Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "What's the story on the bear?" I asked.

  "It's been getting into my trash. I called the game warden. They brought out the barrel," he replied.

  "When are they going to pick it up?" I said.

  "They didn't say. Maybe if it gets thirsty in there, it won't come back when they turn it loose," he said.

  His face was flat and his glasses wobbled with light.

  Temple studied a folded-back page in her notebook. "Wyatt Dixon talk to you about killing Lamar Ellison?" she said.

  His face seemed to soften. "Wyatt hasn't hurt anybody. If I was you, I wouldn't be talking about him that way," he said.

  He pulled the knife from the fence post and walked back into the center of the lot. He stood at an oblique angle to the post, concentrating, the knife blade dripping from his fingers. His mouth pursed slightly before he flung the knife again. This time the handle caromed off the post.

  "You go to the university, Terry?" I said. "I'm thinking about it. Or I might take up rodeoing."

  "What were you down for in North Carolina?" I asked.

  He grinned and pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Littering," he said.

  "Did you guys make Ellison for a snitch? Because if you had knowledge of what was going to happen to him, you've become an accessory," Temple said.

  "Y'all are local cops who went down South and learned your accents?" he said. He pitched his head at his own joke.

  "You seem like a smart young guy, Terry," I said. "Wyatt's been down at least twice. He'll probably go down again. You want to be his fall partner?"

  "Y'all have a TV camera hid out in the bushes? I'd like to say hello to my mom," he said.

  Temple looked at me, then began punching in numbers on her cell phone.

  "Who you calling?" Witherspoon asked.

  She didn't reply. She spoke into the cell phone and clicked it shut.

  "Fish and Game will be here in a little while," she said. "You're right, Terry, I'm not a local cop. That means I really wish you'd wise off again so I can rip that grin off your face and shove your puny little ass into that bear barrel."

  He pitched his head again, clearing his hair off his glasses, then cocked the knife over his shoulder and parked it solidly into the fence post. When he walked over to retrieve it, his profile jiggled with laughter.

  That NIGHT I heard a vehicle grinding through the field behind Doc's house, then a rattling sound like rocks under the vehicle's fenders and a thud down in the trees by the river. I unlocked the front door and walked barefoot out on the porch. It was cold and the valley and cliffs were lighted by the moon, and I could see a sports utility vehicle high-centered on a sand spit in the river, the current riffling around its tires. A man waded from the driver's door toward the front of Doc's property.

  The man stumbled and fell in the water but held aloft the square-shaped gin bottle he carried so it did not break on the rocks. He splashed up on the bank, his clothes and thick hair dripping with water and moonlight. Just before he tumbled into the grass and passed out I saw the bandaged hand and feral and besotted face of Xavier Girard.

  I closed the door and slipped the bolt and went back to sleep and hoped the sun would rise on a better world for all of us.

  Chapter 12

  At first light I looked through my window and saw him on all fours, cupping water out of the river and sipping it from his palm. When I walked up behind him, he turned his head slowly, as though he were in pain. His face was gray with hangover, his eyes the color of iodine.

  "How'd I get here?" he asked.

  Smoke from Lucas's breakfast fire was blowing through the trees out onto the darkness of the water. Upstream I could see Lucas standing in the middle of the riffle, false-casting a dry fly under the overhang.

  "Looks like you might have wanted to wash your Jeep," I said. I found a clean cup in Lucas's rucksack and filled it with coffee from the pot on the fire, then squatted down next to Xavier and handed it to him. "How's your hand?"

  He looked at the dirty elastic bandage that hung from his fingers like strips of mummy cloth. "It doesn't feel good to be my age and wonder if you're anybody's punch," he said.

  I shifted my weight on one haunch and picked up a small, flat stone and flipped it with my thumb into the current. "Why'd you come out here, sir?" I said.

  "I don't rightly remember. It probably made a lot of sense last night," he said.

  His face was dripping with river water and he blotted his mouth and forehead on his sleeve. His eyes were puffed, as though they had been stung with bees, his breath as dense as sewer gas.

