Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "I'm staying home tonight," he said.

  Wyatt grinned and approached him.

  "Terry, you never could figure out when good things was happening in your life. That Indian woman I was talking about? I showed her a picture of me and you just a little while ago. She seen you in the clinic, all right, but you was in there to get fixed up after them greaseballs stuck you in the batting cage. It's time to have some fun."

  What Wyatt had said to him made no sense at all. Wyatt was walking closer to him now, rolling an unlit cigar in his mouth with his fingers, his eyes possessed of a curious gleam, as though he were both amused by Terry and enjoying a fantasy about Terry's immediate fate.

  He pinched Terry's sleeve, tugging slightly on the cloth.

  "Don't wrinkle your nose at me, boy. Hop in the car. You're gonna like it," he said.

  "I got to go to the bathroom first," Terry said.

  He walked down the fence line toward the shack, tapping his hand on the top rail. His single-bladed pocketknife was stuck at a forty-five-degree angle in the corner post, where he had thrown it that morning. He reached out and grasped it by the wood handle, hefted it once so that the blade dropped across the calloused cup of his fingers, then whirled, whipping his arm backward, flinging the knife into Wyatt's chest.

  Wyatt stared at him stupidly, then grabbed the top fence rail with one hand and fitted his other around the knife's handle. His lips formed a cone and he sucked air in and out of his mouth, as though a piece of dry ice were burning his tongue. He tried to pull the knife from his chest, but Terry pushed it in deeper, bending it sideways to widen the wound, hammering the flat of his fist on the knife's butt like a man driving a spike into wood.

  Terry felt the blade snap off at the hilt, felt himself lose balance, then realized he was only inches from Wyatt's face now, staring into Wyatt's eyes, the broken handle of the knife clenched impotently in his palm, his fingers warm with Wyatt's blood, his whole life laid out behind him like a railroad track that had brought him to this particular moment and place, his heart bursting with the terrible knowledge that he had only seconds to remove himself from Wyatt's reach.

  Then Wyatt's left hand seized his throat and lifted him up into a vortex of sunlit pine needles and blue sky and mountain peaks that were so high no air existed on their slopes.

  Chapter 31

  That night Temple stayed at Doc's and I gave her my bunk bed and slept in the tent by the river with Lucas. During the night I heard rain on the canvas and the pop of lightning on the ridges, then the dawn broke clear and cool and deer were grazing in the pasture behind Doc's barn when I opened the tent flap in the morning.

  Lucas had already built a fire and made coffee. He squatted down and filled a tin cup for me and added canned milk to it and handed it to me, then looked thoughtfully at the smoke drifting out on the water.

  "You can make a fellow nervous sleeping with that dadburn gun," he said.

  "Next time I'll leave it somewhere else," I said.

  "Doc's gonna get out of his troubles?"

  "I think so."

  "Then let the law take care of all them bad people out there."

  "It doesn't work that way, bud. When you're the victim of a violent crime, most of the time you're on your own."

  "I ain't gonna argue. You're a lot smarter than me. Can you loan me two thousand dollars?"

  "What?"

  "I signed up at the University of Montana for the fall semester. I got to pay out-of-state tuition."

  "If it's for your education, it's not a loan. You know that."

  "Thanks, Billy Bob. Me and Dogus are going upstream. I'll catch you later," he said.

  He picked up his fly rod and creel and slung his fly vest over his shoulder. He and the mongrel dog walked through the trees to a white, pebbly stretch of shoreline where the water had receded and Lucas could back-cast without hanging his fly in the trees.

  If indeed I was smarter than my son, I thought, why did I feel I had just been had?

  When I walked up the slope, Doc opened the front door and tossed me the portable phone.

  "Tell this guy to work on his speaking skills. He's a little incoherent," he said.

  "Which guy?"

  "The sheriff."

  I put the receiver to my ear.

  "Hello?" I said.

  "What'd be say?" the sheriff asked.

  "Sorry, I wasn't listening," I replied.

  "Then you'd better listen to this. We just pulled Terry Witherspoon out of a tree. He's alive but that's about all. His back's broken. Guess who did it to him?"

