Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "Hello?" I said, and tapped on the jamb.

  She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist and looked at me through the gloom.

  "How'd you know where I was?" she asked.

  "Your carpenter."

  But she was preoccupied with her work and was not looking at me now.

  "Okay, you guys wash your dishes when you're finished," she said to the children. "Can you do that? Your grandmother is going to be here soon. My friend and I are going to wait outside. What are we doing Saturday?"

  "Going to the movies!" the children shouted together.

  A moment later Cleo and I walked out into the yard. The sun was gone, and a heavy, gray mist was moving across the trees at the top of the mountain and raindrops were striking like wet stars on the dirt in the clearing.

  "Their mother is nineteen. Nineteen, with three kids. She's in the Missoula jail right now. She gave up glue sniffing for the joys of crystal meth," Cleo said.

  "How long has it been out here?" I asked.

  "Three years, maybe. The California gangs brought it into Seattle and Spokane, then it was everywhere."

  My eyes drifted to her mouth, the mole on her chin, the way the wind blew her hair on her cheek. A middle-aged Indian woman driving a rusted junker that had no glass in the front windows pulled into the yard and went into the house. She nodded at Cleo but ignored me.

  "That's the grandmother?" I asked.

  "There's a likelihood she'll be a great-grandmother at fifty," Cleo said.

  "Take a ride with me," I said.

  "Where to?"

  "Anyplace you want to go."

  She looked at me for a long moment.

  "You a serious man, Billy Bob?" she asked.

  "You can always run me off."

  She looked at the torn shreds of cloud swirling just above the tops of the trees and said, "I'll leave my truck at the clinic. I have to be back there by three."

  I opened her truck door for her. When I closed it, my fingers touched the top of her hand.

  "Your carpenter says you're special," I said.

  Her eyes seemed to reach inside mine, as they had once before, probing for the secret thought, the personal agenda.

  "Eric's gay. That's why he speaks so generously about women," she said.

  "My grandpa used to say outcasts and people of color are always a white person's best measure," I replied.

  "I think you and Doc really belong here," she said.

  We dropped her truck off at the clinic, then drove in the rain toward a cafe farther up the Jocko that sold buffalo burgers and huckleberry milkshakes. I pulled into a gas station and parked next to a row of sheltered pumps and stuck the gas hose into the tank. Then I saw a low-slung red car at the next gas island and an Indian girl with blond streaks in her hair standing by the back fender while the hose pumped gas into her tank.

  She saw me watching her and turned her back and lit a cigarette.

  "You got a suicide wish?" I said.

  "No, you do, dickhead. Get out of here," she said.

  "You're on the job?"

  Her face grew heated, her lips crimped tightly together. She ripped the gas nozzle out of the tank and clanked it back on the pump.

  Then a red-haired, lantern-jawed man in a yellow slicker and an Australian flop hat pushed open the glass door of the convenience store and walked toward us in the rain, an idiot's grin on his mouth.

  "Bless your heart, I been thinking about you all day and you pull right in to the gas pump," Wyatt Dixon said.

  "He was coming on to me, Wyatt," the girl said.

  "Sue Lynn, Mr. Holland is a lawyer and a respecter of womanhood and a Texas gentleman. My sister, Katie Jo Winset, the one in the graveyard? She said he always removes his hat in the house and he don't never walk around with spit cups, either," Dixon said.

  "Did you follow me up to Montana?" I said.

  "I'm a rodeo man, sir. Calgary to Madison Square Garden to San Angelo. Can you step over here with me?"

  I started back toward my truck. But he situated himself in my path, the taut, grained skin of his face beaded with raindrops. His shirt was unbuttoned to the navel under his slicker, and I could smell the dampness on his body, like the odor of drainwater welling out of an iron grate. Behind him a stump fire was smoking in the mist.

  "At night, in a jailhouse, when you hear somebody scream? The kind of scream that's different from any other you ever heard? You know Lamar or one like him has just speared a new fish. Jailing ain't like it was in the old days, Mr. Holland. Folks ain't raising criminals like they used to," Dixon said.

