Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "Say it again. How did y'all find me?" she said.

  "Somebody at the health club saw a man drive your Explorer away. I called the sheriff and he put an APB on it. A highway patrolman called in and said he'd seen a vehicle like yours headed west through Alberton Gorge. The sheriff got a helicopter and we took off."

  "You could see the Explorer from the air?"

  "Yeah, that's about it."

  Her gaze was turned inward, as though she were adding up numerical sums.

  "If they'd parked the Explorer in the trees, y'all would have flown right over me," she said.

  "I guess we would have," I said.

  She took a breath and pushed her hair back off her forehead.

  "I don't think I'm going to sleep for a long time," she said.

  I walked with her into her motel room, then left while she showered and changed. I drove down to a fast-food restaurant and ordered fried chicken and french-fried potatoes and a milk shake to go. When I returned to the motel, Temple opened the door on the night chain, her.38 hidden behind her leg.

  "It's only me," I said, and tried to smile.

  She slipped the chain and let me in and placed her revolver on a table by the door. She had put on makeup and a fresh pair of jeans and a blouse with flowers on it, but her eyes would not meet mine and her breath hung in her throat, as though the air were tainted and might injure her lungs.

  "Don't you want to eat something?" I asked.

  "Not now."

  "Those tar mules down in Coahuila set a field on fire with me in the middle of it," I said. "I would have burned to death if L.Q. hadn't pulled me up on his horse. I still have nightmares about it. But that's all they are, nightmares."

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked into space.

  "Why did they give me the air hose? Why did they want to keep me alive?" she said.

  "To make both of us suffer."

  "I spit it out the first time. The second time I let him put it in my mouth. That bastard won, didn't he?" she said.

  "No. They're cowards. Their kind never win," I said.

  But my words were useless. She squeezed her temples and lowered her head, her eyes shut. I sat beside her and placed my arm around her and felt her shaking, as though an incurable coldness had invade her body.

  I STAYED with Temple until she fell asleep, then covered her up and left a note to the effect that would return later in the day.

  I drove west of town, through green pastureland and small horse ranches with new red barns am white fences, then up the dirt road that led to Terry Witherspoon's shack above the Clark Fork River. I parked in the clearing and banged on his door and looked in his windows, then walked around back.

  A trash fire was burning in a rusty oil barrel. The thick curds of black smoke rolling from it were laced with an eye-watering stench. I found a rake in a tool-shed and kicked the barrel on its side and combed out the contents.

  In the tangle of wire and cans and tinfoil he hadn't bothered to separate out from his ignitable trash were plastic bottles of motor oil, animal entrails and strips of fur, and a blackened roll of pipe tape.

  I went back into the toolshed and hunted in the corners and under a molded canvas tarp and in a huge wood locker box full of tractor parts. Then I pushed over a stack of bald tires and found an Army surplus entrenching tool that had been propped inside, the blade still locked in the right-angle position of a hoe, the tip scratched a dull silver from fresh digging.

  Just as I went outside I saw Witherspoon walk into the clearing, a wood rabbit with a bloody head hanging from his belt, a.22 bolt-action rifle over his shoulder. A bone-handled skinning knife in a scabbard was stuck down in his side pocket. For just a moment he looked like a nineteenth-century illustration in a Mark Twain novel.

  "What do you think you're doing?" he asked.

  "Tearing your place up. You couldn't bring yourself to get rid of the E-tool, could you? You're a mountain man. A mountain man needs all his equipment," I said.

  "Stay away from me," he said. I slapped him across the face, so hard the light went out of his eyes and his glasses swung from one ear. He peeled his glasses off his head and stared at me in disbelief.

  "Go ahead. Throw down on me," I said.

  "You've got a gun in your belt."

  "That's right," I said, and slapped him again. My handprint was bright red on his cheek and there was spittle on his chin. "Where's Wyatt?"

  "I don't know. Why don't you go to his house instead of coming here?" he said, his eyes blinking in anticipation of being hit again.

  "Because he's not going to be there. Because he's not as stupid as you are."

