Bitterroot

Chapter 26

"You KNOW what he Morsed me? 'Sorry.' He was sorry," Amos Rackley said.

It was the next morning, and we were standing in front of Doc's porch. Rackley's face was drained of color, his eyes smoldering.

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine hasn't been here. I don't know where your vehicle is, either," I said.

"Is your son in his tent?"

"He took my truck to town. Leave him alone, Mr. Rackley. He's not in this."

"He just porks her on a regular basis when she's not getting federal agents killed?"

I looked at the fatigue and caffeinated tension in his face and knew it was only a matter of time before the anger in his eyes focused inward and Amos Rackley found himself locked up with his own thoughts for many years.

"Come inside, sir," I said.

"What?"

"Have you eaten? I have some coffee and pancakes on the stove."

He took a breath of air through his nose, looking off into the distance, as though he were choosing between one of several insults to hurl at me.

"I should have been with them," he said.

"They were doing their job. Why not give them credit for it?"

"I made a wisecrack to Jim about Fargo. That's the last thing I said to him."

"It wasn't anybody's fault except the bastards who did it. These are the guys you hang out to dry. Not yourself, not a kid like Sue Lynn Big Medicine."

He rubbed his face with his hand. He had shaved so closely there were pink scrape marks on his chin. He seemed to take my measure as though he didn't know who I was.

"I'll take a raincheck on the pancakes. Could I use your bathroom?" he said.

As Rackley drove through the field behind Doc's he passed Temple Carrol's Explorer. She parked in the yard and walked up on the porch, her backpack full of research materials slung from one hand.

"That guy looked like a fed," she said.

"He is. Two of his agents were killed on the Flathead Reservation last night."

"The ones who rousted you?"

"Yeah, one of them, anyway."

"Who did it?"

"Probably one of Carl Hinkel's people. Sue Lynn took the agents' vehicle and left them stranded with her uncle's stock car. The shooter probably thought she was inside."

Temple threw her backpack onto a chair and went into the house and came back out with a cup of coffee in her hand.

"Where's Sue Lynn?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"I checked out the background of Xavier and Holly Girard," she said.

"What for?"

"He's a writer and she's an actress, but they keep showing up where they don't have any business. Each time they have some innocuous explanation. Read this," she said, and handed me a manila folder filled with fax sheets from a private investigator in Phoenix, Arizona.

"By the way, Holly Girard didn't meet Nicki Molinari out here. Their families both belonged to the same country club in Scottsdale," she said.

I sat down and read through the sheets in the folder.

"Her mother's maiden name was Carruthers?" I said.

"You got it."

"Why is it I feel I've been had?" I said.

"I couldn't guess," Temple said.

We drove to the Girards' house above the Clark Fork but no one was home. Then, because I was unconvinced of Xavier's sobriety, we tried the downtown bars. We found him playing pinochle in the back of a workingman's place on Front Street called Stockman's, a bottle of ginger ale by his elbow. He gave me a tired look. "What is it now?" he asked.

"Not much, a discussion of assets, family names, mining interests, that sort of thing," I said.

He grinned at the other players and shrugged his shoulders, as though saying "What can I do?" We went out the back door into the sunshine. A carousel was revolving on the riverbank, the hand-carved wooden horses filled with children.

"Your wife is a member of the family that owns the Phillips-Carruthers Corporation, the same guys who want to destroy the Blackfoot River?" I said.

"You're talking about Holly's mother, not Holly. Holly doesn't own anything," he replied, leaning against an iron rail, looking off at the river.

"That's a little bit disingenuous, don't you think?" I said.

"Hey, get out of our lives, Mr. Holland." "You misled me. I think you've misled this community, too."

"About what?" he said.

"Your wife has a vested interest in seeing Doc hurt. By extension, so do you. That brings us right back to the rape of Maisey Voss and the murder of Lamar Ellison," I said. "You're full of shit."

