Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  The sheriff flexed his dentures and tried to obscure his face when he fitted on his hat, but he could not hide the embarrassed light in his eyes.

  THAT NIGHT Lucas returned late from Sue Lynn's house. Through my bedroom window I saw him build a fire by his tent and squat next to the flames and slice open a can with his pocketknife and pour the contents into a skillet. I put on a coat and walked down to the riverbank and sat on a stump behind him without his hearing me.

  "Lordy, you give me a start!" he said when he saw me.

  "Guilty conscience?" I said.

  He stirred the corned beef hash in the skillet and sprinkled red pepper on it. "You was born for the pulpit, Billy Bob," he said.

  "Go back home, Lucas."

  "I've done fell in love with Montana. I'm thinking of transferring up here to the university."

  The woods were dark, the larch trees shaggy with moss. An animal, perhaps the cougar that had been getting into the pet bowls, growled somewhere on the other side of the river. Lucas shifted his weight and stared into the darkness, one knee crimping into the pine needles on the ground, his young face and long-sleeved cream-colored shirt painted with the light from the fire. I looked at the innocence in his face and his refusal to show fear, and felt again my old inadequacy as his father.

  But before I could speak, he said, "You believe in hell, Billy Bob?"

  "I can't rightly say."

  "Sue Lynn thinks she's going there."

  "What has she done that's so terrible?"

  "She has this nightmare all the time. It might make sense to you, but I sure cain't cipher it out."

  The WORLD of Sue Lynn Big Medicine's sleep seemed more a collective record of her people than a dream. There was no historical date on the scene nor many particular names associated with it, but the season was summer and the hills above the river were treeless and golden in the heat, the water down in the river basin milky green, tepid to the touch, the surface flecked with cottonwood bloom.

  The column of soldiers came out of the south, the razored blue peaks of distant mountains at their backs. They wore gray hats that were damp and wilted in the heat and blue blouses and trousers with yellow stripes on the legs, and the pommels of their saddles were strung with wooden canteens that clunked against the leather. The soldiers' blouses were sun-faded and stiff with salt, puffed in the hot wind, and their trousers so dark with sweat against their saddles that the soldiers looked as if they had fouled themselves.

  The Crow scouts rode at the head of the column with an officer who was dressed differently from the rest. His boots were polished and flared at the knees, his trousers skintight, his yellow hair longer than a woman's, his hat festooned with bird plumes. The sun danced on the nickel plate of his English Bulldog revolvers. An ethereal light seemed to glow in his face, and he breathed the wind as though the chaff and dust in it were simply the embellishments on a grand day in history that was of his own manufacture.

  The Crow horses pitched their heads, the nostrils dilating, the eyes protruding like walnuts, then they whirled in circles, fighting against the bit as though snakes lay in the golden grass that grew up the slope of the hill. The cottonwoods on the river were empty of birds, the buffalo briefly visible on the horizon, then gone. Magpies clattered in an arroyo, pulling shreds of meat from the exposed ribs of an elk that had already been butchered and skinned with stone knives.

  The wind changed and a familiar odor struck the noses of the Crow scouts, a dense mixture of woodsmoke, horses hobbled among shade trees, animal hides curing over fires piled with willow branches and wet leaves, and churned mud flats that were now green and slick with feces in the sun.

  The Crow were the first to reach the crest of the hill. What they saw in the valley below them turned them to stone.

  The wickiups along the river and up the arroyos numbered in the thousands. These were all Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, the enemies of the Crow, but for just a moment the scouts wished the Crow were part of the assemblage, too, because surely the red people now had enough numbers to drive the white men back across the mountains to a place in the East where all the white man's diseases and his greed and his treachery came from.

  The officer who was different from all the others joined them, his face impassive, his profile motionless against the hard blue background of the sky. His hair hung in ringlets on his shoulders, and he wiped the dampness off his throat with a kerchief and raised himself slightly in the stirrups, the leather creaking under him, in order to form a better view of the valley.

