Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  Lucas returned my truck keys the next morning and sat at the plank table in the kitchen and drank coffee and looked out the window at the frost high up on the mountain.

  "Don't worry about her. She's a smart gal," I said.

  "I went by her uncle's after I got off work. They hadn't brought her back," he said.

  "She was involved with these Treasury guys before you met her, Lucas. She hung out with bikers. She was there when they stuck up a general store and post office on the Res."

  "I don't like it when you talk that way, Billy Bob."

  "Sue Lynn's history is her own. I didn't make it up."

  "That agent said the same thing about you."

  "Maybe you should listen to him."

  Lucas got up from the table and threw his coffee out the back door. Then he washed the cup in the sink and set it in the dry rack.

  "You hurt people when they try to stand up for you. But I don't hold it against you. It's just the way you are. You ain't never gonna change, Billy Bob," he said.

  He fitted on his hat and went outside, past the side window, his head bent forward, his face as sharp as an ax blade in the wind.

  Chapter 25

  Kingdoms are lost for want of a nail in a horse's shoe. I think perhaps lives unravel in the same fashion, sometimes over events as slight as an insult to the pride of a misanthropic young man from North Carolina who thought he was going to be a mountain man.

  Lucas was playing that afternoon with a band at a bluegrass festival outside of Hamilton. The bandstand had been knocked together with green lumber at the bottom of a long slope that tapered upward into the shadows of the mountains, and thousands of people sat on folding chairs and blankets in the sunshine, while the electronically amplified songs of Appalachia echoed through the canyons of the Bitterroot Valley.

  Doc, Maisey, Temple, and I spread a blanket in the grass, not far from a group of college kids who were red-faced with beer and agitated by a situation of some kind near the concession area.

  "Somebody should rip it down. It doesn't belong here. This is Montana," a girl was saying.

  "Ignore them. They're a bunch of losers," a boy said.

  "There's a black man working at the hot-dog stand. How would you feel if you were a black man and somebody stuck that in your face?" the girl said.

  "What's going on with the college kids?" Temple said.

  "You got me," I said.

  I looked past the crowd at a white camper with a tarp extended from the roof and supported on poles to shade the people who sat under it. On one side of the tarp was a staff that flew the American flag; on the other side, flapping like a red-and-blue martial challenge out of the past, was the battle flag of the Confederacy.

  "I'm going to the concession stand. Y'all want anything?" Maisey said.

  "Yeah," Doc said, and gave her a twenty-dollar bill.

  "Like what do you want?" Maisey asked.

  "Whatever you like. Just make sure everything is free of cholesterol and preservatives and none of it is made by Third World child labor and the vendors have sound political attitudes," Doc said.

  Maisey made one of her faces to show her tolerance of her father's immaturity and walked off into the crowd, just as Lucas's band came on stage and went into Bill Monroe's "Molly and Tenbrooks."

  The sunlight was warm on Maisey's skin as she stood in line, the wind balmy in her face, the timbered slopes of the mountains rising almost straight up into snow that still had not melted with summer. The fields were iridescent with the spray from irrigation wheel lines, and up the incline the aspens and cottonwoods along the drainages rippled in the shadows of the mountains that towered over them.

  Then she felt a presence behind her before she saw it, and smelled an odor like a combination of hair tonic and chewing gum and layered deodorant, as though the person emanating it thought a manufactured scent was a form of physical sophistication. "Bet I scared you," Terry Witherspoon said. He wore a white T-shirt and black jeans and engineering boots and a skinning knife on his belt. He grinned at the corner of his mouth and pitched his head to get a strand of hair out of his glasses.

  She turned away from him and moved up with the line, her eyes fastening on a jolly fat man frying burgers inside the concession stand.

  "Did you get my note?" Terry asked.

  "No," she said, hurriedly, then felt her cheeks burn with her lie. She turned and faced him. "I did get it. Please don't leave any more."

  "I went way out on a limb for you. You shouldn't talk to me like that."

  "Leave me alone," she said, her teeth gritted, her eyes shining with embarrassment at the stares she was now receiving.

