Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "Do you think of me as a victim, Billy Bob?" she asked.

  "No, I don't."

  "Then you don't need to worry about me."

  Her nylon backpack was propped against a huckleberry bush. The flap had fallen open and inside I could see the blue-black finish and pearl-handled butt of her.38 revolver.

  "You aim to kill Wyatt Dixon, don't you?" I said.

  "You think of me as a friend or you think of me with guilt. But you don't think of me in other ways," she said, ignoring my statement.

  "You're not fair," I said, and took my hand from hers.

  She rose to her feet and gathered up her backpack by its straps and stepped off the rock onto the trail.

  "I'm going to walk back now. It's pretty out here. Don't worry about this stuff. It's not your fault," she said.

  And with that she slung her backpack over one shoulder and strolled back down the trail, her chestnut hair freckled with the sunlight that shone through the canopy, the clash of color in her jeans and pink tennis shoes somehow reminiscent of the little girl who lived inside her and who I'd learned could sometimes break my heart.

  My great-grandfather, Sam Morgan Holland, the drover and drunkard and gunfighter turned saddle preacher, had kept a journal that told of the herds he had swum across the Red River and chased through mesa country and stream bottoms in electric storms on the Goodnight-Loving and Chisholm trails, his armed encounters with the Dalton-Doolin gang in Oklahoma Territory, and his love affair with the outlaw woman, the Rose of Cimarron.

  But he wrote mostly about the abiding anger inside him that never allowed him to rest, that made him sit sleepless on the side of his bed in a patch of moonlight, his palms aching to hold his twin Navy Colt revolvers. In Wichita and Newton and Abilene, while prostitutes watched from the balconies of saloons, he lighted up the street with the flashes from his revolvers and filled the night with thunder and the smell of cordite and for just a moment felt he had righted the world and driven evil from his own breast by taking the lives of others who were worse men than he.

  How did a man who had always been inclined for the cloth, who was basically decent and honorable, allow himself to be branded with the mark of Cain?

  He did it at Little Round Top and Kennesaw Mountain and the Battle of Franklin, and learned it was easy. You just had to convince yourself, or be convinced by others, that your enemy deserved his fate and keep your mind free of empathy and moral restraint before you did it.

  I ATE SUPPER early that afternoon, out of a tin plate and a cup from a GI mess kit, sitting on a stump down by the river, so I would not have to talk to anyone before I left Doc's house. But Doc caught me before I drove away.

  "Where you going with L.Q.'s pistol?" he asked.

  "Target shooting."

  "You don't have enough room around here?" he said.

  "Tag along if you like." I focused my eyes at a spot in empty space.

  "You go ahead. Stay out of trouble. Don't follow my example."

  "Wouldn't dream of it," I said.

  I DROVE DOWN to Hamilton and went past Carl Hinkel's ranch to a farm road that wound down to the Bitterroot River. I parked my truck among cottonwoods in an empty campground and walked downstream until I was at the back of Hinkel's property. I stepped across a barbed-wire fence that ran down through a slough into the river and walked up a boulder-strewn, wooded incline until I was slightly above the log house where Wyatt Dixon lived. I could hear the muttering of a chain saw on the far side of the house.

  The sun was still above the Bitterroots, but the pine trees on the incline were deep in shadow, the boulder I stood behind cool and damp to the touch. The light on the fields was soft, almost like a green vapor hanging over the grass, and Wyatt Dixon, stripped to the waist, his jeans so tight they looked stitched to his skin, walked into full view and went to work on a log he had propped across sawhorses, lopping it into segments for firewood.

  The wind was in my face, the distance about seventy yards.

  I took L.Q. Navarro's.45 revolver from my belt and steadied it with both hands on top of the boulder and sighted on Dixon's back. His skin was taut and brown, etched with vertebrae, his biceps pumped as he worked, his silky red hair creased in the wind.

  Walk away, I heard a voice say inside me.

  I looked around me in the shadows, among the pine trunks and the boulders that grew out of the humus like the tops of toadstools, but L.Q. was not there.