  "Wyatt Dixon?"

  "Witherspoon left a knife blade in Dixon's chest. He says Dixon has plans for you and the Voss girl and Ms. Carrol."

  "Thanks for telling us."

  "You're responsible for all this bullshit, Mr. Holland. I hope you can sleep at night."

  "Like a stone. Good-bye, sir," I said, and clicked off the phone.

  But my lie hung in my throat.

  An hour later Holly Girard drove a hand-waxed, fire-engine-red Corvette across the field behind the house and came to a stop two feet short of the front steps and got out and slammed the door behind her. Her hair was blown into a tangle on her head, her face red with windburn around her brown-tinted aviator's glasses.

  "Has Xavier been here?" she said.

  "Not to my knowledge," I said.

  "Go inside and ask Doc and Maisey."

  "Pardon?"

  "Do I have to say it more slowly so you understand? Go inside and find out if that drunk idiot has been here."

  "No, he hasn't. I can't think of any reason he'd want to come out here, Ms. Girard."

  "He went up to the set of my new picture and accused the director of being a money launderer for

  Nicki Molinari. He had a gun with him. He starting screaming about protecting the river. I may be fired off my own picture."

  "A gun?"

  "Oh, you are listening."

  "I'd appreciate it if you'd take your anger out on somebody else."

  "You twerp," she said, and went past me and into Doc's house.

  Doc was reading in a chair by the window, his granny glasses down on his nose. His eyes lifted up into Holly Girard's.

  "Eventually the poor, self-deluded weakling I married will be out here. That's because you've been stoking him up ever since you moved to Montana and he can't pee in the morning without first praising the noble Dr. Voss. If you don't call the sheriff the minute you see him, your troubles with rapists will be the least of your problems," Holly said.

  Doc folded his book and removed his glasses and dropped them into his shirt pocket and gazed at her face.

  "I'm really sorry to hear you take that point of view, Holly," he said.

  "You and your friends are so smug, with your books that nobody reads. Did you ever have to make a payroll or tell people they were laid off because of a revolution in Malaysia?" she said.

  He started to reply when Temple came out of the kitchen.

  "Doc and Billy Bob are gentlemen. I'm not. Get out of here, you stupid bitch," she said, and shoved Holly Girard through the door.

  I WA L K E D down in the trees by the river and sat on a pink and gray rock above a pool filled with cotton-wood leaves that had turned yellow and sunk to the bottom. I had lied to the sheriff about my peace of mind. The fact was I got no rest, not with L.Q.'s wandering spirit, not with the anger and the thirst for blood and vengeance that was like a genetic heirloom in the Holland family.

  Witherspoon and Dixon deserved whatever happened to them, I told myself. Their violence lived in them like a succubus; I wasn't the catalyst for it. The law had failed Maisey; it had failed Doc; in a way it had failed Sue Lynn Big Medicine. Sometimes you had to shave the dice or be consumed by the evil that society or government, for whatever reason, allowed to exist.

  My carefully constructed syllogism almost had me out of the woods.

  But a strange sense of guilt and depression seemed to settle on me, and
it had nothing to do with Dixon or Witherspoon. For the first time I knew with certainty why L.Q. Navarro's spirit haunted me.

  I had broken the troth the preacher had described to me when I was river-baptized in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. While I was still shivering inside my father's old Army shirt, the preacher had leaned his long face through the truck window and had told me I never needed to be afraid again, that there was no mistaking the significance of the green-gold autumnal light that had broken like shattered crystal across my eyes when I was lifted gasping for breath from the stream. The burning in my skin was like no sensation I had ever experienced, as different from prior association as the landscape had become, the way the leaves of the hardwoods fluttered with red and gold, flowing for miles like a field of flowers, all the way up the slope to the massive blue outline of the Ozarks.

  But fear that L.Q. and I would not prevail, that we would not be vindicated or avenged, got L.Q. killed in an insect-infested arroyo over amounts of narcotics that were minuscule in terms of the larger market, that probably did not change the life of one addict or put one dealer out of business. What a trade-off, I thought.

