Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  Maisey hit the brakes, shifted into reverse, and mashed on the gas pedal. The trailer hitch on the truck speared through the pipework on Wither-spoon's grille, gashing the radiator open, tearing the fan so metal screamed against metal. She straightened the truck, then floorboarded into him again, this time crumpling a fender down on a tire, shattering the headlights, knocking his forehead into the windshield.

  When she shifted back into first gear, the low-slung red car that belonged to Wyatt Dixon was bleeding green pools of antifreeze onto the asphalt, spokes of steam whistling from under the hood. An elderly woman with Coke-bottle glasses pulled in behind Witherspoon and began blowing her horn for him to get out of the way.

  The next morning the sheriff called and asked me to drop by his office.

  "The two ATF agents were killed by.223 rounds, all fired from the same rifle, probably an M-16. The spent casings were all clean," he said.

  The sheriff was sitting behind his desk, his Stetson pushed up on the back of his head, his suit coat on, fiddling with his hands as he talked, as though he were concentrating more on his own thoughts than on his listener.

  "Amos Rackley told you this?" I asked.

  "The Flathead Reservation has patches of privately owned land on it. The ridge where the shooter was? It's owned by a white man. The government can't keep me out of this one," the sheriff said.

  "I don't understand why you called me."

  "The shooter dropped one of his ear plugs. He left a thumbprint on it. You know a guy named Clayton Stark?"

  "No," I said.

  "He don't have a record here, but three years ago he was picked up for questioning in a child abduction case in Pocatello. Does that ring any bells for you?"

  "A pedophile was arrested in Carl Hinkel's yard five years ago," I replied.

  "That's right. Your son's girlfriend, this gal Sue Lynn Big Medicine? Her little brother was abducted and killed, wasn't he?"

  "How'd you know that?"

  "I get paid to do my damn homework, son. You see a pattern here on this pedophilia stuff?"

  "Yeah, but I don't know what it is."

  "Neither do I," the sheriff said. He got up from his desk and began fumbling around in a closet.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "There's a bull trout under the Higgins Street Bridge that daily gives me a lesson in humility," he said, lifting a rod and reel from behind a raincoat. "Take a walk with me. I want to tell you a story."

  The PREVIOUS day the sheriff had been visiting a cemetery on the north side, a lovely, tree-shaded area on a knoll where the town's oldest families were buried. He saw Cleo Lonnigan sitting on a bench by her son's grave, leaning over, setting stem roses in a row by the headstone. She was talking to herself and did not hear the sheriff when he walked up behind her.

  "You want company?" he asked.

  "It's his birthday," she said.

  "Oh," he said, nodding.

  "On his birthday I make a wish for each year of his life that he would have had, then put roses on his grave," she said.

  The sheriff sat beside her on the bench. It was made of stone and felt cold and hard under his legs. "I worry about you, Cleo."

  "Why is that, J.T?"

  He looked down the slope, through the trees, at a maroon Cadillac convertible that was parked in the drive with the top up. The Cadillac had been waxed and hand-buffed with soft rags and the reflection of the leaves overhead seemed trapped inside the paint.

  "You're here with Nicki Molinari?" the sheriff asked.

  "We've let bygones be bygones." "I have a hard time accepting a statement like that."

  She rose from the bench. It was cool in the shade and she wore a silk scarf tied under her chin.

  "I don't ask you to, J.T.," she replied, and walked down the slope toward Nicki Molinari's car. The wind blew the roses into crossed patterns on top of her son's grave.

  "She's one I can't read, Sheriff," I said.

  "It's not hard. Her husband's crooked money got her little boy killed. Cleo says she didn't know where that money come from. When people got more than they're supposed to have, they always know where it comes from. So she's got to get up every morning, denying to herself that little boy's death is not on her. How'd you like to carry a burden like that?"

  We were in the shadow of the Higgins Bridge now, and the sheriff had managed to fling his lure into a willow tree.

  "Why'd you tell me about Cleo and Molinari?" I asked.

  "It's just a warning. She'd like to see you hung from a meat hook."

