Bitterroot

Chapter 21

The sheriff sat with me in the waiting room at St. Patrick's Hospital. He watched me walk up and down.

"I'll bring Dixon in. You got my word on it," he said.

"Then what?" I said.

"She's never heard his voice before. I'll find a half dozen other peckerwoods and do a voice lineup."

"She marked him with the cigarette lighter. That should be enough."

"It's a start. Why don't you relax? You remind me of a lizard panting on top of a hot rock."

"You'd better get him off the street, Sheriff."

"I think your mama put you outdoors before the glue was dry, son. I really do," he replied.

A half hour later, after the sheriff had gone, Temple walked out of the emergency room. Her clothes were wrinkled and grimed with dirt, her hair in disarray.

"Give a girl a ride?" she said.

"You okay?"

"Sure," she said.

"Let me talk to the doctor first," I said.

She stepped close to me and leaned her forehead against my shoulder. I could smell the damp odor of earth and decayed leaves in her hair and clothes. "Take me home, Billy Bob," she said.

I opened the truck door for her and drove down Broadway toward her motel. The sky was blue, the snow melted from the trees now, the streets glistening and wet in the sunshine. It was a beautiful day, but Temple's eyes were disconnected from the world around her.

"Say it again. How did y'all find me?" she said.

"Somebody at the health club saw a man drive your Explorer away. I called the sheriff and he put an APB on it. A highway patrolman called in and said he'd seen a vehicle like yours headed west through Alberton Gorge. The sheriff got a helicopter and we took off."

"You could see the Explorer from the air?"

"Yeah, that's about it."

Her gaze was turned inward, as though she were adding up numerical sums.

"If they'd parked the Explorer in the trees, y'all would have flown right over me," she said.

"I guess we would have," I said.

She took a breath and pushed her hair back off her forehead.

"I don't think I'm going to sleep for a long time," she said.

I walked with her into her motel room, then left while she showered and changed. I drove down to a fast-food restaurant and ordered fried chicken and french-fried potatoes and a milk shake to go. When I returned to the motel, Temple opened the door on the night chain, her.38 hidden behind her leg.

"It's only me," I said, and tried to smile.

She slipped the chain and let me in and placed her revolver on a table by the door. She had put on makeup and a fresh pair of jeans and a blouse with flowers on it, but her eyes would not meet mine and her breath hung in her throat, as though the air were tainted and might injure her lungs.

"Don't you want to eat something?" I asked.

"Not now."

"Those tar mules down in Coahuila set a field on fire with me in the middle of it," I said. "I would have burned to death if L.Q. hadn't pulled me up on his horse. I still have nightmares about it. But that's all they are, nightmares."

She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked into space.

"Why did they give me the air hose? Why did they want to keep me alive?" she said.

"To make both of us suffer."

"I spit it out the first time. The second time I let him put it in my mouth. That bastard won, didn't he?" she said.

"No. They're cowards. Their kind never win," I said.

But my words were useless. She squeezed her temples and lowered her head, her eyes shut. I sat beside her and placed my arm around her and felt her shaking, as though an incurable coldness had invade her body.

I STAYED with Temple until she fell asleep, then covered her up and left a note to the effect that would return later in the day.

I drove west of town, through green pastureland and small horse ranches with new red barns am white fences, then up the dirt road that led to Terry Witherspoon's shack above the Clark Fork River. I parked in the clearing and banged on his door and looked in his windows, then walked around back.

A trash fire was burning in a rusty oil barrel. The thick curds of black smoke rolling from it were laced with an eye-watering stench. I found a rake in a tool-shed and kicked the barrel on its side and combed out the contents.

In the tangle of wire and cans and tinfoil he hadn't bothered to separate out from his ignitable trash were plastic bottles of motor oil, animal entrails and strips of fur, and a blackened roll of pipe tape.

I went back into the toolshed and hunted in the corners and under a molded canvas tarp and in a huge wood locker box full of tractor parts. Then I pushed over a stack of bald tires and found an Army surplus entrenching tool that had been propped inside, the blade still locked in the right-angle position of a hoe, the tip scratched a dull silver from fresh digging.

