Bitterroot

Chapter 14

My wrists were cuffed behind my back, and I was put in a holding cell at the county jail, where I stayed, without being booked, until early the next morning.

Sheriff Cain walked down the corridor behind a trusty who was wheeling a food cart from cell to cell. The sheriff picked up a Styrofoam container of scrambled eggs and tiny sausages and a cup of coffee and a cellophane-wrapped plastic fork from the tray and set them on the apron of the food slit.

"Them three skinheads you whacked with that pole are still in the hospital," he said.

"Gee, I'm sorry to hear that," I replied.

"I was gonna ride in the parade last night. I was really looking forward to it. Somebody should glue warning labels on you. You're a traveling shit storm."

"Do I get out of here?"

"You got a bloodlust, Mr. Holland. I seen it in your face."

"I don't apologize for it."

"Then I hope you can live with it, 'cause it'll plumb eat you up. A federal agent wants to talk with you. When he's done, I'll kick you loose," the sheriff said, and walked away heavily, like a man who knew his knowledge of the world would never have an influence upon it.

I sat down on the bench in the cell and drank from the Styrofoam coffee cup. Amos Rackley, the ATF agent who had told me he'd break my nose off if I put it in government business again, walked to the cell door and propped his arms across a horizontal iron plate, then removed them and dusted off his sleeves.

His face was smooth-grained and handsome, his sandy hair neatly parted. He took a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and kept clicking the button on top with his thumb.

"Can you explain to me what your son is doing with Sue Lynn Big Medicine?" he said.

"Dancing, the last time I saw her."

"You were an officer of the federal court. You know how our operations work. You know the danger that certain individuals are exposed to. Where's your judgment, man?"

I set the Styrofoam cup down on the bench and stood up. My khakis and leather jacket and boots were powdered with dust, my body sore and stiff all over from the fight at the concert.

"Y'all are still after the Oklahoma City bombers. You don't care about the rape of a teenage girl. You don't care about the assault on my son's person. You lost friends in the Murrah Building and I can understand the feelings you have now. So I don't want you to take it personally when I tell you to go play with your pencils and stay out of my life."

He bit his lip and looked down the corridor at nothing, then fixed his eyes on me again.

"You know what I wish, Mr. Holland? That I could forget who I was for just ten minutes and stomp the living shit out of you," he said.

Two NIGHTS LATER Doc was in Missoula, buying groceries, when an electric storm rolled up the Blackfoot canyon. Bolts of lightning crashed on the ridges above the house, bursting ponderosa trees into small fires that flared and died in the rain. Then the storm passed and the rain stopped and black clouds sealed the sky, flickering with lightning that gave no thunder. Just above the river, the mountainsides were hung with mist, the air sweet with smoke from wood-stove pine.

Bears had been in the garbage before sunrise that same day and had pushed against the windows with their paws, trying to slide the glass. Now a sow and two cubs came down out of the trees on the far side of the river and waded into the shallows and crossed the deepest part of the current by jumping from boulder to boulder until they lumbered belly-deep into the water on the near side and walked dripping up the bank past the garden.

Maisey went into the bathroom and undressed for her shower, then heard the garbage cans rattle. She rubbed the moisture off the window glass and looked out at the log barn and saw the bears ripping the bungee cords off the garbage can tops and pulling the vinyl bags out with their teeth. One of the cubs dug into a split bag and flung the garbage backward through his hindquarters.

She got into the shower and stayed under the hot water until her skin was red. When she toweled off, the window was clouded with steam and she thought she saw a bear's paw push and flatten against the glass. She wrapped the towel around her head and approached the window, leaned one way and then the other in order to see outside, then used her arm to wipe a swath through the moisture on the glass.

The face of a young man stared back at her. He wore glasses and his eyes traveled the length of her nakedness and his mouth formed a red oval as though he wanted to speak.

From the living room I heard her scream, then the sound of feet running outside. I pulled Doc's sporterized '03 Springfield from the gun rack and went out the front door and around the side of the house. Dry lightning jumped between the clouds and the valley floor turned white. I saw a slender man run past the barn, toward the river.

I slid a round into the chamber and locked down the bolt, wrapped the leather sling around my left arm, and put the Springfield to my shoulder. I aimed through the iron sights, leading the target just slightly, waiting for lightning to leap between the clouds again.