  "You can sure put it in a memorable way, sir," I said, and started to leave. "By the way, how is it you're so close to Cleo?"

  "My son's in that same cemetery. He was killed in Desert Storm. That was rich men fighting over oil, Mr. Holland. My boy was too young to enlist on his own. So I signed the papers for him."

  He began jerking his lure to free it from the tree, until the line broke in his big hand.

  I BOUGHT avocado and creamed cheese sandwiches and frozen yogurt and cold drinks at a grocery by the university and put it all in an ice chest and picked up Temple at her motel. We drove through Hellgate Canyon, east of town, and out toward Rock Creek to eat lunch. I told Temple about the sheriff's encounter with Cleo Lonnigan in the cemetery. I thought I could simply mention it casually and get it out of the way and not call up unpleasant memories about past relationships. That's what I thought.

  "What's God's gift to the Res up to?" Temple said.

  "Taking Molinari over the hurdles. He's out of his depth," I said.

  "Maybe it's the other way around. Xavier Girard says Molinari is in the sack with his wife. But maybe our girl is asexual or a lesbian and doesn't care. What's your opinion?"

  "I don't have one," I said.

  "A little sensitive, are we?"

  "No, I just wish I hadn't brought this up," I said.

  There was no sound in the truck except the hum of the tires on the asphalt. We were in a long valley now and the hills rose up steep and green against the sky. When I turned off the interstate I passed a restaurant made of logs and entered another valley, this one traversed by a wide, pebble-bottomed stream that flowed out of the south, with both meadowland and high, wooded, sharp-peaked mountains on each side.

  I drove two miles along the stream, past fishermen up to their waists in the riffles, and did not try to say anything else to Temple. But I could feel her looking at the side of my face.

  "You're just going to turn to stone on me?" she said.

  "No, I gave up."

  "Pardon?"

  "I'm tired of sackcloth and ashes," I said.

  "You're saying I'm too heavy a burden to deal with?"

  Farther up the road was a deep-green piney woods and a rusty turnstile that allowed fishermen to enter the woods on their way to the stream without letting cattle out on the road. Temple waited for me to answer her.

  "You know how I feel about you. But you're unrelenting and unforgiving," I said.

  She sat very still for a long time, her milky-green eyes filled with thoughts I couldn't guess at. She turned her head and studied my face.

  "I don't know how much more of this I can take," she said.

  "You want to go back to Texas?"

  "After I nail the two guys who tried to bury me alive."

  "That's the only reason you're here now?"

  "That's a good question. Let me think very hard on it," she said, her mouth pinched with anger.

  I pulled off the road into a stand of grand fir and pine trees and parked in a dry slough that fed into the stream. My head was splitting. I wanted to turn around and drive back to town, but Temple had already gotten out of the truck and slammed the door and walked through a clump of huckleberry bushes to the edge of the stream. The wind dropped and I could hear the heat of the truck engine ticking under the hood.

  I got the food and a picnic blanket out of the truck and walked down the slough toward the bank. Through the trees I could see a huge dalles
and the stream sliding over sculpted boulders the size of small blimps. The air was loud with the roar of the water, sweet and cool with the spray that coated the rocks.

  I tripped on a root and looked down at a fresh, hoofed track in the slough, one as long as my foot. To my right the reeds and huckleberry bushes had been broken or mashed down into the moistness of the silt and gravel along the bank.

  I set down our food and followed the hoofed tracks through the reeds. I worked my way through an overhang of willows and stepped across a cotton-wood that beavers had cut down, then I saw the moose on a small promontory above Temple, its webbed rack the largest I had ever seen on an animal of any kind, its nostrils puffing with her scent.

  She was standing on a sand spit, her hands in her back pockets, looking upstream, and she neither heard nor saw the animal behind her. I moved quickly along the bank, and the moose jerked its rack around, its eyes on me now, its weight shifting on the promontory, dirt scudding down into the water from its hooves.

  Then I heard it whirl and turn in the undergrowth and I knew it was coming for either me or Temple.

