Bitterroot

Chapter 15

The next day I drove to a Catholic church in Missoula's university district. The chapel area was empty, the confessional booths stacked with furniture. A secretary in the pastor's office told me I could find the pastor at his home down the street. I walked a block under maple trees to a tan stucco house with a neat yard and tulip beds and saw a tall man in an undershirt and black trousers up on the roof.

"Can I help you?" he said, peering down through an overhang of maple leaves.

"I'd like to go to Reconciliation," I replied.

"You have a problem with heights?"

I climbed the ladder and joined him in a flat, sunless place where he had hung his tool bag on the chimney and was eating his lunch. The blueness of the sky overhead looked like a river through a gap in the canopy of the maple trees, as though the earth were turned upside down and we were viewing a riparian landscape from high above.

The priest's name was Hogan and he offered me a sandwich from his lunch sack. He talked politely for a moment, then realized the origin of my awkwardness with the ritual that Catholics today call Reconciliation.

"You're not a cradle Catholic?" he asked.

"I was baptized by immersion in a fundamentalist church when I was a child. I became a convert after the loss of a friend."

"You want to tell me what's bothering you?"

"I went to bed with a woman. It was a self-serving act, impulsive and badly thought out," I said.

"I'm getting the sense things didn't turn out as you planned."

"That's an understatement, sir."

"I'm not quite sure what we're owning up to here. You mean you acted lustfully or you feel you've used somebody, or you simply regret getting involved with the wrong person?"

"How about all of the above?"

"I see."

"I've done this previously. For reasons that mask a more grave sin in my past."

"I'm not sure I follow," he said.

In the silence I could hear the maple branches sweeping against the roof.

"I accidentally shot and killed my best friend. I did this while we were killing other men. His death is with me morning and night. His specter never leaves me," I said.

The face of the priest remained impassive, but he lowered his eyes so I could not see the sadness in them.

"Is there anything else you want to tell me?" he asked.

"No, sir."

He placed one hand on my shoulder. "You all right, partner?" he said.

"Right as rain," I said, hoping he would not hold my lie against me.

That afternoon a waxed black car drove through the field behind Doc's house and parked in front, the sunlight wobbling like a yellow flame on the tinted windows.

Amos Rackley, the ATF agent, got out of the passenger seat and knocked on the door with his fist, rattling a picture on the wall. He wore shades and a dark suit that seemed to contain and intensify the heat and energy in his body. His gum snapped in his mouth and his jawbone was slick with perspiration.

When I opened the door, he said, "It must be the genes."

"What?"

"Your family. Like a stopped-up commode that keeps overflowing on the floor. First I have trouble with you. Now your kid."

"What are you talking about?"

"We sent somebody to ring the doorbell at a certain Indian gal's house. Guess who answers the door?"

"Lucas?"

"Not wearing shirt or shoes. With long red scratches on his back. I'm surprised he took time to zip his fly."

"You guys should have had jobs at Salem in 1692. You would have fit right in," I said.

"You listen, you arrogant prick…"

But he was so angry he couldn't talk. He took the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on a post and opened a folder full of eight-by-ten photographs. They showed blood-streaked people being lifted from rubble, a woman crying with a dead child in her arms, a white police officer giving mouth-to-mouth to a black man on a stretcher.

"That's the Alfred P. Murrah Building, motherfucker," he said. "I'm betting my career this shit goes back to Hayden Lake, Idaho. But you and now your son have decided to factor yourself in, either because you've got cooze on the brain or you just can't stand to let things alone. So why don't we just walk out in the woods here, you and me, and see what develops? I can't tell you how much I'd enjoy that."

I stepped out on the porch. The day was bright, the wind cold on my face in the shade.

"My son has nothing to do with your investigation. His interest in Sue Lynn Big Medicine is romantic. You were that age once. Why don't you show a little empathy?" I said.

"That's a great word coming from a disgraced Ranger who killed his own partner. I changed my mind about you, Mr. Holland. I wouldn't dirty my hands fighting a man like you. You turn my stomach."

When he drove away I could feel my eyes filming, the ridgeline and ponderosa and cliffs distorting into green and yellow shapes. I wanted to turn and see L.Q. standing by the barn or down in the shade of the cottonwoods by the river or perched atop a rail by the horse lot.