But he looked like a wounded animal, the hot glare in his eyes focusing on nothing, as if nothing in his range of vision would connect with the confused thoughts in his head. He had managed to combine the roles of cuckold, novelist, flamboyant drunk, Hollywood iconoclast, friend of the environment, confidant of gangsters, and object of pity all in one persona. I wondered when the day would come when he stuck a pistol into his mouth.

Temple and I started to walk away.

"If it's any of your business, Holly and I are busting up," he said at my back.

"Why?" I said.

"She's getting it on with Molinari again. I've had it," he replied.

But if he intended to elicit sympathy, he failed with Temple. She walked to within a foot of his face.

"You're going on the stand, baby cakes. Get used to it," she said.

Later, Maisey got into Doc's truck with a shopping list and headed down the dirt road toward the main highway and the small, independent grocery store in Bonner. As she approached the log bridge over the Blackfoot she saw a low-slung red car in her rearview mirror. The bridge trembled under her as she rumbled across the wood planks and a dust cloud blew out on the water and disappeared in the current. When she swung out onto the highway she looked back briefly and saw the red car again and this time she recognized Terry Witherspoon behind the wheel.

He followed her all the way into Bonner, through the quiet stretch of tree-shaded, company-owned houses, past the sawmill and the piles of green lumber stacked next to waiting train cars, past the normal world that most people lived in, then around a bend in the road to the grocery store parking lot. She got out of the truck and started inside, then went back and locked the door, even though she left the window open.

Terry Witherspoon pulled in close to the store entrance and was now waving at her, as though the only problem between them was her failure to recognize who he was.

Then he got out of his car, smiling at her above the top of the door.

"Didn't you see me back there?" he said.

"Right," she said.

He was dressed in khaki slacks and shined loafers and a gold and burgundy University of Montana sweater.

"I was coming up to your house when you zoomed on past me," he said.

"You were hiding on the side road."

"I wasn't," he said, crinkling his nose under his glasses, waiting to see if she would refute the lie. When she didn't she could see the vindication grow in his face. "Your father attacked me in front of all those people at the concert. I took you home that night when the football players were going to hurt you. I got in a lot of trouble with Wyatt over that."

"You buried a woman alive. You're disgusting. Get out of here," she said.

"You don't know what you're saying. That Indian bitch caused all this."

"Caused what?" Maisey said, then realized she had stepped into the trap of arguing with a person who had probably never told the truth about anything in his life.

"She got those federal agents killed. They're gonna blame Wyatt or me. Everything's coming apart. I had a lot of plans," he said. Then he seemed to grow more passionate, more unjustly injured, his eyes magnifying behind his glasses. "I bought a camera. I want to take pictures of you. Down on the river."

The fact that he was speaking intimately to her, as though she were part of his world, made her stomach turn. She rushed inside the store and got a basket and pushed it down the aisle, trying to concentrate on the list in her hand.

Out in the parking lot Terry Witherspoon stood by Doc's truck, chewing on a hangnail, glaring at the traffic.

"Is everything all right, miss?" the butcher said. He was an Indian, wrapped around the middle with a red-stained apron.

"Yes. Fine," she replied.

"You know that fellow out there?" he asked.

"Not really."

"He was in here once before. That's why he's not in here now. You let me know if he bothers you," the butcher said.

Fifteen minutes later she wheeled her basket loaded with sacked groceries back into the parking lot. Terry Witherspoon was waiting for her, tossing his head to clear a strand of hair from his glasses.

"When I saw you through the window, in the shower that night, you were as beautiful as a movie star," he said. When she didn't answer he started to lift one of the sacks from the basket.

"Don't touch that," she said. "I want to help you."

"Don't put your hands on our food. Get away from my basket."

The wind blew his hair across his glasses. He continued to stare at her as though he could not assimilate what he was being told. Then he said, "Shit on you."

She loaded her groceries into the bed of the pickup, trying to ignore the closeness of his body and the smell of deodorant that rose from his clothes. She got into the truck and started the engine, but Witherspoon remained standing by her window.