Just as I went outside I saw Witherspoon walk into the clearing, a wood rabbit with a bloody head hanging from his belt, a.22 bolt-action rifle over his shoulder. A bone-handled skinning knife in a scabbard was stuck down in his side pocket. For just a moment he looked like a nineteenth-century illustration in a Mark Twain novel.

"What do you think you're doing?" he asked.

"Tearing your place up. You couldn't bring yourself to get rid of the E-tool, could you? You're a mountain man. A mountain man needs all his equipment," I said.

"Stay away from me," he said. I slapped him across the face, so hard the light went out of his eyes and his glasses swung from one ear. He peeled his glasses off his head and stared at me in disbelief.

"Go ahead. Throw down on me," I said.

"You've got a gun in your belt."

"That's right," I said, and slapped him again. My handprint was bright red on his cheek and there was spittle on his chin. "Where's Wyatt?"

"I don't know. Why don't you go to his house instead of coming here?" he said, his eyes blinking in anticipation of being hit again.

"Because he's not going to be there. Because he's not as stupid as you are."

I ripped his rifle from his shoulder and whipped it by the barrel against a pine trunk. The stock snapped in half and spun crazily, like a splintered baseball bat, out into the trees.

Then I headed for Terry Witherspoon again.

"Wyatt's at a rodeo in Billings. Carl flies him to all his rodeos," he said hurriedly. Involuntarily his thumb hooked over the bone handle of his knife.

I hit him with my fist and knocked him on the ground. Then I knelt over him and knotted his shirt in one hand and pulled the.38 from my belt and gripped it by the barrel, the butt curved outward, like a hammer.

"Does it make you feel powerful to bury a woman alive, Terry?" I asked.

"I didn't do it," he replied.

"Do what? Say what you did not do. How do you know what I'm talking about?"

His words bound in his throat and his eyes looked at mine and filled with genuine terror.

"I didn't do whatever you're talking about. I been here. I don't have a car. I can't go anywhere."

I dropped the pistol to the ground and drove my fist into the center of his face, then released his shirt and clenched my hand on his throat, pinching off his air, and raised my right fist again.

On the edge of the clearing, his Stetson and striped black suit cut by a shaft of sunlight, I saw L.Q. Navarro looking at me, his gold toothpick between his teeth, his lips pursed as though he were witnessing a spectacle that offended moral paradigms he considered mandatory in his friends.

I pulled Terry Witherspoon to his feet and shoved him toward the woods and kicked him in the tail-bone.

"Get out of here," I said.

"I live here," he said, his breath hiccupping in his throat.

"That doesn't matter. Get out of my sight until I'm gone."

He backed away from me, hooking on his glasses crookedly, then turned and hurried into the forest, the dead rabbit coated with dust and blood, swinging stiffly against his thigh.

I drove back into Missoula and used a pay phone to call the sheriff at his office. There was no answer. I called the 911 dispatcher.

"It's Sunday. He's not in his office today," she said.

"Give me his home number."

"I can't do that."

"This is about an attempted homicide. I'll give you my number. I'll wait by the pay phone."

"Sir, you'd better not be jerking people around," she replied.

But she pulled it off. Five minutes later the pay phone rang.

"Go up to Terry Witherspoon's shack on the river. There's a roll of half-burned pipe tape by the trash barrel in back. Get there before he finishes destroying it and I bet it'll match the tape that was used to tie up Temple," I said.

"You tossed his place?" the sheriff said.

"No, I tossed Witherspoon."

"I think you just managed to blow it for everybody. It's Sunday. I have to get a hold of a judge and a search warrant."

"I need directions to Nicki Molinari's dude ranch," I said.

"You're about to start a second career, son. Convict cowboy over at Deer Lodge. The place is full of smart asses who got their own mind about everything. You'll fit right in," he replied.

BUT ACTUALLY I didn't need the sheriff's directions to find the Molinari ranch. Previously the sheriff had mentioned it was outside Stevensville, twenty-five miles down in the Bitterroots. On Monday, I drove to Stevensville and stopped at a barbershop in an old brick building on the main street and went inside. Two barbers were cutting hair while a third customer, an old man with his trousers tucked inside his boots, read a newspaper, his elbows on his knees, his face scowling with disapproval at the news of the day.

"Could you tell me where Nicki Molinari lives?" I asked.

