Bitterroot

Chapter 25

Kingdoms are lost for want of a nail in a horse's shoe. I think perhaps lives unravel in the same fashion, sometimes over events as slight as an insult to the pride of a misanthropic young man from North Carolina who thought he was going to be a mountain man.

Lucas was playing that afternoon with a band at a bluegrass festival outside of Hamilton. The bandstand had been knocked together with green lumber at the bottom of a long slope that tapered upward into the shadows of the mountains, and thousands of people sat on folding chairs and blankets in the sunshine, while the electronically amplified songs of Appalachia echoed through the canyons of the Bitterroot Valley.

Doc, Maisey, Temple, and I spread a blanket in the grass, not far from a group of college kids who were red-faced with beer and agitated by a situation of some kind near the concession area.

"Somebody should rip it down. It doesn't belong here. This is Montana," a girl was saying.

"Ignore them. They're a bunch of losers," a boy said.

"There's a black man working at the hot-dog stand. How would you feel if you were a black man and somebody stuck that in your face?" the girl said.

"What's going on with the college kids?" Temple said.

"You got me," I said.

I looked past the crowd at a white camper with a tarp extended from the roof and supported on poles to shade the people who sat under it. On one side of the tarp was a staff that flew the American flag; on the other side, flapping like a red-and-blue martial challenge out of the past, was the battle flag of the Confederacy.

"I'm going to the concession stand. Y'all want anything?" Maisey said.

"Yeah," Doc said, and gave her a twenty-dollar bill.

"Like what do you want?" Maisey asked.

"Whatever you like. Just make sure everything is free of cholesterol and preservatives and none of it is made by Third World child labor and the vendors have sound political attitudes," Doc said.

Maisey made one of her faces to show her tolerance of her father's immaturity and walked off into the crowd, just as Lucas's band came on stage and went into Bill Monroe's "Molly and Tenbrooks."

The sunlight was warm on Maisey's skin as she stood in line, the wind balmy in her face, the timbered slopes of the mountains rising almost straight up into snow that still had not melted with summer. The fields were iridescent with the spray from irrigation wheel lines, and up the incline the aspens and cottonwoods along the drainages rippled in the shadows of the mountains that towered over them.

Then she felt a presence behind her before she saw it, and smelled an odor like a combination of hair tonic and chewing gum and layered deodorant, as though the person emanating it thought a manufactured scent was a form of physical sophistication. "Bet I scared you," Terry Witherspoon said. He wore a white T-shirt and black jeans and engineering boots and a skinning knife on his belt. He grinned at the corner of his mouth and pitched his head to get a strand of hair out of his glasses.

She turned away from him and moved up with the line, her eyes fastening on a jolly fat man frying burgers inside the concession stand.

"Did you get my note?" Terry asked.

"No," she said, hurriedly, then felt her cheeks burn with her lie. She turned and faced him. "I did get it. Please don't leave any more."

"I went way out on a limb for you. You shouldn't talk to me like that."

"Leave me alone," she said, her teeth gritted, her eyes shining with embarrassment at the stares she was now receiving.

He didn't answer. A long moment passed and she thought perhaps Terry had gone away. But when she turned around he was looking down into her face, crinkling his nose under his glasses, his arms hanging straight down, as though he didn't know what else to do with them, one hand locked on his wrist.

"I'll pay for the burgers. Let's walk up the canyon and eat them. There're grouse in the pines. I've got a hand line we can fish with," he said.

But before she could reply she saw her father coming toward the concession stand, pushing his ash-blond hair back over his head, his gait longer than it should have been, his shoulders slightly stooped. Perhaps for the first time she saw the complex man who would never be at home in the world, a Mennonite farm boy who went to war as a healer and became a killer in the Phoenix Program, a recovered intravenous addict who published poems and whose soft voice belied the potential that burned just below his skin, a father who mourned his wife and loved his daughter and brooked no intrusion into the life of his family.

Doc's right hand bit into Terry Witherspoon's arm, squeezing the muscle into the bone.

"You're the boy who left that note?" he said.

"I might have. Take your hand off-" Witherspoon said.

"Don't find any reason to get near me or Maisey, son. Now, you get back over there with your friends. While you're at it, you tell them those are grand flags on their camper and sonsofbitches like them don't have any right to fly them."