  "Step out of my way, please."

  "Two thousand dollars and that boy will be in a wood chipper. There won't be no trace of him except a Polaroid picture for your doctor friend to burn in front of his daughter. Me and you has got regional commonalities, sir. For that reason I'm offering you a once-in-a-lifetime bargain." He snapped his fingers at the air, the vacuity of his eyes filling with energy, his lips parted with expectation.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and looked out into the grayness of the mountains and the fir and pine trees bending in the wind.

  "Let me see if I can phrase myself adequately, Wyatt," I said. "Every so often a real piece of shit floats to the top of the bowl. I'm not talking about just ordinary white trash like your sister but somebody who should have been strapped down in Ole Sparky and had his grits scorched the first time he got a parking ticket. You following me?"

  "I'm fascinated, sir. Your elocution is like none I have ever heard, and I have stood at tent revivals throughout this great nation and have listened to the very best."

  "You stay away from me, partner," I said.

  After I had pulled the gas nozzle out of my tank and gotten back into the truck, he tapped on my glass, leaning close in to it, his face distorting in the raindrops that slid down it as he stared at Cleo. I wanted to simply drive away, but now I was blocked in by a car both in front and behind me. I rolled down the window.

  "What do you want?" I said.

  "On Sugarland Farm I learned to read lips from a deaf man. You said 'On the job' to Sue Lynn. You was telling her she's a cop?"

  "No."

  "I hope you're not lying, sir. It would seriously subtract from my faith in human beings." Then he said to Cleo, lifting his hat, "Good afternoon to you, ma'am. One look at the sweetness of your form and I got to go lift a car bumper."

  Chapter 8

  What had I done?

  I took Cleo back home and drove to the sheriff's office and caught him in the corridor of the courthouse annex.

  "You did what?" he said, loud enough for passersby to stare.

  "Can we go in your office?" I said.

  "I'm not sure I want you around here that long."

  I felt my face coloring and I looked away from the glare in his eyes and started over.

  "I messed up. The question is can we fix it?" I said.

  "This ain't about We. You and trouble seem to go together like shit and stink."

  "I'm having a hard time with your remarks, Sheriff."

  He looked up and down the corridor.

  "You blow the cover on an undercover cop, then you drag your sorry ass in here to piss on my rug? You're lucky I don't have you in jail," he said.

  "Is she one of yours or not?"

  "No. I never heard of her."

  "Wyatt Dixon offered to snuff Lamar Ellison for two thousand dollars. That's solicitation of murder."

  "Number one, that don't make any sense. Number two… There ain't no number two. Just get a lot of gone between you and here, okay?" the sheriff said.

  I WENT BACK to Doc's log house on the Black-foot. Doc and Maisey were out on the riverbank, collecting colored stones to make a rock garden. Maisey lifted up a boxful and smiled at me and carried the stones up the incline. Her jeans were damp on the knees, her skin bright with tan in the sunlight.

  But toward evening, when the sun died below the ridgeline, I knew
her attempts at cheer would go out of her face and she would sit in front of the television set, her expression disjointed with memories she refused to describe.

  "We got another call while you were gone. No voice, just heavy-metal music playing into the receiver," Doc said.

  "Maybe it was a crank," I said.

  "Sure. Anyway, I had the number changed."

  "Doc, I don't want to overstay my welcome. Maybe I'm not much help to you here."

  He picked at a callus on his hand, then looked away at the river where it was in shadow between the trees. "Everything I do with Maisey is all thumbs. She sees pity in my face and hides her head under a pillow. How bad can one guy screw up?"

  I helped him and Maisey gather rocks, and we laid them out on the sunny side of a spruce tree and spread bagged topsoil between them and planted moss roses and petunias and pansies in the soil.