  I ripped his rifle from his shoulder and whipped it by the barrel against a pine trunk. The stock snapped in half and spun crazily, like a splintered baseball bat, out into the trees.

  Then I headed for Terry Witherspoon again.

  "Wyatt's at a rodeo in Billings. Carl flies him to all his rodeos," he said hurriedly. Involuntarily his thumb hooked over the bone handle of his knife.

  I hit him with my fist and knocked him on the ground. Then I knelt over him and knotted his shirt in one hand and pulled the.38 from my belt and gripped it by the barrel, the butt curved outward, like a hammer.

  "Does it make you feel powerful to bury a woman alive, Terry?" I asked.

  "I didn't do it," he replied.

  "Do what? Say what you did not do. How do you know what I'm talking about?"

  His words bound in his throat and his eyes looked at mine and filled with genuine terror.

  "I didn't do whatever you're talking about. I been here. I don't have a car. I can't go anywhere."

  I dropped the pistol to the ground and drove my fist into the center of his face, then released his shirt and clenched my hand on his throat, pinching off his air, and raised my right fist again.

  On the edge of the clearing, his Stetson and striped black suit cut by a shaft of sunlight, I saw L.Q. Navarro looking at me, his gold toothpick between his teeth, his lips pursed as though he were witnessing a spectacle that offended moral paradigms he considered mandatory in his friends.

  I pulled Terry Witherspoon to his feet and shoved him toward the woods and kicked him in the tail-bone.

  "Get out of here," I said.

  "I live here," he said, his breath hiccupping in his throat.

  "That doesn't matter. Get out of my sight until I'm gone."

  He backed away from me, hooking on his glasses crookedly, then turned and hurried into the forest, the dead rabbit coated with dust and blood, swinging stiffly against his thigh.

  I drove back into Missoula and used a pay phone to call the sheriff at his office. There was no answer. I called the 911 dispatcher.

  "It's Sunday. He's not in his office today," she said.

  "Give me his home number."

  "I can't do that."

  "This is about an attempted homicide. I'll give you my number. I'll wait by the pay phone."

  "Sir, you'd better not be jerking people around," she replied.

  But she pulled it off. Five minutes later the pay phone rang.

  "Go up to Terry Witherspoon's shack on the river. There's a roll of half-burned pipe tape by the trash barrel in back. Get there before he finishes destroying it and I bet it'll match the tape that was used to tie up Temple," I said.

  "You tossed his place?" the sheriff said.

  "No, I tossed Witherspoon."

  "I think you just managed to blow it for everybody. It's Sunday. I have to get a hold of a judge and a search warrant."

  "I need directions to Nicki Molinari's dude ranch," I said.

  "You're about to start a second career, son. Convict cowboy over at Deer Lodge. The place is full of smart asses who got their own mind about everything. You'll fit right in," he replied.

  BUT ACTUALLY I didn't need the sheriff's directions to find the Molinari ranch. Previously the sheriff had mentioned it was outside Stevensville, twenty-five miles down in the Bitterroots. On Mond
ay, I drove to Stevensville and stopped at a barbershop in an old brick building on the main street and went inside. Two barbers were cutting hair while a third customer, an old man with his trousers tucked inside his boots, read a newspaper, his elbows on his knees, his face scowling with disapproval at the news of the day.

  "Could you tell me where Nicki Molinari lives?" I asked.

  Both the barbers turned their backs on me and went on snipping and combing hair as though they hadn't heard me. The customers in the barber chairs cut their eyes at me, then looked straight ahead.

  But the old man had lowered his newspaper and was staring at me with the intensity of a hawk sighting in on a field mouse from a telephone line. His skin looked like it had been cured in a smokehouse, his clothes soaked in a bucket of starch and flat-ironed on his skinny frame. A cross was embroidered with gold thread on the pocket of his white snap-button shirt, and there were choleric blazes in his throat, as though heat were climbing out of his collar.

  "You a pimp?" he asked.

  "Sir?" I said.