  I pulled back the hammer on full cock and fired.

  The.45 jerked upward from the rock, the report flattening in the wind.

  I saw water jump in the river on the far side of Wyatt Dixon, and I knew the round had carried high and to the left.

  My heart was thundering now. I fired a second and third time, the butt of the.45 raking finely against rock dust, the pleasant cordite smell of burned powder in my face. But Wyatt Dixon moved about unawares in the roar of the chain saw, the rounds missing him by inches. My hands were sweating on the ivory grips now, the air damp and tannic inside my lungs. When I fired again I thought I heard the round knock into wood.

  This time Wyatt Dixon paused, as though a foreign object might have invaded his environment. He looked away at the river, the cottonwoods and aspens bending in the breeze, the mountains on the western side of the valley and the clouds that were now filled with a purple and gold sheen. Then he bent to his work again, his saw ripping a spray of white pulp out of the log.

  I was sweating inside my clothes. Bile rose out of my stomach and I could smell the sourness of my own breath when I breathed into my palm. I pulled back the hammer with my thumb a fifth time.

  Walk away, the voice said.

  Yes, I thought. This time, yes.

  I stepped back from the boulder, my temples pounding, my ears almost deaf from the four rounds I had discharged. I eased the hammer back down with both thumbs and shoved the pistol into my belt and walked back through the trees, stepping across a creek drainage, mounting a small hill that should have brought me out above my truck and the campground on the river.

  Instead, I walked right into two of Amos Rackley's Treasury agents.

  They were set up behind a rock, like picnickers, a lunch box opened in front of them, with sandwiches placed on paper napkins next to their thermos and cell phone and binoculars.

  "What do you think you're doing, asshole?" the blond, crewcut man named Jim said, chewing a small bite of sandwich. He wore khakis and a checkered shirt and a tan cap with a green fish on it. There was a blood-filled bump on the bridge of his nose. He and his partner wore identical sunglasses.

  "Me?" I said.

  "Dixon did a mind-fuck on you, huh?" Jim said.

  "Is Wyatt around here? That's why you guys are here?" I said.

  "You haven't had the pleasure," Jim said to his partner. "This guy's a real wit."

  I took a breath and widened my eyes. My face felt sweaty and dilated in the breeze. "Tell me if my reasoning is messed up. You don't care if somebody pops Ole Wyatt or not. You know you can't turn him, so he's of no use to you."

  "You ought to ask Amos for a job. He's always looking for new talent," Jim said.

  I dumped my spent brass in my palm.

  "Give him this for me, will you?" I said, and bounced the casings off the rock in front of them. "It's great seeing you. Keep up the good work."

  Jim bit into his sandwich and turned to his friend. "This guy was an Assistant U.S. Attorney," he said. The friend grinned and looked at his nails.

  Chapter 23

  I was still wired when I walked into an old brick Catholic church on the north side of Missoula early the next morning. The day was cool and misty, and the pillared interior of the church, whose ceilings were painted with celestial scenes, seemed to enclose an unnatural, smoky blue light. The few parishioners in the pews were elderly, traditional people from another era who said rosaries and probably attended Mass daily and confessed sins that were largely imaginary to a priest who fought to keep from nodding off. I fe
lt like an intruder in their midst.

  I knelt in the back of the church and prayed to be relieved of the anger that still throbbed in my wrists and left my mouth as dry as paper and my thoughts like shards of glass. A young priest in a cassock entered the center booth in the confessional and I followed him and knelt in the adjoining booth and waited for him to slide back the wood cover on the small screened window that separated us.

  "I should confess early on I know another priest here in town but I chose not to go to him," I said.

  "Why is that?" the priest asked.

  "I'm ashamed."

  "There's no shame when you take your sins to God."

  "I tried to kill a man yesterday, Father. He was unarmed. I shot at his back four times."

  The priest started to turn, to look through the screen at my face, but instead lowered his eyes and remained motionless. I could hear the soft rise and fall of his breath.

  "What you're telling me is very serious," he said.