  That evening, at sunset, I walked deep into the woods and squatted by the river's edge and tossed pine cones into a long ribbon of green water flowing between two large round boulders. I glanced up at the ponderosa above me and saw L.Q. Navarro sitting on a thick limb, his face in shadow, a gold toothpick catching the sun's last light.

  "You wanted Doc to tell you to go home?" he asked.

  "Maybe," I said.

  "You scared you're falling for that Lonnigan woman? "

  "Did I say that? Did I even think that?" I said.

  "She's an angry person."

  "Her child was murdered."

  "If you ask me, she's working on more than one thorn."

  "I'd just like a little peace, L.Q."

  "Interesting word choice. What do them big round boulders out there in the river remind you of?"

  "I'm going into town. You're not coming, either."

  "Tell her hello for me," he said.

  Early the next morning Doc and Maisey drove into Bonner to get the mail, and I washed the breakfast dishes and watered the rock garden with a sprinkler can. The phone rang inside.

  When I answered it, a voice said, "Oh, it's the Lone Ranger again."

  "Who gave you this number?" I said.

  "What do you care? Put the pill roller on."

  "He's not here."

  He paused, then said, "I made her come."

  "If this is Ellison…"

  "That little twist is lying to you, bubba. She knows it was consensual. That's why she didn't identify nobody from the mug shots. Ask her what she whispered in my ear when I…"

  I hung up on him and punched in "Star 69" on the phone, then I called the sheriff.

  "Ellison or one of the other rapists is harassing the victim," I said.

  "How do you know it's them?"

  "I'm not even going to answer that question."

  "You can ID the call by-"

  "I already tried. The number's blocked."

  "Tell Dr. Voss to change his number."

  "He did that yesterday."

  I heard him take a deep breath. "Tell Dr. Voss to come in and sign a complaint," he said.

  "Where's this militia leader live? What's his name, Hinkel?" I said.

  "You're jumping me over the hurdles, right?"

  "I'm not sympathetic with the problems of your office. You're telling a raped girl and her father, 'Eat shit, you're on your own.'"

  "You got a gift, son. Just talking to you gives me the red scours. You should contact the Pentagon, see about a career in biological warfare."

  Carl Hinkel's ranch was outside Hamilton, down in the Bitterroot Valley. Beyond the stone house in which he lived were green pastures dotted with prize Angus, and beyond his pastures were mountains that rose up blue and as jagged as tin against the sky, their saddles and peaks blazing with new snow.

  Carl Hinkel's drive was planted with poplar trees, his white gravel walks bordered with rosebeds. An American flag flew upside down in the front yard, the cloth popping in the wind, the chain tinkling against the silver pole.

  There was no gate across the cattle guard, but I must have triggered an electronic signal when I entered Hinkel's property, because two men immediately came from behind the house and stood in the driveway, their feet slightly spread, their hands opening and closing at their sides, their bodies contoured with the anatomical distortions of steroid addicts. They wore military boots and undershirts and carried pistols in their belts, and in each of their unshaved faces was a pinched, dark light that seemed to have no relationship to anything in their environment. I nodded at them, but they continued to stare at me with the fixated intensity of people for whom daily life was part of a cosmic conspiracy.

  Hinkel emerged from a small stone hut off to the side of the main house, wearing a navy blue shirt and white suspenders and corduroy trousers. He eyed me carefully, smoke leaking from around the stem of the corncob pipe clenched in his mouth. He waved the two men away.

  "You were at the rodeo. You have a history with Wyatt," he said.

  "I'd like to talk with you about him, Mr. Hinkel. Or, more specifically, about a man named Lamar Ellison," I said.

  "Wyatt says you were a Texas Ranger."

  "Among other things."

  "A Ranger?" he said reflectively. "Well, we'll just have to ask you in, sir."

  I followed him into the hut, stooping slightly under the doorway's wood casement. The desk and tables and shelves inside were stacked with clutter. The monitor on his computer bathed the stone walls with a green light. He clicked off the screen so I could not read what was on it.

