Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  But for some illogical reason I kept remembering a story, or rather an image, related to me by my grandfather about the death of the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin in the Acme Saloon in El Paso in 1895. Hardin was the most feared and dangerous man in Texas and may have killed as many as seventy-five men. In the Acme he was drinking shot-glass whiskey and rolling poker dice out of a leather cup. He inverted the cup and clapped the dice on the bar and said to a friend, "You got four sixes to beat."

  That's when he heard a revolver cock behind him. A split second later a lawman named John Selman blew Hardin's brain matter on the mirror.

  "You make me think of an ice cube sweating in a skillet. You worried about something?" Doc said.

  "You rolled the dice for all of us, Doc," I replied.

  "I'd change it if I could."

  I paced up and down. "Did I get any phone calls?"

  "Yeah, you did." He started slicing bread, the knife going snick, snick, snick into the plank table while I waited.

  "From whom?"

  "Cleo Lonnigan. She says you and Temple Carrol caused a scene at the concert."

  "Is she crazy?"

  "Yeah, probably."

  "I appreciate your telling me that now."

  "This bread is special. You want to try it with some jam?" he said.

  An hour later, however, Doc's spirits died with the appearance of the sheriff's cruiser in the front yard, its emergency lights flashing.

  "Step out here, Mr. Holland," the sheriff said.

  "What do you want?" I asked.

  "Are you hard of hearing?"

  I walked out on the porch. Under the shadow of his hat the sheriff's face looked as hard and bloodless as a turnip.

  "Where were you two hours ago?" he asked.

  "In East Missoula. Talking with my son."

  "Cleo Lonnigan says you were on her property, up the Jocko."

  "She's delusional."

  "You're under arrest for assault and battery. Put your hands on the banister. No, don't open your mouth, don't think about it, just do what I tell you," he said.

  I leaned on the porch railing and felt his hands travel over my person.

  "Who is he supposed to have assaulted?" Doc said behind me.

  "Go back inside, Dr. Voss. If there was ever a double-header giant-size pain in the ass, it's you two. You better hope that man don't die," the sheriff said, and hooked up my wrists and turned me toward his cruiser.

  "Which man? Who are you talking about?" I said.

  "That homosexual carpenter you beat the shit out of with a piece of pipe, one with an iron bonnet on it. Why didn't you just run his head over with a tractor wheel while you was at it?"

  "This is insane," I said.

  "Tell that to Cleo Lonnigan. She wants your head on a post, Mr. Holland. You'd better be thankful I got to you first," he replied.

  I TRIED to reason with him from the backseat of the cruiser as we headed toward the county jail. When we passed through East Missoula I craned my head to catch a glimpse of the salvage yard where I had left Lucas with Sue Lynn.

  "Listen to me, Sheriff. I can't be in jail. Wyatt Dixon threatened both my son and Doc's daughter. That woman's lying. I couldn't have been up the Jocko. Stop and talk with Lucas."

  "Shut up, Mr. Holland," the sheriff replied.

  I kicked the wire-mesh screen. "You're a thickheaded old fool, sir. I'm an attorney. I don't beat up innocent people with metal objects. Use your judgment, for God's sake," I said.

  "You hurt my vehicle, I'm gonna pull on a side road and take your bark off," he said.

  In the holding cell I yelled down the corridor, demanded to use the phone, and shook the barred door against the lock. Finally a sleepy, overweight turnkey walked down the corridor and looked into my face.

  "You want something?" he asked.

  "To use the phone."

  "It's out of order. We'll let you know when it's fixed," he said, and walked away.

  At three in the morning the sheriff came down the corridor with a wood chair gripped in his hand. He set the chair in front of my cell and sat in it. He removed an apple wrapped in a paper bag from his coat pocket and began paring the skin away with a pocketknife.

  "I checked with your son. He confirms your story," the sheriff said.

  "Then kick me loose."

  "Not till I tell Cleo she made a mistake. What'd you do to her, anyway?"

  "You're keeping me here for my own protection?" I said incredulously.

  A long curlicue of apple skin dangled from the sheriff's knife blade. "Let's see if I can remember her words. Something like 'I'd better not see that sorry sack of shit before you do.' You think she meant anything by that?"

  "Where's my son?"

  "Safe and snug in his tent. The Voss girl is with her daddy. You don't need to worry about them."

  "Let me out of here, sir."

  "I hear Carl Hinkel told you he was sixty years old outside that town meeting at the Holiday Inn. Made everybody think you was picking on an old man."

  "I've had better moments."

  "He's fifty-three. He isn't no military hero, either. He was kicked out of the Army for running some kind of PX scam in Vietnam. You know how you can tell when Carl Hinkel is lying? His lips are moving."

  The sheriff split the apple longways and hollowed the seeds out of the pulp and stuck one piece into his mouth and speared the other half on his knife blade and extended it through the bars. "You got a good heart, Mr. Holland. But I suspect you was off playing pocket pool when the Lord passed out the brains."

  Later, I lay down on a bench at the back of the cell and rested my arm across my eyes and tried to sleep. But I found no rest. L.Q. Navarro stood in the gloom, his arms folded, one foot propped backward on the wall, his eyes lost in thought.