"I don't have to do anything you tell me, you old fuck."

Doc pulled Witherspoon out of the line and marched him by one arm through the crowd toward the camper. When Witherspoon tripped and fell, Doc knotted the back of his T-shirt in his fist and hauled him out of the dust and pushed him through the crowd like a rag doll.

In the shade of the tarp Carl Hinkel and Wyatt Dixon sat in canvas recliners, drinking canned beer, gazing benignly at the stage.

Behind them, Sue Lynn Big Medicine sat in the doorway of the camper, wearing shorts and a halter and no shoes, her face fatigued, her lipstick on crooked. Doc shoved Witherspoon into their midst. "Your man here got lost. Make sure he stays on a short tether," Doc said.

"Goodness gracious, sir, you behave like somebody just spit in your dinner plate. Sue Lynn, get Dr. Voss a cold drink. Terry wasn't rude to your daughter, was he? He got one sniff of her and ain't talked about nothing else," Wyatt Dixon said.

Wyatt Dixon turned his attention back to the stage, grinning at nothing, his body supine, one hand cupped on his scrotum, while Carl Hinkel puffed on his cob pipe as though the events taking place around him had nothing to do with his life.

I draped my arm around Doc's shoulders and walked him toward the concession stands. "Wrong place to take them on," I said. "If you're the voice of reason, Billy Bob, we're in trouble," he replied.

A half HOUR LATER Sue Lynn found Lucas behind the bandstand. He was kneeling on a blanket, replacing a broken treble string on his Martin, twisting the tuning peg until the string whined with tension.

"Where have you been? I went by your place three times today. Your uncle said you took his car and didn't tell him where you were going," he said, getting to his feet.

"I went back and got a few clothes. I'm staying at Wyatt's awhile," she replied.

"Wyatt's? Are you insane?"

"I have to, Lucas."

"Tell those government buttwipes to kiss your ass."

"Lower your voice."

"I mean it, Sue Lynn. Eighty-six this stuff. This is a free country."

"We can't be together again. You have to accept that."

He stared at her, then looked out at a deep, shadowed chasm that cut through the mountains.

"Don't tell me stuff like that. I'm not gonna listen," he said.

"I'm going to jail or I'm going to be killed. You want to be killed, too?"

"Come out to Doc's and talk to Billy Bob."

"Try to understand. I have to make a decision about something. It eats on me all the time. I might have to go away for a long time, for something you don't know about."

"Go away where?"

She gave up.

"Don't get around Wyatt," she said. "Dr. Voss just humiliated Terry in front of a bunch of college kids. Terry is Wyatt's punk. That means Wyatt has to hurt somebody so Terry can feel he's important again. That's the way they do things inside."

"Who cares what these guys do? They're scum… Stop backing away from me."

But she was running now, in her moccasins and halter and shorts that were dirty in the rump, and for some reason she made him think of a frightened doe bolting through a forest where the trees took no note of the wild beating of its heart.

Two hours later Lucas, Temple, Doc, Maisey and I loaded up in Temple's Explorer, drowsy on beer and from sitting in the sun, the encounter with Terry Witherspoon pushed out of our minds, the summer evening still blue and pink and filled with promise.

As we snaked our way out of the parking area, I looked through the haze of dust and saw Wyatt Dixon in front of the white camper, dancing with Sue Lynn slung over his shoulder like a side of beef. When she tried to raise her torso erect, he slapped her rump and danced faster and faster in a circle, his knees jerking upward like an Indian's while the Confederate flag flapped over his head.

Lucas was sitting next to me in the backseat. His eyes started to follow mine.

"Look at the eagles up on the hill," I said.

"Where?" he said.

"They're flying right above the trees, right across the canyon," I said.

He looked at the canyon, then out the rear window of the vehicle.

"Was something going on back there?" he asked.

"Nothing that we can change," I said.