  He didn't answer. A long moment passed and she thought perhaps Terry had gone away. But when she turned around he was looking down into her face, crinkling his nose under his glasses, his arms hanging straight down, as though he didn't know what else to do with them, one hand locked on his wrist.

  "I'll pay for the burgers. Let's walk up the canyon and eat them. There're grouse in the pines. I've got a hand line we can fish with," he said.

  But before she could reply she saw her father coming toward the concession stand, pushing his ash-blond hair back over his head, his gait longer than it should have been, his shoulders slightly stooped. Perhaps for the first time she saw the complex man who would never be at home in the world, a Mennonite farm boy who went to war as a healer and became a killer in the Phoenix Program, a recovered intravenous addict who published poems and whose soft voice belied the potential that burned just below his skin, a father who mourned his wife and loved his daughter and brooked no intrusion into the life of his family.

  Doc's right hand bit into Terry Witherspoon's arm, squeezing the muscle into the bone.

  "You're the boy who left that note?" he said.

  "I might have. Take your hand off-" Witherspoon said.

  "Don't find any reason to get near me or Maisey, son. Now, you get back over there with your friends. While you're at it, you tell them those are grand flags on their camper and sonsofbitches like them don't have any right to fly them."

  "I don't have to do anything you tell me, you old fuck."

  Doc pulled Witherspoon out of the line and marched him by one arm through the crowd toward the camper. When Witherspoon tripped and fell, Doc knotted the back of his T-shirt in his fist and hauled him out of the dust and pushed him through the crowd like a rag doll.

  In the shade of the tarp Carl Hinkel and Wyatt Dixon sat in canvas recliners, drinking canned beer, gazing benignly at the stage.

  Behind them, Sue Lynn Big Medicine sat in the doorway of the camper, wearing shorts and a halter and no shoes, her face fatigued, her lipstick on crooked. Doc shoved Witherspoon into their midst. "Your man here got lost. Make sure he stays on a short tether," Doc said.

  "Goodness gracious, sir, you behave like somebody just spit in your dinner plate. Sue Lynn, get Dr. Voss a cold drink. Terry wasn't rude to your daughter, was he? He got one sniff of her and ain't talked about nothing else," Wyatt Dixon said.

  Wyatt Dixon turned his attention back to the stage, grinning at nothing, his body supine, one hand cupped on his scrotum, while Carl Hinkel puffed on his cob pipe as though the events taking place around him had nothing to do with his life.

  I draped my arm around Doc's shoulders and walked him toward the concession stands. "Wrong place to take them on," I said. "If you're the voice of reason, Billy Bob, we're in trouble," he replied.

  A half HOUR LATER Sue Lynn found Lucas behind the bandstand. He was kneeling on a blanket, replacing a broken treble string on his Martin, twisting the tuning peg until the string whined with tension.

  "Where have you been? I went by your place three times today. Your uncle said you took his car and didn't tell him where you were going," he said, getting to his feet.

  "I went back and got a few clothes. I'm staying at Wyatt's awhile," she replied.

  "Wyatt's? Are you insane?"

  "I have to, Lucas."

/>   "Tell those government buttwipes to kiss your ass."

  "Lower your voice."

  "I mean it, Sue Lynn. Eighty-six this stuff. This is a free country."

  "We can't be together again. You have to accept that."

  He stared at her, then looked out at a deep, shadowed chasm that cut through the mountains.

  "Don't tell me stuff like that. I'm not gonna listen," he said.

  "I'm going to jail or I'm going to be killed. You want to be killed, too?"

  "Come out to Doc's and talk to Billy Bob."

  "Try to understand. I have to make a decision about something. It eats on me all the time. I might have to go away for a long time, for something you don't know about."

  "Go away where?"

  She gave up.

  "Don't get around Wyatt," she said. "Dr. Voss just humiliated Terry in front of a bunch of college kids. Terry is Wyatt's punk. That means Wyatt has to hurt somebody so Terry can feel he's important again. That's the way they do things inside."

  "Who cares what these guys do? They're scum… Stop backing away from me."