  On the wall were pictures of Douglas MacArthur, A. P. Hill, and the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell. There was also a youthful photograph of Carl Hinkel in uniform.

  "You were in the airborne, Mr. Hinkel?" I said.

  His eyes had a peculiar cast in them. They seemed to look at me in a mirthful way, and at the same time analyze each word I had just spoken.

  "You asked about this man Ellison. He's been here. But not recently. He won't be back, either," he said, ignoring my question about his military background.

  His accent was Tidewater, the r's almost like w's. He sat erectly in his chair at his desk, his entire posture one of ninety-degree angles.

  "Ellison is no longer welcome?" I said, and tried to smile.

  "I have nothing to say about him."

  "Wyatt Dixon offered to kill him for two thousand dollars. That's bargain basement. I have the feeling Wyatt was trying to pick up two grand on a done deal."

  "You're offensive, sir."

  "Excuse me?"

  "I don't share your frame of reference. You presume that I do."

  I placed my elbow on his desk and leaned toward him and said, "Psychopaths like Lamar Ellison and Wyatt Dixon and the men who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? They all seek validation from male authority figures, fraudulent patriarchs who manipulate them for their own ends. They come to you like rats down a mooring rope, Mr. Hinkel."

  He looked at me for a long time, his eyelids never blinking.

  "You came here to sow discord and violence between two troubled young men," he said. "You use the methods of ZOG well. You may be a gentile but the yellow star is on your brow."

  The evening of the next day Doc took Maisey to a movie in Missoula. I called Cleo and asked her to supper, but she had to work late at the clinic and said she would meet me in town, maybe for dessert, at nine o'clock.

  I parked my truck by the Clark Fork River and walked back across the bridge toward downtown. The western sky was pink, the mountains unbroken and dark across the horizon. Down below I could see trout feeding on the flies that were hatching in the shadows of the bridge. The air smelled cold and heavy, and the runoff from the melting snow in the mountains had flooded the willows along the banks so that their branches trailed like lace in the water.

  I walked farther into town and went into a saloon and cafe called the Oxford, which claimed to have never closed its doors since 1891.1 paid little attention to a waxed, black car across the street, and the three men in suits
who sat inside it.

  I ate a hamburger and drank a cup of coffee at the counter. Deeper inside the building was a darkened bar area where topless women were dancing on a runway. I finished eating and walked back outside and started to cross the street at the light. The black car pulled to the curb and a man in back opened a door for me. He was sandy-haired and pleasant-looking, and he held up a badge holder for me to see.

  "Hop in, Mr. Holland. We'll give you a ride to your truck," he said.

  "The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is running a jitney service?" I said.

  "We justify our jobs any way we can. Come on, be a sport," he said.

  I got inside and closed the door behind me. The two men in front did not turn around. We drove up the street, past an old vaudeville and movie theater that had been turned into a multiplex, and crossed the long bridge over the river. The mountains in the west were rimmed with fire and the air full of birds that swept in and out of the willows on the riverbank.

  The agent in back had a folder open on his lap.

  "You used to be one of us," he said.

  "Yeah, it was a great life," I replied.

  "It says here you meddled in a federal investigation down in Texas. That's not true, is it?" He smiled when he spoke.

  "No, I don't recall that."

  "You always eat supper in T amp;A joints?" the agent in the passenger's seat asked, without turning around.

  "Single man. You know how it is," I said.

  "Lamar Ellison hangs out there. Just coincidence you wander in?" the agent in the passenger's seat said.

  "Oh, you know Lamar? He raped my friend's daughter," I said.

  "My name's Amos Rackley. You know why we're here?" the agent in back said.

  "I think I do."

  "Good. We'd hate for a well-intentioned person like yourself to hurt one of our people. You understand me, don't you?" the agent named Amos Rackley said.

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "I think he's a hard guy," the agent in the passenger's seat said to the driver. The hair on the back of his neck was shaved neatly above his collar, his skin pink, his jawline well defined.