  "Have you ever thought about hitting one of those twelve-step meetings?" I said.

  "They're full of drunks," he said.

  "I guess that's a possibility," I said, my gaze focusing on nothing.

  He sat on a rock and held the coffee cup to his mouth with both hands. He tried to drink but couldn't swallow. He pressed the back of his wrist to his forehead. His fingers were shaking.

  "I talked with Holly about starting up a defense fund for Doc. She said it was none of our damn business," he said. The river was still in shadow, and he stared upstream at Lucas false-casting in the riffle, as though the image of a young man in hip waders silhouetted under the lighted canopy of the forest was a reminder of someone he might have known long ago.

  "Maybe she has her reasons," I said.

  He pitched the coffee from his cup into the rocks. "You see a gin bottle around here?"

  "It's over there, in the grass."

  He walked over to the bottle and picked it up and tightened the cap on it, then tilted it sideways, measuring its content.

  "I'd better go now," he said.

  "Come back anytime."

  "Holly worries about finances. I've gone belly-up on a couple of deals. She always thinks we're going to take on legal liability. That's why she's a lot more conservative than I am," he said.

  "Makes sense," I said.

  "Forget I was here, will you, Mr. Holland?"

  "No problem," I said, and watched him walk to his Jeep Cherokee, his fingers spidered around the square edges of the gin bottle. When he drove into the sunlight, grinding the gears, the skin of his face seemed to shrink at the hard, bright, lonely reality of the day that awaited him.

  Later, I drove out to see Cleo at her place in the Jocko Valley. When I thumped across the cattle guard I saw Cleo's gay carpenter arguing with three men in a maroon Cadillac convertible. The carpenter wore a leather tool belt and no shirt; a ball-peen hammer hung loosely from his right hand. Farther up the dirt drive I could see Cleo standing on the porch of her house.

  I got out of my truck and walked toward the convertible. It wasn't hard to make the men inside. They wore slacks with knife-blade creases and sport shirts unbuttoned at the top to show off their gold chains and chest hair, and radiated a visceral self-satisfaction. Their stares were invasive, vaguely contemptuous, devoid of all empathy. The man in back was eating the last of a hot dog. When he finished, he wiped the mustard off his mouth with a paper napkin and let the napkin blow away on the grass.

  The carpenter grinned at me as I approached the convertible. He flipped the hammer into the air and caught it again and slipped the handle through a loop in his belt. His skin was bronzed and his hair gold from the sun.

  "These fellows are just leaving. Cleo's up at the house," he said.

  "I see," I said.

  "They didn't like the welcome they got," the carpenter said.

  I looked the carpenter flatly in the face. Don't crowd them, bud, I thought.

  "Catch you later," he said to me, and walked back toward the barn where he had been working.

  The driver of the convertible was a muscular, handsome man, with smooth skin and black hair that he combed straight back. He wore a bright yellow golf shirt, and when he had drawn his car abreast of me, he said, "You got a problem, too?"

  "No, I don't think so," I replied.

  "Your truck's in the road," he said.


  "Just pull around on the grass," I said.

  "Why you looking at me like that?" he said.

  "You're Nicki Molinari."

  "You know me from somewhere?"

  "I used to work for the G. Your picture would float across my desk from time to time."

  "Sorry the recognition isn't mutual. Now please move your fucking truck out of the fucking road."

  "What's your business with Cleo, Nicki?"

  "Where you get off calling me by my first name?"

  "You're a famous guy. No offense meant. I heard you were doing a nickel in Terminal Island."

  The man in the passenger seat started to get out. But Nicki Molinari raised his hand.

  "Here's your lesson for the day, whatever your name is," he said. "If that broad is your regular pump, I feel sorry for you. Second of all, I'd better not see you again."

  He eased his transmission out of park and drove around my truck, across the cattle guard, and onto the county road. When I pulled into Cleo's yard, she walked down the steps toward me, but her eyes were still on the convertible that was now disappearing over a rise.