  The Crow waited, not speaking, their faces as flat and empty of emotion as potter's clay. They had long ago learned not to speak to the officer unless he addressed them first. His anger was of a quiet kind that burned just below the skin, but his capacity for cruelty was legendary. The kitchen tent had been converted to a workshop where the officer indulged his hobby of stuffing the animals and birds he shot while his men ate cold rations. A soldier who stole a dried apple from a supply wagon was shaved bald and not allowed to mount his horse for one hundred miles. Three deserters were forced to kneel, then were shot to death at point-blank range.

  Another officer, this one young, the exposed skin of his chest emblazoned with a V-shaped patch of sunburn, rode forward from the column, posting in the saddle.

  "Sir?" he said, sweat running through his eyebrows.

  But the officer who was different, whom the Indians called the Son of the Morning Star, did not answer.

  "Sir?" the younger officer repeated.

  "What?"

  "What are your orders, sir?"

  The Son of the Morning Star pulled off his fringed gloves and rubbed the tips of his fingers against the heel of his right hand, as though enjoying the feel of the oil in his skin.

  "Why, young man, I'm very glad you asked that. I think I'm going to take an elk's tooth off a squaw's dress today," he said.

  The younger officer let the focus go out of his eyes to hide his recognition of the senior officer's implication.

  Big Medicine, the spokesman for the Crow scouts, glanced at his friends, then backed his horse away from the crest until he was abreast of the Son of the Morning Star.

  "We go down there?" Big Medicine asked. "They're ours for the taking, my painted friend," the Son of the Morning Star said.

  "We go down there, in that valley, we sing death song first," he said.

  "Then you are cowards and you do not belong on this hill. Be gone from my sight," the Son of the Morning Star replied.

  But the three Crow did not move. The Son of the Morning Star was scribbling in a book filled with blank pages. He tore a page with a single line on it from the book and handed it to a messenger. "Can you read what that says?" he asked. "Yes, sir. 'Hurry-bring packs,'" the messenger replied.

  "Take these cowards back with you. They dishonor sacred ground," the Son of the Morning Star said.

  The Crow scouts looked at one another again, then rode their horses in file past the senior officer, their eyes straight ahead, the coup feathers in their hair stiffening and flattening in the wind.

  But Big Medicine reined his horse and turned it in a circle and pulled a heavy, cap-and-ball Army-issue revolver from a holster strapped across his chest. He clenched the revolver by the barrel and flung it spinning down the hill.

  "The Shyelas hate Son of the Morning Star for all the women and children and old ones he killed on the Washita. You will take no button off a squaw's clothes today. Instead your spirit will travel the Ghost Trail without ears to listen or sight to see," he said.

  If the senior officer heard, he gave no sign. His posture in the saddle was regal, his thoughts already deep in the battle that was about to take place. The Crow disappeared down the slope, through the golden fields of yellow grass, out of history, while the long column of sweat-soaked soldiers rode past them toward the senior officer and the crest of the hill and the panorama of sky and cottonwoods on a lazy green river and thousands of deerhide wickiups that teemed with families who
never thought they would be attacked by a military force as small as the one now flowing over the hill's crest.

  But the next events in Sue Lynn Big Medicine's dream broke with history and reason. Even though she was a Crow, she was inside the encampment of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne and saw the attack through their eyes rather than through her people's.

  The soldiers rode down the valley with a recklessness that the Indians could not believe, firing pistols and rifles from their saddles into the wickiups, splitting their column down the middle to encircle the Indians as though they were about to round up livestock. She heard toppling rounds whirring past her head and saw the stitched deerhide on the wickiup she had just exited pop and snap on the lodge poles that supported it.

  She raced back inside and saw her ten-year-old brother sitting on a buffalo robe, holding the flat of his palm against his mouth. He removed his hand and stared at it and at the circle of blood in the center of it, then looked at her and grinned and put his fingers to the small hole in his chest. She sank to both knees in front of him, while bullets from the soldiers' guns tore through the wickiup, and held both his hands in hers and watched the focus go out of his eyes and the pallor of death invade his cheeks.