Both the barbers turned their backs on me and went on snipping and combing hair as though they hadn't heard me. The customers in the barber chairs cut their eyes at me, then looked straight ahead.

But the old man had lowered his newspaper and was staring at me with the intensity of a hawk sighting in on a field mouse from a telephone line. His skin looked like it had been cured in a smokehouse, his clothes soaked in a bucket of starch and flat-ironed on his skinny frame. A cross was embroidered with gold thread on the pocket of his white snap-button shirt, and there were choleric blazes in his throat, as though heat were climbing out of his collar.

"You a pimp?" he asked.

"Sir?" I said.

"I asked if you're a procurer, one of them that brings women out to that greaser's ranch." His accent was Appalachian, West Virginia or perhaps Kentucky, a wood rasp being ground across a metal surface.

"No, sir. I'm an attorney."

"Is there a difference?" he said.

"Thanks for y'all's time," I said, and went back out on the street.

But the old man followed me out on the sidewalk. The Sapphire Mountains rose up behind him, their green slopes the texture of velvet, the crests strung with clouds.

"What's your business with that gangster?" he asked.

"As you imply, sir, it's my business."

"No, it ain't. He's my neighbor. I run a church. Now I got a shitpot of criminals and whores swimming naked in a pool within view of our services."

"I guess what I aim to do is mess up Nicki Molinari's day any way I can."

When he grinned he showed two teeth that stood up in his gums like slats.

"Drive straight toward the Sapphires. The China-Polish hogs are mine. The Cadillacs and the naked whores throwing beach balls on the lawn are his," he said.

The ranch owned by Nicki Molinari and his friends looked out of place, out of sync with itself, as though it had been designed and put together by someone who had toured the West and wasn't quite sure what he remembered about it.

The house was Santa Fe stucco, with shady arcades and tile walkways and big glazed urns spilling over with flowers. An antique freight wagon sat by the driveway, as though announcing a historical connection to the past. A half dozen horses, their backs rubbed with saddle sores the size of half dollars, stood listlessly in a lot that was nubbed down to the dirt, while rolled hay lay humped and yellow in the fields. A swimming pool the color and shape of a chemical green teardrop steamed in the cool air next to a new log barn that housed no animals or farm machinery but an enclosed batting cage with an automatic pitching machine inside.

I pulled into a gravel parking area on the side of the house. Molinari shut down the pitching machine and opened a door in the batting cage and came toward me, dressed only in tennis shoes and knee-length socks and cutoff sweatpants that were hitched tightly into his genitalia.

"Am I gonna have trouble here?" he said. "Call somebody if you feel uncomfortable," I replied.

"If I call anybody, it'll be for an ambulance. You're starting to be a nuisance."

"You bashed Cleo Lonnigan's carpenter. I got picked up for it. While I was in jail, a friend of mine was buried alive by Wyatt Dixon."

His eyes fixed on mine, as though reading significance in my words that only he understood. He scratched at a pimple on top of his shoulder.

"I'm sorry about the carpenter, but it's not on me. Cleo is sitting on money that don't belong to her. I told you, the people her husband stiffed give out motivational lessons nobody forgets. Her husband didn't learn that lesson, either, and it got him and his kid killed," he said.

He squeezed the pimple until it popped, then brushed at his skin.

"Save the shuck for your hired morons. My friend and I took your weight. That means if Wyatt Dixon comes around my friend again, I'm going to be out to see you," I said.

"Right," he said, and looked off into the breeze. His skin was olive-toned and looked cool and taut in the sunshine. "You want to hit some in the cage?"

"No."

"Don't go, man. What do you think of Xavier Girard as a writer?"

"Why?"

"Because he's writing my life story. Because I've told him stuff I don't tell everybody."

"What stuff?"

"You asked me once how I got out of Laos. I rode out on the skid of a helicopter. Except I pushed another guy off the skid. A GI. At five hundred feet." His eyes left mine, then came back and refocused on me again. His face seemed to energize, as though the answer to all his questions lay within inches of his grasp. "After you capped your friend, that other Texas Ranger, you saw a shrink?"

I wanted to simply walk away, to pretend I was above his inquisition and his criminal level of morality. He waited, his face expectant. A woman with dyed red hair came out of the house and got into a convertible with a bright white top and began blowing the horn at him.

