Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  Tony saw strangers come through the small house in the dirty mining town, eat his mother’s cakes, and then go off into a bedroom. When he was six, after the family moved sixty miles west to Spokane, his father came home early on Christmas Eve and caught his mother with a musician, a man who was not coarse or crude like the filthy miners. Tony was a skinny string of a boy—no more than forty pounds. Frightened by his father’s rage, he scrambled under a bed and watched him savagely beat the man.

  The police arrived and found the musician unconscious. One of the officers knelt down next to the bed, coaxed the scared little boy out from under it, and hugged him. Tony never forgot the two giants in blue with their guns and badges, angels in uniform. Both parents were taken to jail. His father was booked for felony assault; his mother was held on vagrancy charges, the catch-all crime of the Spokane Police Department. The three children spent Christmas morning with the two policemen.

  Louis Bamonte had come to America from Italy and was alone in New York at an early age after both of his parents died. One of six children, he had spent most of his childhood homeless in the Bronx. Nicknamed “Bull,” the dark-haired Bamonte could swing an axe or wield a mining pick with ferocity. He also read poetry aloud, practiced ballroom dancing, and insisted that his children go to Catholic mass. On Sundays, even when he lived in a tent near a logging camp, he put on a suit and read or composed verse. He was not a heavy drinker, like so many of the miners and timber beasts of the inland Northwest, but he had a temper. If the police had not come on Christmas Eve, Bull Bamonte would have killed the man he found with his wife.

  Shortly after the Christmas fight, Lucille Bamonte fled to Hawaii with her lover. Tony did not see his mother for two years. He hated her for what she had done, breaking the family up, treating the children like they didn’t matter, forcing his father to jail. For a while, he lived with his maternal grandfather, but then he died. With the three closest people in his life gone—his father in jail, his mother in the Pacific, his grandfather dead—the boy retreated into his inner self, trying to escape the closed and frightened world where adults beat each other up and were always leaving each other. Every time somebody turned to exit, he thought, could be the last.

  Once out of jail, Bull Bamonte took the kids to a logging camp in the northern part of Pend Oreille County, one of the last truly wild areas in the American West. Red cedar, Douglas fir, tamarack, and ponderosa pine all grew to great heights in the Selkirk Mountains. The elevation was high enough to knock down the clouds and squeeze out sufficient rainfall, so the forest was more like that of the western Cascades than the drier pine woods of eastern Washington.

  Tony slept on a straw mat on the floor of a tent. At night he listened to the labored breathing of his father as he coughed up the accumulated residue from years in the Silver Valley. But as long as the boy could hear his father’s chest heaving in and out, he was happy—it meant that Bull was alive. Most mornings, he would not let his father go off to work without him; while he should have been in school Tony insisted on following Bull to the logging camps in the woods. The willowy kid became the shadow of Bull, the tree-cutting machine, a man who worked twelve and fourteen hours a day, logging and skinning small cedars in the mountains around Metaline Falls. Bull’s dream was to save enough money to buy his own small mine, and then he hoped to strike it rich in this land where the rivers carried gold nuggets downstream, and the rock walls glistened with galena.

  After several months in the tent, the family moved into a one-room cabin, two hundred square feet, with three windows. Tony slept on an old service cot with “United States Army” stamped on the side. There was no running water or electricity inside the cabin, but it sat beside a creek that was full of trout and attracted deer. Food was never any farther than the wild game outside the cabin door; his father killed a deer every six weeks or so. But Tony grew to hate the taste of venison. Even now, he cannot go near deer meat without thinking of the time spent inside the one-room cabin. In the depths of winter, they moved into an abandoned dance hall, the Red Rooster, a few miles north of Metaline Falls. The old beer hall, which had roared with timber workers and their women during Prohibition, had been silent for a number of years. The stench of alcohol remained, and the walls were pockmarked from the shrapnel of bar fights. But for a seven-year-old boy, it was a mansion, an indoor frontier. The Bamontes set up their home on the hardwood dance floor and cooked meals on the giant wood stove. One of Tony’s jobs was to make sure the fire never went out.