The next day was Sunday. That afternoon Sue Lynn sat on top of a boulder behind Wyatt's log house and watched him and Terry smoke homegrown gage and flip a hatchet end over end into a cottonwood tree. Wyatt had said nothing to her about her relationship with Lucas, nor had he tried to put moves on her last night or this morning. In fact, he gave her a blanket and pillow and told her to sleep on the deerhide couch in his house and said he would sleep in the bedroom. When she woke in the morning, he fixed coffee and eggs for her and whistled a tune while he did it, his bare triangular back turned to her, as though he were both indifferent to the coldness of the predawn hour and the presence of several loaded firearms that hung on antler racks which she could easily take down and discharge if she chose.

But she knew Wyatt and the way he thought, if "thought" was the proper word to use. He never did what others expected. Unlike Carl Hinkel and his shaved-head windups, Wyatt seemed to be possessed by no ideological passion. His war was not with the government or with people of a different race. His war was with humanity, or better yet, the normality that defined most human beings. Wyatt was like the virus that immediately recognizes the antibodies in an immune system as its enemy. He used and ingested people. He did it with an idiot's grin, eating his own pain, demeaning and degrading his adversaries in ways that often took them days to figure out.

From a good thirty feet Wyatt threw the hatchet into the tree trunk, thunking it so solidly into the wood the handle trembled with a sound like a sprung saw blade. He worked the steel head out of the bark and extended the handle to Terry, then jerked it back, smiling, when Terry tried to take it.

Then he repeated the maneuver, teasing Terry, jumping around sideways as though he had springs on his feet. But before Terry could go into a pout, Wyatt slipped the handle into Terry's palm and clasped his hand affectionately on the back of Terry's neck and pulled the roach Terry was smoking off his lips and took two hits off it, then pinched off the ash and ate it.

"Roll us another one, Sue Lynn," Terry said.

Roll it yourself, fuckhead, she thought.

But she didn't say it. Not with Wyatt there. He might bitch-slap Terry or force him to wear makeup and throw him from an automobile, but when push came to shove, with either Carl or any of the other lamebrains who hung around the compound, Terry was Wyatt's mainline bar of soap and nobody made remarks about him or put their hands on him except Wyatt.

So she rolled a joint from the home-grown marijuana in Wyatt's tobacco pouch and licked down the glue on the seam of the cigarette paper and crimped down the ends while Wyatt went inside the log house to use the toilet.

Terry pulled the joint from her fingers and put it into his mouth. He was bare-chested and his pants hung two inches below his belly button. Dirt rings clung to his neck like a necklace of insects.

"Light it for me," he said.

She ignored him and slid off the boulder and walked down toward the river, dusting off her rump, working a pack of cigarettes out of her jeans, sticking one into her mouth.

"I can have your ass if I want," he said behind her.

He traced his fingernail down her spine to her panties.

She tried to bite down on the words that welled out of her throat but it was too late. "Your mother must have thought she gave birth to a tumor," she said.

He took her book of matches from her hand and lit the joint, holding the hit deep down in his lungs, and bounced the dead match off her face.

"Have a nice day, Sue Lynn," he said.

Later, she went inside the log house and lay on the couch, a blanket wrapped around her head, and tried to sleep. But it was no use. One of Wyatt's buddies was running a dirt bike up and down an adjacent hill, gunning the engine through the trees, scouring humus and rock and grass into the air, filling the softness of the evening with a sound like a chain saw grinding on steel pipe.

Why not eighty-six it, like Lucas said? she thought.

Because Amos Rackley told her she stayed on the job until she found out what kinds of weapons were in Carl Hinkel's basement. Maybe she should have worn the wire, she thought. Now she had no umbilical cord to the outside.

What Amos Rackley could not comprehend, what he would not hear, was the fact that Carl Hinkel could look inside people's heads. He saw where they were weak, the thoughts they tried to hide, the flare of ambition in their eyes. He understood evil in others, tolerated it the way a father does an errant child, and used it for his own ends. His followers all knew they could deceive themselves or lie to the world and Carl would remain their friend. But they dared not lie to him.

He seemed to have no sexual interest in either women or men. His pastime was his absorption with the Internet. He sat for hours in front of his computer, his features wrapped with the green glow of his monitor, while he tapped on the keys and addressed chat rooms filled with his admirers.

