Bitterroot

Chapter 13

Sheriff J. T. Cain knocked on Doc's door early the next morning.

"Where were you last night?" he said.

"Here," Doc said.

"All night?"

"Yeah, I was here all night."

"Doing what?" the sheriff said.

"Sleeping."

"You vouch for that?" the sheriff said to me.

"What's this about, Sheriff?" I said.

"Nothing much. Another dead man. Step out here, please," he said to me.

I followed him to his car. The sun wasn't up yet, and fog rose off the boulders in the river and hung in the trees. The sheriff stood with his hands on his hips, his cowboy hat slanted on his head, his wide red tie clipped to his shirt.

"That man in there didn't leave the house last night?" he asked.

"To my knowledge, no."

"To your knowledge, huh? Take a ride with me."

"What for?"

"You defense lawyers spend too much time in your office. I want you to see the handiwork of our shooter."

I got into his car and we rode west of Missoula, up the long grade toward the Idaho line. The mountains were green with Douglas fir, the crests tumbling higher and higher against a salmon-colored sky. Then the Clark Fork dropped away in the canyons below us and finally disappeared from view altogether.

We went through the little town of St. Regis, then turned off the four-lane under a train trestle and entered a hollow traversed by a dirt road that was dotted with clapboard houses on each side. The yards were strung with washlines and littered with debris, like a scene out of Appalachia.

The sheriff had said very little during our journey.

"See all that old growth timber up there? That's the way it used to be everywhere," he said. "We didn't have cyanide in the river and runoff from the clear-cuts destroying the spawning beds. We didn't have no Aryan Nation or Christian Identity or militia people coming in here from Idaho, either. You know why they like it up here in the woods?"

"They're cowards. They fear blacks and Jews and locate in places where they'll never have to face them on equal terms."

He turned his head and stared at me and almost drove us off the road.

"Damn, son, you may have more sense than I give you credit for," he said.

The coroner had been late in arriving at the crime scene and was just finishing his work. Two paramedics were waiting by the road with a gurney. An empty black body bag lay unzippered on top of it.

The impact of the round had blown Tommy Lee Stoltz off the porch and into the yard. A roll of toilet paper from the box of groceries he had been carrying had bounced down the steps and rolled back under the porch into a pool of brown water. Stoltz lay on his back, staring at the sky, his shattered glasses crooked on his face. The right lens was embedded in the eye socket, coated with blood.

The sheriff from Mineral County stooped under the front door and walked out on the porch and looked at me and Sheriff Cain. He had a broad stomach and red face and graying blond hair and mustache. He wore a sheep-lined vest and a blue baseball cap with the letters MCSD on it.

"Who's he?" he said to Cain.

"An ex-Texas Ranger along for the ride. What have you got?" Sheriff Cain said.

"A neighbor heard the shot and looked out the window and saw somebody in a hat and a long coat with a chrome-plated pistol. We didn't find any brass, so the shooter picked it up or he was using a revolver. I don't think we'll get much from ballistics. The exit wound and the splatter tell me that round's way up on the hillside somewheres. This one of the guys you pulled in for questioning in the Voss rape?"

"Yep," Sheriff Cain said.

"Where was the girl's father last night?"

"He says he was at home," Sheriff Cain said.

"You believe him?"

"I haven't decided," Sheriff Cain said.

"J.T., you quit running these morons into my jurisdiction," the Mineral County sheriff said.

"You folks got a lot more room over here," Sheriff Cain said.

The Mineral County sheriff lit a pipe and smoked it out on the road while the paramedics loaded the body into an ambulance. I was beginning to look at Sheriff Cain in a new light.

"Why'd you introduce me as an ex-Ranger and not as Doc Voss's attorney?" I asked.

"I felt like it. What do you think Stoltz got hit with?" he said.

"Something big. Probably with a jacket on it."

"A.44 Magnum?"

"Maybe."

"Dr. Voss has got one registered in his name."