  When he was enrolled in first grade, the separation from his father so frightened him that he seldom made it through a full day without a crying tantrum: he was sure his father would be gone for good when he came home from school. Tony begged his father to let him skip school and follow him to work, and Bull relented, allowing the boy to tag along on days when the weather wasn’t too harsh. Tony would sit on a stump and watch Bull split cedar logs into fence posts; he was never happier. But the relationship was mostly a one-way affair. Growing up, Tony was never told by the man he idolized that he loved him. More often, Bull expressed his feelings with a razor strap on Tony’s bare ass. Still, the beatings left no ill feelings with Tony; he always thought he had it coming.

  Two years after the Christmas Eve fight, Lucille Bamonte returned from Hawaii and attempted to gain custody of her children. Tony’s first encounter with the law in Pend Oreille County came when a sheriff’s deputy served a warrant on Bull Bamonte at the Red Rooster. Again, he looked up at a tall man in uniform with a badge and a pistol strapped to his leg, an intermediary between a man and a woman who had come to hate each other. For a long time, the two parents had scrapped over who would get the kids; once, the struggle was physical, the two parents literally tugging at Tony, each holding an arm. In the end, Bull Bamonte was given the kids, and Lucille went off with her latest husband—one of eight men she married in her lifetime.

  After five years in the Red Rooster, the family moved out of the dance hall to Osburn, Idaho—another ravaged mining town in the Silver Valley, near Wallace. Although doctors had told Bull to keep out of the mines if he wanted to stay alive, he couldn’t curb the silver bug. All he needed was one break, he kept telling Tony. But the smelter-fouled valley proved to be no luckier for the Bamontes this time than it had been seven years earlier, and so they moved back to Pend Oreille County to start anew. In the boom-and-bust nature of hard-rock mining, ventures fail and go bankrupt more often than they produce riches. But something is always popping up to keep the allure of a big hit alive. It is somewhat like fishing, in that a single nibble after a day-long skunking is enough to make the angler want to return. In the Pend Oreille, Bull became a partner in an old silver and gold mine, and he sunk every free dollar—the stake from years of peeling cedar poles and scraping silver in Idaho—into it. The family moved into another small cabin, right next to the mining portal into Mount Linton. They used the mine’s dark, cold shaft as a refrigerator. Their latrine was an earthen ditch. At the same time, Bull ran a small sawmill, trying to make enough money to keep his family alive during the speculative months of the mine. Never had Tony felt so impoverished or seen his father work so hard.

  The boy’s clothes were hand-me-downs which he picked up from a local house of charity. Sometimes, he showed up at school in a sweater or pair of pants that another boy recognized. “Hey, that’s the shirt my mom threw away!” a schoolboy shouted at Tony in seventh grade. The other kids laughed and pointed at the skinny son of the Italian miner. Occasionally, he answered the taunts with fists, but even after a brawling triumph he went home ashamed. He had no use for school anyway. In his view, the way to get anywhere in life was to work hard outdoors. It was a simple equation: the more cedar you split, or the more silver you blasted from beneath the skin of the earth, the better off you were. But Bull insisted that Tony stay in school; he did not want this life of bone-crunching servitude for his boy. As if to prove his point, the price of silver collapsed, and the machinery in the Bamonte mine bro
ke down during a particularly harsh cold spell, just as Bull and his partners had reached a rich vein deep inside the core of the mountain.

  Isolated from other kids throughout his school years, Tony developed the attitude of an outsider. The slang used by high-schoolers was not his language. As a teenager, he began working with his father, the shadow now helping the aging machine split logs or burrow into Mount Linton. After years of watching Bull from his perch on a stump, Tony knew the routine. The work kept him out of school, and he fell so far behind that the teachers flunked him his senior year. To every other humiliation of growing up was added this final slight: he stayed behind, the flunkee, while the other boys went off to join the army or go to college or take a union job at the mill.