"L.Q.?" I said.

But there was no reply except the wind in the trees.

Toward evening Maisey and I saddled the Appaloosa and thoroughbred that Doc boarded for his neighbors and rode them up a switchback logging road in the hills behind the house. In the distance we could see old clear-cuts and burned stumps along the sides of the Rattlesnake Mountains.

"I overheard what that Treasury agent said to you this morning, Billy Bob. Why'd you let him get away with that?" she said.

"He lost his friends in Oklahoma City. He can't do anything about it, so he takes his grief out on others. That's the way it is sometimes."

"My father says under it all you're a violent man."

"I have been. That doesn't mean I am today."

"The sheriff called this morning. He wants to talk to my father again."

"What for?"

"The third man who raped me is dead. I'm glad. I hope he suffered when he died," she said. Her face was narrow with anger, her mouth pinched with an unrelieved bitterness.

"Maisey, I can't argue with your feelings, but-"

"Don't say anything, Billy Bob. Just please don't say anything."

She turned her horse away from me and rode into the shade, then dismounted and began picking huckleberries and putting them into her hat, even though they were green and much too sour to eat.

Down below I saw the sheriff's cruiser pull into the yard.

I rode the thoroughbred down the hill and took off my hat and looked at the greenness of the country and grinned at the sheriff and waited for him to explain the cloud in his face.

"I don't care to look up at a man on horseback," he said.

I got down from the saddle and hung my hat on the pommel and tied the reins to the porch railing. I let my hand trail off the thoroughbred's rump, my eyes fixed on the sheriff's.

"Where was the good doctor yesterday afternoon?" he said.

"I don't know. Ask him," I replied.

"I would. If I could find him." The sheriff stood by the open door of his vehicle, his face cut by light and shadow, the wind flapping his coat. "The third suspect in Miss Voss's rape was pulled out of a river two days ago in Idaho. He had chest waders on and was submerged standing up in the bottom of a pool like a man with concrete boots on."

"Sounds like an accident to me," I said.

"Except he wasn't carrying no fishing gear, never owned a fishing license, and was never known to fish. Also, most sane people don't wear chest waders in July."

"Well, we'll all try to feel as bad as possible about his passing, Sheriff."

"I love to hear you talk, Mr. Holland. Every time you open your mouth I'm convinced this is indeed a great country, that absolutely any little dimwit can become an attorney. Tell Dr. Voss to call me before I come out here and put him in handcuffs."

I watched his cruiser drive across the field behind the house, then disappear down the dirt road. A half hour later my head was still pounding with his remarks. I called him at his office.

"Did you bother to check out this kid Terry Witherspoon?" I asked.

"The voyeur? Yeah, I did. He says he never looked in Maisey Voss's window and was never on her property."

"What did you expect him to say? Did you lift any prints off that gas can?"

"Lab work on peeping Tom complaints? Yeah, we got time for that. When we ain't busting up crack labs and trying to keep them goddamn Crips out of here."

"I really don't like being your straight man, Sheriff."

"Son, you were born for it. Lord God, I wish you people would move to Los Angeles," he said, and hung up.

Temple Carrol picked me up at Doc's house the next morning, and we drove into Missoula for breakfast. She wore khakis and scuffed boots and a yellow pullover, and because of her short height she steered with her chin tilted slightly upward. She was one of those women whose contradictions made both her admirers and her adversaries misjudge her potential.

Her eyes were a milky green that changed color when she was angry, as though dark smoke swam inside them, and she had a distracting habit of chewing gum or piling her hair on top of her head while I talked to her, as though she were not listening. Then I would discover days later she could repeat a conversation back to me, word for word, and accurately correct my own memory of it.

She kick-boxed on a heavy bag every day at a gym in Deaf Smith and could touch the floor with the flats of her hands. She was often dirty from work in her garden, the seat of her shorts grass-stained, her hair full of leaves, her body glowing with sweat and the smell of crushed flowers. She cared nothing for other people's opinions, thought politics were foolish, kept guns all over her house, and fed every stray animal on the west side of the county. Anyone who mistook her eccentricities for weakness and crossed a line with her did so only once.