  "I asked if you're a procurer, one of them that brings women out to that greaser's ranch." His accent was Appalachian, West Virginia or perhaps Kentucky, a wood rasp being ground across a metal surface.

  "No, sir. I'm an attorney."

  "Is there a difference?" he said.

  "Thanks for y'all's time," I said, and went back out on the street.

  But the old man followed me out on the sidewalk. The Sapphire Mountains rose up behind him, their green slopes the texture of velvet, the crests strung with clouds.

  "What's your business with that gangster?" he asked.

  "As you imply, sir, it's my business."

  "No, it ain't. He's my neighbor. I run a church. Now I got a shitpot of criminals and whores swimming naked in a pool within view of our services."

  "I guess what I aim to do is mess up Nicki Molinari's day any way I can."

  When he grinned he showed two teeth that stood up in his gums like slats.

  "Drive straight toward the Sapphires. The China-Polish hogs are mine. The Cadillacs and the naked whores throwing beach balls on the lawn are his," he said.

  The ranch owned by Nicki Molinari and his friends looked out of place, out of sync with itself, as though it had been designed and put together by someone who had toured the West and wasn't quite sure what he remembered about it.

  The house was Santa Fe stucco, with shady arcades and tile walkways and big glazed urns spilling over with flowers. An antique freight wagon sat by the driveway, as though announcing a historical connection to the past. A half dozen horses, their backs rubbed with saddle sores the size of half dollars, stood listlessly in a lot that was nubbed down to the dirt, while rolled hay lay humped and yellow in the fields. A swimming pool the color and shape of a chemical green teardrop steamed in the cool air next to a new log barn that housed no animals or farm machinery but an enclosed batting cage with an automatic pitching machine inside.

  I pulled into a gravel parking area on the side of the house. Molinari shut down the pitching machine and opened a door in the batting cage and came toward me, dressed only in tennis shoes and knee-length socks and cutoff sweatpants that were hitched tightly into his genitalia.

  "Am I gonna have trouble here?" he said. "Call somebody if you feel uncomfortable," I replied.

  "If I call anybody, it'll be for an ambulance. You're starting to be a nuisance."

  "You bashed Cleo Lonnigan's carpenter. I got picked up for it. While I was in jail, a friend of mine was buried alive by Wyatt Dixon."

  His eyes fixed on mine, as though reading significance in my words that only he understood. He scratched at a pimple on top of his shoulder.

  "I'm sorry about the carpenter, but it's not on me. Cleo is sitting on money that don't belong to her. I told you, the people her husband stiffed give out motivational lessons nobody forgets. Her husband didn't learn that lesson, either, and it got him and his kid killed," he said.

  He squeezed the pimple until it popped, then brushed at his skin.

  "Save the shuck for your hired morons. My friend and I took your weight. That means if Wyatt Dixon comes around my friend again, I'm going to be out to see you," I said.

  "Right," he said, and looked off into the breeze. His skin was olive-toned and looked cool and taut in the sunshine. "You want to hit some in the cage?"

  "No."

  "Don't go, man. What do you think of Xavier Girard as a writer?"

  "Why?"

  "Because he's writing my life story. Because I've told him stuff I don't tell everybody."

  "What stuff?"

  "You asked me once how I got out of Laos. I rode out on the skid of a helicopter. Except I pushed another guy off the skid. A GI. At five hundred feet." His eyes left mine, then came back and refocused on me again. His face seemed to energize, as though the answer to all his questions lay within inches of his grasp. "After you capped your friend, that other Texas Ranger, you saw a shrink?"

  I wanted to simply walk away, to pretend I was above his inquisition and his criminal level of morality. He waited, his face expectant. A woman with dyed red hair came out of the house and got into a convertible with a bright white top and began blowing the horn at him.

  "Shut up that damn noise!" he yelled at her, then turned back to me. "How'd you get that guy off your conscience?"

  "I didn't. I never dealt with it. I feel sorry for you," I said.

  "You never dealt-" he said, then stopped and pressed his fingers in the center of his forehead, his mouth open slightly, as though he were fingering a tumor or perhaps recognizing a brother-in-arms.