  But she was running now, in her moccasins and halter and shorts that were dirty in the rump, and for some reason she made him think of a frightened doe bolting through a forest where the trees took no note of the wild beating of its heart.

  Two hours later Lucas, Temple, Doc, Maisey and I loaded up in Temple's Explorer, drowsy on beer and from sitting in the sun, the encounter with Terry Witherspoon pushed out of our minds, the summer evening still blue and pink and filled with promise.

  As we snaked our way out of the parking area, I looked through the haze of dust and saw Wyatt Dixon in front of the white camper, dancing with Sue Lynn slung over his shoulder like a side of beef. When she tried to raise her torso erect, he slapped her rump and danced faster and faster in a circle, his knees jerking upward like an Indian's while the Confederate flag flapped over his head.

  Lucas was sitting next to me in the backseat. His eyes started to follow mine.

  "Look at the eagles up on the hill," I said.

  "Where?" he said.

  "They're flying right above the trees, right across the canyon," I said.

  He looked at the canyon, then out the rear window of the vehicle.

  "Was something going on back there?" he asked.

  "Nothing that we can change," I said.

  The next day was Sunday. That afternoon Sue Lynn sat on top of a boulder behind Wyatt's log house and watched him and Terry smoke homegrown gage and flip a hatchet end over end into a cottonwood tree. Wyatt had said nothing to her about her relationship with Lucas, nor had he tried to put moves on her last night or this morning. In fact, he gave her a blanket and pillow and told her to sleep on the deerhide couch in his house and said he would sleep in the bedroom. When she woke in the morning, he fixed coffee and eggs for her and whistled a tune while he did it, his bare triangular back turned to her, as though he were both indifferent to the coldness of the predawn hour and the presence of several loaded firearms that hung on antler racks which she could easily take down and discharge if she chose.

  But she knew Wyatt and the way he thought, if "thought" was the proper word to use. He never did what others expected. Unlike Carl Hinkel and his shaved-head windups, Wyatt seemed to be possessed by no ideological passion. His war was not with the government or with people of a different race. His war was with humanity, or better yet, the normality that defined most human beings. Wyatt was like the virus that immediately recognizes the antibodies in an immune system as its enemy. He used and ingested people. He did it with an idiot's grin, eating his own pain, demeaning and degrading his adversaries in ways that often took them days to figure out.

  From a good thirty feet Wyatt threw the hatchet into the tree trunk, thunking it so solidly into the wood the handle trembled with a sound like a sprung saw blade. He worked the steel head out of the bark and extended the handle to Terry, then jerked it back, smiling, when Terry tried to take it.

  Then he repeated the maneuver, teasing Terry, jumping around sideways as though he had springs on his feet. But before Terry could go into a pout, Wyatt slipped the handle into Terry's palm and clasped his hand affectionately on the back of Terry's neck and pulled the roach Terry was smoking off his lips and took two hits off it, then pinched off the ash and ate it.

  "Roll us another one, Sue Lynn," Terry said.

  Roll it yourself, fuckhead, she thought.

  But she didn't say it. Not with Wyatt there. He might bitch-slap Terry or force him to wear makeup and throw him from an automobile, but when push came to shove, with either Carl or any of the other lamebrains who hung around the compound, Terry was Wyatt's mainline bar of soap and nobody made remarks about him or put their hands on him except Wyatt.

  So she rolled a joint from the home-grown marijuana in Wyatt's tobacco pouch and licked down the glue on the seam of the cigarette paper and crimped down the ends while Wyatt went inside the log house to use the toilet.

  Terry pulled the joint from her fingers and put it into his mouth. He was bare-chested and his pants hung two inches below his belly button. Dirt rings clung to his neck like a necklace of insects.

  "Light it for me," he said.

  She ignored him and slid off the boulder and walked down toward the river, dusting off her rump, working a pack of cigarettes out of her jeans, sticking one into her mouth.

  "I can have your ass if I want," he said behind her.

  He traced his fingernail down her spine to her panties.

  She tried to bite down on the words that welled out of her throat but it was too late. "Your mother must have thought she gave birth to a tumor," she said.