Maybe he had seen me, because he seemed to know that someone had locked down on him. He jumped a rock fence like a deer, then zigzagged across a field, glancing back once as though a round was about to nail him between the shoulder blades. When the clouds pulsed with lightning I saw the reflection on his glasses, his brown hair, his body that was as lithe and supple as a young girl's.

I swung the rifle's sights ahead of him and fired a single round that whined off a rock into the darkness.

The running figure disappeared into the trees.

Maisey came out on the porch in her robe, the towel still wrapped on her head.

"He was at the bathroom window. He was watching me take a shower," she said.

"Did you recognize him?" I asked.

"The glass was steamed over. I saw him for just a second."

"Maybe he just wandered in off the highway," I said, my eyes avoiding hers. I ejected the spent shell from the rifle and pressed down the rounds in the magazine with my thumb and slid the bolt over them so the chamber remained empty, then propped the rifle against the porch rail and traced the footprints of the voyeur from the bathroom window back to a rick fence he had climbed through by the barn.

A fuel can lay on its side by the bottom rail of the fence, leaking gas into the mud.

I called the sheriff's department. A half hour later a tall, overworked deputy with a black mustache walked with me out to the fence and looked down at the can and then at the house. His breath fogged in the dampness of the air.

"He didn't come here to borrow gas. The can's almost full. He was watching the girl through the window?" he said.

"Yes."

"It looks like he was going to torch your house and got distracted. I'd say you're lucky."

"I don't think the Voss family feels lucky, sir," I said.

"No offense meant. Some people around here would have shot him and drug his body through the door. Who do you think he was?"

"Y'all got a file on a kid from North Carolina by the name of Terry Witherspoon?"

Wednesday morning Doc answered the cordless phone in the kitchen, then handed it to me and walked out of the room.

"I'm trying to figure out what your idea of a relationship is. I'm sure the problem is mine," Cleo's voice said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Just for a minute, can't you lose that obtuse attitude?"

"I haven't called you? That's what we're talking about?"

"What do you think?" she asked.

"I figured I'd struck out."

"Maybe you decided you'd just find another chickie and cut a new notch on your gun."

"I don't think that's a real good thing to say, Cleo."

"Then maybe we need to have a serious talk."

"What do you call this?" I said.

"Come to the house."

"I have an appointment at the sheriff's office."

"Screw your appointment," she said.

"I'm going to hang up now. Good-bye, Cleo."

I eased the receiver down in the cradle, my skin tingling, as though I had just walked through a cobweb.

Doc WAs BOARDING an Appaloosa and a thoroughbred for a neighbor. I went outside and propped my forearms across the top rail of the rick fence that enclosed the horse lot and began to shave an apple with my pocketknife. The barn was made of ancient logs that were soft with decay. Through the open back doors I saw both horses walk out of the pasture, through the cool darkness of the barn, their hooves powdering dust in the air, sawing their heads as they approached the fence.

I quartered the apple and fed pieces to each of them with the flat of my hand. Inside the barn, his pinstripe suit and ash-gray Stetson slatted with sunlight, I saw L.Q. Navarro perched atop a stall, idly spinning the rowel on a Mexican spur.

"You're getting sucked in, bud," he said.

"With Cleo?"

"I'm talking about these skinheads and bikers. Doc was trying to shut down that gold mine. Now he's charged with murder and you're rolling in the dirt with a collection of tattooed pissants whose mothers was probably knocked up by a spittoon."

"I didn't have much selection about it, L.Q."

"That's what we told each other when we was blowing feathers off them Mexican drug mules."

"Anything else you want to tell me?"

He flicked the rowel on the spur and lifted his eyes.

"I'd sure like a couple of ice-cold Carta Blancas," he said.

I WENT BACK up on the front porch, where Doc was trying to tie a blood knot in a tapered leader. But it was obvious he could not concentrate on the task at hand. He squinted at the tippets, missed threading a nylon tip through a loop, then gave it up and dropped the leader on top of a cloth creel by his foot.

"Can you show me all the information you have on that mining company?" I said.

"What for?"

"They have a vested interest in seeing you jammed up."

"I remodeled Lamar Ellison's face in that bar. I got my daughter raped. I thought I was through with free-fire zones. Instead, I carried one back from Vietnam."

"Don't put this on yourself, Doc."

"That stuff you want is out in the barn. You can burn it when you're finished," he said.