  That same day Carl Hinkel drifted his single-engine plane on currents of warm air above the Bitterroot River and landed on a freshly mowed pasture at the rear of his ranch. As soon as Wyatt Dixon stepped from the passenger door, he was arrested by two sheriff's deputies. But before they could cuff him he peeled off his T-shirt and shook it loose from his hand like a stripteaser on a stage. The veins and tendons in his upper torso looked like the root system in a tree.

  "Please notice I am burned from the neck all the way down one shoulder," he said, lifting a thick pad of grease-stained bandages from his skin. "I am placing myself at y'all's disposal, with hopes you will take me to a hospital. It is civil servants such as yourself a rodeo cowboy must turn to when he don't have enough sense not to drop a red-hot car muffler on his face."

  He held his right hand in stiff salute against his eyebrow.

  The voice lineup consisted of an escaped Arkansas convict who was being held in the county jail, a toothless cook at the transient shelter, a sheriff's deputy from Sweetwater, Texas, an insane street preacher who spent the day shouting at traffic in the middle of town, and a university speech therapist from Oklahoma whose voice sounded like wire being pulled through a hole in a tin can. Together, they represented a cross section of mushmouth and adenoidal Southern accents that would have probably caused Shakespeare to burn his texts and rewrite his plays in Cantonese.

  But the lineup was not like one shown in television dramas. Neither the city police nor the sheriff's department had a stage, and the latter did not even have an interview room large enough to accommodate the six men who were to take part in the voice identification. So the sheriff recorded Wyatt Dixon and the five other men on cassettes and numbered each cassette one through six. Each man read the same statement into the microphone: "This world has done become a toilet."

  Then Temple sat in the sheriff's office, a notepad on her knee, and listened to the cassettes, one at a time, while I sat behind her.

  She was attentive, motionless, her head lowered slightly, while the sheriff played the first four. Then he put the fifth cassette into the machine and hit the play button. The voice was Wyatt Dixon's, but without dramatic emphasis, devoid of the manufactured and startled tone that characterized his speech. Temple raised her head, as though she were going to speak, then she motioned the sheriff to play the sixth tape.

  "Ther
e ain't no hurry. You want me to play any of them again?" the sheriff asked.

  "Number two and five," she said.

  "Yes, ma'am," he said.

  She listened again, then nodded, her lips crimping together.

  "It's number two," she said.

  The sheriff slapped the back of his head and blew out his breath.

  "No?" she said.

  "You just picked out my deputy," the sheriff said. He looked at me, his cheeks puffed with air.

  "Don't say what I think you're fixing to," I said.

  "I got to kick him loose. Terry Witherspoon got rid of the pipe tape you called me about. There are no latents in Ms. Carrol's vehicle. Three or four people over in Billings are willing to swear Dixon was at the rodeo when Ms. Carrol was abducted," he said.

  "Which people in Billings?" I asked.

  "A prostitute and Carl Hinkel and a couple of ex-convicts. He don't hang out with your regular civic club types."

  "Talk to them about the consequences for perjury. Bring in Witherspoon. Put him in a cell full of Indians and blacks and lose his paperwork," I said.

  "Come on, Ms. Carrol, I'll walk you to your car," the sheriff said, ignoring me.

  "I can manage, thank you," she replied.

  "Don't misinterpret the gesture. I'm just going across the street to buy my grandson a birthday present. Counselor, one way or another I'm gonna put Wyatt Dixon and this Witherspoon kid out of business. But in the meantime they'd better remain the healthiest pair of white trash in Missoula County. We clear on this?"

  "Not really," I said.

  He hooked on his glasses and studied the calendar on his desk.

  "You got about three weeks before Dr. Voss goes to trial for Lamar Ellison's murder. Why don't you turn your attentions to your profession and quit pretending you're still a lawman?" he said.

  "Don't you dare speak down to him like that. He was a Texas Ranger. In the old days he and his partner would have fed Wyatt Dixon into a hay baler," Temple said.