  He took her book of matches from her hand and lit the joint, holding the hit deep down in his lungs, and bounced the dead match off her face.

  "Have a nice day, Sue Lynn," he said.

  Later, she went inside the log house and lay on the couch, a blanket wrapped around her head, and tried to sleep. But it was no use. One of Wyatt's buddies was running a dirt bike up and down an adjacent hill, gunning the engine through the trees, scouring humus and rock and grass into the air, filling the softness of the evening with a sound like a chain saw grinding on steel pipe.

  Why not eighty-six it, like Lucas said? she thought.

  Because Amos Rackley told her she stayed on the job until she found out what kinds of weapons were in Carl Hinkel's basement. Maybe she should have worn the wire, she thought. Now she had no umbilical cord to the outside.

  What Amos Rackley could not comprehend, what he would not hear, was the fact that Carl Hinkel could look inside people's heads. He saw where they were weak, the thoughts they tried to hide, the flare of ambition in their eyes. He understood evil in others, tolerated it the way a father does an errant child, and used it for his own ends. His followers all knew they could deceive themselves or lie to the world and Carl would remain their friend. But they dared not lie to him.

  He seemed to have no sexual interest in either women or men. His pastime was his absorption with the Internet. He sat for hours in front of his computer, his features wrapped with the green glow of his monitor, while he tapped on the keys and addressed chat rooms filled with his admirers.

  But she had seen one peculiarity in his commitment to his computer. In nice weather he left the door open to his little stone office, and anyone in the compound could see him at his desk, puffing clouds of white smoke from his cob pipe, his back as straight as a bayonet, while his fingers danced across the keyboard. But sometimes he would shut the door and slide the wood crossbar into place, and everyone understood that Carl was not to be disturbed.

  Once a new member at the compound, a jug-eared kid just out of the Wyoming pen, called Shortening Bread behind his back because of his dark skin, wanted to curry favor with Carl and made lunch for him and carried it on a tray to the office. Unfortunately for Shortening Bread, Carl had not quite secured the crossbar on the door, and Shortening Bread worked his foot into th
e jamb and pushed the door back and started to step inside the office without asking permission.

  Carl rose from his chair and flung the tray into the yard. When Shortening Bread broke into tears, Carl put his arm over his shoulders and walked with him around the compound, explaining the need for discipline among members of the Second American Revolution, reassuring him that he was a valuable man.

  Sue Lynn got up from the couch and washed her face and walked down the slope to the river, then wandered along the bank to a shady copse of trees and sat down in the grass and watched the spokes of white light the sun gave off beyond the rim of the Bitterroots.

  Then she heard the dirt bike go silent and the voices of Wyatt and Terry and she realized the two men were no more than twenty yards above her, behind a boulder, and Terry was sharpening his knife on a whetstone, probably spitting on it, as was his fashion, and grinding the knife in a slow, monotonous circle.

  "She's got a mouth on her, I'll 'low that. 'Birth to a tumor'?"

  "It's not funny, Wyatt."

  "You ain't got to tell me. An Indian woman shouldn't be talking to a white man like that," Wyatt said, his voice suddenly somber.

  "What are you gonna do about it?" Terry asked.

  "Have a little talk with her."

  "I want it to hurt."

  "Oh, it will."

  "Wyatt?"

  "What?"

  "I want to watch."

  Sue Lynn sat in the shadows, bent forward, her stomach sick. Even in the coolness of the wind off the river she was sweating all over, a fearful sweat that clung to her skin like night damp. She remained motionless, afraid to get up or turn around. Then she heard Wyatt and Terry walking out of the trees toward the campground upstream, where Terry sometimes worm-fished with a handline behind a beaver dam.

  When they were out of sight she ran for her uncle's windowless stock car that had no headlights. She fired up the engine and fishtailed across the gravel driveway in front of Carl's house and roared up the dirt road toward the highway that led back into Missoula, her heart pounding, the reflected images of Carl Hinkel and three of his subordinates staring at her like painted miniatures in the rearview mirror.