  "Want to share what's on your mind?" I asked.

  "Wyatt Dixon's gonna pay you back by hurting somebody close to you he don't have no connection with hisself."

  "Who?" I asked.

  "He's a cruel man. He's got womanhood on the brain. You figure it out."

  "He's seen me with Cleo. Maybe it was Dixon who busted up her carpenter."

  "Good try, bud," L.Q. replied, and looked toward the window as a clap of dry thunder rolled through the mountains.

  The light was turning gray outside and the storm clouds of last night now looked as if they were filled with snow. A trusty walked by my cell door with a mop and bucket in one hand.

  "Get the turnkey down here," I said to him.

  Chapter 20

  Temple went to the health club for her workout at six that morning. She couldn't believe the change in the weather. The temperature had dropped perhaps forty degrees and the fir trees at the top of the canyon were powdered with snow. She went up to the Nautilus room on the second floor of the club and did stomach crunches on a recliner board and watched through the window as a gray curtain of rain and mist and snow moved through the canyon, obscuring the cliff walls, smudging the trees, leaving only the emerald green ribbon of the river inside the mist.

  The parking lot was white now and she could see the curlicues of car tracks on the cement and her Ford Explorer parked by the river. A low-slung red automobile pulled up on the far side of it, as though the driver could not decide whether to park. Then the mist and snow swirled over the lot and her vehicle faded and disappeared inside it.

  She finished her workout and showered and dressed in her khaki jeans and a warm flannel shirt and her scuffed boots and put on a cotton jacket with a hood and began to tie it with a drawstring, then accidently pulled the plastic tippet off the string. She dropped the tippet into her shirt pocket and hung her workout bag on her shoulder and walked to her vehicle.

  She shut the Explorer's door and started the engine. The windows had frosted and she turned on the heater and felt the coldness of the air surge into her face. While she waited for the engine to warm and the air vents to dry the moisture on the windows she pushed in the cigarette lighter so she could so
ften the plastic tippet and mold it back on the drawstring of her hood.

  For just a second she saw a man's face under a hat brim in the rearview mirror, then the face slipped out of the glass and a pair of arms and gloved hands seized her neck and upper torso. Her attacker's strength was incredible. He lifted her over the seat and into the back as though she were stuffed with straw. Then he fitted his forearms on her neck and began to squeeze.

  But the cigarette lighter was still in her hand and she reached backward with it blindly and felt the heated coils bite into his skin. An odor like animal hair burning in a trash barrel struck her nostrils. Even with the blood flow to her brain shutting down she held the lighter tightly against his flesh. She expected him to give up, his arms to fling her from him, but instead his body trembled and grew more rigid as he ate his pain and tightened his hold on her neck and crushed her head into the point of his chin, a grinding sound like a wood saw rasping against metal issuing from his throat.

  The defroster was forming an oval-shaped clear area over the steering wheel now and Temple could see snow crystals blowing horizontally above the river. She could see college kids in bright winter clothes climbing a zigzag trail to the top of the mountain, their scarves whipping in the wind. She could see orange cliffs and trees and a solitary ball of tum-bleweed bouncing across the land toward her vehicle. Her right hand went limp and she felt the cigarette lighter drop from her fingers, then the vision in her left eye clouded over and one side of her body went dead and she saw the tumbleweed bounce once over the hood of her vehicle and slap wetly against the defrosted clearing on the window glass like an angry man stuffing a cork in a bottle.

  When she awoke, her eyes were bound and she was being carried under the thighs and back by someone with arms that were as hard as oak. Her head was pressed against his chest and she could hear the whirrings of his heart and feel the rise and fall of his lungs as he carried her through trees and across ground that was littered with leaves and dead twigs.

  She tried to raise her hands, then realized they were taped at the wrists and the tape was wound around her body. The man carrying her knelt to the ground and placed her on pine needles and leaves that were cold against her skin where her shirt had pulled out of her jeans. She could hear a river down below, roaring through a canyon or perhaps over rocks, and she could smell the coldness of the water and the clean odor of new snow in the wind. Then she heard a shovel bite into the earth and she swallowed with a type of fear she had never experienced before.

  "Why are you doing this?" she asked. But her words were lost in the sounds of the river. She heard a second shovel chopping at the ground, the metal clanging against rocks, scraping back soil into a pile, the way someone might use an Army entrenching tool, and she knew two people were now digging her grave.

  She tried to sit up, but a large hand restrained her, pressing her back onto the ground. The man lowered his face to hers, and she felt his breath on her skin and she knew his eyes were examining her mouth and nose and hair, like a curious animal investigating prey he had stumbled upon in a den. One finger traced a mole by the corner of her mouth, then his knuckle moved up and down her jawline, and she was convinced she had never been touched by a more brutal hand. It was sheathed in callus, as though the tissue had been rubbed with brick dust or burned and hardened with chemicals. The pads of the fingers had the texture of emery paper.

  His thumb brushed her lips and his nail played with her teeth, then he pried them apart and inserted a rubber hose in her mouth.

  "No, don't be trying to spit it out, now. That ain't smart. No-sirree-bob," the man's voice said.