  When he finally graduated from the high school in Metaline Falls, Tony was ready to see the world outside of Pend Oreille County. His hands were dark, callused, and cut up; but he had all his fingers and all his toes, a rarity for anyone who had worked the woods. Only two jobs are considered more hazardous than logging: crop dusting and professional football. He took a year-long job in the mines, breaking rock (“beating grizzly,” they called it), drilling with a diamond bit, driving diesel trucks underground, and then enlisted in the army.

  Leaving home, he looked for some sign of love from Bull, hoping his father would at least drive him to the airport before the shadow left behind the world of straw mattresses and earthen latrines and home in the Red Rooster. But the old man, who had come to the Northwest in 1932, chasing water and opportunity, was exhausted, his body and spirit broken. He died a few years after Tony left the Pend Oreille, a victim of cellulitis, a cancer caused by exposure to mining dust. Tony scattered his ashes inside the mine that had helped to kill him, the tunnel into Mount Linton.

  BAMONTE RETURNED to the Pend Oreille in 1975, picking up where his father left off, working in the woods, a father himself with his own son, trying to earn a living from the forest. During his fourteen-year absence, he had sealed off many of the memories of childhood; a tour in Vietnam, followed by eight years as a Spokane policeman, provided Bamonte with fresh horrors to replace the pain of his youth. He protected those images of the dance-hall home and schoolmates laughing at his hand-me-downs and the parade of men who came to sleep with his mother.

  It wasn’t until the late 1980s, when he started work on his master’s thesis, that he began to replay some of the incidents witnessed by the little boy who was always afraid of being left alone. By then, he had a cushion: the visitor to the early years was a graduate student, deliberately detached; he tried to treat his own memories like history. As he drove through the river valleys or along deep-rutted roads in the Selkirks, he saw empty homesteads. The wind carried laughter, tears, and table talk from the abandoned sheds, their roofs caved in after years of heavy snow. Sometimes, he heard the voices of his own family. More often, they were strangers’.

  Leafing through the old files of the sheriff’s department, the student found a story about a shoot-out in 1929: Black Jack Rowden, holed up in a log home, had died in a spray of rifle fire. Bamonte recognized the location as a cabin where he had picked bullets from the wood as a kid, and that sprang open a cage of memories about playing and waiting for his father to return, his fears mounting with each minute closer to dusk.

  Reading about another sheriff brought to mind the stern-faced man with glasses and a huge forehead who had served his father with court papers over child custody. The boy who had looked up at the lawman outside the Red Rooster, wondering if the sheriff was coming to take his father away as the other uniformed man had done in Spokane, was replaced now by a forty-six-year-old graduate student whose job included serving similar papers on divorced parents.

  Back further, back in the Depression and the days of Sheriff Elmer Black, the police reports often spoke of immigrants and transients who slept in the woods near the road. They were usually dismissed with a pejorative swipe—the “unwashed itinerants,” “Okies,” or “failed sod-busters.” Those who had jobs and property, and the sheriffs who protected them, were on one side. Those without were on the other. Tony wondered how his predecessors in law enforcement would have viewed his father, the Italian who grew up homeless in the Bronx, joined the Marines at age sixteen, kicked around the country during the 1920s, and finally landed in the forests of the inland Northwest in 1932.

  Also in the archives was a case where a man had been shot over butter. The student knew all about hunger, but this was almost beyond belief. The deputies’ logs spoke of faceless men who were said to be too hungry to obey the law—so desperate that they stole food from the farmers of the Pend Oreille.

  Bamonte read further: George Conniff, the Newport night marshal, was killed after he came upon a pair of gunmen who were robbing the creamery. The victim was a lawman, like Bamonte. The killers were never found. Beyond that, the information was sketchy. Bamonte asked around town. Whatever outrage the killing had generated was long gone. A few old-timers remembered Marshal Conniff. Hell of a man, they said; shot by butter thieves. The killers got away with it. Afterwards, the Conniff family fell apart. Moved away from Newport, God knows where.

