I said.

  "She carries a big load about something. It don't always help our love life."

  "Come home with me," I said.

  "She'll drive me. Everything's cool here."

  "Did you see Wyatt Dixon at the concert?"

  "Nope."

  "He intends to do us harm, Lucas."

  "He'd better not come around here. Sue Lynn's uncle was in the federal pen for cutting up a couple of guys on the Res."

  "I can see this is a great place for a prayer garden. You're not moving in with this girl, are you?" I said.

  "Quit calling her a girl. You worry too much, Billy Bob," he said, and hit me on the arm.

  The innocence in his smile made my heart sink.

  I drove back to Doc's place but found no release from the abiding fear that an undeserved fate was about to be visited upon someone close to me. The house was lighted and smoke flattened off the chimney and I could smell bread baking in the kitchen. Maisey played in front of the fireplace with her cat, the goodness in her young face undiminished by the violence the world had done her. Doc had an apron tied around his waist and was carrying two bread pans with hot pads to the plank table in the center of the kitchen. He had already laid out jars of blackberry and orange jam and a block of butter and a cold platter of fried chicken and a pitcher of milk on the table, and for just a moment I saw the tranquillity in his expression as he became both mother and doting father, and I was sure the bloodlust he had brought back from Vietnam had finally become a decaying memory.