  But she did it anyway, spitting the hose out as well as the unwashed taste of his hand.

  "You motherfuckers," she said, turning her head, trying to sight her words on his face.

  "A profane woman brings discredit on her gender. Please do not use words of that nature to me again. I declare, this world has done become a toilet," the man said.

  He fitted his hands under her arms and dragged her into a depressed, rocky place that caused her heels to drop abruptly into the hardness of the ground. Then the two diggers began burying her alive, flinging spadeful after spadeful of dirt onto her body.

  She was amazed at how little time it took for her feet, then her calves and thighs and stomach and chest and arms to be weighted and encased with dirt and rock that seemed to hold her as solidly as cement. One of the diggers stopped work and dropped his shovel on the ground and knelt down and removed a strand of hair from the edge of her mouth.

  Then he touched the hose against her teeth, and this time she opened her mouth and took it.

  The diggers went back to work, and she felt the dirt strike her cheeks like dry rain and the earth close on her face. The noise of the river and the voices of the diggers disappeared, as though effaced from the surface of the world, and the only sound she could hear was her own breathing through the hose and the thump of large stones being dropped into place on top of her.

  She tried to think of the farm where she had lived as a little girl down by Matagorda Bay. The pasture was carpeted with bluebonnets in the spring, and a family of owls lived in a desiccated red barn behind the house, and at sunrise she would look through the window and see the owls gliding out of the woods to a hole in the barn roof, where they squeezed inside and disappeared just as the pinkness of the morning broke across the countryside. She came to associate the owls' flight into darkness with the fine beginning of a new day.

  She thought of Gulf storms and the way the rain marched across the bay and danced on the watermelons in her father's fields. She saw the windmill ginning in the breeze and water pumping into the horse tank and the hard blueness of the sky and the moss straightening in the live oak that shaded one side of their house. She saw a sky writer spelling out the name of a soda pop, banking and climbing straight up into the dome of heaven itself, laying out white smoke one thick letter at a time. Then the letters lost their rigidity of line and broke into curds, like buttermilk, and her father told her that was the wind blowing across the top of the sky, and she wondered how wind could blow in a place where no trees grew.

  She thought of all the earth's gifts that lived in the air, the smell of sea salt on a hot day, the way clouds transformed themselves when you lay in the grass and looked up into the heavens, the ozone that lightning gave off, the clatter of palm fronds, the red and gold leaves that cascaded out of the trees in the fall.

  In her mind's eye she saw the mother owl returning from the woods again, gliding on extended wings toward the hole in the barn roof, its stomach gorged from feeding all night. The return of the owl always meant the beginning of a new day, didn't it, one filled with promise and expectation? But this time the owl didn't squeeze back through the hole in the roof. Instead, it flew directly at her face, its talons open.

  It grew in size and shape and texture, its wings leathery, enormous in breadth now, flapping in the sky, blocking out the sun. The flapping sound was so loud now it droned in her ears and made the earth around her head tremble.

  So this is the way it comes, she thought, and she gagged on her own saliva and felt the hose slip loose from her mouth.

  That's when a pair of hands pried a flat stone loose from above her forehead and wiped the dirt from her face and pulled the tape from her eyes and removed a sliver of rock from her tongue. "Billy Bob?" she said.

  Then she was being pulled from her grave by each arm, like a crucified figure being lifted from a cross.

  "You're going to be all right, lady," the sheriff said. "Don't worry about a thing. We'll have you at the heliport and into St. Pat's in ten minutes."

  She stared into the sunlight and at the silhouettes above her and at the humped shape of a helicopter by a stand of ponderosa that grew out of rock. "Billy Bob?" she said.

  "Yes," I said.

  But she looked down at the river bursting against boulders in the channel below us and at the iridescent spray on the canyon walls, then at the snow
melting on the fir trees and the brown hawks wheeling in the sky and the long green roll of the northern Rockies and she could not find any other words to speak.

  Chapter 21

  The sheriff sat with me in the waiting room at St. Patrick's Hospital. He watched me walk up and down.

  "I'll bring Dixon in. You got my word on it," he said.

  "Then what?" I said.

  "She's never heard his voice before. I'll find a half dozen other peckerwoods and do a voice lineup."

  "She marked him with the cigarette lighter. That should be enough."

  "It's a start. Why don't you relax? You remind me of a lizard panting on top of a hot rock."

  "You'd better get him off the street, Sheriff."

  "I think your mama put you outdoors before the glue was dry, son. I really do," he replied.

  A half hour later, after the sheriff had gone, Temple walked out of the emergency room. Her clothes were wrinkled and grimed with dirt, her hair in disarray.

  "Give a girl a ride?" she said.

  "You okay?"

  "Sure," she said.

  "Let me talk to the doctor first," I said.

  She stepped close to me and leaned her forehead against my shoulder. I could smell the damp odor of earth and decayed leaves in her hair and clothes. "Take me home, Billy Bob," she said.

  I opened the truck door for her and drove down Broadway toward her motel. The sky was blue, the snow melted from the trees now, the streets glistening and wet in the sunshine. It was a beautiful day, but Temple's eyes were disconnected from the world around her.