"I can't see the street," she said.

"I should have let Wyatt bust you. You're just a little whore. That's why you were hanging out in that bar. You wanted more of what Lamar and the others gave you. Lamar said you gave good head."

She ground the transmission and tried to swing out on the street, but the guards were up at the train crossing and traffic had backed up across the entrance to the parking lot.

Witherspoon got behind her and began blowing his horn and smashing his bumper against hers, much harder than she thought a low-centered car would be able to do. Then she realized pieces of pipe were overwelded, like gridwork or a battering ram, on the front of his car. Witherspoon snugged the bumper against the rear of the truck and slowly accelerated and starting pushing her into the street. His back tires burned black strips on the asphalt and spun circles of smoke under the fenders, but the truck was wobbling on the frame now, the back wheels losing purchase, Maisey's foot slipping on the brake. All the while Witherspoon kept his palm clamped down on his horn button.

Even if she made it out into the traffic without being hit she knew he would follow her all the way home, tailgating and cutting her off, trying to force her into the path of oncoming traffic.

Go inside and get the butcher, she thought.

Like hell.

She pulled into the street, glancing once in her rearview mirror. Witherspoon was looking right and left, waiting for an opportunity to floor the accelerator after her. He never realized the seriousness of his presumption until it was too late.

Maisey hit the brakes, shifted into reverse, and mashed on the gas pedal. The trailer hitch on the truck speared through the pipework on Wither-spoon's grille, gashing the radiator open, tearing the fan so metal screamed against metal. She straightened the truck, then floorboarded into him again, this time crumpling a fender down on a tire, shattering the headlights, knocking his forehead into the windshield.

When she shifted back into first gear, the low-slung red car that belonged to Wyatt Dixon was bleeding green pools of antifreeze onto the asphalt, spokes of steam whistling from under the hood. An elderly woman with Coke-bottle glasses pulled in behind Witherspoon and began blowing her horn for him to get out of the way.

The next morning the sheriff called and asked me to drop by his office.

"The two ATF agents were killed by.223 rounds, all fired from the same rifle, probably an M-16. The spent casings were all clean," he said.

The sheriff was sitting behind his desk, his Stetson pushed up on the back of his head, his suit coat on, fiddling with his hands as he talked, as though he were concentrating more on his own thoughts than on his listener.

"Amos Rackley told you this?" I asked.

"The Flathead Reservation has patches of privately owned land on it. The ridge where the shooter was? It's owned by a white man. The government can't keep me out of this one," the sheriff said.

"I don't understand why you called me."

"The shooter dropped one of his ear plugs. He left a thumbprint on it. You know a guy named Clayton Stark?"

"No," I said.

"He don't have a record here, but three years ago he was picked up for questioning in a child abduction case in Pocatello. Does that ring any bells for you?"

"A pedophile was arrested in Carl Hinkel's yard five years ago," I replied.

"That's right. Your son's girlfriend, this gal Sue Lynn Big Medicine? Her little brother was abducted and killed, wasn't he?"

"How'd you know that?"

"I get paid to do my damn homework, son. You see a pattern here on this pedophilia stuff?"

"Yeah, but I don't know what it is."

"Neither do I," the sheriff said. He got up from his desk and began fumbling around in a closet.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"There's a bull trout under the Higgins Street Bridge that daily gives me a lesson in humility," he said, lifting a rod and reel from behind a raincoat. "Take a walk with me. I want to tell you a story."

The PREVIOUS day the sheriff had been visiting a cemetery on the north side, a lovely, tree-shaded area on a knoll where the town's oldest families were buried. He saw Cleo Lonnigan sitting on a bench by her son's grave, leaning over, setting stem roses in a row by the headstone. She was talking to herself and did not hear the sheriff when he walked up behind her.

"You want company?" he asked.

"It's his birthday," she said.

"Oh," he said, nodding.

"On his birthday I make a wish for each year of his life that he would have had, then put roses on his grave," she said.