  When she rose to her feet the streaks of blood on her hands felt as hot as burns. She wiped the blood on her face and hair and went outside into the swirl of dust from the soldiers' horses and the running of people from the wickiups. Up the slope she saw the officer the Indians called the Son of the Morning Star. Many of his men were down now, running for the hilltop behind them, their horses gut-shot and writhing in the grass, but the Son of the Morning Star was still mounted and only yards from the edge of the village, the bit sawed back in his horse's mouth, while he fired one ball after another from his revolvers.

  But his courage or his devotion to killing Indians or his grandiose belief in himself, whatever quality or vice had allowed him to remain unscathed in years of warfare, suddenly had no application in the maelstrom he had ridden into. His men, mostly German and Irish immigrants from the slums of the East, many who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were now forming a ragged perimeter on the hilltop, their noncommissioned officers screaming orders at men whose hands shook so badly they could hardly throw the breech on their rifles.

  The Son of the Morning Star rode after his men, firing back over his horse's rump to cover their retreat, his heels slashing into his horse's ribs, his face filled with rage, as though history were betraying him. Then the Indians surged out of the encampment, with arrows and bows and coup sticks and Spencer and Henry repeaters and steel hatchets and stone axes and bundles of fire they dragged on ropes behind their horses.

  The squaws ferreted out the wounded who tried to hide in the cattails along the river and mutilated them with knives. The wind was blowing out of the south, and the fires climbed up the hill where the surviving soldiers were kneeling in the grass and shooting down the slope. Many of the soldiers had carried whiskey in their canteens and now had no water. The dust and smoke swirled over them, and down the hill they heard the screams of their friends inside the burning grass, saw blackened shapes trying to rise like crippled birds from the flames. Some of the soldiers on the hill inverted their pistols and discharged them into their mouths.

  Inside it all the Son of the Morning Star fired his nickel-plated revolvers at the Indians, who now had broken through his perimeter and were clubbing his men to death with stone axes, cracking skulls and jawbones apart as if they were clay pots. The Indians swept across the top of the hill, and the Son of the Morning Star fell to one knee, like a medieval knight giving allegiance to a king, an arrow quivering in his rib cage. The squaws thronged up the incline, their throats warbling with birdsong.

  In the dream Sue Lynn Big Medicine was in their midst and saw the Shyela and Sioux women bend over the fallen officer and pierce his eyes and ears with bone awls. But it was not enough price to exact from him, she thought, not nearly enough, and with a knife made from rose-colored quartz and elk antler she stooped over the fallen officer and pulled loose his belt and unfastened the top button of his trousers and pulled the cloth back from the whiteness of his stomach.

  Her hand slashed downward with the knife. When she had finished, the Son of the Morning Star seemed to stare into her face with his destroyed eyes, seeing her inside his mind, discovering only now the level of enmity in which he was held by his adversaries. Then with the other squaws Sue Lynn forced the bloody burden in her hands down his throat. From the bottom of the slope she thought she heard the screams of a soldier burning to death inside the grass, then realized, her eyes tightly shut now, her temples thundering like a thousand drums, it was her own voice bursting from her chest, breaking against her teeth, keening into a sky that had already filled with carrion birds.

  Lucas broke two eggs on top of the corned beef hash, then divided the pan with a spatula and put half his food in a tin plate for me.

  "Sue Lynn says the Indians gelded Custer and suffocated him with his own scrotum," he said. "That's not in history books, is it?"

  "Not to my knowledge."

  "How come she's in a dream like that?"

  I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the river.

  "I was never big on psychoanalysis."

  "Billy Bob, analyzing is a full-time job with you. You see a flea on a possum's belly and you got a take on it."

  "I think Sue Lynn killed somebody."

  The smile fell away from his lips and he stared at me with his mouth open. Out in the darkness I heard an animal's roar, and this time I knew it was a cougar's.