  "This man did something truly evil to a friend of mine," I said.

  "With respect, I have to stop you there. You don't bargain in a sacramental situation."

  "He buried her alive."

  I saw him press his forehead with the heel of his hand.

  "Listen, do you plan to make another attempt against this man's life?" he said.

  "I'll do him no harm except in defense of myself or another."

  I could see a thin sheen of perspiration along his jawbone and a lump of cartilage working below his ear. He waited a long time before he spoke again.

  "If you have not been honest with me, the absolution you receive here will be of little use to you. That said, you are forgiven of your sins," he said. Then added, as I rose from the kneeler, "You must put away your violence, sir. You will never have peace until you do. Until that day comes, a minister such as I will be only a seashell echoing the wind."

  His words clung to me like a net when I walked out into the sunlight.

  I WALKED from the church down to the river and sat on a shady bench and watched the sun burn the mist off the hills. The siltation caused by the snow melt had settled out of the river and the water was now a dark green again, undulating smoothly over the submerged boulders in the deepest part of the river, the trout rising on the edge of the shade for the first fly hatch of the day.

  I had less than three weeks to prepare Doc's defense. When all else failed, a hard-nosed criminal lawyer could always put the police on trial. But that was not only unwise in the case of Sheriff Cain, who was an intelligent and decent man and also well liked, a defense strategy deliberately based on destroying people's faith in their legal system was a little bit like burning down all your neighbors' houses in order to save your own.

  Who had really killed Lamar Ellison? I had an idea, but my speculations were of no value. I believed Lamar Ellison and his two cohorts were sent by Carl Hinkel to Doc Voss's house to rape his daughter. But all three rapists were dead now and I would probably never get Hinkel into a courtroom. Hinkel was like the drunk who runs a red light at ninety miles an hour and fills an intersection with mayhem and carnage and disappears back into anonymity.

  Regardless, as much as I disliked him and the xenophobic mentality that was characteristic of his kind, I did not think he was behind Ellison's murder. I tried to think through the tangled web Doc and I had wandered into the night he went up against the bikers in the bar at Lincoln: gold mine interests on the Blackfoot River, Cleo Lonnigan's belief that Lamar Ellison's biker gang had murdered her child, Nicki Molinari's insistence that Cleo Lonnigan had stolen money from him, Xavier and Holly Girard's involvement with Molinari, the kidnapping and murder of Sue Lynn Big Medicine's little brother, the fanatical dedication of the ATF agents who wanted to avenge the deaths of their friends and colleagues in the Alfred P. Murrah Building.

  I wondered what it would be like to line up childhood photos of all the above-mentioned people. Would it tell us something about the influence of the world on each of us? Probably. But the lesson was too depressing to even think about.

  "I have a bone to pick with you," a voice said behind me.

  "Oh, hello, Ms. Girard," I said, removing my hat and rising from the bench.

  She wore shades and a white suit and high heels and white stockings and carried a shopping bag from a fashionable store by its paper straps. She sat down and crossed her legs and lit a cigarette with a silver lighter.

  "Do you mind?" she asked.

  "No," I said, not quite sure if she was referring to her cigarette or her sitting down uninvited.

  "God forbid, my prayers have been answered. My husband has stopped drinking. He has also gone crazy. I think he gets some of his ideas from you and Doc Voss," she said. "I doubt it."

  "He wants to stop production of my picture. He says more publicity about the Blackfoot will cause it to be overrun by tourists. He says he's going to rat-fuck Nicki Molinari. Do you think that's an advisable activity?"

  "I wouldn't know, Ms. Girard. To tell you the truth, I don't care, either."

  She removed her sunglasses and let them rest in her lap. In the shade, or perhaps because of her makeup, her eyes had the color of lilacs. They roved over my face thoughtfully, then she smiled in that unrehearsed and vulnerable way that seemed totally foreign to everything else she did.

  "I've made a bad impression on you twice now," she said.

  "How's that?"

  "When you caught me inhaling a substance I could do without. Then Xavier told you of a foolish moment I had with Nicki Molinari."