"There're.44 Magnums all over this state." And in my mind's eye, I saw the heavy, chrome-plated revolver that Cleo Lonnigan had used to threaten Nicki Molinari at her house. "You really figure Doc for this?"

The sheriff squinted at the sun breaking over the top of the hollow and chewed on the end of a toothpick until it was flat.

"Whoever killed Stoltz just wanted him dead. The person who killed Lamar Ellison wanted him to suffer first. I think we got two different perpetrators," the sheriff said.

"I think you're an intelligent man."

"Your friend ain't off the hook. Come on, let's eat breakfast. I been up since four. I got to find me another job. This morning my old woman told me I'm the reason our grandkids are ugly," he said.

"Doc didn't kill Ellison, Sheriff."

"How do you know?"

"He would have made Ellison fight for his life. Then he would have cut him from his scrotum to his throat."

"That'll make a fine defense, won't it?" he replied.

Friday evening Lucas walked up from his tent on the river and took a shower in Doc's house and was combing his hair in the mirror when I inadvertently opened the bathroom door on him. His cheeks glowed with a fresh shave and his back was white and cuffed with sunburn around the neck.

"Where you headed, slick?" I asked.

"To see Merle Haggard. He's playing at a place called the Mule Palace. You ever been there?" His words were hurried, as though he wanted to distract me from an impending question.

"No, I've never been there. Who you going with?"

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine."

"Tell me, bud, did you come all the way up here to see how much grief you could get into?"

"Since you're already pissed off at me, can I share something else with you?"

"What might that be?" I said.

"I need to borrow your truck," he replied.

Ten minutes later I watched him shine his boots on the porch and slip them on his feet and walk back down to the tent and put on a long-sleeve white cowboy shirt embroidered with roses and his wide-brim cream-colored straw hat, with a scarlet cord around the crown, and climb into my truck and start the engine.

But before he could get out of the yard I waved my hand to stop him. He wore mirrored sunglasses, and I could see my reflection bending down toward him, distorted, a bit comical, the constant deliverer of rhetoric that was meant to compensate for my years of absence as a father.

He waited for me to speak. When I didn't, he said, "What was you gonna say?"

"Nothing. Y'all have a good time."

"Say, you couldn't let me have a ten-spot till I cash a check, could you? Tickets are twenty-five dollars," he said.

I ate supper with Doc and Maisey, then took a walk along the river and threw pinecones into the current and watched them float downstream into the shade. I saw L.Q. Navarro sitting in the fork of a cottonwood tree.

"Quit picking on that Indian gal," he said.

"She keeps company with people you wouldn't spit on, L.Q. Don't lecture at me."

"You got a way of getting upset when that boy takes up with minority people."

"That's a dadburn lie."

"Then leave him alone."

"All right, I will. Just stop pestering me."

"Where you goin?" L.Q. said.

"None of your business."

I walked back to the house and called Temple Carrol at her motel in Missoula. "You like Merle Haggard?" I asked.

Temple picked me up at Doc's and we drove back down the Blackfoot highway toward Missoula. The sun was still above the mountains in the west, but the bottom of the canyon was already in shadow. When the wind gusted, the leaves of the cottonwoods and aspens along the riverbank flickered like paper against the copperish-green tint of the current.

"Your hot water bottle occupied tonight?" Temple said.

"Pardon?"

"Your girlfriend, the one who works at the clinic on the Reservation."

"I haven't seen her."

"A friend ran her name through NCIC. He got a hit."

"Cleo?"

"Her ex-husband was Mobbed-up with a gangster named Molinari on the West Coast."

"I know all about it," I said.

"Good," she said, and didn't speak again until we reached the top of the long, timber-lined grade that fed into the Jocko Valley.

The concert was being held outdoors on the edge of the Flathead Indian Reservation. The sun had just gone down behind the mountains, and the hills were plum-colored and the floor of the valley a dark green under a light-filled sky that gave you vertigo when you looked directly up into it. The air was heavy with the cool smell of water in irrigation ditches and the pine trees that were in shadow on the hillsides and the faintly acidic warm odor of mules and horses penned outside the viewing stands. To one side of the stage, concessionaires were grilling sausages and hamburgers on open pits and selling beer and soda pop out of galvanized horse tanks swimming with crushed ice. Merle Haggard had just walked out on the stage with his band, and the crowd on the cement dance slab was shouting, "Hag! Hag! Hag!"