  I ran along the water's edge, yelling Temple's name. She looked at me, startled, then her face went white. I picked her up at the waist, locking my arms around her, and splashed into a side channel and came up onto an island. But the moose was right behind us, its hooves clacking across underwater rocks, its rack cracking a cottonwood limb in half like a twig.

  I stumbled and fell, then rose to my feet and picked up Temple again and went over the other side of the island into the stream, into deep water and a fast-running, ice-cold current that swept us through a series of gray boulders that steamed with mist.

  We floated around a bend, under an overhang of willows, into a pool that was deep in shadow. I felt the pebbled bottom under my shoes, and I pulled Temple toward me out of the current and we walked chest-deep toward the far bank, behind the protection of a beaver dam. But the bank had been undercut by the current so that it kept shaling under my weight as I tried to get out of the water. I grabbed the bottom of a willow and pulled myself up until I could find purchase with one knee, then I locked my hand on Temple's wrist and hoisted her up after me.

  I heard the moose's hooves clatter once more on stone, then saw it lift itself, wet and blowing and magnificent, onto the opposite bank and disappear into the trees. Temple and I fell into the leaves, and I held her against me and kissed her face and hair and neck and covered her with my body and felt the firm muscles of her back and legs and gathered her against me with such force that I could hear the breath coming out of her chest. Her cheek felt as hot as a baby's waking from sleep.

  I kissed her hands and mouth and the tops of her breasts and I unbuttoned her shirt and kissed her stomach and touched her breasts and thighs without permission or shame, then felt her hand begin loosening my belt. She peeled off her shirt and bra and threw them aside and put her tongue in my mouth and pulled my weight down on top of her. I rubbed my face in the wetness of her hair and kissed her eyes and sucked her fingers and put her nipples in my mouth, then I was inside her, inside Temple Carrol, inside all her pink warmth and the caress and charity and heat of her thighs. Her mouth opened and her breath rose against my skin with a smell and coolness like flowers blooming in snow, and she pressed me deeper inside her and held me tight with her arms and locked her legs in mine.

  I wanted to raise up on my arms and kiss her again and look into the flush on her face and the mystery and beauty of her eyes, but I felt both of us rushing toward that irreversible moment that even memory cannot enhance, and I held her against me, my voice hoarse and weak and barely above a whisper, my poor attempt at a statement of affection lost in the roar of the stream and the creak of the wind in the trees and the rhythmic breath of Temple Carrol in my ear and the kneading of her palms on my spine. Then I felt a burst of light in my loins and a release from all the rage and violence that had fouled my blood for a lifetime. There was only the beating of her heart and the moist touch of her skin and the softness of her smile as I slipped out of her, exhausted and spent, and rested my head between her breasts while her fingers stroked my hair.

  Chapter 27

  Thursday morning I drove down to Stevens-ville, then east of town toward the Sapphires and Nicki Molinari's ranch. It was raining in the south and dust was blowing out of the valley, and in the distance there were veins of lightning inside the dust and rain. When I turned into Molinari's drive his man Frank was trying to catch up a horse that was eating the petunias in the flower bed.

  He ran at the horse with a rope, then threw dirt clods at it. He tried to whip it across the flanks with a fishing rod and instead tripped over the garden hose and was almost kicked in the face.

  Nicki Molinari came out of the barn, waving his hands.

  "Frank, Frank, wrong way to go about it," he said.

  "He ate all your flowers," Frank said.

  "We'll get some new ones. Look, give him these molasses balls. See, let him eat them out of your palm so he don't bite your fingers," Molinari said.

  "He went to the bathroom all over the walk," Frank said.

  "I'll hose it off. I'm gonna talk to my guest now. You did fine, Frank," Molinari said.

  He watched Frank walk into the barn with the horse following behind him.

  "You want a job in personnel management?" he asked.

  "I hear you got over your objections to Cleo Lonnigan."

  "What, you think she's working my joint or something?"

  "It occurred to me," I said.

  "Well, you thought right. It would be the smart move. Cleo gives me my money, I remodel your bone structure. Except the truth is I like you. Don't ask me why."