  "What's with the greaseballs?" I said.

  "You know them?"

  "Every DEA agent in the country knows who Nicki Molinari is. You didn't answer my question. Why are they here?"

  "They claim my husband owed them money,"

  "What did you tell them?"

  "To get out."

  "Why would your husband owe them money?"

  "I don't care and I don't want to know."

  "These aren't guys you just run off."

  "I just did. I stuck a gun in his face. He looked bad in front of his men, so he tried to give Eric a hard time. You want to come in or not?"

  "I thought you might want to go to lunch,"

  "I can fix something if you're hungry," she said, her voice flat, disinterested, her eyes lingering on the dust cloud left by Nicki Molinari's convertible.

  "This isn't quite what I had in mind, Cleo."

  "What?" she said, her attention refocusing itself on my words.

  "No, I'm not hungry. I thought you might be. Maybe I should go."

  "Will you just come in, Billy Bob?" she said, and pulled me by the arm, either out of irritation or conciliation, I didn't know which.

  A chrome-plated.44 Magnum revolver rested on a table in the hallway.

  "Just a minute," she said, and picked up the revolver and entered the den and opened a felt-backed glass gun cabinet where at least two dozen antique and modern pistols were hung. She flipped open the cylinder on the Magnum and dumped the cartridges into her palm, then fitted the Magnum on its hooks and closed the glass doors.

  "What a collection," I said.

  "They were my father's. He was career Army. He wanted a son."

  "He taught you to shoot?"

  "I taught myself. You want a roast beef sandwich?"

  "Sure," I said.

  On the way out of the den I saw on top of a bookcase a framed photograph of a little boy. He wore a cowboy hat and sat atop a Shetland pony. The pony was eating out of a bucket, and the little boy's legs were too short to reach the stirrups. The boy was holding on to the pommel as though he were frightened by the distance to the ground.

  I followed Cleo into the kitchen.

  "Why so quiet?" she asked.

  Greaseballs in her front yard, her suppressed rage and grief over a murdered child, compassion for a rape victim and destitute Indians, a personality that blew hot and cold with the moment. I couldn't begin to express my thoughts.

  "My son's staying out at Doc's. I'd like for you to meet him," I said.

  But she made no reply.

  I stood next to her at the drainboard. Through the window the Douglas fir trees on the hill crest looked hard and perpendicular against the sky. I placed my hand on her back. "You have to be at the clinic this afternoon?" I said.

  "Not really."

  "You have any other commitments?" I said, touching her hair.

  "I have a lot of chores to do," she said.

  I nodded and took my hand away.

  "You interrogated me, Billy Bob. I don't care for it," she said.

  "Nicki Molinari is a dope dealer and a degenerate. He not only kills people, he has them taken apart."

  "You don't have to tell me that. My husband brought him to our house. He used our phone to have a chippy delivered to his motel."

  It was not a time to say anything else. In fact, I was tired of playing the fool's role. I picked up my hat and left. When I was driving back out the front gate, I saw her in the rearview mirror, standing in the doorway, her dress blowing across her thighs.

  I WENT BACK to Doc's and found Lucas sitting on the front steps, playing his guitar. It was a Martin HD-28, one I had given him for his birthday. The lightest touch of the plectrum on the strings resonated out of the box with the deep, mellow quality of sound that might have been aged in oak.

  "Here's one I bet you don't know," he said. Then he began to sing,

  "I'm an old log hauler,

  I drove a big truck.

  I shot the pinball machine,

  But it caused me bad luck.

  All I ever made

  On a pinball machine

  Was four katty-corners,

  Then I'd miss the sixteen."

  He rested his arm across the top of the Martin, careful not to scratch the finish with the button on the cuff of his denim shirt.

  "That's one of them old ones," he said.

  "Really?" I said, trying not to smile at what he considered old. "Where is everybody?"

  "Doc and Maisey had a fight. I don't know where he went, but she took off with some high school boy.