The sheriff sat beside her on the bench. It was made of stone and felt cold and hard under his legs. "I worry about you, Cleo."

"Why is that, J.T?"

He looked down the slope, through the trees, at a maroon Cadillac convertible that was parked in the drive with the top up. The Cadillac had been waxed and hand-buffed with soft rags and the reflection of the leaves overhead seemed trapped inside the paint.

"You're here with Nicki Molinari?" the sheriff asked.

"We've let bygones be bygones." "I have a hard time accepting a statement like that."

She rose from the bench. It was cool in the shade and she wore a silk scarf tied under her chin.

"I don't ask you to, J.T.," she replied, and walked down the slope toward Nicki Molinari's car. The wind blew the roses into crossed patterns on top of her son's grave.

"She's one I can't read, Sheriff," I said.

"It's not hard. Her husband's crooked money got her little boy killed. Cleo says she didn't know where that money come from. When people got more than they're supposed to have, they always know where it comes from. So she's got to get up every morning, denying to herself that little boy's death is not on her. How'd you like to carry a burden like that?"

We were in the shadow of the Higgins Bridge now, and the sheriff had managed to fling his lure into a willow tree.

"Why'd you tell me about Cleo and Molinari?" I asked.

"It's just a warning. She'd like to see you hung from a meat hook."

"You can sure put it in a memorable way, sir," I said, and started to leave. "By the way, how is it you're so close to Cleo?"

"My son's in that same cemetery. He was killed in Desert Storm. That was rich men fighting over oil, Mr. Holland. My boy was too young to enlist on his own. So I signed the papers for him."

He began jerking his lure to free it from the tree, until the line broke in his big hand.

I BOUGHT avocado and creamed cheese sandwiches and frozen yogurt and cold drinks at a grocery by the university and put it all in an ice chest and picked up Temple at her motel. We drove through Hellgate Canyon, east of town, and out toward Rock Creek to eat lunch. I told Temple about the sheriff's encounter with Cleo Lonnigan in the cemetery. I thought I could simply mention it casually and get it out of the way and not call up unpleasant memories about past relationships. That's what I thought.

"What's God's gift to the Res up to?" Temple said.

"Taking Molinari over the hurdles. He's out of his depth," I said.

"Maybe it's the other way around. Xavier Girard says Molinari is in the sack with his wife. But maybe our girl is asexual or a lesbian and doesn't care. What's your opinion?"

"I don't have one," I said.

"A little sensitive, are we?"

"No, I just wish I hadn't brought this up," I said.

There was no sound in the truck except the hum of the tires on the asphalt. We were in a long valley now and the hills rose up steep and green against the sky. When I turned off the interstate I passed a restaurant made of logs and entered another valley, this one traversed by a wide, pebble-bottomed stream that flowed out of the south, with both meadowland and high, wooded, sharp-peaked mountains on each side.

I drove two miles along the stream, past fishermen up to their waists in the riffles, and did not try to say anything else to Temple. But I could feel her looking at the side of my face.

"You're just going to turn to stone on me?" she said.

"No, I gave up."

"Pardon?"

"I'm tired of sackcloth and ashes," I said.

"You're saying I'm too heavy a burden to deal with?"

Farther up the road was a deep-green piney woods and a rusty turnstile that allowed fishermen to enter the woods on their way to the stream without letting cattle out on the road. Temple waited for me to answer her.

"You know how I feel about you. But you're unrelenting and unforgiving," I said.

She sat very still for a long time, her milky-green eyes filled with thoughts I couldn't guess at. She turned her head and studied my face.

"I don't know how much more of this I can take," she said.

"You want to go back to Texas?"

"After I nail the two guys who tried to bury me alive."

"That's the only reason you're here now?"

"That's a good question. Let me think very hard on it," she said, her mouth pinched with anger.

I pulled off the road into a stand of grand fir and pine trees and parked in a dry slough that fed into the stream. My head was splitting. I wanted to turn around and drive back to town, but Temple had already gotten out of the truck and slammed the door and walked through a clump of huckleberry bushes to the edge of the stream. The wind dropped and I could hear the heat of the truck engine ticking under the hood.