  "I make you mad up there, throwing Holly Girard out?" Temple said behind me.

  "No, not at all. You were eloquent," I replied.

  "So what are you thinking on?"

  "Carl Hinkel's gone missing. I know where he is."

  "Oh?"

  "I made sure Nicki Molinari knew about Hinkel's connection to the murder of Cleo Lonnigan's son. Molinari's going to use Hinkel to get his money back from Cleo. I think Molinari might let Cleo pop him."

  "It's their grief," Temple said.

  "Maybe."

  "Where you going?" she asked.

  "To pull the plug on this if I can," I said.

  But there was no answer at Cleo Lonnigan's house and her message machine was turned off. I went back outside and took L.Q.'s revolver and a box of.45 rounds from Lucas's tent and found Temple down by the river.

  "Want a ride home?" I said.

  "No. But I'll go with you wherever it is that you and I need to go together," she replied.

  e DROVE out to the Jocko Valley and Cleo Lonnigan's place, but she wasn't home. I left a note inside her door that read:

  Dear Cleo,

  Do not go out to Nicki Molinari's ranch, regardless of what you might consider the necessity of the situation. I'm contacting the sheriff and informing him I think Molinari is involved with a kidnapping. Eventually Carl Hinkel's fate will probably be worse than anything you or I could design for him.

  I wish you all the best, Billy Bob Holland

  I got into the truck and used Temple's cell phone to call 911. A dispatcher patched me in to the sheriff. Once again I had caught him on the weekend. I told him what I believed had happened to Carl Hinkel.

  "You're telling me it was Molinari grabbed him in front of that barbershop?" the sheriff said.

  "Yes," I replied.

  "And you set it up?"

  "Not exactly."

  "No, you set it up."

  "Okay."

  "I'll pass on your information to the sheriff in Ravalli County."

  "When?"

  "When I get hold of him. In the meantime I'd better not hear from you again till Monday morning," he said.

  I clicked off the cell phone and started the truck.

  "I have a feeling the sheriff isn't sweating the fate of Carl Hinkel," I said.

  "What do you want to do?" Temple asked.

  "I have to go out there. I'll drop you off at your motel."

  "Forget it," she said.

  We drove into the Bitterroot Valley, into its mead-owland and meandering river lined with cotton-woods and canyons that were like dark purple gashes inside the green immensity of the mountains in the west. Up ahead I saw four or five cars and a wrecker on the side of the road and a highway patrolman interviewing two people and writing on a clipboard.

  One of the interviewees was Cleo Lonnigan. She seemed to recognize my truck as we sped past her. In my rearview mirror I saw her hand raised momentarily in the air, like someone trying to flag down a bus.

  "You think she'd shoot Carl Hinkel?" Temple said.

  "Maybe. It's not easy to do when you have to look the victim in the eye."

  "Hinkel and Wyatt Dixon aren't victims. I wish I'd been there when Terry Witherspoon was taken down from the tree. I had something I would have liked to say."

  "What?"

  "He would have remembered it."

  We turned off the highway at Stevensville and drove through town toward the Sapphires. I pulled into the entrance of Molinari's but stopped when I saw the preacher from next door standing on top of his church, an electric saw in his hand, staring at Molinari's stucco house.

  I got out of the truck and walked to the fence that separated the preacher's and Molinari's property.

  "Anything wrong?" I said.

  The preacher draped his saw across the crest of the roof and climbed down a ladder and walked toward me.

  "There was a drunk man around here last night and again this morning. I think he was looking for that greaser. But he couldn't raise nobody," he said.

  "What was he driving?" I asked.

  "A Jeep Cherokee. He knocked down the mailbox."

  "Where'd he go?" I said.

  "He come back a little while ago. That's why I was trying to see what went on."

  "I don't understand," I said.

  "I heard about fifteen pops. They sounded like they all come from the same gun."

  I got back into the truck and started the engine and Temple punched in a 911 call to the Ravalli County Sheriff's Department.

  "Y'all going in there?" the preacher said.