Temple and I sat midway up in the stands. Her cheeks were as red as a doll's, her mouth like a small purple flower, her face glowing with the perfection of the evening. But it was obvious her thoughts were far away.

"I came up to Montana because Doc asked me to. But maybe I should head back to Deaf Smith," she said.

"I need you here, Temple," I said, my eyes looking straight ahead.

"I'm not convinced Doc's an innocent man," she said.

"Guilty or innocent, we still defend him."

"Let me put it another way. You've got a girlfriend with Mob connections. She also has an obsession about this biker gang, the Berdoo Jesters."

"The sheriff told you this?"

"Don't worry about who told me. If you want me to work with you, you'd better haul your head out of your ass."

A drunk cowboy in front of us heard the last statement and turned around and grinned.

"How about saving it till later?" I said to Temple.

"Fine," she replied, and sipped from her soda can, her throat streaked with color.

I touched her on the top of her hand in hopes she would look back at me. But she didn't.

The crowd out on the dance slab was hard-core working class: truck drivers, horse wranglers, waitresses, gypo loggers, Indian feed growers, bale buckers, 4-H kids, women who drank beer with one hand and smoked with the other while they bumped rumps, petty criminals scrolled with jailhouse art, barroom strippers dancing for their own gender with undisguised erotic joy, a group of fist-fighting drunks charter-bused from a saloon, and three Indians who kept squatting down below eye level to inhale huge mouthfuls of white smoke off a crack pipe.

Then I saw my son dancing with Sue Lynn Big Medicine, like kids from the early fifties. She wore a black cowboy hat and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off at the armpits and black jeans that were dusty in the rump. She danced close to Lucas without actually touching his body, her blond-streaked hair hanging to her shoulders, her chin lifted in the air. With each beat in the music she raised one booted foot behind her, her Roman profile opaque, the brim of his hat touching hers when he leaned over her, his shadow like a protective screen between her and the glare of the world.

"You going to talk to me at all?" I said to Temple.

She finished her soda and set the empty can between us. She seemed to concentrate on the stage. "Was Haggard really in the pen?" she said.

"Yeah, Quentin or Folsom."

"I don't think he's the only graduate here. Take a look at that bunch by the side of the stage," she said.

Three head-shaved, bare-chested young men, wearing laced, steel-toed boots and bleached jeans without belts, were drinking canned beer and watching the dancers from the edge of the cement slab. Their skin was jailhouse white, emblazoned with swastikas and red and black German crosses, their torsos plated and tapered with the muscle development of dedicated, on-the-yard bench pressers. Each wore a stubble mustache and goatee, so that his mouth looked like a dirty hole leering out of the whiteness of his face.

"Is that Carl Hinkel with them?" Temple said.

"That's the man. The George Lincoln Rockwell of the Bitterroot Valley."

Then two other men walked from the rest room area and joined them. One was a slender kid with glasses and a crooked smile on his mouth, an ever-present facial insult that allowed him to offend others without giving them sufficient provocation to tear him apart. His companion had large, wide-set teeth and virtually colorless eyes and wore a flowered green shirt with purple garters on the sleeves, a polished rodeo buckle against his corrugated stomach, and new, stiff jeans that were hitched tightly around his genitalia.

Temple was watching my face. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"That's Wyatt Dixon. I can't think of a worse time for that guy to show up."

Dixon had seen Lucas and Sue Lynn out on the dance slab. He put a cigar into his mouth and popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail and cupped the flame to the cigar in the shadow of his hat. He stood duck-footed, smoking, an amused light in his face, and watched Lucas and Sue Lynn dance. Then he walked out onto the slab, his shoulders pushing aside anyone who chanced to move into his path.