I got the food and a picnic blanket out of the truck and walked down the slough toward the bank. Through the trees I could see a huge dalles and the stream sliding over sculpted boulders the size of small blimps. The air was loud with the roar of the water, sweet and cool with the spray that coated the rocks.

I tripped on a root and looked down at a fresh, hoofed track in the slough, one as long as my foot. To my right the reeds and huckleberry bushes had been broken or mashed down into the moistness of the silt and gravel along the bank.

I set down our food and followed the hoofed tracks through the reeds. I worked my way through an overhang of willows and stepped across a cotton-wood that beavers had cut down, then I saw the moose on a small promontory above Temple, its webbed rack the largest I had ever seen on an animal of any kind, its nostrils puffing with her scent.

She was standing on a sand spit, her hands in her back pockets, looking upstream, and she neither heard nor saw the animal behind her. I moved quickly along the bank, and the moose jerked its rack around, its eyes on me now, its weight shifting on the promontory, dirt scudding down into the water from its hooves.

Then I heard it whirl and turn in the undergrowth and I knew it was coming for either me or Temple.

I ran along the water's edge, yelling Temple's name. She looked at me, startled, then her face went white. I picked her up at the waist, locking my arms around her, and splashed into a side channel and came up onto an island. But the moose was right behind us, its hooves clacking across underwater rocks, its rack cracking a cottonwood limb in half like a twig.

I stumbled and fell, then rose to my feet and picked up Temple again and went over the other side of the island into the stream, into deep water and a fast-running, ice-cold current that swept us through a series of gray boulders that steamed with mist.

We floated around a bend, under an overhang of willows, into a pool that was deep in shadow. I felt the pebbled bottom under my shoes, and I pulled Temple toward me out of the current and we walked chest-deep toward the far bank, behind the protection of a beaver dam. But the bank had been undercut by the current so that it kept shaling under my weight as I tried to get out of the water. I grabbed the bottom of a willow and pulled myself up until I could find purchase with one knee, then I locked my hand on Temple's wrist and hoisted her up after me.

I heard the moose's hooves clatter once more on stone, then saw it lift itself, wet and blowing and magnificent, onto the opposite bank and disappear into the trees. Temple and I fell into the leaves, and I held her against me and kissed her face and hair and neck and covered her with my body and felt the firm muscles of her back and legs and gathered her against me with such force that I could hear the breath coming out of her chest. Her cheek felt as hot as a baby's waking from sleep.

I kissed her hands and mouth and the tops of her breasts and I unbuttoned her shirt and kissed her stomach and touched her breasts and thighs without permission or shame, then felt her hand begin loosening my belt. She peeled off her shirt and bra and threw them aside and put her tongue in my mouth and pulled my weight down on top of her. I rubbed my face in the wetness of her hair and kissed her eyes and sucked her fingers and put her nipples in my mouth, then I was inside her, inside Temple Carrol, inside all her pink warmth and the caress and charity and heat of her thighs. Her mouth opened and her breath rose against my skin with a smell and coolness like flowers blooming in snow, and she pressed me deeper inside her and held me tight with her arms and locked her legs in mine.

I wanted to raise up on my arms and kiss her again and look into the flush on her face and the mystery and beauty of her eyes, but I felt both of us rushing toward that irreversible moment that even memory cannot enhance, and I held her against me, my voice hoarse and weak and barely above a whisper, my poor attempt at a statement of affection lost in the roar of the stream and the creak of the wind in the trees and the rhythmic breath of Temple Carrol in my ear and the kneading of her palms on my spine. Then I felt a burst of light in my loins and a release from all the rage and violence that had fouled my blood for a lifetime. There was only the beating of her heart and the moist touch of her skin and the softness of her smile as I slipped out of her, exhausted and spent, and rested my head between her breasts while her fingers stroked my hair.