I spent the next two hours rooting through the cardboard boxes that Doc had stuffed with news clippings and documents on extractive industries in Montana. File folders filled with aerial photographs showed miles of clear-cuts and once-virgin wilderness areas that had been turned into stump farms or chemical soup. Networks of creeks that fed the upper Blackfoot River looked like gangrene in living tissue. The cumulative damage wasn't just bad. It numbed the mind.

The corporation name that recurred again and again was Phillips-Carruthers, old-time union busters whose goons had once loaded Wobblies onto cattle cars and transported them in 115-degree heat into the Arizona-New Mexico desert and left then locked inside without water for two days. Those who didn't die or end up in Yuma Territorial Prison as syndicalists thought twice about trying to shut down a Phillips-Carruthers mine again.

How far would a bunch like this be willing to go in order to get Doc off the board?

I heard the tinkling sound of roweled spurs on the plank floor of the barn and looked up and saw L.Q. Navarro peering over my shoulder.

"There's a story in there about Woody Guthrie and his buds going up against that company in 1947," he said.

"These are the guys we love to hate. It's too easy, L.Q.," I said.

"John D.'s hired thugs killed my grandmother at the Ludlow Massacre in 1914. Wasn't no mystery to it," he said.

"The bad guys are a lot slicker today," I said.

"They ain't no slicker, son. The good guys are just dumber."

I started to smile at his joke, but then looked at his face. He was staring out the back of the barn at the thoroughbred and Appaloosa in the pasture, an unrelieved glint of sadness in his eyes. The horses were grazing next to a ribbon-like stream that wound through Indian paintbrush and harebells, tearing at the grass, their tails switching across their rumps.

"What are you studying on?" I asked.

He shook the moment out of his face.

"Remember when we chased that bunch of coke mules across the sand flats? We painted red flowers all over those stovepipe cactus. We took a rum flask out of a dead man's pocket and had a drink and poured the rest on his face. You miss it sometimes?" he said.

"No," I replied.

L.Q. pulled his Stetson down over his brow and turned away from me to hide the gentle reproach in his eyes. When I looked at him again he had gone.

I don't miss it. I know I don't, I said to myself as I walked back toward the house, like the alcoholic on his way to the saloon, denying the nature of his own insatiable desires.

"Talking to yourself?" a voice said from the porch.

"Oh, hi, Maisey, I didn't see you there," I said.

"No kidding?" she said. She wore makeup and khakis and sandals and a low-cut embroidered white peasant blouse and looked older than her years. She picked up an oversize can of beer that was wrapped in a paper bag. She salted the top and drank from it.

"Where's your old man?" I asked.

"In town."

"Early in the morning for a cold one, isn't it?"

"Billy Bob?"

"Yes?"

"Mind your own business. By the way, Lucas said to tell you he was going down to the Milltown Bar with Sue Lynn Big Medicine to see about a job in the band. You want a beer?"

The Milltown Bar was a legendary clapboard blue-collar anachronism squeezed between river shacks and railroad tracks and a sawmill at the southern tip of the Blackfoot Valley.

Lucas had no trouble getting a four-night-a-week slot in the house band. Besides guitar, he could sing and play banjo, mandolin, fiddle, Dobro, and stand-up bass. Also, he didn't bother to ask the bar owner how much he would be paid.

It should have been a fine morning for Lucas. It wasn't. This was the first time he'd seen Sue Lynn Big Medicine since the fight at the dance up in the Jocko. But she didn't act the same anymore. She seemed disconnected, her gaze lingering on his only momentarily, like somehow the fact she was two years older had suddenly become important.

Outside the bar, while he fitted his guitar case into the backseat of her car, he said, "Something wrong, Sue Lynn?"

"Not in a way you can do anything about," she replied.

"I see. There's a problem, but I'm too young or dumb to understand it?"

"Your father doesn't want me around you. He's probably right."

"That's just Billy Bob. You watch. He'll be taking us out to dinner."

But he might as well have been talking to the wind. She started the car, and they drove along the highway, past the sawmill, through the willow-lined streets of Bonner. The car had no windshield and Sue Lynn's hair kept whipping in her face.

He looked at her Roman profile, the coffee-and-milk color of her skin, a threadlike white scar on her cheek, the soft purple hue of her mouth. He wanted to touch her, but her silence and the roar of the gutted muffler against the asphalt fed his irritation and ineptitude.