  "I don't guess I remember any of that very well."

  "You're quite a guy, Tex. I could cast you in a minute, if you're not too ambitious. Don't pay too much attention to Xavier while he's sober. He thinks better when he's drunk," she said, and pinched me on top of the thigh when she got up to leave.

  When I got back to Doc's house Maisey was waiting for me on the front porch.

  "What's wrong?" I said.

  She handed me a folded piece of notebook paper. "This was pushed in under my screen," she said. It read:

  Dear Maysy,

  I saw Mr. Holland shoot at Wyatt. Wyatt was running a chain saw and couldn't hear the shots. So I told him what I saw. You need to get away from Mr. Holland. We could go to Idaho or to the rain forest in Washington. I know how to build a cabin and to hunt and fish. What do you think? Meet me outside our place on Front Street at 8 tonite.

  Your friend, Terry

  "'Our place'?" I said.

  "He must mean the bar where I met him. What a loser."

  "Has your dad seen this?"

  "Not yet. He went to the feed store. What does he mean you shot at Wyatt Dixon?"

  "Witherspoon has probably been eating mushrooms," I said.

  But I didn't fool her. She put her hands on her hips, her eyes boring in on me.

  "Have you lost your mind, Billy Bob?"

  "Don't underestimate the value of mental illness. It makes life a lot easier," I said.

  "I thought my father was uncontrollable. You two guys are beyond belief," she said. She shook her head despairingly, tapping her toe, her mouth screwed into a button.

  But THINGS were just warming up. A half hour later I saw Nicki Molinari's maroon convertible tearing through the field behind Doc's house, the top down, with Molinari behind the wheel and his second baseman, the man called Frank, next to him. Frank looked like a seven-foot cadaver propped up in the seat.

  Molinari got out of the car and left the door hanging open, the engine still running, and jabbed his finger at me.

  "I'm about an inch from creating one less lawyer in Missoula, Montana," he said.

  "Oh?" I said.

  "I'm eating breakfast in a cafe this morning and this rodeo psycho, what's-his-name, Wyatt Dixon, comes in and stands there, leering down at me with this twisted smile on his mouth. I go, 'You got a problem?' He goes, 'I've got it on high authority your friend Mr. Holland took some shots at me. Could it be you was involved with a c
owardly action like that, sir?'

  "I go, 'What are you talking about? And stop calling me sir.'

  "He says, 'I seen one of your men bird-dogging me. Which made me wonder if you and Mr. Holland is working together. All these people is waiting for your response, sir.'

  "I go, 'No, I don't know nothing about people shooting at you. So get away from my table, you crazy fuck.'

  "He goes, 'You are a war hero, sir. I have driven by your home many times. I have seen the batting cage in your barn and the beautiful women that swims in your pool. I would like to model my life on yours but I am only a humble cowboy. You, sir, are a credit to the Italian race.'"

  I waited for Molinari to continue.

  "Are you listening?" he said.

  "Yeah. So why are you out here?"

  His face blanched with anger.

  "You're playing with this guy's head. I'm a businessman. I got this shitkicker meltdown 'fronting me in public. I don't need that kind of publicity."

  "Why did he put you and me together?"

  "He's con-wise. He knows we've both been involved with the skank. Hey, bottom line, my man, he's nuts."

  "Nice of you to come out," I said.

  I walked away from him, into the trees, into the cold air rising off the river in the shadows. Molinari followed me and scooped up a pine cone and threw it at my head.

  "Don't turn your back on me, Mr. Holland," he said.

  "Your problem is not with me, Nicki. It's back in Laos, on that helicopter skid."

  His hands opened and closed at his sides. His hired man followed us into the trees, his silhouette gargantuan against the sunlight. Molinari turned and said, "Everything's cool here, Frank. Take a smoke. I'll be along in a minute." I started to speak but Molinari shook his finger.

  "You got no right to stick that information in my face," he said.

  "Hell is a place you carry with you. I hope you get out of it one day."