But she had seen one peculiarity in his commitment to his computer. In nice weather he left the door open to his little stone office, and anyone in the compound could see him at his desk, puffing clouds of white smoke from his cob pipe, his back as straight as a bayonet, while his fingers danced across the keyboard. But sometimes he would shut the door and slide the wood crossbar into place, and everyone understood that Carl was not to be disturbed.

Once a new member at the compound, a jug-eared kid just out of the Wyoming pen, called Shortening Bread behind his back because of his dark skin, wanted to curry favor with Carl and made lunch for him and carried it on a tray to the office. Unfortunately for Shortening Bread, Carl had not quite secured the crossbar on the door, and Shortening Bread worked his foot into the jamb and pushed the door back and started to step inside the office without asking permission.

Carl rose from his chair and flung the tray into the yard. When Shortening Bread broke into tears, Carl put his arm over his shoulders and walked with him around the compound, explaining the need for discipline among members of the Second American Revolution, reassuring him that he was a valuable man.

Sue Lynn got up from the couch and washed her face and walked down the slope to the river, then wandered along the bank to a shady copse of trees and sat down in the grass and watched the spokes of white light the sun gave off beyond the rim of the Bitterroots.

Then she heard the dirt bike go silent and the voices of Wyatt and Terry and she realized the two men were no more than twenty yards above her, behind a boulder, and Terry was sharpening his knife on a whetstone, probably spitting on it, as was his fashion, and grinding the knife in a slow, monotonous circle.

"She's got a mouth on her, I'll 'low that. 'Birth to a tumor'?"

"It's not funny, Wyatt."

"You ain't got to tell me. An Indian woman shouldn't be talking to a white man like that," Wyatt said, his voice suddenly somber.

"What are you gonna do about it?" Terry asked.

"Have a little talk with her."

"I want it to hurt."

"Oh, it will."

"Wyatt?"

"What?"

"I want to watch."

Sue Lynn sat in the shadows, bent forward, her stomach sick. Even in the coolness of the wind off the river she was sweating all over, a fearful sweat that clung to her skin like night damp. She remained motionless, afraid to get up or turn around. Then she heard Wyatt and Terry walking out of the trees toward the campground upstream, where Terry sometimes worm-fished with a handline behind a beaver dam.

When they were out of sight she ran for her uncle's windowless stock car that had no headlights. She fired up the engine and fishtailed across the gravel driveway in front of Carl's house and roared up the dirt road toward the highway that led back into Missoula, her heart pounding, the reflected images of Carl Hinkel and three of his subordinates staring at her like painted miniatures in the rearview mirror.

She stopped at Lolo, ten miles south of Missoula, and used a pay phone outside a cafe to call the contact number the Treasury agents had made her memorize. An unfamiliar voice answered, then the call was relayed to another location and she heard the voice of Amos Rackley.

"I can't take it anymore," she said. "Slow down. You can handle this."

"Carl knows.''

"You're having a panic attack. He doesn't know. He's not that smart."

"They're out there." "Out where?" he said.

A low-slung red car ran the yellow light at the intersection and she felt her heart stop. Then she saw the car was not Wyatt's.

"They're everywhere. They have radios in their cars," she said.

"Go to the meeting place on the Res. People will be waiting for you there. Now stop worrying. You did a good job."

"I never saw the guns." "So fuck it," he said.

She drove on through Missoula and caught the highway west of town that led to the Flathead Reservation. The Clark Fork of the Columbia River looked like a long, flat silver snake in the twilight.

The evening star had risen above the mountains when she drove up into the timbered hills above the Jocko River and pulled off the dirt road and parked by the abandoned sweat lodge on the creek bank. Twice on the highway she had seen cars pace themselves behind her, dropping back when she slowed, accelerating when she sped up. Then she had turned on to the Res and had lost them. But five minutes later, as she climbed into the hills, she had seen headlights down below, tracking across the same bridges she had crossed, following the same dirt roads she had driven.

The trees and hills were dark now, the sky like a bowl of blue light above her head. She got out of her uncle's stock car and waited by the stream, listening to the water that braided across the rocks, the thick sounds of bats' wings crisscrossing through the air, the animals that were coming down through the woods to drink at the close of day.

Where was Rackley? He had said people would be waiting for her. But once again she was alone, and now it was too dark for her to drive her uncle's car back home.