"Why do you drive a junker like this, anyway?" Lucas said.

"Because I live in a junkyard. Because the government tells me what I have to do. Because I don't have choices about my life," she said.

Her hands had tightened on the wheel. When she looked over at him her eyes were blazing.

"Pull over," he said.

"No!"

"Stop acting like you got to talk in code. It's a real drag, Sue Lynn," he said, and grabbed the wheel so that the car drove across the opposite lane onto a flat turnaround above a sandy beach that flanged the Blackfoot River.

"I made a mistake. I shouldn't have gone to the dance with you. Wyatt Dixon and Carl Hinkel and their friends are animals. They'll tear you in pieces," she said.

"Back home their kind are a dime a tote sack." "You're just a boy. You don't know what you're talking about."

She got out of the car. He thought she was going to kick the door, but instead she stared silently at the river, the wind blowing her hair in her face, a look of regret in her eyes that he couldn't explain.

"I'm sorry for getting mad. I like you a lot, Sue Lynn. But I ain't no kid and you got to stop talking to me like I am one," he said.

"I'm not who you think I am, Lucas. I'm not a good person," she said.

She walked down a footpath to the beach. Five college boys in swim trunks were sitting in the shadow of a huge egg-shaped rock, drinking beer and sailing a red Frisbee out on the river for a mongrel dog to retrieve. Each time the dog brought back the Frisbee, one of the boys would give it a piece of hamburger bun.

Lucas caught up with Sue Lynn by the water's edge. The Frisbee sailed like a dinner plate past her head and landed far out in the current. The dog splashed into the water and swam after it. Its back was lesioned with mange, its ribs etched against its sides.

"What gives you the right to be saying you're no good? That's like telling folks who believe in you they're stupid," Lucas said.

"I'm going to drive you back home now," she said.

"Billy Bob give me two tickets to the Joan Baez concert at the university," he lied.

"I'm glad I met you, Lucas, but I'm not going to see you again."

"That's a rotten damn way to be," he replied.

"One day it'll make sense to you."

"Right," he said.

The dog had just returned the Frisbee to one of the college boys and was trying to nose a piece of bread out of the sand. The dog was trembling with exhaustion, the wet hair on its hindquarters exposing the emaciated thinness of its legs. The college boy flung the Frisbee through the air again. It plopped on top of the riffle and floated downstream.

"Just a minute," Lucas said to Sue Lynn.

He waded into the river and picked up the Frisbee and walked to the shade of the rock, where the college boys were sitting on blankets with an ice chest set among them. They were suntanned and hard-muscled, innocently secure in the knowledge that membership in a group of people such as themselves meant that age and mortality would never hold sway in their lives.

"This dog's wore out. If you want to feed him, why not just do it? Don't make him drown hisself to get a little food," Lucas said.

One of the boys propped himself up on his elbow and squinted into the sun with one eye.

"You think that up all by yourself?" he asked.

"It's five of y'all, one of me. I know what you can do. But don't torment a dumb animal," Lucas said.

One of the other boys removed his sunglasses and started to his feet, sand sifting off of his body. But the boy who was propped on one elbow put a hand on his friend's arm.

"You got a point. Why don't you feed him?" he said, and tossed a sack of lunch trash to Lucas.

Lucas started up the trail, then knelt and gave the dog a half-eaten weenie.

"Hey, buddy, what's your name?" the college boy yelled after him.

"Lucas Smothers."

"How about throwing our Frisbee back, Lucas Smothers?"

Lucas sailed it through the air, then picked up the dog under the stomach and put it into the backseat of Sue Lynn's car.

Sue Lynn had watched it all without saying a word. Now she was staring at him with a strange light in her face, pushing her hair out of her eyes, tilting her chin up as though she were having a conversation with herself.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"I'd better get home. Billy Bob gets in trouble if I ain't around."

"You want to drive?" she asked.

"I don't mind."

They headed up the highway, following the Blackfoot, through timbered canyons and meadow-land, through sunlight and shady areas where spring-water leaked across the asphalt. The dog was already sound asleep on the backseat. Sue Lynn moved closer to Lucas and took his right hand off the steering wheel and held it in hers.

When he looked over at her, her gaze was focused straight ahead, her eyes sleepy with thoughts he couldn't fathom.

Tell me women ain't a puzzle, he thought.