  Does Maisey act kind of funny for a girl who's been raped?" he said.

  "How's that?"

  "The way she was dressed and acting. Hoop earrings, fire-engine makeup, one of them bras that-" His eyes went away from mine, as they always did when he felt he had to protect me from his generation's knowledge of the world.

  "That what?" I said.

  "It don't exactly signal a guy to keep his big-boy in his britches."

  "That's how it works, Lucas."

  "What works?" he asked.

  "Rape victims want to show they still have control. So they try to fly back through the candle flame."

  He seemed to study the thought, his fingers chord-ing without sound on the neck of the guitar. "An Indian gal was looking for you," he said.

  "Sue Lynn?"

  "She didn't say. She has blond streaks in her hair. What's the deal on her?" He threaded his plectrum through the strings at the top of the guitar neck and adjusted his straw hat and gazed abstractly at the river.

  "Why?" I said.

  "No reason. She said she liked country music. I was showing her some chords."

  "I'd leave her alone."

  "She seemed pretty nice."

  "She hangs with some bad dudes. Why not keep things simple and enjoy the trout fishing?"

  He fed a stick of gum into his mouth and nodded his head slowly, as though humbly agreeing with a profound statement.

  "That's how come you been milking through Doc's fence?" he said.

  I walked on inside the house and hung my hat on a wood peg and poured a glass of iced tea in the kitchen. Through the front door I could see him putting his guitar inside its case, tucking the cloth strap around its edges, gum snapping in his jaw, his eyes bright with a thought he couldn't handle. He got up from the porch step, the guitar case still open, and came inside.

  "I didn't mean to say that."

  "I asked for it."

  He grinned and spun his hat on his finger. "Who am I to argue with superior minds?" he said.

  Temple Carrol had been told the juvenile file on Wyatt Dixon's knife-throwing friend, Terry Witherspoon, had been sealed. But there was another avenue. Temple had written down the name of the small town in western North Carolina where Witherspoon had been convicted, and I called the sheriff's department in
the county seat there and asked to talk with any officer on duty who handled juvenile cases.

  My call was transferred to a detective named Benbow.

  "Terry Witherspoon's a suspect in a murder investigation in Montana?" he said.

  "Not exactly."

  "Sounds a mite vague, Mr. Holland. Regardless, his records were sealed a long time ago. For all I know they were destroyed when he reached legal age."

  "You know him?" I asked.

  "I wish I didn't."

  "Give me a thread," I said.

  "You say you were a Texas Ranger?"

  "Yes, sir."

  I waited.

  "Then you know the rules. Wish I could help," he said, and hung up.

  But a half hour later he called back.

  "I can't tell you anything about the records the court has sealed. We clear on that?" he said.

  "You bet."

  "But I can tell you about suspicions I have that never became part of a formal investigation. A year ago we had a bomber hid out in these mountains. I think Terry was bringing him food. I don't have any evidence to prove that. But I've known Terry since he was seven years old, and he's the meanest little shit I ever came acrost."

  "He's hooked up with terrorists?"

  "The cause will find Terry, not the other way around. A farmhouse was broken into not far from the caves where this bomber was hid out. The owner and his wife probably came home and surprised the intruder. He tied them both to chairs and stuffed gags in their mouths. Then he cut the woman's throat and shot the man."

  "You think Witherspoon did it?"

  "The FBI still hasn't caught the bomber. Whoever was feeding him knew every cave in this county. I think the same guy killed the two people in the farmhouse. We have a small population here. To my knowledge, we've produced only one kid around here the likes of Terry Witherspoon. You know what kills me about this stuff, Mr. Holland?"

  "What's that?"

  "The only job this simpleton ever had was boxing up groceries at a supermarket. We'll spend our careers getting a net over a box boy."

  "You know why he came out to Montana?"

  "He said he wanted to be a mountain man in a whites-only nation. Is it true you can buy Montana T-shirts that say 'At Least Our Cows Are Sane'?"