She saw the trees move on the ridge above her but she guessed it was only the wind. Upstream there was a clattering sound on the rocks, deer or elk or perhaps cattle crossing the creek bed.

She had to get it together, stop her hands from trembling, her blood from racing. If she could just think clearly, just for a moment, she knew she could figure a way out of this.

Rackley had said fuck it. That was a surprise. Was he letting her off the hook? Or did he plan to put moves on her, use her as his permanent snitch and part-time squeeze?

She saw lights coming up the road, a four-wheel-drive vehicle in low gear, and she folded her arms across her chest, starting to hyperventilate now, determined to stare down whoever it was, even if they killed her.

The agent named Jim and a second agent whose name she didn't know pulled their Cherokee onto the grass and parked next to her car and got out and walked toward her, dressed like trout fishermen, smiling easily.

"Amos says you had a rough day today," Jim said.

"Where've you been, you sonofabitch?" she said.

"Let's don't have profanity. That's not nice," Jim said.

"Somebody was following me," she said, trying to keep her voice from trembling.

"The road was empty. There's nobody out there," he replied.

"I want a plane ticket to Seattle," she said.

"I don't think that's in the cards right now," Jim said.

"You do it for people in Witness Protection all the time."

"We still got a lot of unfinished work. A lot of work," he said, shaking his head profoundly.

"Amos said 'fuck it.' He told me I did a good job."

"You shouldn't have boosted a post office, kiddo," Jim said.

"I got to take a leak," the other agent said.

As though she were not there, the two agents walked down by the stream and pointed themselves into a Douglas fir tree and urinated on the ground. She stared at their backs, listening to their banter, realizing finally how absolutely insignificant she was.

Screw you, she thought, and got into their Cherokee, started the engine, and made a U-turn, the driver's door swinging back on its hinges. Their mouths hung open in disbelief as the Cherokee roared down the road in the darkness.

Jim took a cell phone out of the pocket of his windbreaker and punched in several numbers.

"A little problem here, boss man," he said.

"What problem?" the voice of Amos Rackley said.

"Pocahontas just hauled ass."

"So go after her."

"Can't do it, Amos. She took the Cherokee and left us her shit machine. The one with no lights."

There was a pause.

"Have you visited Fargo in the winter?" Rackley asked.

Jim clicked off the cell phone and set it on the roof of Sue Lynn's car and propped his arms against the metal and stared at the waning light on the ridgeline. The trees rustled in the wind and he thought he smelled rain. He fished in his pocket and removed a cheese sandwich he had wrapped in wax paper and handed half of it to his friend just as a solitary raindrop struck the hood of the car.

He and the other agent got inside and closed the doors and ate the sandwich, bored, irritated with themselves, wondering if Amos was serious about Fargo.

High up on the ridge a man wearing cowboy boots with sharply defined heels worked his way through the tree trunks until he saw the stock car parked down below in the glade, the orange numerals in bold relief against the gray primer on the door. He stuffed rubber plugs in his ears and got down in a prone position and steadied a rifle on a collapsible tripod in the softness of the pine needles, then pulled back the bolt and chambered a round.

He sighted down the slope and waited, working his jaw comfortably against the stock. The moon was up now and he could see clearly into the glade. A shadow moved behind the steering wheel; a cigarette lighter flared on a face. Perfect.

The shooter squeezed back the trigger and burned the entire thirty-round magazine, swinging the barrel on the tripod, the copper-jacketed.223 rounds pocking the door panels and the roof, gashing the seats, blowing glass out of the dashboard, popping the horn button loose like a tiddlywink.

When the breech locked open, the shooter rose to his feet and removed the rubber plugs from his ears, dropping one into the pine needles, and walked back down the opposite slope to his vehicle.

Down in the glade the driver's door of Sue Lynn's car swung open and Jim fell out on the grass, his mouth blooming with uneaten sandwich bread. He clawed his way up the side of the car and found his cell phone where he had left it on the roof, then collapsed on the ground again, his clothes soaked with blood, and pushed the redial button.

But when Amos Rackley answered, Jim realized that the sucking chest wound he tried to close with his hand had stolen his voice. He lay on his back in the grass, one leg bent under him, and used his fingernail to tap out a last message on the mouthpiece to Amos Rackley.