As I looked at the pinkness of her skin, the baby fat on her arms, the way a strand of her chestnut hair kept blowing in her eye, I wanted to touch her, to place the back of my hand on the heat of her cheek, to rest my arm across her shoulders. As she drove along the river, through the blueness of the morning, her profile and the angle of her mouth contained all the innocence and loveliness of a high school girl waiting to be kissed, and I felt ashamed of my own impulses and all the times I had been cavalier about her loyalty and friendship.

But try as I might, I always did or said the wrong thing with Temple Carrol.

"You have a reason for staring at me?" she said.

"Sorry," I said.

"I get the feeling you're in a confessional mood about something," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"I was jogging by the campus yesterday. I happened to see you on the roof of a house with another man."

"Really?" I said.

"The postman told me that's the home of a Catholic priest. Are we using the clergy again to rinse out our latest affair?"

"How about some slack, Temple?"

"I'd like to break your damn neck," she replied, and gave me a look. "I interviewed your Dr. Pisspot yesterday. You can really pick them."

"You did what?"

"I went out to Cleo Lonnigan's house. God's gift to the Red Man. She seems to think she glows with blue fire."

"You shouldn't have done that."

"She thinks those bikers killed her child. That makes her a viable murder suspect. By the way, I wouldn't waste my energies being protective of her. She seems to put you on a level with the Antichrist."

"I shouldn't have gotten involved with her. It was my fault. She's not a bad person."

"I don't think you're chivalric, Billy Bob. You're just real dumb sometimes," she said. When she looked at me the milky green color of her eyes had darkened but not with anger. The depth of injury in them, like a stone bruise down in the soul, made me swallow with shame.

ve minutes after I returned to Doc's the phone rang in the living room.

"Hello?" I said.

"Where have you been?" Cleo Lonnigan's voice said.

"Out."

"Then why don't you get a message machine?" she asked.

"Because it's not my home."

"Did you send that nasty little bitch up to my ranch?" she said.

"What did you say?"

"Ms. Carrol. Is she house-trained?"

"You keep your mouth off her, Cleo."

"Do you think you can take a woman to bed and then just say, 'Drop dead, I'm busy color-matching my socks right now'?"

"Good-bye, Cleo. You're an amazing woman. I hope I never see you again," I said, and gently hung up the phone.

I went outside so I would not have to hear the phone ring when she called back.

I WALKED through the cottonwoods and aspens on the riverbank. The river was in shadow under the canopy, but the sun had risen above the ridge and the boulders in the center of the current were steaming in the light. I saw L.Q. Navarro squatting down on his haunches in the shallows, scraping a hellgrammite off the bottom of a rock with the blade of his pocketknife. The bottoms of his suit pants were dark with water, his teeth white with his grin. He threaded the hellgrammite onto a hook that hung from a fishing pole carved out of a willow branch.

"The last couple of days been bard on your pride?"

"You might say that."

"Next time that ATF agent smarts off, you bust his jaw. I never could abide them federal types."

"What am I going to do with Cleo Lonnigan?"

"Get out of town?"

"That's not funny."

"It wasn't meant to be."

Then his attention wandered, as it often did when I imposed all my daily concerns upon him. His hellgrammite had slipped off the hook in the current, and he waded deeper into the water, into the shade, and lifted up a heavy rock from the bed and set it down on top of a boulder and scraped another hellgrammite from the moss-slick underside.

"Hand me my pole, will you, bud?" he said.

I picked up the willow branch he had shaved clean of leaves and notched at one end for his line and walked into the stream with it. The current, filled with snowmelt, climbed over my knees and struck my genitals like a hammer. The sunlight had gone and the tunnel of trees suddenly seemed as cold as the grave.

I realized L.Q. was looking beyond me, at someone on the bank. Then L.Q. was gone and in his place a huge hatch of pink and dark-winged salmon flies churned over the current.

"You always get in the water with your clothes on, Mr. Holland? Hand me your stick and I'll pull you out," Nicki Molinari said from the bank, his cigarette smoke leaking like a piece of cotton from his mouth.