  The student’s chapter on Sheriff Black’s tenure, which included the Conniff killing, was only one small section of a thesis that would run well over five hundred pages when completed. Initially, Bamonte did not plan to spend much time on the marshal’s murder; he didn’t really know what to make of it. At one time he was going to skip it, or mention it only in passing. But then he found the file on the case, buried in a tomb of county records. A half-century of inactivity had turned the papers yellow and thin. He could barely read some of the lettering, handwritten in pencil or typed. There were no leads, and Black’s notations indicated a particular frustration with the case.

  Maybe, Bamonte thought, Black was still around somewhere. He might make a good interview, providing answers on the Conniff case, firsthand information on Depression-era law enforcement, as well as some fresh insight into the times of Bull Bamonte. Checking the records, he discovered that Sheriff Black had served from 1934 to 1942. And then, the files showed, he was called back as an informal consultant in 1955. Two decades after the killing of Marshal Conniff, some new information had surfaced in the case, the files indicated.

  Black had been the original investigator of the marshal’s killing. He was the plodding sheriff who initiated his probe by lugging around a pair of pawned pants and a greased door. He had gone twenty years without a decent idea of who had killed George Conniff. Then, in the summer of 1955, the investigation was reopened, and Black was summoned to help with what looked like a major breakthrough in a long-standing mystery. What he learned that year was that the Spokane Police Department had apparently solved the case back in 1935 but had kept the killer’s identity under wraps. Shortly after Black heard the new information, he fell forty-five feet to his death from the bridge that spanned the Pend Oreille River east of Newport. A child found his body near shore, on the Idaho side of the river. He died of a skull fracture. There was no follow-up investigation of Elmer Black’s death. The sheriff of neighboring Bonner County, in Idaho, theorized that the old lawman had become dizzy and lost his balance.

  10.

  The Sheriff

  IF ELMER BLACK could fall off a bridge that he had crossed hundreds of times, then the Pend Oreille River could flow uphill. What seemed obvious to Bamonte, reading about this fatal accident more than three decades after it occurred, was that gravity was not the sole culprit. Bamonte knew the interstate bridge like a barge pilot knew the side currents of the Mississippi. Just about every kid who grew up in northeastern Washington considered the span over the wide Pend Oreille part of his private playground. From the bridge, a boy could toss a twig that might end up in the Pacific Ocean, or watch ospreys snag trout and carry them back to their big stick nests atop pilings. The bridge’s guard rails were standard federal building code—thirty-six inches high. At the very minimum, it would require a deliberate effort, or a very
big slip, to get up and over the rail enough to fall. Bamonte wondered if Black’s death was a suicide. If so, then the seventy-one-year-old retired sheriff left nothing for the instant archaeologists: no note, no signs of lingering despondency; he was not terminally ill. And what a way to go—a long dive into a concrete base, smashing his skull.

  Bamonte suspected that somebody had pushed Black. His death, coming after he had learned dramatic new information about the 1935 killing of Marshal Conniff, was a hard coincidence to swallow. It cried out for further investigation. But there was none. The book on Black was closed a few days after his death in 1955.

  To the student in Bamonte, this was a telling point: a sleepy sheriff’s office had accepted one person’s theory of a suspicious death. Dulled by bureaucratic inertia, no one had checked the guard rails for fingerprints or signs of struggle, or conducted tests to see if Black could have fallen at the angle that left his body below the bridge. If the sheriff of Bonner County thought Black had gotten dizzy and fallen, that was good enough for the sheriff on the Washington side of the river. Besides, everybody knew Elmer Black was slow in his way, sort of accident prone, and the death seemed to match his personality.

  The sheriff in Bamonte wanted to start a new investigation—thirty-four years after Black’s death—to see what was behind the fall. When he mentioned this to a few associates, word got around town that Bamonte was getting ready to go off on another one of his impossible expeditions. There was the usual round of snide remarks and rolled eyes: the stubborn son-of-a-buck was at it again. Elmer Black? And what about all the unsolved burglaries? The missing animals? The kids spraying rap slogans on the train underpass? The people of the Pend Oreille weren’t paying their sheriff to chase ancient history.