  "Yeah, I think we'd better."

  "Wait a minute," he said, and went into his church house and came back out with a Bible. He climbed up into the bed of the truck and scrunched down like a squirrel and hit the cab with his fist.

  We drove up to the stucco house and parked behind Molinari's convertible and a white Cherokee. When we got out of the truck, our footsteps seemed as loud as rocks on slate. Out in a field an unmilked cow, its udder hard and veined, bawled in the wind. I picked up L.Q.'s revolver from the seat and let it hang from my right hand. We walked through the arcade that fronted the house, past the ceramic urns spilling over with passion vine, around the side to the heated pool that looked like a chemical green teardrop.

  "Good God," Temple said.

  A fat woman in a dress floated stomach-up in the pool, her face goggle-eyed beneath the surface, her blood already breaking up in the water. The man named Frank sat in a lawn chair, a cigarette burning in his lap, a small bullet hole above one eyebrow.

  A second man, one I didn't know, with a pink face and thinning blond hair, lay on the grass, as if he had curled up and gone to sleep, an exit wound in his neck. There were bees in the clover where he lay, and one of his hands twitched involuntarily. When I felt his throat he opened his eyes and tried to breathe and a hard piece of chewing gum fell out of his mouth.

  The preacher squatted beside him and stared into his face. He patted the man's chest with the tips of his fingers.

  "You ain't got to talk. I'll say the words for you. You just pretend in your own mind they're your words. 'I commend my soul into the hands of the Lord.' The prayer's that simple, son. Don't be afraid. Ain't nothing bad can happen to you now," the preacher said.

  Temple and I walked on into the backyard. The barn door was open and I could see Carl Hinkel tied to a chair inside the batting cage. The area around his feet was covered with scuffed baseballs. Hinkel's face didn't look human.

  Xavier Girard sat on a plank table, drinking from a huge red plastic cup that rattled with ice and smelled of mint leaves and bourbon. His face was gloriously happy. A Ruger.22 automatic and two spare magazines lay next to his thigh. "Where's Molinari?" I asked.

  "In the shower. He almost made it to his clothes. He might have been trouble," he repli
ed.

  "Did you kill Hinkel?" I said.

  "You bet. In the ear. Twice."

  Xavier leaned forward and peered out the door at the preacher bending over the man on the grass. Xavier smiled fondly, then looked up at me and Temple, his eyes full of expectation, as though somehow he had liberated himself from all the baggage of a dull existence and he waited for us to usher him into his new life.

  "Why'd you kill the woman?" Temple asked.

  "Frank's wife?" Xavier seemed to review a scene in his head. "Yeah, she got it, too, didn't she? It's hard to put the bottle down when it's half full. What a rush. I'm still high."

  The wind fluttered the barn doors. The air was cool and filled with the smells of horses and alfalfa and distant rain in the mountains. I didn't want to stand any longer among the creations of Xavier Girard's alcoholic madness.

  Xavier picked up his.22 and rested it on his thigh, the balls of his fingers rubbing the checkered grips.

  "Molinari left you a message. He said, 'Tell the counselor I'm square.' What do you think he meant by that?" he said.

  "You going to do anything else with that Ruger?" I said.

  "I haven't decided."

  "Yeah, you have," I said. I gave L.Q.'s.45 to Temple and wrapped my hand around Girard's pistol and removed it from his grasp and pulled the magazine from the butt and ejected the unfired round in the chamber and sailed the pistol by its barrel into the barnyard. I stuck his spare magazines and the ejected round into my pocket and poured his booze and ice into the dust and set his empty cup next to him, then Temple and I walked back into the wind and sunlight and the rumble of thunder out in the hills.

  "Don't quote me about the rush. That was off the record," Girard called out behind us.

  Temple and I had to go into Hamilton with the Ravalli County sheriff, then we drove back to Doc's place on the Blackfoot. Fires were burning in Idaho, and the western sky was red with smoke, but a sun shower was falling on the Blackfoot Valley and the light was gold on the treetops along the river and there were carpets of Indian paintbrush and lupine on the hillsides.