"Shut up that damn noise!" he yelled at her, then turned back to me. "How'd you get that guy off your conscience?"

"I didn't. I never dealt with it. I feel sorry for you," I said.

"You never dealt-" he said, then stopped and pressed his fingers in the center of his forehead, his mouth open slightly, as though he were fingering a tumor or perhaps recognizing a brother-in-arms.

That same day Carl Hinkel drifted his single-engine plane on currents of warm air above the Bitterroot River and landed on a freshly mowed pasture at the rear of his ranch. As soon as Wyatt Dixon stepped from the passenger door, he was arrested by two sheriff's deputies. But before they could cuff him he peeled off his T-shirt and shook it loose from his hand like a stripteaser on a stage. The veins and tendons in his upper torso looked like the root system in a tree.

"Please notice I am burned from the neck all the way down one shoulder," he said, lifting a thick pad of grease-stained bandages from his skin. "I am placing myself at y'all's disposal, with hopes you will take me to a hospital. It is civil servants such as yourself a rodeo cowboy must turn to when he don't have enough sense not to drop a red-hot car muffler on his face."

He held his right hand in stiff salute against his eyebrow.

The voice lineup consisted of an escaped Arkansas convict who was being held in the county jail, a toothless cook at the transient shelter, a sheriff's deputy from Sweetwater, Texas, an insane street preacher who spent the day shouting at traffic in the middle of town, and a university speech therapist from Oklahoma whose voice sounded like wire being pulled through a hole in a tin can. Together, they represented a cross section of mushmouth and adenoidal Southern accents that would have probably caused Shakespeare to burn his texts and rewrite his plays in Cantonese.

But the lineup was not like one shown in television dramas. Neither the city police nor the sheriff's department had a stage, and the latter did not even have an interview room large enough to accommodate the six men who were to take part in the voice identification. So the sheriff recorded Wyatt Dixon and the five other men on cassettes and numbered each cassette one through six. Each man read the same statement into the microphone: "This world has done become a toilet."

Then Temple sat in the sheriff's office, a notepad on her knee, and listened to the cassettes, one at a time, while I sat behind her.

She was attentive, motionless, her head lowered slightly, while the sheriff played the first four. Then he put the fifth cassette into the machine and hit the play button. The voice was Wyatt Dixon's, but without dramatic emphasis, devoid of the manufactured and startled tone that characterized his speech. Temple raised her head, as though she were going to speak, then she motioned the sheriff to play the sixth tape.

"There ain't no hurry. You want me to play any of them again?" the sheriff asked.

"Number two and five," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

She listened again, then nodded, her lips crimping together.

"It's number two," she said.

The sheriff slapped the back of his head and blew out his breath.

"No?" she said.

"You just picked out my deputy," the sheriff said. He looked at me, his cheeks puffed with air.

"Don't say what I think you're fixing to," I said.

"I got to kick him loose. Terry Witherspoon got rid of the pipe tape you called me about. There are no latents in Ms. Carrol's vehicle. Three or four people over in Billings are willing to swear Dixon was at the rodeo when Ms. Carrol was abducted," he said.

"Which people in Billings?" I asked.

"A prostitute and Carl Hinkel and a couple of ex-convicts. He don't hang out with your regular civic club types."

"Talk to them about the consequences for perjury. Bring in Witherspoon. Put him in a cell full of Indians and blacks and lose his paperwork," I said.

"Come on, Ms. Carrol, I'll walk you to your car," the sheriff said, ignoring me.

"I can manage, thank you," she replied.

"Don't misinterpret the gesture. I'm just going across the street to buy my grandson a birthday present. Counselor, one way or another I'm gonna put Wyatt Dixon and this Witherspoon kid out of business. But in the meantime they'd better remain the healthiest pair of white trash in Missoula County. We clear on this?"

"Not really," I said.

He hooked on his glasses and studied the calendar on his desk.

"You got about three weeks before Dr. Voss goes to trial for Lamar Ellison's murder. Why don't you turn your attentions to your profession and quit pretending you're still a lawman?" he said.

"Don't you dare speak down to him like that. He was a Texas Ranger. In the old days he and his partner would have fed Wyatt Dixon into a hay baler," Temple said.

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.