When, as a father, do you intervene in your son's life and perhaps steal his self-respect? I'd never had an answer to that question.

"I'll be back," I said to Temple, and walked down the wood stairs onto the cement slab.

Dixon stood inches from Lucas and Sue Lynn, his back to me, saying something I couldn't hear. But I saw the heat climb into Sue Lynn's face and the bewilderment in Lucas's.

"You want to talk to me, Mr. Dixon?" I said.

He screwed his head around, his cigar clenched in his teeth, his profiled right eye like a clear glass bubble.

"I declare, people from all walks of life has shown up here tonight. It ain't accident you and the boy favor, is it?" he said.

"How about I buy you a beer?" I said.

"No, thank you, sir. I aim to dance. Sue Lynn don't mind. She and me has bellied up before in what you might call private-type situations."

Lucas's hat was pushed back on his head and his hands hung awkwardly at his sides. There were red circles, like apples, in his cheeks.

"What's with you, man?" he said to Wyatt Dixon.

"I'm a great admirer of womanhood, son. I respect every part of their God-made bodies, and this 'un here done won my heart a long time ago. Now go over yonder and sit down and drink you a soda pop. Ask your daddy to tell you about my sister, Katie Jo Winset. Her fate was a great Texas tragedy."

Dixon reached out with two forked knuckles toward Lucas's nose, but Lucas stepped backward and slapped Dixon's hand away, disbelieving the insult to his person even as it took place. Dixon smiled and glanced toward the purple glow on the hills, breathing in the heavy fragrance of the evening, then lowered his hand between Lucas and Sue Lynn and fastened it on Lucas's scrotum. That's when Lucas hit him.

The blow knocked Dixon's hat off his head, but the grin never left his face.

"I still got your package in my hand, boy. You want, I can tear it out root and stem," he said.

I swung my fist into Dixon's ear but it was like hitting stone. He turned his head slowly toward me, his ear bleeding, his right hand tightening on my son's genitalia.

"I'm gonna come for you, Mr. Holland. You'll smell me in the dark, then you'll feel my hand fasten on you, and the next day you'll be somebody else," he said.

I swung my fist into his mouth and felt the edges of his teeth cut into my skin. Then his friends were upon me.

The fight rolled through the concession area. I can't describe what happened with any certitude, because since I had been a young boy anger had always affected me in the same way whiskey does a drunkard. I would hear whirring sounds in my ears, then I would be inside a dead zone filled with shards of red and yellow light, a place where I felt neither physical pain nor any form of moral restraint.

I remember being knocked into the side of a horse tank, of hearing hooves thudding inside the livestock pens, then picking up a shaved wooden pole, about four foot in length, and smashing it into the face of a man who had a swastika tattooed between his eyes. I kicked a man who was on the ground, hard, in the spleen, and again in the head. Women were screaming, an overweight rent-a-cop was flung into a water puddle, and I swung the wood pole like a baseball bat and saw blood fly against the canvas side of a tepee and saw the man I'd hit fall on his knees and weep.

But it was Wyatt Dixon I wanted. As in a dream, I flailed at my attackers, but the source of my rage stood on the edge of the fray and grinned, adjusting the garters on his sleeves, one ear leaking a scarlet line down his jawbone.

The rent-a-cop struggled to his feet from the water puddle, wheezing for breath, his uniform flecked with mud. The strap on his revolver had popped loose and the checkered handle protruded loosely from the holster, the heavy, brass-cased rounds fat and snug inside the cylinder.

I pushed someone out of the way and reached for the revolver. Then I heard horse's hooves and suddenly the side of an enormous buckskin mare knocked me senseless into a rick fence.

I stared up from the ground at the silhouette of the rider. He was huge, the backs of his hands traced with scar tissue, his face a mixture of pity and incomprehension.

"I ain't playing with you, son. I'll whip you with a blackjack if I have to," he said.

Then I felt the world come back into focus and saw Temple and Lucas bending down toward me, touching me with their hands.

"Why, how you doin', Sheriff?" I said to the man on horseback. "You like Merle Haggard?"