  Chapter 22

  Early the next morning Maisey looked through the front window, sipping coffee in a house robe, her face quizzical.

  "What are you looking at?" I asked.

  "Not much. Xavier Girard throwing pinecones at the chipmunks," she replied.

  I walked outside into the coolness of the morning, under the vastness of a purple, rain-scented sky that had not been touched yet by the sun. The sound of the river was loud through the trees, the riffle blackish-green in the shadows, the air sweet with the smell of woodsmoke and wet pine needles.

  Xavier stood by the bank, his back to me. He wore a nylon vest and plaid flannel shirt and baggy jeans, and his neck was cuffed with sunburn and his hair freshly cropped. When he turned around, I hardly recognized him. The alcoholic flush and dissipated lines were gone from his face. He grinned with the easy composure of a man who had just been given a new lease on life.

  "Can I help you?" I asked.

  "I took your advice and started hitting some meetings. My sponsor said I needed to come out here and tell you that," he said.

  "Well, I appreciate that," I replied, not knowing what else to say.

  "I hear you had a talk with Nicki Molinari."

  "Yeah, I happened to be in his neighborhood."

  "He's quite a guy."

  "That's one way to put it," I said, my sense of discomfort starting to grow.

  "I guess you don't think much of me. I mean, letting the guy get in the sack with my wife."

  "I don't remember much of that afternoon, sir," I said, studying a spot of the riverbank.

  "Nicki's free ride is over. I've learned in the program I don't have to take bullshit off greaseballs or anybody else."

  "I didn't know AA worked like that."

  "It's a great life. Everybody ought to try it," he said.

  "You bet," I said, and glanced at my watch. "Well, big day ahead. All the best to you."

  I walked back into the house, then looked through the window at his Jeep Cherokee bouncing across the field toward the dirt road.

  "Was he drunk?" Maisey asked.

  "He says he's out of the saloons."

  She waited for me to continue.

  "It's no accident a lot of saloons have revolving doors," I said.

  The TRUTH was I didn't care what Xavier and Holly Girard or Nicki Molinari did with their lives. The truth was I had even stopped worry
ing about Doc. The truth was I could not get the sadistic injury done to Temple Carrol by Wyatt Dixon and Terry Witherspoon off my mind, done to her in all probability with the approval of Carl Hinkel.

  I put my rucksack and fly vest and fly rod and creel into my truck and picked up Temple at her motel and took her for breakfast at a truck stop in Lolo. Then we drove deeper into the Bitterroot Valley, up a dirt road through meadowland to a canyon with a roaring creek and a chain of deep-water pools at the bottom. A trail followed the creek up a steady incline, winding under cliffs and the ponderosa that grew out of rock, until the creek and a series of falls were far below us. Then the trail leveled out in a box canyon filled with birch trees and we came out on the creek again, and sat on a table rock just above a pool that was so clear you could see the cutthroat and brook trout ginning in the current, ten feet below the surface.

  I had known Temple most of her life. She hid her pain, rarely complained, and never accepted defeat. But now she had the same detached cast in her eyes that I had seen in Maisey's after Maisey was gang-raped. I flipped a dry fly at the head of the pool and hooked a small cutthroat, then wet my hand and released it and gave the rod to Temple.

  "Cast it over on the other side. There's usually a fat one hanging under the bank," I said.

  She was sitting against a birch tree with her knees pulled up before her. The rock was mottled with lichen and the leaves overhead flickered against the sunlight.

  "I'll just watch," she said.

  "I tried to get Lucas to go back to Deaf Smith. You wouldn't consider that yourself, would you?"

  "I'll pass, thanks," she said.

  I laid down my fly rod and sat next to her. I put my hand on her shoulder and brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. When she looked into my eyes I could read no meaning in them.

  "What are you thinking, Temple?" I asked.

  But she didn't answer. She leaned her head back against the tree and watched a bighorn sheep that stood on a ledge high up on the canyon's far wall. Her complexion had the glow and smoothness of a newly opened rose. I rested my hand on top of hers.