  "What's the angle with Cleo?"

  "Horizontal. It's the nature of the world, Counselor."

  I looked away at his neighbor's property. There was a small white church by the road, and the neighbor was up on the roof, hammering down shingles. I looked back at Molinari. For some reason his face seemed different, the eyes sunken, the skeletal outline of his skull just below the skin.

  "What are you staring at?" he asked.

  "I think you're going to come to a bad end."

  "You're a fortune-teller or something?" he said, and tried to grin. "Hey, Counselor, you need to get that look off your face."

  "It's the way you use people. I think it's about to come back on you."

  "I'm in a good mood here. But you're using up my patience."

  "You're a victim, Nicki. You just don't know it."

  "I'm a victim?"

  "She's a physician. You're a graduate of Terminal Island. Who do you think is going to win all the marbles?"

  "Frank, get out here!" he yelled at the barn.

  I DROVE BACK to Missoula and parked at Temple's motel, and we took a walk down by the river and she put her hand in mine. The current in the river looked fast and green and coppery in the late-afternoon sunlight, and rafters were floating under the walk bridge that led to the university, splashing foam into the air with their oars. I told Temple about my visit with Nicki Molinari and felt her release my hand.

  "Cleo Lonnigan again. What's this guy got that she wants?" she said.

  "I'm not sure."

  "Why'd you call Molinari a victim?"

  I looked out at the rafters rolling and spinning through the riffle and wished I had not gotten into the subject.

  "I smelled an odor I'd almost forgotten. At first I thought it was on the wind. Soldiers talk about it," I said.

  "I don't know if I want to hear this," Temple said.

  "I stuck playing cards in the mouths of dead people, Temple. I couldn't wash their smell off my hand. Like they'd breathed something on my skin. I smelled it on Molinari. I didn't imagine it."

  "I'm not going to listen to this. No, no, not today. See you in the ice cream store," she said, walking ahead of me, shaking her hands in the air, smiling giddily at people passing in the opposite direction.

  The next morning the p
hone rang in Doc's living room. Maisey answered it, then handed the receiver to me.

  "That little puke Terry Witherspoon just left the department. He's filing a hit-and-run charge against Maisey Voss," the sheriff said.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "She deliberately smashed in the front of Wyatt Dixon's car."

  "Witherspoon started it. She should have run over him," I said.

  "I can't believe you're an attorney."

  I waited in the silence. Then I said, "Did you call here for another reason?"

  I heard him exhale against the phone receiver. "I drove out to Cleo Lonnigan's yesterday. She told me this ATF agent, this guy Rackley, was out to see her last week. Rackley says her son and husband were probably killed by outlaw bikers."

  "How do you know he actually said this?"

  "I called him up. He says Lamar Ellison may have been mixed up in it."

  "Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

  "Because maybe Cleo was right all along and I was saying otherwise. Because maybe other individuals had reason to set Lamar Ellison on fire."

  "Did you tell that to the district attorney?"

  "None of your business," he said.

  "You're a good man, Sheriff."

  "Tell my old woman that. Have you seen Sue Lynn Big Medicine?"

  "No, sir."

  "Where's your son?"

  After a beat, I said, "I couldn't say right offhand."

  "That's what I thought," the sheriff said. The line went dead.

  I walked into the kitchen, where Doc was washing out three gutted rainbows in the sink and rinsing the rubber liner of his creel.

  "Why would Nicki Molinari insist West Coast wiseguys killed Cleo's husband and son if somebody else did it?" I asked.

  "People are scared of the Mob. He wants to hold a threat over her head without seeming to be involved."

  The clarity of Doc's reply made me wonder about the depth and adequacy of my own thought processes.

  Terry Witherspoon did not have memories, not in the ordinary sense. The high school he attended had been a place he went in the morning and left in the afternoon, neither better nor worse for the experience. He learned that reticence ensured he would not be bothered by others; in fact, reticence in school was a way to purchase virtual invisibility. If pressed in a difficult situation, he just grinned at the corner of his mouth and flipped his hair out of his face and let others wonder what was on his mind.